tater

I'm with Alshain (again, lol). Aside from the single use, it's ugly.

So I just got home and made a few fairings. I'll admit that I was wrong about the shape of the base part---I realized that they are so ugly that I haven't used them in many, many months at all, possibly approaching a year. The principal problem is actually their texture. The angled, stripy pattern makes them look like they are like a length of hemp rope, when in fact they are flat. I honestly remembered them as having bumps along them for this reason. If the part was the same color as the fairing, 99% of the problems would go away. There is a beveled edge top and bottom that needs to go away, but it's pretty tiny.

Make a fairing. Take a screenshot of it that matches an image (close) of a real fairing. Does the stock fairing or base look like the real picture? Do the same with mods that add fairings. Which look more like real photographs? Unless your answer is "stock" there's nothing more for you to say in defense of the awful stock part. EDIT: @foamyesque, I was wrong about the actual shape of the part, mea culpa, I never use them. They could blend in if the texture was not absurd, that's really the problem.

Except I could not find "notification settings" where they belong, under "settings."

The fairing base part should be exactly the same size as a tank body at the same diameter. Nothing raised at all. So in your image, the white band above ULA would work as the base part. The current part is a raised, silver/gray ribbed looking, ugly part that is in no way flush with the tank. The ribs around the 2.5m, ugly tanks should not exist, either (or on any part, frankly).

OMG, thank you! I looked for it under, you know, "Settings" under my name, where I expected all settings to reside. It never occurred to me to look under notifications.

Yes, your image shows exactly what I mean. To look like stock, the white band above ULA would have to be a huge, textured rib. The lower part if the actual fairing (the bit that angles out) should BE the fairing part before you build the fairing. This does show, though, that sharp transitions can look OK, however. The rounded nose help a lot, though.

It's funny, people complained that aero was going to get fixed, because it was bad for so long that "bad" was equated with "the way things should be." The soup "is a challenge to be designed around," etc, ad nauseum. If they could suddenly make all the planets have awesome, realistic craters and landscape features down to cm resolution with no performance hit at all, people here would post that lousy, boring planets were "kerbal" and making them better was a bad idea .

When they first came out, this virtually never worked for me, so ever since I have never bothered even trying that. This is why QA matters. The part itself should be flush, though, that or it should form the bottom arc away from the tank (the SSTU fairing does this) so the fairing looks like it isn't surpassing from a rib.

Right now the little box in the top right is checked and says I am following THIS thread, and guess what, I'm not following this thread. I never told it to follow this thread. Every thread I post in gets followed, then I have to unfollow it. This defeats the purpose. I thought I had fixed it, but if I have to do something with every thread, I might as well just ignore the functionality (since there isn't any).

I managed to figure out interstages in PF, but gave up on that in stock a while ago, though maybe they work... I think that as part of the supposedly forthcoming improvements in rocket aesthetics they should fix the stock fairings. There is no need to replicate PF, just make stock fairings "not ugly." That seems a pretty low bar to me, to have them not be awful.

I only added the small parts idea to make you some early junk parts .

EDIT, the fact that you say "Can you prove it wrong?" is pretty telling. Nothing needs to be proved wrong. Positive claims need to be proved true.

At the expense of an extra part for every single such attachment in a game that is fundamentally limited by part count. The net result is exactly the same, except for those extra parts. Nothing is added, except parts. It's the very definition of a slippery slope fallacy. "Where does it end?" You are making a claim, so for it to be true, you must demonstrate that it is true.

@adsii1970No, actually I don't. My view is the distillation of what is being discussed. Every single part in KSP can already be radially attached by 2 mechanisms. You can slap on the radial attachment part, or you can use the entirely stock offset and rotation tools. The former needlessly adds to the part count for virtually zero reason (do what OP suggests, and those parts are entirely unneeded). The latter has many other complications as anyone who has used those tools knows when you then move a part by mistake (or intent) and it goes wonky.

@The_Rocketeer, there are really no impossible combinations. We can do everything radially right now, it just adds a part. There is no innovation bread. Slap on radial attachment point, add non-radial part. There is no there there, just an extra part. In stock KSP mass is pretty meaningless, demonstrated by how trivial it is to create SSTOs, so the extra parts are not a mass constraint, just a part count constraint---this on top of a stock game purpose-designed for wobbly rockets that require numerous ugly struts.

Bad design is bad design. This is a thread in suggestion for the stock game, the "use mods" answer is not appropriate, @regex actually makes mods, so telling him about them is pretty funny, he knows. I use mods already, and in fact for the engine clusters I have abandoned stock engines altogether in favor of a mod that clusters engines as a single part (and I can cluster them in number, arrangement, and mount type at will (entirely addressing regex's concerns with my image post in his post above)). The point of the thread is that the choices of which parts can attach radially is not some master plan to encourage innovation, it's arbitrary, and often nonsensical and counterintuitive.

@KSK, I don't disagree that parts could have varied aesthetics over time, but the problem is that we have to use the same parts at every stage. 1. Currently the earliest parts are in fact sort of sleek, the middle parts are junk, and the late parts are sleek again---but early, middle, and late are defined only based upon size. 2. Having a texture toggle (check out SSTU for this) would work, and you could even predicate it on tech unlocks. Have allowed textures change as the tree is advanced. Once all the parts are unlocked, "sic-fi" textures become a thing. 3. I hate the junkyard aesthetic, but even if I didn't, then the spaceplane parts need to be junkified. Either everything is junk, or nothing should be junk. The schizophrenic mixture is absurd. Here's an idea. Add a new class of 0.625m rocket parts that look like they were cobbled together in an actual barn (I hate the barn, too, BTW, but I'll accept the notion for this). Those are tier 0 test rockets. Have a launcher part they come with (a rail) that you explicitly set to a launch angle, and they are unguided. Learn rocketry with it, it can be ugly.

Tech unlocked by time and money makes sense, and it also makes sense that particular tasks ("contracts" "missions," whatever) might speed things up. Certain science might also either speed things up, or actually be a requirement for tech to get past some milestone. So imagine my idea above. You start research, which incurs some cost in funds, and might also have required precursors (in facilities, other tech, or even specific science). That node appears on a timeline with milestones every "Minmonth" (I use Minmus months because the munar month in KSP is 6 days, and a Minmus month ("Minmonth") is ~50). You get there by simple time progression, but perhaps each milestone could have a way to jump to it via completing science/testing. Note that some milestones might require the previous milestone, but others might not, letting you leapfrog. Want to develop the Hitchhiker? Say that one gets 4 minmonths of dev time. Since as a station/base part, rendezvous and docking will almost certainly be a thing, perhaps the first month can be jumped by completing a docking of 2 vessels. The third milestone might allow an orbital mission of at least a month, but no precursor, so you could launch that mission, and a month later you'll leapfrog and save 2 months. You get the idea.

Yeah, like I said, I was looking for a small image to show the idea, did;t want to spam a huge image, so I took the first one I found that was : 1. small, 2. had an even number of engines depicted.

I make the best out of it by not using hardly any stock parts any more. Yeah, that was the first image that wasn't huge that I saw with multiple engine bells that were even in number. I could have used 5 F1s or J2s, instead, I suppose one on the node, and 4 radially, I was thinking in terms of 1 part with radial symmetry turned on though, so I looked for even numbers .

@Bomoo, that's just another game design flaw. Every rocket part in the game looks terrible. Even if they would look wrong, the functionality is needed (for example tanks becoming available in the tech tree with no appropriate engines, and the fact that any stage separator (also ugly) places fairings to the engine, and not the tanks it separates.

I gave up on stock interstages a long time ago... I hadn't realized that they had fixed that functionality. That's the problem with bad design that gets released, people learn that certain things are not possible, and never try doing it again. The interstage thing was so flakey for me, I gave up (I don't really like them at this point anyway). My biggest complaints are merely aesthetic at this point. Like every single other rocket part in KSP, the fairings themselves, and the base part are all transcendently ugly. That any parts are being added at all to KSP before making the rocket parts look decent sort of bugs me. Spaceplanes look like stunning craft from science fiction (which, you know, they are), whereas rockets---something that actually exist---look like they are made out of stuff cobbled from the junkyard. The base part (and every, single stage separator) needs to be flush. The fairings need a slight rounding to the transitions to look real.

Treating oversights on the part of the game designer as places to facilitate innovation on the part of the player makes little sense. You can stick an I-beam radially out of a fragile fuel tank (how many times have you seen this particular construction in the real world?), but you cannot have 2 or 4 rocket engines radially arranged on the bottom of the same tank, something you see literally all the time in the real world.

More in my continuing Apollo missions in 6.4X. (this was mission 2 to the Mun, taken before the LEM was pulled from the adapter) ' OTW back to the CSM.