TiktaalikDreaming

Happy Newton's day everyone. I'm away for a couple of days driving several hundred km around to see various bits of family. Then I have some spare time. Or work from home with low expectations anyway. I'll be looking at changing the colliders for the decouplers to convex in preparation for KSP 1.1, because I know that's comng, AND the new collider system works fine (in fact, that's default for all other parts) in 1.0.5, but it needs tweaking for decouplers. Esp the Nexus decouplers, which do tend to create plenty of trouble even without convex colliders. Be good to each other, fly weird craft, and try not crashing or exploding too much.

Happy Newton's day everyone. I'm away for a couple of days driving several hundred km around to see various bits of family. Then I have some spare time. Or work from home with low expectations anyway. I have some partly formed pieces to add, including the A-1/A-2 engine (the main difference bwteen the two craft is where in the stack the gyros were), which is tested, but is so damned small, I need to get the fuel tanks etc done before it'll fly. I can do up a procedural fuel tanks, but every control system is too damned big. Be good to each other, fly weird craft, and try not crashing or exploding too much.

Just 'cos I can; comparison shots of the V-2 vs some stock Kerbal rockets. It's worth noting that the smaller of the KSP stock engines has roughly twice the thrust of the A-4 rocket. Yes, it's a lot tidier, only one or two pipes leading in, but it probably has a single combustion chamber and less absurb bandaid solutions to issues raised by other bandaid solutions. I've said it before, and I'll say it again (because it's kinda cool), the A-4 was literally a steam powered rocket.

Ha! True. But when? You've just encouraged me to wait before adding emissive heat animations. :-)

No worries, no offence taken. Although I guess, rereading what I said, it might be a bit confrontational as well. I think where I was going is that the engine does stick out. And when you see a real one vs a real modern rocket it sticks out as well. Reading Operation Backfire (report on the thing in great detail) the whole thing was absurdly complex. Partly because they didn't realise they could run the turbines from exhaust gases, and partly because when they couldn't stabilize the combustion (they just used 18 combustion chambers from the A-3 feeding into a main chamber). 10 out of 10 to Braun et al for getting a working production rocket during wartimes, with a pretty high production volume, and having it mostly work. But by modern standards, it's weird. It looks weird, and, hell, I like it. :-) Also, what I forgot to say earlier when discussing load from complexity. The collider complexity will f*ck you up. Simple simple colliders are the way to go. Because (thanks to pretty stuff selling) graphics are easy, physics are hard.

The polygons per piece isn't excessive, the engine just had a bucket load more complexity than other rocket engines. I don't happen to think it looks out of place, especially as I'm intending it goes right at the beginning of the tech tree, and wouldn't expect anyone to use it after the initial stages of the game. I mean we're burning booze and LOX, and occasionally exploding, to achieve a pretty ordinary Isp and almost passable thrust. "Why bother?" Why bother with any of this? I enjoy it. I like having this old clunker of an engine in my game. I like the idea that Kerbanauts might steal some fuel to pour over some ice to watch the sunset. And I like complex non-stockalike models of engines. I'm seriously in love with the FASA mod. Those models are f*k*n awesome. To hell with making things look like the existing KSP parts, Squad will be working on that stuff. I like my bits to look like real world parts. And if you happen to like the stock look, then good for you, you don't need my mod. And your game will probably run smoother, but not look as sexy.

All of them. :-) Not sure, at work at the moment. Many. Although I discovered that I could leave the pipes as beziers with assigned width etc and Unity would handle that, so less than it looks like (unless unity does the conversion for me). But, when I was messing about with modelling and seeing what affects draw speed and RAM use, I found that you can make objects a LOT more complex than most KSP models are, without much affect on frame rate. But texture size will break things, esp with the 32-bit Windows RAM limits. This might be due to how my PC is set up, but generally the more complex models are OK until they're really daft. I did wonder about this, but I loaded it up on my cheap laptop and the game still ran fine (although I crashed the rocket plane into the ocean).

Yesterday I wrote a reply to this. But obviously didn't hit Submit or something. Now my browser brings up a prior message in the new message box everytime I go to reply. Stupid forum. Anyway, I've put some work into colours. I'll tidy up some of the non-engine parts and upload in the next few days. But the engine is looking better, thanks to Rokker's photos.

Some progress. I found a colour image of an A-4 (V-2) engine. Maybe even with original colours, although I don't have any way to tell. Rocket colours are no issue, they're detailed in minuscia. I've started wotk on the A-2/A-3/A-5 engine. The stupid engine goes inside the fuel tank, so it's a tad weird. And I'm not sure how I'll arrange the parts just yet. I am chasing down the various "but what if the rocket explodes on take off?" mods to see if the A-2 rocket can be made as successful as it was historically.

I'm hoping I'm not being annoying by asking something that was in one of the middle pages of posts. I read the first few and last few, but that middle section is unchecked. :-) Is there a way of tagging a part so that it has increased or decreased failure rates? I'm asking as I'm working on a mod for V-2 rockets and the aggregate family or rocket parts associated. And, well, the A-1 through to A3, plus the A-5 had a ludicrous failure rate. These are at the birth of rocketry, and (for example) every A-3 failed at some stage before they were supposed to (although I think they all launched). So, the A-4 (aka V-2) was a bit better, possibly because it had more launches and no chutes, but I'd like to crank failure rates to "you can't pay a Kerbal enough to sit on one of these" IFF players have Dangit.

Updated. Includes a couple of example Nexi. I'll build some extras for the next update.

Starship, get yourself http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/50911-105-kerbal-joint-reinforcement-v314-62215/ All large craft suffer from physics issues in KSP, and this mod does a fair bit towards fixing that up. As to separating stages when you have really long engine sections, it's tricky at best, as your chance of the engine clipping the fairing wall is pretty good. What I do is make sure all my acceleration is stopped and do my utmost best to cut any and all rotation. Then I still cross my fingers. especially with the high Isp engine. I'm also currently building a collection of demo/example Nexuses to replace the old ones.

That is intended. When it's not burning ablator the effective Isp (including ablator) is higher, but the consumption of LH+LOX per thrust should be the same. The ablator is a cooling mechanism, that's actually fairly common on rockets and this is my attempt at modelling it. You should also notice that using the non-ablation mode will over-heat and explode fairly quickly.

Never fear. Nexus size 2 is coming soon. Twice the lift, twice the payload. Mostly because I found I couldn't get anything using the high Isp GCR into orbit using the basic Nexus.

And updated.

I _think_ I have what's needed for a resize if real solar system is installed, but something's horribly wrong with my realismoverhaul KSP. It's possible it's been broken since 1.0.5, possibly by my super clever upgrade cycle. And trying to temporarily add RSS to my current test game has met with some minor disasters. So I might release what I have (confirmed not going strange combination of sizes without RSS) and ask others if it does weird stuff. After I fix the gimbal. :-)

Yes, the parts are smaller. There's not yet an easy resize. But I'll definitely be looking at either a real solar or realism overhaul mm patch. Or even just two sets, one of half scale, one at full scale.

updated. A-4 stuff pretty well done now.

The first K is Kerbal, and Kerbals would never bother adding that, so It's just KKII. :-) The thought did occur to me. I'm not a fan of triple K mentalities. But I'm not going to let them steal all uses of "K"

It's worth noting the "broken links" that say Javascript disabled or whatever, do work to take you to the album. Which is handy when you have no idea what your album links were.

@NathanKell mentioned that over in the topic I started to keep the Aggregates separate from the Nexuses.

Maybe after I make it available. :-)

1.1.6, as the current version. Although it's a bit of a bitch getting the high ISP gcr into orbit.

V-2 and A-12 and eventually the family of Aggregate rockets has a new WIP thread over at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/127413-wip-german-wwii-rockets-including-never-built-absurdities/

I never spotted the Taerobee mod. My forum-search-fu is lacking. But then, I posted this at least partly so others might correct my "there's no existing V-2 mod" statement. :-) The A-12 isn't really a likely design. I meant the rough design is moderated advanced. In general terms. The engine concepts are generally held to be severely unlikely to have ever worked. But that's the sort of thing that would have been fixed at the engineering stage (EG: the A-4 rocket is a mashed up series of A-3 rockets because they couldn't get a single large combustion chamber to work). But yeah, it likely started as an unfunded "what if" set of scribbles. I think my intentions are at least an approximation of the whole Aggregate range of rockets. But so far, just the orignial A-4, and that's just a half done engine. Maybe a couple of Goddards in for completeness.