lo-fi

Yes and no. As stuff has grown sort of organically, I've ended up having to refactor some module names. You won't end up with broken craft due to missing parts, but settings saved in persistence will be lost unless you're happy doing a find and replace with module names in the persistence file. One or two parts will be updated, so there might be the odd placement issue too. This should be the last (sort of) save breaking update, as things are decidedly more settled now, though. Thanks for sticking with it, its been a steep learning curve!

Missing collider!

SoonTM Seriously, though, I think the next release will be the last alpha, then there's only one way to go from there Thanks for your tips, and that video is great! Got to admit, it's kinda cool hearing someone casually say 'and we add the Kerbal Foundries parts...'. I'll try out the race track once you and Spanner have finished tinkering. Glad you're getting stuck in, your craft designs and videos are so good I'd love to see what cool parts you'd make

Axelord: I hope so since I used to be one of those people! Admittedly, I did have a lot of experience in 3Dstudio, but the rest was entity new to me. Could make some simple lead ballast blocks to shift the CoG on the pod racer? Was a pretty poor wheel, huh! Next came what is now the large wheel, though with stock style sliding suspension. The rest is history

There are several people who could make amazing pod racer construction videos, I'm sure... *cough* We've come a long way, Gaalidas! Did I ever post a pic of my first wheel before? Yep. Took me aaaaages to get that working in game. The .max file is dated 27/05/2014, so only just over five months ago, and I hadn't even thought of repulsors, let alone written a single line of C#. Tracks were, frankly, a terrifyingly awesome prospect I never thought I'd be tackling myself.

I went to the air race this year at Ascot it was a cracking day out (and a British 1-2!)! I was thinking about setting pylons up with a trigger collider, so like the real ones they collapse when hit and give you a penalty. Though I suppose crashing into something solid is a far more Kerbal penalty I'm thinking loose rules for the pod racers, in that they have to be judged to be 'in the spirit of a pod racer', rather than and exact copy. Height limit, part count/weight classes all seem like good ideas to me. Maybe rocket/air breathing category? Don't want to make it too complicated though. And cheers, Axelord FTW

Sepertrons? I thought they were sherbet dips! I was feeding them to the interns as rewards for not sneaking into the pods. Oh well. Yeah, cold war Russian hardware was my inspiration for the long tracks. Recreating real stuff to the last detail isn't really my thing, but heavy cues from stuff I like is always fun, so nice to know it shines through. Glad you guys like them, they behave rather well now I've tweaked the settings a bit more. That's three new track units to chalk up for 1.8. Lots of other stuff is ready, so this will probably be the last new one to make it in before the next (and possibly final) alpha release. Looking forward to removing that WIP sticker and posting in the releases forum - it's on the horizon!

Ah, Kerbal kind of fun. Just don't let them lick the RTG's again...

No speed limits on my wheels Though if you're going to play with the torque curves, just remember about the maxRPM. All it does it cut the torque production to zero, it's not a hard limit on how fast they can rotate when pushed by SRB's....

In other news: That's a record. Three hours from nothing to a KSP part. Needs a little finesse to the track skin, suspension mesh, UV mapping and obviously some textures, but that's the hard bit done. It's good to finally have a workflow for these, they were so damn hard to start with, and it used to take me two days to get half that far.

I should have known you'd have something crazy like that in your toy box, Spanner! Watch my wheel modding tutorial if you need pointers getting started with unity, Darren. Or shout if you've got questions

Yeah, that would work Sounds good to me. Yep, KK ought to help with that, and 3-4 minutes sound sensible given fuel limitations. Half water, half coast for a bit of high speed and some terrain to negotiate?

Excellent! That must be hilarious building it in the SPH.. Spanner's KK idea might be a good call to static stuff. Bundle up a set track and run time trials. What do you reckon? What we start a thread in the challenges forum? So much to do! Yep, I'll get back to long tracks shortly, I know what I want to make now FSU making new landing legs currently.. Bottom mount tracks? Yes, I had a bit of an issues, in that I need to modify the plugin because the orientation ends up being a bit different. That will take a little time I'm afraid, as will the tweakable mount. I small tracks were going to be under-mounted, but all the part orientation stuff gets all fubar and they wouldn't steer, so it will need adjusting.

The dot products are already calculated in my code for determining part orientation on the vessel, so that bit is easy . Sadly, with the wheel colliders being a one-dimensional raycast and the up-chain hierarchy being non-kinematic until you reach a part joint, whatever you do in that respect won't get you very far. You could probably bodge something workable together with a uni-wheel (working on one of these) and a carefully configured and oriented IR docking washer.... I'm just learning about configurable joints myself, but have a lot of work ahead of me before I can produce anything so sophisticated in a single part. It's like a feeding frenzy of ideas around here at the moment; it's absolutely brilliant EDIT: And we just reached 100 votes for more tracks. I had no idea these things would be so popular! Interesting that rover bodies are in second place too, I think Spanner has come along just at the right time with his DSR range (which will hopefully see an initial release soonTM)

The honest answer is not very, but not impossible. It would require putting the wheel collider on the end of a configurable joint to get the forces to transfer back up as the caster angle does it's job. Cool, look forward to seeing that Pod/swoop races are going to take some thought, I think the simple course with flags would be cool, I'll see if achroma might be amenable to releasing the ones he demonstrated in his racing vid.

Getting busy again.... Ouch, that's odd. Not had anyone run into that particular issue thus far, and I think Gaalidas' answer pretty much covers anything I would add. Sounds like I could do with tweaking the attach point for the repulsors. I'm sure I read what the equivalent node size for surface attach was, but I can't remember now. Landing legs are going to be fun, I can't wait ti have them working Thanks for posting the log. Going through it, it looks like you've had a graphics crash though. A lot going on in that install, so I'd check your memory usage and strip something out and see if it stops. I've got no key bindings in the plugin, and I can't replicate myself I'm afraid. http://i.imgur.com/E2X1R81.pngI've tiddled with the repulsors and they're fun too but I'm not imaginative to do much with them. To that guy with the SW racing pods... WOA! I'll try to make a Swoop Bike (KotOR style). With FAR, I wonder how fast I can make it while keeping it stable. EDIT: Oh, that's hella sweet an idea. Please! I'd forgotten about the swoop bike, that would be cool Need to generate some ideas for the pod racer challenge. Maybe a set course using terrain features somewhere? Or did Jeb smash Jeb into the side of a wall in a snacks coma...? Pssst. You can change that in the config using chargeConsumptionRate = in the repulsor module. 1 is the default value set in the plugin, other values obviously scale it.

^It's worth the work, you can't mistake it for anything but Sebulba's pod racer! Love what you guys are doing with the parts To complement Spanner's amazing work on the rover hull/pod system, I'm working on some landing legs. The idea is, when deployed, they will telescope until they hit the ground, then stop. Tweak their individual height to your hearts content, then lock them into collective movement mode so you can slowly and controllably raise and lower your craft/pod/habitat/whatever without it tipping over. Classic landing legs don't really work on an incline or uneven ground, so this is my attempt at a solution, and something to allow the pods to be loaded/unloaded on and off the rover chassis in flight. A few visual tricks I've picked up while working on the tracks will come into play too, so should end up being something quite unique.

Nice work, Gaalidas, I'll add that into configs. Maybe KSPI extensions so they can be toggled would be a good idea, though? Good work, Trollkowski, knew you'd get there in the end! I think we might need a pod racer challenge

Maybe the space and pipe character after Spinner in the config?

Remember that the surface mount versions are uni-directional and provide no stability on their own. Put at least three on, and angle them out - it will work like a charm Looks cool!

Cool! Great piece of original design. You left Jeb alone and unsupervised with a prototype? You fool! Glad you're enjoying it, I'm looking forward to getting the next release out.

Looks like a smoothing group thing: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Smoothing Congrats, on your first part, btw

^Yes, good call if they've been placed and re-placed with symmetry, especially if you've clipped them inside

If it's any consolation, that's exactly how it is making parts The yawing is weird, I can't see what might be causing that. What's the pod made up of? Good to hear about the water hovering. Did you try splash down, save and hover again?

I like it Look forward to seeing the first release.