Zarbizaure

Sorry for the inconvenience. FRE is no longer in developpment right now (I''m passing my final exams for the french "Grandes écoles" in 2 month). I might come back as a developper later.

Thank you @Darkfedor (the mod is now on Github, I created a directory for stock config files) The real engines specs are in the RO configs files I wrote. Then it's just a bit of adjustement to make them usable in KSP. Some examples/ideas: Rutherfords : 0.625m engines? similar thurst to the stock small engine (that I forgot the name ) but better ISP. Vikings : early 1.25m engine, maybe 2.5 for the vacuum one. FREs : 1.25m engines, high tech and high ISP. The FRE2 should have a thrust similar to the stock aerospike. LE-5 : 2.5m high ISP vac engine. LE-7 : 2.5m medium thrust engine. Vega P80 engine 2.5m and 1.25m for the Zefiros. 0.625m for the RD-843 Actually using these size comparing to the specs in the real engines files and multipliying mass/thrust by the corresponding factor should be fine. The most annoying thing to do is to move the nodes around and to resize the engines to their right size (since you need to often restart KSP to heck how close you are), I have a custom install with no mods and almost no squad part (except a few tanks and some avionics) to make loading faster. About the : "I'm currently busy" : I've been building recently a thrust vectored 230grams rocket powered by a small model rocket engine and controlled by an arduino board and the first test flight is approaching

@Darkfedor there no standard config yet...if I have a little time I promise I'll do it ! (but I'm quite busy now...) If you want to you can try to write the stock config files (I'll be so thankfull if you could share them !), it's simply a lot of tweaking to get the nodes and size right ! (heads at a Squad engine config file to see how they are written).

I could if I have time. It is not really hard to do, and my test are done on regular KSP with fast edited config.

I'll probably release an update in July. Not before though I don't have a lot of spare time left to work on FRE so if anybody is interested in continuing the development you could PM me Cheers

@StoryMusgrave I know tjis, but pricing is added by RP-0. Are you playing withouth it? If they are some players playing a career mode withouth RP-0 I could add it; but honestly I found RO career boring withouth RP-P0. Just a personal though, it cost nothing to add it to the files (And I may do it when I'll come back home in a week).

Interesting, and nice modelling! As Phineas Freak stated, it looks like we'll have the same goal (we modelled both the Electron engines, with a slight difference in texture style though). I don't know how long I'll be able to model, but maybe we can do something in common.

I thinks the standard SABRE is good, but the RO SABRE only needs to be changed. I'll update my PR to change its size. (Really? it's 5m width?) I just need some better configs for the AJE parameters. About the wings: with FAR and B9 procedural wing, the design is really stable. It has a really high liftoff speed (about Mach 0.5 or 160m/s) but it fly well. The only problem I have in air-breathing mode is the lack of thurst. Even the canard wings work fine in RO and provide a good amount of pitch. About the mass: yes, that's the unknow but important factor...it's set to 8T in RO, I suppose it's a bit high. A similar engine with the same thurst level would be the RS-25; and the RS-25 weights 3.2T. Even if it will have a higher mass with the precooler mass, it should be around 4-6T. The 275T mass is for the skylon C1; the sylon D1 will be a bit heavier.

in stock, the SABRE is not a problem. But with realism overhaul...if you don't have the right stats, an SSTO is impossible. I'm not asking to modify the part for stock, just for RO. My skylon is as close as possible to the original: 330T start mass, 55T dry mass, 6.8km/s in closed cycle mode...The only problem is the air-breathing part. Flying a monster like the skylon with only 2*450kN of thurst is REALLY hard. That's why we need realistics stats for RO. And a longer runway too.

@blowfish yes, we don't have a lot of data, because the engine is still in R&D! But with the config we currently have, the skylon is totally un-orbitable. According to REL, the S.A.B.R.E. should have great performance at a wide range of speed and altitude. Therefore it needs to have a not-too low thrust on the ground (as you said ~700kN) and then to rise to an higher thrust (~1900kN, still from wiki = 1.3 TWR in mid flight) between mach 1-2 and mach 5. After mach 5 the thrust should start to decrease and be almost null at mach 5.5. For the ISP there is little to no data for the S.A.B.R.E. but there is data for the A2 : TSFC = 40.9kN.s/kg at Mach 5 and 96.0kN.s/kg at Mach 0.9. It don't know if this will help but the SABRE has probably similar performances. By formula, this is between 4186s and 9473s. EDIT: not sure at all of my calculation.

well, itt make sense (0.6 TWR seems ok), it still make the currently configured S.A.B.R.E. undepowered... and I have absolutely no idea how AJEModuleEngines works. Could you look at this to create a realistic config? It would be really nice! There is indeed a RO file but it's just copied/pasted from AJE: https://github.com/Zarbizaure/RealismOverhaul/blob/master/GameData/RealismOverhaul/REWORK/RO_B9.cfg

so, it seems like the S.A.B.R.E. from B9 aerospace is not properly configured with realism overhaul. Any idea on how to reach some better performance? I hardly struggle to maintain a 500kN thrust per engine whereas wikipedia states "1960kN SL" so in air breathing mode. It's possible to lift off the Skylon with only 0.28 TWR (what I have with a 500kN SABRE) but it' alsmot impossible to go past mach 1.5. Any ideas?

So, is there a good S.A.B.R.E. mod for KSP configured in Realism Overhaul? I know there's one from B9, but B9 is very heavy mod and I don't know if it's properly configured for RO.... Do any of want some more SSTO parts, like the S.A.B.R.E. from the skylon or the (X)RS2200 linear aerospike from the XR33/VentureStar?

You TRReflection Module is cool However, I did not find any way to cumulate a reflective shader AND an emissive map. If I set my shader to Reflective/Specular or whatever it is there is no option for an emissive map. And if I add a second material set to KSP/Emissive/Specular with the correct emissive texture the heat animation still doesn't show up. Any ideas?

know issue: the reflective plugin killed the emissive animation for somes models. I'll work on that tomorrow.

@Benji I have no idea. I never used testFlight so it's not in my top priorities for now...but if you want to help for that module, it'll be cool

0.7.0.0 - KSP 1.1.3 NEW PART: Firefly Research Engine 1! (FRE-1) NEW PART: Firefly Research Engine 2 (FRE-2), an aerospike engine! Texture Replacer support and reflection effect for most of the engines (if you have TR installed) Minor changes to Rutherford SL ISP Some tweak to the P80 nodes size Major organization/folder structure changes (it should not change a lot in game, but it'll make thing easier for me) Other minors fixes

now that I'm setting up these "#?!!@]& really nice and simple gimbals in Unity, I have one issue. I want to have roll control during flight, so there should be multiple thrust control object, right? So if I create twelve thrustTransform objects, will each of them produce 1/12 of the total thrust., or will they produce nominal thrust, meaning I'll have to set up the thrust to 1/12 of the real thrust? And how to add this inside a ModuleEngines config? Can I just add multiple thrustTransform on a single line?

@Sobol thanks I'll give texture replacer a try and see the result. I agree with you, more control over the reflection is always good. Some of your parts are a bit too much glossy, but that's just my personal opinion, and maybe you can't change it because of the way texture replacer works.

so I'm a noob, I was disturbed by the number of engines and started to create a 10-chamber aerospike cluster until I realized that there are 12 engines in their latest plan I'm not 100% sure for the grid-look. On their page, their design are bulbous and they are probably more recent that these grid aerospike ones. Anyway, I'll do a bulbous one, adding a grid should not be a lot of work if I want to

yeah I'm still on Blender and it will hurt when I'll have to set up everything in Unity Also, your model is probably an old one. It has only 10 chambers (what is stated on the outdated wikipedia page) whereas the correct one will have 12. Source: http://fireflyspace.com/assets/files/Firefly Alpha - Payload User's Guide-20160609093017.pdf I'll try to do it close to the thing we see under the Firefly Alpha, butif you have better links, I'll take them (from where does this picture come from?) Nevermind, found it: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/firefly-space-systems-charges-full-speed-toward-low-earth-orbit/ it seems to be a relatively old visual.

FRE-2 in progress, modelling almost done

@liquidhype thanks! I'll try with the specular map and I'll see what it gives

you're doing an amazing job! Just a question, as a mod developper: how did you created those shiny reflective effetcs? I've seen that there is a Reflection Plugin, but it is outdated and does not work with KSP 1.1.X.

sorry, I meant reflective. There's this plugin, but it is outdated. However, I've seen some reflective effects on others mods, even in 1.1.2, like the orion capsule on this one: And there's already a specular map in my models, but it does not look exactly how I want it to look like... @gemini4 I have no control on when the RP-0 tech tree is updated, so I have to wait until Nathankell update the mod. Rutherford were indeed added in the latest RP-0 update.