TiktaalikDreaming

Between a bit of a gap while rebuilding my PC and noticing FASA is becoming a collaborative effort headed by @NathanKell due to Frissank retiring from maintaining it, I've somehow been trapped making some bridging engines between the Aggregate rocket range and the NASA rockets. So far I've been putting effort into the Redstone A-6 (NAA-75-110 so far, but deleting items from that gives the other A-6s, and then deleting parts from that gets the A-7s, mostly) which sits somehwere between this mod and the FASA mod. I'm inclined to keep this mod for the German engines and the German imagined engines, aka Wernher's extrapolations on where they could take the Aggregate range. So, I'm really just mentioning this so people know I have not forgotten this mod, just momentarily distracted from it. That I'm open to ideas of whether the Redstones, Navahos etc belong here, in FASA, or a third mod. And because this relates to this mod, even though it doesn't quite belong, the same people might be interested in it. And, also, as I found out when doing this for the A-4, posting this gets floods of really useful help, links to info, and links to other mods doing the same thing that I never noticed. :-) Redstone progress will be added to the following imgur album;

Started working on the A-6. It wasn't used much before progressing to the A-7, but once I have the A-6, the A-7 is pretty similar. So, not complete with even the shape yet. Damned hard figuring out how some of the tubings went. There's just not a huge amount of detail available, and so much of the early rockets where the bits that weren't nozzle. At least with later engines, the combustion chamber and associated pumps, tanks, turbines, pipes, etc were relatively smaller. Getting there though.

They are a bit redundant, esp with the 45 degree angle on the sideways. I should do the two way that'd result in removing the central.

Finally got around to remeshing the block I had for 3-way so it has a 45 degree side panel. Image 1 is basically what @Psycho_zs has been talking about. A mix of the Apollo CM and that for image 2. Image3 is just messing about. I do intend to create parts that are just standalone RCS nozzles, although what's shown is not that. Image 4 is my other type of 3-way. They'd need a central 2-way to complete the translation set, and would mostly be useful on long craft where the axial thrust would have a huge moment of inertia. And, yes, maybe I coulda done the screen shots to show that. :-) But thinking of it while typing this and having already uploaded it doesn't help that. Actual mod update to follow.

Well, I had my HDD crash, and I've basically just got a working OS with Unity and have been looking at all the various dev stuff to install, while also trying to recover data from the old HDD. But development will begin again soon. I did look at the new shaders in Unity5 (didn't realize you can have U4 and U5 installed) in prep for KSP1.1. Those make a big difference to the look of stuff. The metallic slider makes me very happy.

http://heroicrelics.org/ussrc/engines-a-7-indoors/dsc11488.jpg.html We're all used to a much more detailed outside of nozzles than the early systems of basically a dual wall with booze pumped between the walls. As to paintings, a lot of museum pieces will have extra paint to prevent corrosion and sometimes to highlight different systems, eg: blue for oxidizer, red for fuel etc. A lot of that wouldn't be there on live production pieces. I'm not saying the Russians don't paint their engines, but a museum piece isn't demonstrating it clearly.

Wow, @DangerouslyDave really is setting a high bar. :-) Those bridging engines will give me material to work with to try catching up a bit. :-)

Wow, that's good excrements. I had no idea the constraints etc would import through Unity and out to KSP so nicely. Thanks @Nertea. I'd been doing what @riocrokite suggested, aka, fudging it. Fine _mostly_, until it looks odd. This is MUCH better. And those engines are looking fabulous.

I has most of my development environment back. A 5-way and two arrangements of 3-way coming soon. I've been looking at arrangements for a lower section ring of RCS to go between fuel tanks and the engines. That's progressing (it's blender work, so I could progress in my Linux boot) but there's a fair bit of work, mostly in choosing how things are. It's not super complicated modelling, but it does raise many questions to which there are multiple answers. :-)

Well, I'm wondering how much of the early US rocketry should go into my Aggregate rocket pack (Wernher's Old Stuff), and at what point it becomes a FASA thing. @saabstory88's work on some of the early engines is pretty damn good (IMHO), but I noticed when looking up the Atlas details, there are rocket motors bridging the gaps from the A-4 all the way through, and some great photo resources on http://www.b14643.de Especially the shot of a Rocketdyne A-7 with an A-4 motor in the foreground. I'm thinking all the US built engines are FASA jobs (maybe we need a UKAF bridging mod for the early USAF stuff) rather than Aggregates. There is a Redstone in the existing FASA pack, but it's not naked. I think having it naked with an attachable shroud would make the engine evolution clearer. And I has a Unity editor install again! I felt wrong not having a working Unity. :-)

The hints above and @NathanKell's links should keep me busy for some time. :-) Between rebuilding my PC anyway. Stupid HDDs without infinite lifespans.

Do you have any good links for info on the Atlas? I'm just being lazy of course, I can google away as needed, but it sounds like you already did some research.

Yes...but.... It's fairly easy to do yourself. And maintaining a second mod pack of the same parts is slightly annoying, so it comes down to how many people want said engine packs. EG: effort-A x users might be < effort-B. On the other hand, IF you put in that effort, you're now free to upload said pack, with appropriate copyright type notices, to a mod repository for other users, and become a mod publisher.

Yep. The inefficiency is that some nozzles may always be useless, and thus are being lugged around for no benefit. All couple of kg of them. As I said, I tend towards the lazy spectrum, but it's certainly not unheard of for people to carefully balance and optimize these things.

Absolutely. And I'd like to say there's nothing wrong with being lazy while building craft in KSP either. Mine are often thrown together pretty darned haphazardly. With 5 nozzles you're reducing your chances of at least one nozzle not pointing along an axis that intersects the centre of mass, but increasing the chance of having nozzles pointing where you need them. MOAR NOZZLES!

And that's why we need options. Nozzles facing the centre of mass are, I think we can agree, significantly less useful than tits on a bull. I generally think the 5-way would be used in situations where the craft builder cannot be bothered thinking. Just whack a whole bunch of 5-way nozzles all over the place and cross your fingers. It's not really the most efficient way of doing things. Unless the efficiency you're after is "minimum thinking". But most every mod with "extra RCS" has one, and usually because users want it. And, I'm going to have to do up a set of names for each arrangement so I can refer to them without extensive descriptions each time. :-)

Mostly the blender work. I'm still wrestling with getting up to speed with unwrappings and texturing, but I'm getting better at that. I can assist in other aspects as well, I've been building parts pack mods for about a year now. So I can do the range of stuff. My IVA-fu is week. :-)

Ah, yep. With the angles, they become quite a bit more useful. Now I'm thinking bottom left, and top right. Maybe bottom right as well, as it seems odd to do top right without that. What I was discounting was the top left. It just seemed to add nothing that wasn't better covered by the regular 4-way.

I'm always up for some making 3d assets. Especially for the mod that most inspired me.

The uploaded version has the wrong stats for the 3.75m I daftly copied the 2.5 and doubled sizes, instead of x1.5. So, it has as much mono as the 5m should have and the thrust power is where the 5m should be as well. I have a fixed up copy, that I currently can't access, that has corrected sizes 0 through to 4, aka, 0.625m, 1.25m, 2.5m, 3.75m, and 5m. I will also be doing Mk1 and so on, but clearly with different models. At the moment, my modding capability has taken a turn for the worse. My primary HDD with Windows etc, is in a bad way (aka, chirpy noises and more bad sectors than good ones) so I can only boot to Linux. And I don't have Unity working in Linux (I tried, there's a lot of time while waiting for every HDD tool available in linux to run on a few TB), so all I can do until I've fixed my PC is mess with config files. That said, I have a replacement HDD. Day 1 of recovery attempts was to dd the old to new, and see if there was enough data for the easy way out. Turns out the answer is "no". So I'll be reinstalling Windows, and Blender, and GiMP, and Unity, and KSP, and ...... trying to remember all the other excrements that sits in the background and makes life just that little bit easier. Feel free to keep making suggestions, but don't have great expectations of new variants popping up in the next few days.

I have plans for a 5-way, and a 3way, but the 3 way would be one axis in both directions parallel to the surface it's mounted on plus one nozzle firing away from said surface. I can't honestly think of a good use case for other 3-way blocks. I'd be inclined to make just the RCS ring, except maybe for some hypergolic main engines, including an RCS ring. But a hollow RCS ring part does have merit. Thanks.

Updated. Inline now has three sizes, 1.25m, 2.5m, and 3.75m. *** UNTESTED *** I knew the changes I needed, and they were all text cfg changes, so I grabbed the mod and made the changes at work. Don't tell anyone. But that means I can't test. I also changed the folder name to match the (proposed auto) CKAN identifier, even though I also made a request for adding an install stanza where that's specified.

Yep. Although the larger of the two is supposed to be 3.75m already. I didn't actually check yet, I may have scales all wrong. :-) --------------------------------- Yep, the one I meant to be 3.75 is definitely 2.5m Which means the smaller one is 2/3rds of 2.5m, and thus fits nothing. I'll fix this all up next update.

The inlines are still very much in dev. The two so far work, but they pretty ugly. I need to reunwrap them to solve some issues, and then they're going to a dark tile pattern. Also, the existing pattern just does sideways, there's no fore-aft. But, yep, they are freakin useful.

This mod will be a collection of RCS and hypergolic engines. I won't limit myself to hypergolic RCS as such though. I just see a lot of cross-over. Eventually I'll be looking at Realism Overhaul (can't see people wanting much in the line of main hypergolic engines without that), but for the moment I'm just developing using a dual config, one for stock, and one for RealFuels. So, the plan is basically a bunch of RCS block types. A few inline RCS modules (more on that in a sec). And some main engines of a few sizes, plus some larger side mounted engines (like the "puff", but bigger). Why? Because turning big craft with stock RCS is tedious, and often results in catastrophic failure due to lack of manoeuvring speed. And because on really small craft, stock RCS massively overcompensates, and looks ridiculous. So, more than one size is needed. I looked, and there are mods that include different RCS, but along with other stuff. And I'd have needed one mod to grab small RCS and another to grab big RCS. So far I'm mostly working with 3 sizes, stock, stock x2, and stock /2. That's double and half measurements in each dimension, so eight times or one eighth mass and thrust. Inline. While trying to figure out how to do inset RCS (see space shuttle nose etc), I decided I'd do short fuselage parts with RCS inset into them, and a core of a Monoprop fuel tank. So far I have one design, and it's in two sizes, with a pretty awful texture mapped on. 3.75m and 2.5m. Obviously it needs more options than that, which I'm working on. Including adapters between bulkhead sizes/shapes. Thrusting hypergolic engines. I'm not super sure how much of this I'll get into. I'll be looking at at least some different sizes of something like the stock “Puff” engine. And probably a basic inline engine. I probably won't make any of them particularly big (aka, no 5m radius monster hypergolics) as it seems unlikely hypergolics would be used when the added complexity of turbopumps etc becomes so much less cumbersome. And there's none of these yet. Download link http://spacedock.info/mod/71/TD%20Industries%20RCS%20and%20Hypergolic%20engines Pretties; Updated to v0.2. Still the same list of parts, same behaviour. I've updated textures etc, and made some minor adjustments to placement of nozzles. Inline parts no longer look awful.