PocketBrotector

Now that Restock has been released, these engines and fuel tanks have received what will probably be their ultimate, most-polished-possible visual treatment. I've updated my Part Overhaul Integration mod to shift support from the original PartOverhauls to Restock, by copying the PartUpgrade-based rebalancing from the former to the latter.

Current Release (GitHub) The Part Overhauls mod was published by Squad during the KSP 1.2 Pre-Release to showcase the new PartUpgrade feature and to preview the planned Rocket Engine Overhaul. The visual overhaul has since been overtaken by and included in the Restock project. POBI aims to incorporate the PartUpgrade-based rebalance for 1.25m engines into the stock/Restock+ engines, thereby combining gameplay-optimized stats with the best available visuals. Dependencies Required, not included: ModuleManager Recommended, not required: Restock/Restock+ If Restock+ is not installed, the Valiant and Pug engines will not be available. Installation Delete any existing installed version of this mod, then drop the PartOverhaulIntegration folder into your GameData folder wherever KSP is installed. Compatibility If PartOverhauls is present, those parts will receive bugfixes and will be hidden. This is to provide backwards compatibility. Support Report any bugs, issues, requests, or suggestions via GitHub. License Part Overhaul Integration by LouisB3 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Congrats on release... and on first bugfix release! Big ups to everyone posting screenshots... I won't have time to update KSP and get Restock installed until this weekend at the earliest, so I'm still internally operating in pre-release hype mode. @Nertea et al.... do you folks have any particular suggestions or recommendations for other mods that enhance part visuals? I'm wondering particularly if you use anything to enhance the shape of stock fairings. (The only one that I know of is Procedural Fairings, which is practically an antiquity these days - I never followed it, so I don't know if it's still a suitable replacement for stockalike fairings.)

If anyone's interested, here's an alternate take on balancing radial experiments with MSP: @PART[MSP3000] { @mass = 0.2 %PhysicsSignificance = 1 } @PART[GooExperiment]:NEEDS[MSP3000] { %PhysicsSignificance = 1 } This keeps the MSP mass the same as the inline Materials Bay, but makes it "physicsless" so that its mass is added to the parent part. It also makes the Mystery Goo physicsless as well. This preserves overall mass requirements of science experiments while still removing the annoyance of having to push asymmetric payloads. I've been playing with it for some time now without any issues, even though physicsless parts are usually much lighter than 0.2 tons (the heaviest such stock part is the Puff engine at 0.09 tons).

I’m starting to really appreciate that even parts with a superficially simple geometry get this level of attention to detail. Also I’m loving the smorgasbord of parts that appear in the screenshots despite not having been formally previewed. There are at least one or two where I can’t quite figure out the stock analogue... but that’s just another thing to look forward to.

Is the available logic for custom conditions described anywhere currently? The wiki mentions LOGIC nodes but does not describe them in any detail. I'm wondering whether it's possible to use another life support mod (such as Snacks) that forces Kerbals to consume resources, while letting KerbalHealth handle the consequences via the HP system. I'd imagine this would be set up as a custom condition ("Starving") that kicks in when a vessel runs out of food - but I'm not sure if this is supported by the current features/syntax.

Sure!

Here's what I think I was able to spot: Shielded docking port on top of the 2.5m pod 2.5m probe core under the pod 5-way RCS block [incidentally, I'm curious how this will compare visually to the 5-way blocks that we've all hacked together in stock by clipping a 4-way block with a linear port] Square light in service bay HECS and OKTO probe cores Cubic struts RTGs (again) Tiny RCS - including 45-degree variants Small radiators (?) Tiny monopropellant tanks

I'll take this over flowers and chocolate any day...

I'm pretty sure that it's already been stated by the Restock team that they're already tweaking these models to bring them up to Restock style standards. I for one look forward to seeing the new and improved 1.25m engines. In Porkjet's defense, the models released with the PartOverhauls preview are clearly unfinished (unimplemented emissives and compact variants, etc.), and he was developing what was basically an entirely new stock art style for KSP rocket engines. It's not surprising that Restock's work is more polished (which is not to say that Restock isn't extremely impressive in its own right.)

From previous posts by the authors of Restock, it sounds like the Porkjet PartOverhauls engines are to be included in Restock/Restock+, with additional visual improvements.

Yeah, this is critical, and may be the element that I agree with the most out of everything said in this thread. Just because realistic rocket engineering benefits from spreadsheets doesn't mean that abstract gameplay mechanics should! A looong time ago, I tried TAC Life Support, and I eventually realized it was a bunch of gratuitous spreadsheet-oriented math in service of "realism" that didn't contribute to gameplay. (There were only a limited number of ways to balance the food/water/oxygen triad.) Then I used USI-LS for a long time, but it really cried out for MKS to fully develop the resource chain, and MKS for years was on a treadmill of development that was so rapid that it was impossible as a player to keep up with how features were "supposed" to work (vs how they actually worked with bugs and unimplemented features.) It was a constant boom-bust cycle of overcomplication and oversimplification. (I remember back when MKS used a PunchCards resource!) Right now I think the sweet spot is Snacks + KerbalHealth, but the missing piece is colonies. I don't have a compelling reason to create a complex base when a ~3 part outpost can meet all of the life support requirements; not coincidentally, I don't have a way to construct vessels off-world. I applaud anyone who's trying to come up with new concepts to develop satisfying gameplay for colonization within KSP.

I am enjoying the new pods in NF Spacecraft... however I noticed that the Hummingbird engine description mentions a podded version is available, even though the engine doesn't have any variants. Is this an error in the engine description or maybe an unimplemented feature of the engine?

Am I right in thinking that the recoveredData value in Celestial Body Science Editor is also used as a multiplier when determining kerbal XP? So if I wanted to increase that amount of XP that kerbals get for planting a flag on the Mun but reduce the xp for orbiting the Sun, I could increase the recoveredData value for the Mun and decrease the recoveredData value for the Sun. This is just a hunch based on the body multipliers for science and XP listed in the wiki.

That's Squad's PartOverhauls mod itself. It's totally possible to use that alone and get the parts more or less fully functional. I tried to keep a fairly light touch to PartOverhaulIntegrations. It fixes a couple of bugs and hides the old parts - that's pretty much it. Other folks made other decisions based on their own preferences. For example, Snark explained his reasoning in the MissingHistory thread (he wanted to apply the new models to the old stock balance and add the new parts, without incorporating other stuff like the PartUpgrades.) I think it's inevitable that there will be different interpretations of how these parts should be incorporated into the game. They were originally part of a planned overhaul that would completely change both the appearance and the stats of most rocket engines, but that overhaul was never finished. Personally I like the balance in this mod as it replaces the crummy stock 1.25m engines with parts that are initially useful for light early-game payloads, then gradually improved throughout the tech tree to remain competitive with larger parts. But if others don't care for the PartUpgrades system since it was never incorporated into the rest of stock, that's fine too and it's totally reasonable to use something like MissingHistory.

Here is what I happen to recall from mods that I have used personally at some point in time. I think BDB has at least one engine that uses LqdHydrogen, or at least has an option to do so. @CobaltWolf SpaceY has one or more engines that can switch to using LqdHydrogen. @NecroBones WildBlueTools has a CryoEngines patch. @Angel-125 I know that @benjee10 was thinking of including LqdHydrogen configs for reDIRECT so I'll include him here too... Say it ain't so. This will be the end of a great era when it happens. The Near Future etc. mods were and are among the very best content for KSP. Many thanks to you and @Streetwind for all your fine work.

CryoTanks has a patch that adds LH2 configurations to most tanks, but some mods handle it on their own - last time I looked at USI Kontainers, for example, they had their own fuel-switching configs, so they're exempt from the CryoTanks patch. That's a question for Nertea, I think; but the way that I read his post is that the "densification" of the tanks would be driven by the change in propellant ratios, and the change in propellant ratios necessarily means changing the engines (each engine specifies its own propellants, including ratios).

My only suggestion is to provide documentation and/or lead time to facilitate the updating of other mods that use the CryoEngines ratios/density. I know that BDB and SpaceY have some tanks/engines that use LH2(/O), and I think USI does too? And probably a number of others have one or two parts or patches that would be affected. I don't know if there's a way to get a full list (maybe if I learned how to query CKAN to see what mods have CryoTanks as a dependency, I guess). But the CryoEngines paradigm gets used as a sort of de factor community standard, and I'm sure you'd prefer to cut down on the number of times that people ask why LH2O tanks have the "wrong" propellant ratios when used with engines from mod XYZ.

@Snark and company discussed the use of ModulePartVariants in the MissingHistory thread. My takeaway was that while it would be broadly possible to implement boattail-toggling for these engines using a part-switcher (stock or mod), it would require poking around in the source files that are used to generate the models. Unfortunately that's not really in my wheelhouse - I don't have any experience with the software used to manipulate models or textures for KSP.

The Shuttle-C is sort of crying out for a probe core to better support unmanned launches... luckily that's easily remedied. P.S. Congrats on the release of Block II!

Nice work on all these parts... the 2.5m to 3.75m fueled adapter in particular fills an awkward gap that had been present for years. What do you think about a squashed version of the Materials Bay for 1.875m stacks? If you also made a 1.875m version of the Kickback, it would more credibly fill the role of late-game SRB than the current 1.25m version. Currently the 1.25m Kickback is relatively anemic considering it is nominally supposed to be the SRB from the STS and SLS stacks (which are 3.75m - 5m when scaled to KSP sizes).

Thank god for this... the stock tracking station's list of objects sorted by age made it hard to find any one vessel among the clutter of satellites, relays, kerbals awaiting rescue, etc.