The White Guardian

Yes. I merely gave a scientific reason why there could be oxygen in the atmosphere, though I did not say that there has to be enough oxygen per cubic meter for jet engines. I'll let the developer decide the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere: no oxygen, not enough oxygen, or enough. - - - Updated - - - I agree with you, Arkas seems like a planet where dust storms would be common. I haven't added them yet. I'm currently studying Astronomer's Visual Pack: Edge of Oblivion, because that pack includes dust storms for Duna. Once I know at what altitude I have to put the clouds, I'll add sandstorms. I'm also working on some extra cloud maps to create layering, and an optional cloud map that fully hides the surface from view to make Arkas a better Venus analog than Eve ever was. I'll soon take a few screenshots from the surface.

I think I got something for you! http://imgur.com/VOLjBEh (Yeah, a link. I have quite a lot of trouble with embedding Imgur images, sorry) I had an unused texture of orange clouds lying around, so I decided to write a simple config and give it a go. This is the result. Note: the aurora's and atmospheric glow are from Astronomer's Visual Pack: Edge of Oblivion and the thunderstorms are from Astronomer's Visual Pack: Interstellar V2.

Here's the composition of martian soil just to look at how much oxygen is tied up in the crust I know, Martian soil consists primarily of metals combined with oxygen. Also, I did not say that the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere would be enough for jet engines, I only said that it would be possible for oxygen to be present in the atmosphere.

Oxygen does not have to be useful for something or someone to be present in an atmosphere. If a planet formed in an area where oxygen is present, the eventual atmopshere will probably contain oxygen. There is another way for oxygen to form inside an atmopshere: electrify water, and it'll split into Hydrogen gas and Oxygen gas. A heavy thunderstorm on Arkas could easily free some oxygen. Next: how could there possibly be water on Arkas? Simple: water isn't, but water-vapor is. And if watervapor wasn't on Arkas when it formed, after billions of years at least one comet would've hit Arkas. It doesn't matter if the comet reached the surface, what matters is that comets are usually full of water. Still, all of this does not mean that oxygen must be present in Arkas' atmosphere. Look at what happened to planet Venus: evidence suggests that Venus used to have oceans of water, but the incresing heat due to the greenhouse effect caused the oceans to evaporate. Nowadays there is no water present on Venus, neither on the surface nor in the atmosphere. Why the water vapor disappeared? That requires some basic knowledge of atoms. You see, the hotter an object is, the faster the atoms it's made of move. The higher the temparature, the faster atoms move. In the center of the Sun, of example, it's so hot that the atoms slam into eachother, and on Venus it got so hot that the watermolecules moved too fast: Venus' gravity couldn't stop them, so the water disappeared into space. So, in the end, it depends on Arkas' gravity and temparature, and how many comets there are in the Kerbol system. No, that Squad didn't add a comet so far doesn't mean there are no comets in that system, most systems out there have at least ten comets. Systems with no comets at all are extremely rare. In case you're wondering: our solar system has billions of comets. - - - Updated - - - It's fine with me if they are included in the OP. It's made for your mod, after all.

Yeah, that sounds like beyond crazy to me.

Is it alright if I make a few cloud maps and an E.V.E config in the meantime?

Merciful Kod, this looks great! It looks so good that I'll probably make a youtube video of it. Though, how about the clouds? Does this mod have E.V.E support?

I was not questioning if he was telling the truth, I was asking if he was using an outdated version. He is no doubt telling the truth if he says there are bugs, I was merely wondering if it was due to an outdated version of K+. I did not know that the current version has those bugs, because in your earlier messages you wrote that you had fixed most (if not all) of them, so I incorrectly guessed that the mod was updated and that in the latest version the terrain bugs had been taken care of. Sorry for the confusion. - - - Updated - - - I once played KSP with both OPM and KerbalGalaxy2, and even without Active Texture Management it loaded nicely. The new planets did come with a significant performance hit, though.

Are you sure you've been using the latest version of the mod? Older versions had bugs, indeed.

*CRITICAL ERROR* *System 'The White Guardian' has stopped working. Reason: awesomeness overload. Rebooting...*

Oh? Is Sido porting Urania over to Kopernicus? Awesome! The Urania pack was probably one of the best, if not the best planet pack out there back when everyone worked with PFCE, so it's great to see it returning.

I can make High, Medium and Low-res E.V.E clouds in the meantime if you'd like. Hold on, Kopernicus will eventually include clouds? I hope those clouds' effects aren't neutralized by rings like E.V.E clouds do.

Ideas? I'm pretty good at brainstorming, let's see... Perhaps a heavily clouded desert planet with high black mountains?

Farms as big as the VAB, you say? Well, we are talking about a planet diffrent from our own, who knows how big the animals are? Perhaps on Kerbin the cows (known there as 'Kow') are as big as a building? Or do Kerbals farm rocket parts or something? That would explain why there is a seemingly endless supply of parts.

This looks pretty awesome! I wish you the best of luck with creating this pack! (Reads on) 88 km/s escape velocity?! Mother of mercy! I hope that Draco will have at least 0.5G so I can use it as a gravity slingshot, otherwise any Kerbal I send there is doomed.

Enjoy! Oh my goodness! Now this is a gem!

An easter egg, I see? Also, do the planet and moons have science descriptions yet?

I've got an announcement to make! I was finally able to export normals as DXT5_nm from GIMP and Kopernicus seems to like them, so I've made some incredible progress on the promised solar system. I've also changed the star's name, it is now named 'Kobalt' because it is light blue. I've already got a basic version of a dwarf planet and three gas giants, the giants being clones of Neidon from OPM but with diffrent maps so they're far from done, but at least they work. One of the giants already got a set of moons, though one of it's moons is still unfinished, while another might be removed from the final mod because it doesn't show up. I've tested three of the moons and the dwarf planet so far, all were landable. However, I did notice a strange bug when attempting to land on an asteroid moon with an SOI of 24km: all planets, including my own, just shot out of their orbits. I also had OPM installed, and even those planets left their orbits. Only Neidon, Plock and the giant whose system I was exploring stayed in their orbits. I was able to solve it by warping myself to another planet with Hyperedit (I'm using Hyperedit to get to the new moons right away so I can test them). So, either my mod is making the game unstable or Hyperedit and Kopernicus do not like each other. I'd guess the latter one, for Hyperedit can also change a planet's orbit which might conflict with Kopernicus. I'll just hold my fingers crossed and hope the issue goes away when I remove Hyperedit from my game...

Oh my goodness! Those moons just got an entirely diffrent terrain!

Well, I make my planets a bit diffrently. You see, I make a 3D model of my planet/moon in the greatest detail my computer can handle, then export the color, height and normal map as 4096/2048 pixels .PNG images. My maps worked just fine, the only problem was an annoying bug: the lighting on the scaledspace model was messed up. I managed to fix it this morning by only using GIMP. You see, I managed to find a plugin for GIMP that allowed me to export images as DXT5_nm, like Nvidia's plugin for Photoshop. All I did was open my normal map in GIMP, then export it as DXT5_nm. This gave it a funky pink color, and apparantly Kopernicus loves pink, because it worked! I even managed to land on the planet I created, however, I'd placed it closer to Kerbol than Moho, so parts sometimes overheated on their own, but I managed to land nevertheless. And, something about Manai: I don't know if it's got it's ScienceDefs yet, but I think I've come up with a rather 'Kerballish' EVA report for Manai: "It's certainly hot here. You write down a reminder to take marshmellows with you next time.". And a crew report: "The crew tells mission control that they've found the excellent place for a barbecue. Heat included." - - - Updated - - - Oh my Kerbal! Those moons look amazing!

Well, I kinda expect a performance drop when installing a mod that injects planets into KSP, but a performance drop over 50%? It might be a good idea to install Active Texture Management.

I knew that I could grayscale an image with GIMP, but I used the normal map of Tekto from the Outer Planets Mod as example, and that map is semi-transparent, which isn't something I've been able to replicate with GIMP. Well, I 'sort of' replicated it, but Kopernicus doesn't like it. I'll follow the example of K+ and try to make a normal map that is only grayscaled, and I'll see what happens.

That is easy to explain, though much harder to do. You'll need Photoshop and Nvidia's normal map plugin. Import your normal map in Photoshop then export it as DXT5_nm. There also seems to be a way to do it with GIMP, I'm currently trying GIMP so I'll let you know if it works.

Once you've installed Kerbol Plus, dig through your GameData folder before you start KSP. If there's no 'Kopernicus' folder, download and intstall Kopernicus. You see, sometimes Kopernicus mods come bundled with Kopernicus itself, and sometimes they don't.

Step 1: Create an 1024 by 512 pixel image that is completely black or white, and save that. Give it a name like 'MyMod_BiomeMaps'. Step 2: Then, in the Kopernicus configs, enter the file path to your biome map (for example: MyMod/Textures/MyMod_BiomeMaps.png). Next, add the biome 'Rocky Surface' and tell Kopernicus that it has the code 1,1,1,1 (if the map you made earlier is completely white) or 0,0,0,0 (if the map you made earlier is completely black). You can let multiple configs use the same biome map texture, so repeat step 2 for each of your configs and let them load the same biome map. If you still don't get it, I'm willing to write that part of the configs for you, for I am working on an asteroid extension pack as well.