TiktaalikDreaming

OK, I've updated the current version to 0.11, which now includes the A-4, A-4b, A-6, A-9 and A-10, plus the Redstone A-6. I haven't really exhaustively tested the parts, but the aero should be a lot better than previously (although I made a completely unchecked change to the Redstone fins). There's no decoupler, but the small stock decouplers work for A-4<->A-10 decoupling. All stock sizing is now 64% of real-life. There's still a bunch of things to adjust and I don't promise later changes won't break stuff, but the parts should all be basically usable. A-1 and A-2 partly done, but not in this pack yet. They'll be curios at best. I'll get around to the A-3 and A-5 at some stage. And then on to the A-11 and A-12

The centre of mass, lift, drag are all fairly badly wrong. I've fixed them in my dev edition, mostly because all that completely stuffs up everything when it's multi-stage. I'll be updating once I have a few textures done.

new shaders... drool.... KSP 1.2 shall finally look good. :-) Not that FASA, EVE, and few other tweaks stacked don't make it nicely pretty, but new shaders would help a lot.

I just ventured to google for Mad Max vehicles, stumbled on a wiki regarding them, and got caught up in stupid Aussie car nostalgia. My parents had a Kingswood when I was learning to drive. Not the panel wagon thing Max has in the first movie, the sedan. It drove like an aircraft carrier. You suggested where it should go, and in a few minutes it'd gently drift that way. And then there's a "pursuit special" Monaro. I never had one, but I had a later successor, a highway pursuit VL commodore. Twas smaller, had more doors, weighed less, pretty much the same massively inefficient engine and gearbox. You could hear it slurping petrol as your foot went down in the time gap before the engine decided to make noise. But, after being sidetracked, I had a look at the buggy things. The Beyond Thunderdome vehicles look best suited to duna buggies. I'm certainly not doing something (again) with wheel arches until KSP wheels don't freak out or panic stop if they get near other parts. So buggy type things it is. Some of them look very kerbal. Some seem to answer the question "can I build a vehicle completely out of struts?"

If I hadn't been interested in whether I could cram 7 kerbal heads into the thing, I would have had the rear taken up with a fair bit of life support. I won't even mention that you'd have to use the whole rear to include anything like an airlock. But KSP seems rather light on airlocks. I am going to resize this. I found out my assumptions of 50% scaling aren't "standard", but that 64% is where it's at for converting real life stuff. If it wasn't NathanKell saying it, I probably would have gone with the "pull the other one" reply. See here I did some quick resizing, and I was shocked at how little it broke the wheels. I'm a bit nervous about messing with some of the values as if they're scaled be "rescale", then things will go horrible. The IVA needs rescaling at Unity layers.

I've finished revising the 3d model for the A-10 engine. So, it needed the control vanes to not just be A-4 control vanes, the A-10 vanes are huge. And the existing steam exhaust needed revising to not clip and show outside the wing body. I still need to unwrap and texture the engine though. I haven't had a lot of time recently, but I should have an uploadable A-10 done fairly soon. With A-4b, A-6, and A-9 wings for the A-4.

I'm working on some wings (with built in control surfaces, so using ModuleControlSurface), and they're set up the same way I set up other control surfaces. Outboard is Unity Local -X, Blender +X. Forward/Up is UL+Z, B+Z. I've started parenting control surfaces to an empty object with the right axis as this both works and makes setting said axis a lot easier. And they work. But when attached in the VAB/SPH in mirror symmetry, the control surfaces operate in opposite directions. Again, like most of these issues, it's just the animation of the control surfaces that's wrong. The wings provide control in the correct direction, but they look like they shouldn't. Anyways, here's what it looks like, (all the control directions are pitch, no roll, even though it all looks like roll) PS: I grepped out all the stock squad notes on DeflectionLiftCoeff, and it's exactly the listed surface area divided by 3.5 in all cases. And, as soon as I've described the issue I find the offending config. mirrorRefAxis = 0, 0, -1 Which, once removed (like virtually all the control surface parts) it's happy.

Yep, and I'm modelling that using gimbaling (plus some modeled guide vanes). The guide vanes I have in are currently just the A-4 vanes scaled up. It's one of those model tweaks I need to add to the engine before it's releasable. But the effect of those guide vanes is already on the part, and it's still pretty sluggish at turning. It does turn though. For turning, the wings look like they're drawn in on several diagrams with exhaust nozzles running through them. Presumably a proto-RCS type system using the steam output from the hydrogen peroxide steam generator. Although I'm guessing wildly here. So, I've added RCS to the wings using the dual fuel for the moment. But that's arranged to only give a small control boost. It does all "kind of" work though. Here's Jeb going up (there's no provision for coming back down) in my early A-9 cockpit, with A-6 wings on the top of an A-10.

Some progress. The A-10 rocket is mostly done. I need to add texturing and some small tweaks to the model for the engine. And the semi-fairing pieces are reluctant to decouple in any direction except up. Which tends to lead to running into them, so sub-optimal. It turns like a train again. No control surfaces and big fins. The A-9 wings are behaving better, but still stupidly. I need to do more tweaks on the aero CoXOffsets and so on. I don't mind if they're useless, but they behave very strangely at the moment. I do have Blender stage A-4b wings as well, just need to turn them into Unity wings and then KSP wings. And I started, restarted, and restarted again on the A-9 cockpit. This time starting with the inside, working my way out. Seems to be a good way of building the IVA into the design.

Depends what you mean by " it changes the entire part to be defined as a parachute. ". The part's category should be whatever is set in the cfg file. But, any given part can only have one staging capability. So, if you have some other module that triggers staging (engines, decouplers, etc) then one module will over-ride the others. I've had to build single decouplers as three parts before to get it to decouple from the upper stages, retro rocket burn, and then decouple from the lower stages. It's just a "feature" of KSP.

And it seems the absurd aero instability is from the A-9 wing, which I never released because something's wrong with it. As an example of it's brokeness, coming back into the atmosphere from a suborbital flight, it will flip the A-9/4 backwards. There's something horribly wrong with the part's aero. An A-10/A-4 works "fine". With the caveat that any rotation will cause explosions, etc etc. And the fairing pieces currently fire directly forward, which is sub-optimal. :-)

Mods will automatically support both 32bit and 64bit

Early test run of the A-10 without the fairing type thing. Got a clean separation, but as expected, the large wings without control surfaces makes it steer like a train. OK, updating the album to have properly scaled parts. By proper, I mean the A-10 is now the same scale as the A-4, and both are 0.64 as @NathanKell suggested. And, with parts rescaled, it no longer flies like it's on rails! It flies like it wants to go backwards. So far, I'm not sure if that's weight balance, misconfigured fins, or the lack of the aero shell type thing that should go over the transition between the A-10 and A-4/9. So, I've done a fair few launches, and every one starts upwards, then starts spinning. Once I managed to still be in the air when I exhausted the fuel so could do the separation, which actually worked (with the second stage pointed at the ground). And I've also tested separation directly from the launchpad. So, unlike my expectations, separation doesn't look to be a major issue. Although it will be if the craft has any rotation. I'll chuck an aero fairing of some sort on after work and see if I can't get the A-10 to fly in a straight line.

0.64x? OK. I've gone with 0.703x on the Redstone so far to get a 1.25m rocket, but .64x would be pretty close. Close enough to not look totally out of place. I can pretty easily convert seeing as most of my blender models are full scale and then I rescale later. Thoughts in order: This will give me more headroom in the Defender. A-4/V-2 will get a teeny bit bigger, Redstone a teeny bit smaller That Jeb damned Nexus ain't gonna fit in the hangers. Oh, and on daft separations: I ran a quick test using a stock decoupler staged with the A-4 engine. And it actually worked first go.

OK, for the record, this is the main issue with the A10 booster. The upper fuel tank has an inset hollow space for the A-4. I've been trying to think of a way around this, but I think I'll just make it as per daft original plans and see what proportion of separations result in rapid catastrophic disassemblement. So, the top half of the tank has both a tapered cone to fit the A-4 body, and four radial cuts to fit the wings. In the linked album, the first two shots look like a perfectly normal rocket. Then tank and so on showing the required cut-outs (yes, I'll be beveling and rounding some edges before releasing). I expect any deviation from a perfect separation to result in the aforementioned failure scenario.

That's reminiscent of a car I had while a uni student, so seems perfectly realistic to me. :-)

It's being annoying. Or, it's fit between stages is being annoying. But mostly it hasn't been looked at for a while due to other factors. EDIT: Just had another look at my blender file. Issues to resolve: The wing. I have a sketch level drawing of it showing the interior structure of the wing, and it looks like it didn't have control surfaces (aka aileron/rudder/etc) But, there's what looks like pipes leading to exhaust nozzle looking structure. So I'm wondering if I'm looking at steam based RCS nozzles in the wing (exiting the tail edge). Secondly, the arrangement for the A-4 upper stage is nuts. It'll work, but I expect a 50% chemically assisted rapid disassembly on stage separation. The upper stage nestles inside the fuel tank of the first stage, which comes up around the fin structure of the A-4. Because fins are excellent on second stages. :-) But the gimbal vanes on the A-4 are part of the fin structure, so no fin = no gimbal = zero control.

Rescale poll. 0.5 or 0.7? Screen shots of 0.5 and 0.7 rescale. Very clearly the 0.7 rescale fits existing 1.25m parts much better because it's scaled to match 1.25m. The 0.5 scale is just scaled to 0.5.

Actually, GenAtomics came up with a perfectly workable 10m diameter version for NASA and USAF that could be launched (lofted, wouldn't quite make orbit, but above about 100km, orion use would be safe for people on the ground.) on a Saturn V 1st stage. In fact the readily available paper by General Atomics for NASA focuses strongly on the 10m design for this very reason. Not only would it significantly alleviate concerns about safety, it (and sadly, this is probably more important) would have allowed them to not obsolete the Saturn over-night. And the larger 86foot diameter "Medium" sized Orion could have been lofted by some of the post-Saturn ludicrously large boosters. On risk: It's VERY apparent when looking at people's reactions to various causes of death, that actual risk has nothing to do with perceived risk. Nuclear related risk is rated extremely highly in the human consciousness. Unlike road fatalities and heart disease. So, it's just a fact of politics and public opinion that swing us away from nuclear solutions a lot of the time (EG: ignoring other factors, radiation exposure near a coal fuel station is higher than near a nuclear reactor, but just see which people would rather live near). Any mission to Mars or Saturn would be insanely expensive if we were to send humans. Time spent in transit would be a major factor in the size of the vessel needed, and so stupid high ISP is where the game is at. Today, ion thrusters are where it's at for ISP, but they produce such insanely crap TWR they're fairly useless so far for manned missions. There's a host of options besides Orion, many of which are much better politically. Also, much better developed. I still think the main issue with Orion is that there's a lot of development work to do, and *that* is where the issue is. We got the basic physics of it worked out. We know it should work "in theory". But, I can hazard a guess as to what happened to the first ever liquid fueled rocket as well. And how many test launches do we need before we have a working solution? If we'd burnt all those test fires of nukes back in the 60's on pusher plate dynamics and erosion, suspension reactions to 1000G and all that excrements, then we might be in a position to build one. But without having done that, we'd need to re-irradiate the planet again. Because, you can loft up a working Orion, but you'll have a hard job lofting up a few hundred for testing of this or that adjustment. While all the other systems used for thrust get tested exhaustively at ground level. So, yes, the engineering is prohibitive, but not just because the craft would be expensive.

Yeah, the real question is Nova or Space Shuttle. Realistically, the Nova was a post-Saturn design. Yes, originally they thought they needed the Nova to get to the moon, but switched to "just" the Saturn for time related issues (I doubt I'll ever use the term "just" and "Saturn" in a sentence again). But, once NASA had got to the moon, the next decision was "What next?". And, at the time, NASA chose to investigate reusable space planes. And while we all now know that's not as efficient as even throw away boosters, that wasn't known until someone tried. The experiment lasted some decades. excrements happens. There's only so much budget to go around (unless the USA stops spending 1.5T$/y on defense, the crazy freaks) so only one major direction at a time. They're about ready to take off with the SLS, which rather daftly re-uses the shuttle's SME, but it's still a pretty good craft. And I'm not picking on the SME for the usual reasons. Basically, NASA, JPL, etc put a serious truck load of work into those suckers. It would have been nice to take the lessons learned, and redesign from scratch for the new use case. But instead NASA is adjusting the existing design. That always smells bad to me. Still, apart from the OMG scale of the things, they're better in just about every way to the F-1, as much as I love that huge beast. ISP, restarts, loveing huge gimbal, is all hugely better. It falls down a bit on TWR, but only because LH+LOX is never going to match K+LOX for thrust. But it trashes it solidly on efficiency. But really, the process of taking the lessons learned through development and practical use of the F-1 and J-2, and then start with a fresh drawing board, is what got the awesomeness of the SME. And it would have been great to see that happen again. But, America's industrialized corruption isn't going to see that happen. But, going back to Nova or Shuttle. The number of ideas that popped up for the next step are immense. The Nova was well down the path of design, which sets it apart a bit. But there was a host of options provided by every company even remotely involved. In waves as well. Before the decision to go with a "shuttle-like" craft, there was a vast array of rockets, re-usable or otherwise, and then after NASA announced they were looking for submissions into a space plane, there were still a heap of options, but now they all vaguely looked space-plane like. You might as well ask Onion or Phoenix.

The difference of being able to use the last 20% of propellant mass is noticeably huge. :-) With the winglets, there's something weird going on with them. They were working on my dev install, then after updating, I installed on my test game, and they wouldn't attach. I found if I rotated them, then surface attached, detached, then they'd stack node attach. Don't know if it's a game bug or a part issue. A bit annoying. There's no way around them being separate parts though. Only one control surface and one lifting surface per part.

V0.10 is uploaded. This includes the fix for the stock fuel on the A-4 tank being deranged, and colour switching between the test pattern and a dodgy green thing. It also now includes that Redstone first stage A-6 NAA-75-110 engine, with shroud, winglets and a fuel tank. The texturing on the fuel tank is the base layer, I don't think there was ever a plain whitish Redstone rocket, although there were some not far from it. Just a quick note on scale. I usually do all my KSP historical pieces at half scale. There's a bunch of reasons for that, but basically Kerbals are small, and so is Kerbin. But, half scale for the Redstone is a diameter of a bit under 0.9m (nominal body diameter was 5'10" in dodgy units). The A-4 is slightly smaller again. This means nothing lines up with stock parts. So, I'm considering making these match a stock size, just for part compatibility. More for the Redstone than the A-4, which doesn't really need to match anything.

Yep. Looks like I got confused with Oxy vs Fuel ratios when copying it in due to the Real Fuels config using 75% Ethanol. The ethanol fuel ends up being consumed faster than the oxidizer, contrary to virtually every other combustion system ever, mostly due to that 25% water in it. Will fix shortly. Damn, I thought I posted the above about a day ago. Updated with the issue fixed. Thanks for the reminder

On a related note, I'll be adding in the first of the Redstones, the A6 NAA-75-110. Still massively smaller than the A-10 piece of wishful thinking. :-) I still need to add Wernher's really dumb, vane-based "gimballing" and a shroud, but I did up the model in a sort of limbo state of not knowing where to put it. So I decided to add it to this mod rather than just expiring it.

Yeah, the articulation would be the other issue looking for a solution. :-)