colmo

Loving the new wings. They're definitely my favourite - those flaps are great for all sorts of manoeuvre. They drop minimum speed below 30m/s - great for Infinitedice's carrier. Here's a Firespitter jet with procedural fuselage and a Kethane detector in the nose! (req. Firespitter, Procedural Fairings, Kethane): [table] [tr] [td][/td] [td][/td][/tr][/table] Procedural Jet 2.3 craft file

And IMHO that's baseless speculation. They've said resources will come, but were right to prioritise campaign mode.

A prop is certainly something to consider for the procedural treatment - one part, many sizes, can be tuned to suit the craft just like with R.C. electric craft.

Loving the 50's/60's jet theme - it's the most Kerbal time in history. Checking out the new wings now.... Placement of drop tanks has to happen last in assembly - keeping an eye on the CoM indicator, try to place them without it moving, I'd guess.

I spent a few hours landing choppers on the roof of the new VAB. Occasionally, they were even the right way up and intact. A few pointers: - Use pontoons instead of wheels, as wheels grip and cause a flip unless exactly in the direction of travel. - Remap your throttle controls (including cut throttle) to your right hand (I didn't, but I will!), it makes landings easier as your left hand is best left full-time on WASD controlling pitch, and helps prevent fatal key-press errors. - It's near impossible to get a chopper that flies perfectly level. I found if it tended to pitch the nose up, this made landing much easier. I must play with the trim settings part. - Use downward lights to help mark your landing spot; it's difficult to line up landings on screen due to lack of depth perception. I experimented using a docking port under the rotor and controlled from there to test if the different nav ball view helped. I'm not sure it did. I'm also using the radial tanks as my primary fuel source, placed after (and each side of) the rotor such that they do not move the centre of mass. This means they won't unbalance the chopper when fuel drains. Pic of my example (I later settled on the bigger rotor as it actually is more efficient, running at lower throttle) while a Kerbal checks out an awesome bugged ladder on the roof:

Why not nip over to the Hubble website and borrow a few nebulae, then drop them onto a spartan texture set using layers? An excellent way to learn Photoshopping (GIMP will do for free). I was stunned by how good space looked with the 4096 texture. I love how the stars fade when the sun is in view. It's such a simple mod, yet stunning in the visual impact it makes.

I really see Kerbalkind as franchise material, with spin-off games occupying different genres. Kerbal City, Kerbal Tycoon, Kerbal Hospital, The Kerbs, World of Kerbin...and then there's comics, cartoons etc. Let's face it, Kerbals are cute and we all want a plushie.

- yup, we've got that. I was trying to think of other constants we could change into a variable to add a completely separate axis of control. Probably superfluous... Make them action groups and leave it to us to decide? The Pg Up/Down keys are a good choice, especially as a helicopters demand full attention on WASD with the other hand! (The new SAS should help a lot, looking forward to building some choppers with it. I'm wondering if a rotor with combined fuel tanks might be the answer to the problems people have with in-flight balance? I digress....) One limitation of the exponential method is while that would be great for sea-level landing, perching on top of one of those nice new mountains could be a complete nightmare. What you're suggesting, adding granularity to the throttle, sounds better. It might need an emergency override when you get into a tangle on a landing and need to GTFO quickly, but that's yet another key....

So we're after a throttle curve tool to fix the stock game's lack of one. I guess that sums it up! Don't forget my idea of tweaking plane props for more aggressive, faster, thirstier and overheat-prone performance, or for low speed, economical and cool running (my trainer biplanes for example). Having tweakable settings in mods like the Procedural Fairings is great, would love to see them in Firespitter too. Using an R.C. model analogy again, this is often done not by changing engine, but rotor. I know working out the optimum rotor for an electric plane is quite an involved process. In KSP, of course, we can just slap one on, see how it crashes goes, then pick a different rotor. TouhouTorpedo has already begun the business of separating powerplant from mechanical output with engines powering wheels. DYJ was beginning to look at different rotors for different engines too. This is a great mod, which is why we want to keep pushing you to greater heights ;-)

Ah, I didn't know this - I presumed the throttle controlled rotor speed with a fixed collective. I should have read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_flight_controls#Throttle The stock throttle is problematic at the low end, it's very difficult to change it by very small amounts - one moment you're coming in for a hovered landing, next you're plunging from the sky just a bit too fast (do fine controls influence throttle? I've never checked). I've posited the idea of a throttle exponential curve - in R.C. models, better controllers allow an exponential throttle response so that you have good control over low speeds where you need it, at the expense of the high throttle settings, where you don't.

I like a challenge :-) Looking through the cfg of the rotors, I'm looking at the atmosphere and velocity curves. Collective changes the pitch of the rotors - more pitch, more drag (fuel consumption could go up), more lift. For a given collective, you'd have a given atmospheric/velocity curve. Change the collective, the curve changes too. I envisage this as a modifier variable multiplied by those values. They wouldn't need to be drastic - this is basically to allow better, finer landing controls, but still fully manual. Flying at high altitude, you'd crank the collective all the way up, slightly increasing the flight ceiling at a fuel consumption cost. For landing, you'd set the throttle for near-level flight (nearly impossible to lock it completely), them trim the collective to bring it down gently. How does that sound? (Disclaimer - I know little of the inner workings of the game!) P.S. Or it could modify this? MODULE { name = FSpropellerAtmosphericNerf thrustModifier = 1.1 } P.P.S. If this works, allowing it to be set in the SPH for the other props would allow people to tune their engines without modding core files e.g. the complaint the bomber engines weren't powerful enough, but this way there's balance as fuel consumption goes up. Engines could also overheat more readily with greater rotor pitch.

I've been trying to sculpt parts by moulding fuselage sections around parts, then remove the parts they surrounded to save mass. e.g. a tail boom and passenger section for a helicopter, and an open-topped biplane cockpit. This would help.

Could I suggest collective controls on the helicopter rotors? I've always found the standard throttle was far too notchy to affect delicate take off and landing, so a seperate control varying total lift would avoid having to touch it.

The ability to generate resources by elevation could be interesting.

Staggering. Yup, that's all I've got to say.

There's nothing that says "this is a serious mod" quite like an entire ground facility dedicated to it! I recall you mentioned trying different methods of deploring chopper rotors, the accordion style of the electric ones never sat well with me. Real choppers use a Swiss army knife folding method for stowage.

Apologies for the previous abrupt post, my phone lost a longer and more considered post. With Kerbtown, you could build a rustic mid-20th century style airbase at a location of your choosing. With the Launchpad integrated, you can launch there too. I'm looking forward to the dock being worked on. For deployable engines, the Procedural Fairings mod opens up practical ways to get craft to other atmospheric bodies while still looking like a rocket. I'm still planning my spacecopter mission!

More electric or Kethane prop variants please, and make them deployable. Just recoloured from your fuel props would do.

Yes, fairings and fuselage are surface attachable. i note symmetry is not properly supported in SPH yet. I'm fairly certain you can make side shells already with inline bases and fairings. They must completely envelop the structural piece within, though.

Note I used this technique for the Procedural Jet above, and it achieved a completely cylindrical fuselage. It doesn't bulge at all.

Allow me to present the Procedural Jet MkI, using procedural wings and fuselage: Note the use of internal fuel tanks, with fuel flow set to drain from the rear. It adds to the part count, but you get the idea. That plane has a lot of fuel for its size (and it could be packed tighter) and the auto-struts make it very sturdy. The procedural wings are a bit flappy, but nothing a few struts won't fix. It's not a great flyer, but that will come with tuning. Symmetry doesn't currently work in the SPH, so I had to attach wings to the top rather than the sides - I could go for the bottom either. Craft file - mods required are Procedural Fairings, Procedural Wings and Firespitter radial fuel tank. Procdural Jet MkI craft file

Excellent, looking forward to using the fuselage. While we're waiting for airlocks and windowed fuselage, I'm looking forward to mixing fuselage with fairing to reveal storage compartments, maybe even rover bases. Skinning aircraft with sleek bodywork is the ultimate purpose.

These updates keep the modders on their toes. No bad thing, I think.

Nice to see someone learning about evolution with lots of detailed examples. One thing that folks struggle with is the concept of what makes a trait advantageous. The answer is it depends on the environment. Sickle cell anaemia is a classic example - it's considered a disease in Europe, but is advantageous in areas of Africa with endemic malaria.