lindemherz

Hey Beale! You might want to check out http://space-architect.com/en/; the closest thing to an official website I could find for Galina Balashova, the actual interior designer for manned soviet spacecraft (after Vostok, Korolyov not only wanted them life-supporting, but livable). @kopapaka's picture is one of her designs.

A bit to the party, but I. AM. SO. DROOLING. RIGHT NOW.

Grunge level 1, 10%, for me. Even for stuff that has just come out the assembly building you can see a little bit of stuff here and there coming into the creases just by sitting at the pad, or being manipulated. If it's not absolutely mission critical, chips of paint *will* fall off, glosses will dull, blacks will decolour at spots, just by cleaning them up. A living vehicle will have been tested and retested, filled and drained, over and over, and at least minimally stained and cleaned and wiped. But not so much. Kerbals might be reckless, but they ain't filthy.

Hey Cobalt, those shots look gorgeous. Care to share which visual mods you use?

More possible reference material here. Unearthed Nash Vek (Наш век), an impressionist film-essay by Artavazd Peleshyan about cosmonautics up to 1983; although mostly about cosmonauts in training, it has myriad seldom seen shots of soviet hardware (including a very nice view of an engineering mockup of a first generation DOS, if not the actual Salyut-1 or DOS-2 during preprocessing).

To think those crazy stand-up guys actually thought of it...

AFAIK Salyut only needed to do attitude changes to point the docking port towards the approaching craft, with the translation in charge of the active craft.

Damn, them DPOs be Russia Stronk

A bit late to the party, but here I am. The Soyuz/Progress MS has totally revamped it's DPO (Dvigateli Prichalivaniya i Orientatsii, Berthing and Orientation Engines) system, having now at least 10 pairs of thrusters midship (4 pairs on the Z-axis, 4 pairs on the Y-axis, and 2 pairs on the X-axis pointing towards the front). They can be seen quite clearly in the pictures below, 2 Z-pairs around the Instrument/Descent/Orbital umbilical and a 2 Y-pairs 1 X-pairs next to the root of the solar panels. Additionally, there are 4 more Z-pairs pointing towards the back on the base around the KDU (the Soyuz main engine). Try as I might, I couldn't find any more clear images of the back of the ship or even of Progress MS, either during processing or in orbit. Surprisingly enough, it seems the MS series doesn't have any skirt thrusters anymore; they have been quite conspicuous in the previous versions of Soyuz/Progress (and the MS thrusters seem to be the biggest ever), and unless they are hiding behind the "lollipop" antennae at the base of the skirt it'd be safe to say they are gone. That said, it seems the Z-aligned thrusters on the base are angled inwards, and may be playing a dual role, translating on the Z-axis when firing together, and pitching and yawing when used individually. RussianSpaceWeb does show skirt thrusters on their diagrams, but photos show nothing but thermal blankets on their supposed location. There are no thrusters on the orbital module; the only Soyuz to ever feature them was the LOK, and it carried its own tanks on the orbital module for that. One last question remains: How the f@#! do they roll??

If anybody could please copy us the correct values for them I'd appreciate it immensely. I'm only getting a huge yellow ball with a buzzer haircut no matter which values I have.

On bright side, Komandir Kerablya can finally touch instrumentiy with own hands. On down side, even less instruments than Vostok Such is life

Dammit, I leave for a few months to deal with real life shenanigans and @KSK's already built a functional Kerbal language that even accounts for sociological/historical factors and that might even give us a clue to the greater way of thinking of the Kerbals (like in, to my understanding, the ambiguity of Kerba's "negative-statement" constructions leaving room for them actually meaning "superseding/exceeding/surpassing-statement," which basically embeds possibility and hope in parsing the meaning of every expression - a quintessential Kerman characteristic if any). You the man =D Also, my vote goes for -ad, if only because Firesvarad reminds me of Nagyvarad (Oradea), my currently favourite city in the world, Hungarian, and its agglutinations (which language inspired Old Kerba grammar anyway?). Absolutely love the terrible territory the Kerm and Kerbals are plowing through now, Jeb's desperation at the best of Kerman not being able to offset the worst of Kerman, and Val's being so bloody smart she can figure out how to defeat infrareds using the sun even though she hasn't seen seeking missiles in her life. Cannot wait to see where we're going now that the war's really burning.

Not bad! But after seeing it again, I think you get away with just pulling up the existing connectors to where the new one is right now, widen the point where they connect to the tankage so they have the same triangular footprint as the belt struts, and call it a day. They would be even sturdier than a belt strut - and you can always pass them off as heat shields.

My pleasure, Beale! With you bringing us all this cool stuff, helping you out is the least one could do. Assuming the large cylinders on top of the engines are the turbo pump casings, the side-ways ring, although it is aesthetically pleasing, wouldn't have an internal spar that would make it a rigid ring (since this spar would go through the turbo pump). It'd just be holding on to the casing itself, so the lateral forces are actually transferred to the casings instead of being dampened by the ring itself. In the current design, the casings are the thrust bearing structure (thus sturdy as hell), so no worries about regular forces ripping off cases, but I would be worried about an exploding or otherwise "bad" engine affecting the thrust structure of a "good" engine when the forces of the failure get transferred to another engine, losing two for the price of one.

Jesus, Beale, that's gorgeous. Totally dig the new scheme. And I'm always amazed at how much mileage you can get out a single texture sheet. Engineering nitpicking time! On the third stage, the long boxes on the fuselage of the stage should be aligned with the engine mounts. In real life they were covers for fuel lines that went over the liquid oxygen tank, so it would be easier for them to go straight into the engines instead to have to do two 90 deg turns inside the thrust structure. On the second stage, the last fixture for the engine thrust structures/turbopump assembly/etc. is that dark grey thick strut right before the orange stripes, and roughly halfway between the powerheads/engine bells and the thrust attachment point to the stage. Considering the power of the engines we're dealing with, in real life that could allow the engine mount a lot of room to vibrate before these vibrations reach an structural element that damps them (one of the reasons why in real life powerheads are fastened to something sturdier as soon as possible in the vertical axis, even going through the hassle of putting the turbopumps to the side of the powerhead). Vibrating powerheads + vibrating fuel lines = pogo. Although there is a strut ring right after the orange stripe, these struts would transfer those vibrations to and from the other engines, not really solving that. I would probably just pull down the dark grey fixture from before the orange stripe to were the strut ring is, if not even a bit further down, perhaps changing them into a triangular structure like the third stage struts or having the triangular structure and the original fixture if you can spare the polys. Btw, structurally speaking, if we are dealing with the same engines, the third stage should have similarly robust fixtures, although the length of their assemblies is short enough to give it a pass. Nitpicking apart, this thing looks beautiful and I'm more than aching to get Jeb stranded in Duna with it.

The NK-33 had the turbopump to the side; so they looked stockier. Beale's either has a vertically integrated powerhead/thrust structure or he hasn't modeled the pumps yet. Here's a pic of the NK-33 Also, in the N-1, the engines were a lot closer to the stage, and had a circular thrust load structure they connected to, making everything look stockier (Renders by Nick Stevens, who did the technical drawings for the N-1 For the Moon and Mars book)

Thank you, KSK. I've never been happier to have to come up for an explanation on why a 30 year old man was crying like a baby at the office.

Zenit and Proton (at least, without the skirt tanks) diameters are within 20cm of each other, so that baseline idea does seem really nice. Zarya/ATV are roughly the same diameter in real life, but we have the precedent of Cygnus/Antares being significantly off-scale in Tantares. Soyuz/Vostok seems problematic; haven't done the math but I think Tantares simply cannot carry two kerbals believably being smaller than 1.875, and an off-scale Almach on an 1.875 upper stage risks looking ridiculous. Better, Faster, Cheaper. Pick two =/

1.25 Soyuz... how'd two kerbals fit there? I'm going with passinglurker here, perhaps the best way to deal with this would be a careful retweak of the length of all the stages of the Tantares booster series (and by extension AB launchers). It's like designing a transformer without cheating - no matter what you do, chances are you cannot make something that looks perfect on one mode without it being ghastly on the other, so you are stuck with coming up with something that looks cool enough in both.

Jesus, KSK. With all the socio/cultural, biological, and technical brainstorming you've put into the story, I don't think I am the only one here who would LOVE to peek into your notes for First Flight after you are done with it. Something tells me they might be as long as FF itself.

The only reason Voskhod existed was because the development of Soyuz (or rather, Sever back then), was running too long and it wouldn't be ready before Gemini. Even with the detour taken in 1964, with all the historical problems in its development it seems unlikely that Soyuz would have had its first flight before early '66 (opposed to November '66 as in real life). PS. I just found out Soyuz 7KT-OK only had 210m/s of deltaV. Gemini had only 98! I cannot even deorbit with that!

If I'm not mistaken, in the IDS the petals' centerline is offset 60deg clockwise (looking from inside to outside) from the port's (and module's) top-down axis, while in both APAS-89 and 95 one of the petals' centerline is aligned to the port's axis. Although impractical, that would make Tantares APAS accurate to reality.

Beale, Lexx Thai is right, LK has three-axis control; the thing here is that I think you and MACman have different frames of reference. Looking engine block to Kontakt, the 40kgf thrusters provide pitch and yaw, and the 10kgf provide roll (MACman's FOR). Looking like a cosmonaut out of the window, the 40kgf provide pitch and roll, and the 10kgf provide yaw (your FOR). Edit: Interestingly enough, astronauts in the LEM would have to do this frame of reference transition for CSM rendezvous, which worried some Grumman engineers a bit (the other engineers went more like "Meh, they're pilots; they'll handle"). I don't know if cosmonauts with Kontakt ever had to deal with that.

Manually docking, I've been able to reproduce the bug only coming in hot and misaligned starting at about 0.3 m/s. Lots of petal on petal rubbing there, so I second that being a thing of collider interaction. Add my vote to the don't-abandon-APAS camp; I do use it as my primary docking port due to the aligning precision, and I missed it dearly after KSP updates rendered it buggy. Btw, CBBP, what are the chances of an 89/95 type inner petal APAS-96? If you need help with modelling it, or an implementation of the International Docking System Standard, I might be able to give you a hand.

Since it hasn't been mentioned here before, I will cross-post this <b>very constructive</b> criticism from this r/kerbalspaceprogram thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2lpao5/my_thoughts_on_the_kerbal_space_program/ . It happens to approximate quite well to my own feelings about this preview. Kerbals have one fundamental difference of attitude from us on Earth: they believe action is more important than reflection. Kerbals act upon what they have to develop rapidly, whereas risk-adverse humans reflect on what happened each flight very deeply. Because Kerbals do know how to engineer, their constraint when building a space center would not be lack of knowledge on how to build such a center, but instead lack of funding. When building something with low funding, often cost-saving measures include reuse of older parts rather than building from scratch. This would not result in the use of old barns. Most likely, it would use repurposed steel plating and other sturdy but cheap materials. The exteriors wouldn’t look pretty, but it would still look sturdy and competently built. Bac9 explains some general principles used in building the current KSC: Next, you need to create guidelines for yourself to govern the sizes, offsets and types of windows and doors. What greatly helped there was the strict grid and seams established by tile textures. From those guidelines, you can go off to create a set of ready-to-use windows, doors, grates, gates, ladders and combined objects that you can quickly place around the building without wasting time on remodeling each time. And finally, you need a system of versatile props so you won't have to drag yourself into modeling meaningless greeble whenever you need high-frequency detail. For me it was a set of HVAC objects. A final principle I’d add before moving on to some images is that any significant building should be obvious to its purpose. If someone hands me a new smartphone without telling me what it is, I should be able to figure it out. If I can’t, it’s not doing its job at being a smartphone. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Let’s analyze one image of the proposed ‘early days’ KSC: The building is made of wood. Kerbals would be fairly competent even in the early days. Some standard material, like corrugated metal, would be low-cost and decently sturdy. That way the color theme wouldn’t keep changing drastically, but start from a rough metal look and gradually upgrading into smooth whites and grays with splashes of color. This uses so many different textures that seem to be all-new. The texture itself is slightly blurry, which isn’t a good sign. The wood, again, needs to go: it doesn’t fit with anything else. A version of this simply using steel with a few support beams would look more polished and fit in better with the future versions of the Kerbal Space Center. The building looks low-detail, despite the many textures. The competing style of the textures looks like it was built by 10 different and terrible architects. It’s architecturally confusing and doesn’t signal what it is in any way, shape, or form. Every seemingly significant component should signal what it is. This one doesn’t. Perhaps it’s the R&D center, but because of the rust on the developments around it I’m inclined to think it isn’t. There are so. many. tanks. There aren’t that many tanks in the KSC we are used to. The tanks in this image have two different textures. For low-cost components, the obvious choice would not be green tanks, it would be simple storage silos like these. That being said, I'd love for there to be more tanks in the current KSC. There's currently not very many at all. Maybe some like this. Sandbags? Rocks? These seems like insignificant textures that are here for no reason. I don’t see the purpose for them being thereâ€â€they look messy, and I Kerbals can clear that stuff out of a launch facility pretty easily. By the way, what is this place? It could be R&D as well, I’m not really sure. Putting it all together, I don’t actually know what most of this does. Way off to the side, I see the observatory, that one’s pretty obvious, and right in the center, there’s the VAB. Everything else is either insignificant or unclear, and I’m guessing I’m missing at least one component in the frame. The artistic style is confusing, using multiple textures for each material used and one-off textures for rocks, sandbags, and other inconsequential details. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- First, some positives: I love having the tanks. There’s an excessive number of them, but the idea of using tanks is an excellent idea and should be used in the current 0.25 KSC as well. The paths, which seem to be borrowed from the island runway, are perfect for the style. This architectural style’s biggest downfall is that that the purpose of the area is unclear. In fact, if I saw that, I would not know it was a launch site at all. It would look like an observatory station of some sort, with a large HQ in the middle. Instead of looking like a promising space program with a lack of funding but a Kerbal spirit, it simply looks like a half-hearted attempt at a space program. What could be done differently? Instead of making it look unprofessional, make it look impoverished, a space program without a budgetâ€â€but with a dream and the Kerbals to try it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How can we do this? Well, firstly a revamp in materials. Not to make it look better, but to look more sturdy. Essentially, ugly but functional. What materials are readily available, cheap, and sturdy? Wood is readily available, cheap, and not exactly sturdy. Not to mention the fact that rockets do involve fire. Not just the engines (obviously the engines involve fire) but the welding and other technologies often require intense heat. Wood is just not a good material to build metal components in. But there’s one used in practically every large building nowadays. That’s right, concrete! Concrete is an excellent material in terms of compression (squeezing) strength, though it cracks easily with tensile (streching) strength. Concrete foundations and even concrete buildings are very common. They aren’t pretty, but they do work. Both steel and metal, unpainted, look fairly awful. It’s also the cheapest way to go about using it: just give it a corrosion-resistant spray and be done with it. Any materials the Kerbals are using would most likely be unpainted, besides a few parts needed for labeling. Windows look good, and they let natural light in. For such large windows, Kerbals wouldn’t use blue glass, but instead a tinted white glass to let natural light in without being blinding at certain angles. Finally, and most importantly, prefabricated materials would be important to use. Numerous structures could be reused at low cost. Let’s look at some of these by going back to the photos. ------------ The wood texture could be something like steel plating. The texture could utilize half a bolt around the edges so that when two tiles mesh they look like they are bolted together. Because Kerbals seem to be pretty decent engineers, the bolts would be in straight lines. The roof material could be corrugated steel, which has a nice industrial but cheap look to it. Hanger doors could use another texture similar to these giant hanger doors, and the black would contrast nicely with the steel and maintain some uniformity as upgrades take place. Steel plating textures from the VAB could be reused to form the upper dome of this, while concrete could form the rim. The telescope could be slightly less cartoonishâ€â€it doesn’t look serious in this form. Entirely alternatively, what about using bac9’s concept for utilizing a communications tower as a tracking station? It would be cheap but look functional for space-faring rockets. Also, please replace the awful fake decking material wood. It reminds me of a McMansion or something. Perhaps a concrete or dirt path would suffice for this. I don’t know what it is. Make it look like what it is, and use the materials appropriately. As always, the wood should be replaced. The tanks are numerous and green, for no apparent reason. Storage silos used on farms would be the obvious low-cost solution. They would have a metal texture as well. Perhaps some tanks could have writing on them to indicate their purpose, or a blue band around them to indicate a certain material inside. I don’t know what it is. But using new textures for so many one-off elements is a bad idea in general for framerate. Honestly, if those are just there to look like debris, remember what bac9 had pointed out: And finally, you need a system of versatile props so you won't have to drag yourself into modeling meaningless greeble whenever you need high-frequency detail. For me it was a set of HVAC objects. Ultimately, the issue with this complex is simply that firstly, it doesn’t look like a space launch complex, and secondly, that the artistic style doesn’t convey what kerbals are actually bad at: finances. Instead, it conveys that they can’t engineer well. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don’t mean to imply that this complex is entirely worthless: some elements like the tanks were quite a good idea, and the main idea of upgradable buildings is great. But the execution of the upgradable buildings needs a revamp. There’s plenty of artistic ways to make something look low-budget while still maintaining visual appeal. And the experience of building a full complex without Bac9’s assistance means that it will get easier the second time. Squad, perhaps it would be a good idea to reach out to Bac9. He is busy, of course, but I’m sure he has plenty of tips for modeling that he could help you with. But truly, I hope that this complex can be revamped so each building has a clear purpose, and that the path of Kerbal Space Center can clearly be mapped out. Thanks for listening for so long. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMUNITY BOX From Bac9: Another idea: Another: