wildkittyv1

Alright, going to update with some in-game screen shots of the stuff I've gotten into the game so far. Thanks to DYJ, Hyratel and some others in the KSP IRC channel for helping me with getting these in game. I'll be posting my own critiques below each picture and would appreciate any constructive criticism you may have, suggestions for parts you'd like to see, or anything of that nature. I've got a bunch of ideas to work on and implement, but I just wanted to get the process of getting some parts in the game, so I'm throwing these up here. A quick note: I have yet to put the parts through unity, so the UV Mapping seams are very apparent on the engines - that will hopefully be solved once I go through that step. Here's a shot of my tanks stacked up on each other and a stack of the stock stuff right beside it. The small and large variants of my tanks when stacked equals 4 of the large variations of the stock tanks. I feel this is a solid amount. I generally am happy with the design, I want it to look somewhat like how stages are painted in real life to differentiate them, but I will likely be doing some minor tweaking on them and also tweaking the "lips" at the top of each tank. The SRB needs a big model and texture overhaul. The nozzle needs to shrink, the individual sections need to be less "bold" or distinguished, and I'll probably be redoing the textures. I am torn on whether or not to keep the caps, as I feel nothing ever really needs to be stacked on top of SRBs, but I have heard people like to put additional SAS modules on top of theirs. Please give any input. Three of my engines on my small tanks next to the comparative stock engines on the large stock tanks. Nothing much to say here. My large 1m engine is first next to the most powerful of the stock 1m engines. I may widen the nozzle so it looks more like the stock one, but I'm not sure. I was guessing as I did the models. I will probably increase the thickness of the fuel line so it's similar in size to the stock one. The second photo is a twin-nozzle engine next to the smaller of the 1m stock engines. I will likely redo the bracing around the engine as it looks a bit fragile, and I might play with the nozzle a bit as well, shortening it and making the angle more sheer. A potential lander engine next to the stock 1m lander engine. I will be fiddling with this one a bit, most likely omitting the protrusion at the top of my engine, or at least shortening it's vertical profile a bit alongside shortening the nozzle and decreasing the size of its mouth so it's more friendly to landing legs. I'm not trying to replace the stock lander engine, but I would like a more powerful variant that will sacrifice some weight and efficiency when dealing with larger payloads. This is what I'm aiming for with these parts - functionally parallel while not trying to fill in gaps that don't exist. The second engine is a tri-nozzle design that needs some work done on its model still and would likely be an intermediary or potentially more powerful in-atmosphere 1m engine. I was thinking maybe 300 or 320 thrust with appropriate ISP after dropping the 2m tanks and SRBs. Thanks for reading, and I'll be continuing to work on these. After getting them in game I can see more clearly the work I need to do, but am generally happy with my first go at making parts. All the models and textures are a work in progress and not final by any means, I have a lot of cleaning up to do there but just wanted to try and get these into the game. Cheers, and thanks for any input.

Hey guys, sorry about not updating, but I've had a busy week and was having trouble motivating myself to get more work done and wrestling over a few concepts for the tanks. Good news is that I finally managed to get the tanks into the game and have a good idea of what I need to do for most of the stuff I'll initially be releasing. I'm going to be playing with the engine designs and working on getting them into the game tonight, might have some progress to show tomorrow. For now, here's a couple pictures of the tanks. Here's a couple of the tanks stacked on each other, if you use multiples it is meant for the small ones to go on top of the large of the same size to have the painting scheme fit. This is a 1x2m tanks sitting on two, 1x4m tanks. Here are the 2m tanks sitting on top of each other. The small tank is 2x4 and the large is 2x8. And here's one of all of them with the 1-2m adapter from the stock stuff. The top is a 1x6 stack total, which is equal to 4 of the large, 1m stock tanks. The bottom is a 2x12m stack, which would be equal to 4 of the large 2m tanks. Now that I've gotten some parts into the game and know a bit more about the different necessary meshes for blender, I can do some finishing touches on the engines and SRBs and start assigning them values and balancing them. If you have any requests or ideas for parts you'd like to see, feel free to post em here. I have some ideas myself, but I'll keep those tucked away for a surprise. Let me know how you feel about the color scheme of the tanks as well. I've still to add details and fix up the textures to the tanks, but they work as a rough estimate of what I'm going for. I have other designs in mind if I do smaller versions of the tanks, but I don't want to crowd the parts menu so I'm working out what exactly I want to do. Cheers!

I am trying to keep the SRBs visually distinct, so I'll likely rework the textures on one of the two medium-sized ones so it's more distinguishable from the other, though they do have different colored nozzle skirts. Would you mind telling me what you would use a larger SRB for and how often? Since we're going to have NERVA-esque engines (or at least one), I don't think we'll need to construct massive launch vehicles like how people have been assuming and trying to prepare. As it is now, that SRB is about 9m in length total (nozzle included), which is approximately the same length as 3 of the large 2m tanks stacked together (the SRB is 1.5m diameter, so it shouldn't be used with 1m tanks on the same stage). I think most people stop stacking them at around that point, but I was considering making a 2m diameter SRB with a longer length, probably 10m without the nozzle, so about 11m total length. I'm not trying to shoot the idea down, but there is a problem that has to be dealt with right now which is that there is no working cost system in the game. When I was converting the NovaPunch stuff to .16 values, I came across the same hurdle. There is no way to arbitrarily make parts cost more because they are better or more powerful because there's no budget for the player. There's nothing stopping anyone from just strapping the most powerful SRBs onto the side of their ship and just go at it, because there is no real penality for dumping extra fuel or using stuff more powerful than necessary. This is my biggest hangup with making larger and more powerful/efficient parts. So again, I may add one more larger size SRB, but I'm hesitant because it would be really powerful and I wouldn't want people strapping it to the sides of craft that don't necessarily need it. On a side note, I'm all ears for stuff that people would like to see in a parts pack. If you have any other ideas or comments, feel free to let me know. I'm probably going to rework one of the large, single nozzle engines into a nuclear one, and will likely create a 2m one as well to go along with what I have so far.

Alright guys, for tonight I have 4 SRB models and rough textures to upload. I'm fairly happy with how they turned out, but all of them will be updated with small details like bolts/seams and panels to give them a bit of character because they look quite boring at the moment. The reason I'm tossing these up is to get some feedback on the color scheme as I have it at the moment. What I'm looking for from anyone who cares to comment is if you think the caps on the top of the SRBs should stay or go. I want the pack to work alongside the stock parts, so they're not going to be super powerful or anything (the tank capacities and weights are going to mirror stock stuff and engine ISPs will be based on stock ISPs as wel and follow the same pattern), but I want a standard style rocket to be possible (large first stage with two SRBs, then taper off to smaller upper stages), so they will be more powerful (but much heavier) than the stock stuff. I don't think SRBs should have stuff stacked on top of them, but if you guys seem to want them without caps (and I can model caps that can be placed on top of them if the user chooses), then let me know. I just don't want to clutter the parts folders like large parts packs like NovaPunch have done. This is why I'm uploading them with very basic textures. I may also add small pipes the way I have with the engines, but as of right now the SRBs are all one contiguous piece. I looked up what I could regarding real life SRBs and used some blueprint style photos as background images and I did my best matching the angles of the caps to them. They still seem a little off to me, but that might just be because it's in Blender and not the game where I have other parts to compare it to for scale. Anyway, time for the images. Measurements listed are width (diameter) by height (NOT counting the engine nozzle - all nozzles on the SRBs will be smaller in height than the engine nozzles I roughly think they should be used with). This is a 1m by 5.5m SRB. The detail image is to show that the orange/grey stripes at the bottom do have a profile and are not just random strips of color, and that the dark metal bands that appear on the SRB also have height to them. I may lessen the vertical length of them, but keep their protrusion size so that it seems more dramatic and shows up better - I'll have to get the parts into the game first and see how they look with the lighting engine. I didn't see any SRBs with the rounded cap, but I like the way it looks and I want the SRBs to vary at least a small bit from each other. This model also has the light grey rounded by beneath the orange/grey peaks as I saw that feature on the interior of the SRB skirt on a few images I Googled. This SRB is .75m by 4m. This one would be slightly more powerful than the new, larger stock SRB added in .16. The detail shows that the stripes and bands on the part do have a profile and aren't just strips of color. This model used the more common skirt I saw, just receding into the part and then having the nozzle protrude from that. I'm not sure on the shape of the cone, but I modeled it after a blueprint of another SRB and fit it as closely as possible. It might just be the contrast, but it's something I'll have to see in game. A .5m by 3.5m SRB. I think this would be used on upper stages, or could possibly be used as a take along for interplanetary missions to planets/moons with higher gravity to give a bit of extra boost during launch from their surface while saving fuel. It would increase the amount of fuel needed to descend, but I have a few ideas with parachutes for planets with a thick enough atmosphere. Again, not sure on the shape of the cone but it looks better than the previous model. I don't know where there is a seam in the texture on the cone, but it is not there when zoomed in. A 1.5m by 8m SRB. The cone is 1.5m in height and the skirt is approximately .5m with the nozzle extending 1m beyond its lowest edge. The detail shows the tapering tip which was modeled after the SRBs used on the European Ariane 5. Those SRBs did not have an angled nozzle, but I did it for aesthetics. I will be fiddling with its angle and edges, but overall I feel it looks alright for my first go at that shape. I might round off the tip to have it look more like the Ariane's SRBs. Well, that's it for this post. I might go back and update the original post with the latest images of the parts and their textures. For now, I'm just looking for some feedback on the general design and color scheme of the parts. I'm always open for constructive criticism and I'll listen to you guys since I would like for people to use the parts in game. I'm working on a logo and will probably stick with the Sundog name, though I don't know if I'll call it Labs, Mechanics, Aeronautics or something along those lines. If anyone out there has experience with logo design and would like to help me with logo design, just shoot me a PM. I have some ideas in mind but have no tablet and my photoshop skills are a little rusty for that sort of work. Keep in mind that the models and textures aren't finalized, I'll be adding small parts to give the SRBs a bit of life and altering the textures with accent bits. Let me know what you think of the general design of the pack so far, or comment on individual parts. Do you like the cones, or would you rather have flat tops? Do you think the orange skirts work, or should I leave the skirts to be only grey or white? What about the grey bits below the dark bands? Thanks in advance, and hopefully I can sort out exporting these things to unity and get them in game. Going to work on some small bits and bobs tonight, possibly will have a command pod to look at tomorrow night. Peace

Just updating tonight with some images of the update models (some extruded joints and reshaped nozzles) with the textures applied, a few notes on each and an example image of a fuel tank. Nothing crazy got done today as I was busy watching some football. Engines are in the same order sans the one I posted first in the initial post since that didn't change. Just wanted to get these up so people can get a better idea of what the engines look like. The same problems with seams apply and some colors of textures will change. In regards to fuel lines that circle all the engine nozzles, I will likely taper them off on the side opposite where they connect so they mirror real life a bit better. Nothing much to say about this one other than I need to move the orange stripe - put it in the wrong place. I was undecided on whether I wanted the joints/connectors for the fuel lines to be dark or light colored, so I tried both and I think I like the lighter color better, so it shows up more in the next images. Forgot to extend the bottoms of the fuel lines on this one, but it's no biggie. I'll probably add a circling fuel line to this since it's the only one lacking it at the moment. You can see the reshaped nozzle, which caused the short lines in that one spot. Experimented with a dark brown to break up the color a bit and I generally am pleased, but something weird is going on with the support braces there so I'll probably have to remodel the parts because I just can't get them to take the texture for some reason regardless of what I do. Will likely change the color of the 2nd "tier" so it's a bit darker for contrast, and will probably change the color of the joints on the vertical piece to the right. Pretty happy with this one so far, but the braces will likely be reshaped and connected in some way as they look a little frail to me at the moment. Generally happy with this one, too, but I'll be fiddling with the textures on the little ball parts on the right side. Quick example of a tank I threw together. It looks squatty and I wouldn't use as many vertical (if any) stripes on a tank this size (1m x 1m) - those will likely be reserved for the longer tanks. I'm considering making the 1m tanks have an orange base with grey/white accents and having the 2m tanks use the white base with orange and grey accents. I plan on this because if I do indeed add a 3m heavy-lift stage, I plan on making it entirely orange with small white/grey accents to give it some color and a lot of rockets I've seen images of have solid color initial stages and I like the way it looks over a mostly white/black color scheme. I'll probably add some accent pieces to each tank to give them some character so they're not just bland cylinders; these are what will likely take the grey. Anyway, just some image updates tonight. I'll probably model some SRBs tomorrow since they're much simpler than engines. I've got some ideas in mind for some stuff I can do pretty quickly and I'll hammer out a color scheme for the tanks.

Yeah, the question marks are because I'm unsure as to what I want to call this. I was watching Scott Manley's vids and he was playing some old space game called Sundog and it rang a bell, along with being an atmospheric phenomenon. Anyway, I'm just making this post since I have a bit of work to actually show and almost have what I need for the groundwork of the parts completely laid out. I did some work on converting NovaPunch to .16 standards before I knew Tiberion was going to be doing it, and it got me interested in making my own parts pack that was more in line with the stock parts from both an aesthetic and functional standpoint. I also have some ideas in mind for specialized engines and capsule combos for .17 in getting to specific planets/return trips without being OP for generic missions. For now I'm just going to put up some images of stuff I've worked on, although almost all of the models for the engines are different and some of the textures have been changed. I'll post some small changes below each image of the engines and I should have updated ones tomorrow since I need to reshape some parts and rework the UV maps to accommodate the changes made. These are all 1M engines at the moment. Pardon the paragraph below, but it summarizes basically everything that needs to be worked on with the textures. For this engine I still have a few bracing bars and "joint" bits to add in, but overall I'm pleased with the concept. This is a triple-nozzle engine that has the best versions of the textures applied to it so far. I took screenshots of the parts from this angle to show the bit of work I need to do on them to make the blending at the edges more seamless. It's a pretty simple fix that I have already worked out how to do, but just haven't gotten around to doing it yet: copy and flip from one side, apply it to the opposite and blend it at the new seam where I don't have to worry about edges. The "caution tape" is the other major part that needs work, but I mostly threw that together quickly just to see how it would look with the engines so they look similar to the stock parts. The pack is going to be using an orange/white/grey scheme and the tanks (I may do a single 3m engine and tank as a heavy lift module, but for now I'm going to stick with 1m and 2m) will be colored to differentiate stages as is done IRL. There will be at least 2, and possibly 3 different sizes for each tank, except for larger than 2m which will have the one meant for heavy lifting. This is the first engine I worked on that I applied the textures to. I was happy with the way the outside and inside of the nozzle looked, but dissatisfied with the fuel lines and yellow ball part that really serves no purpose other than breaking the part up a bit. I worked on some more metal-colored textures (3 or 4 different values) and radial versions of them to apply to circular parts so they blend better with the parts around them while differing enough to differentiate them. I expanded the joints where the fuel lines connect and have to apply the new metal colors to them as seen in the first image. I also lightened the texture of the fuel line and played with the scaling on it and unwrapping of it so it looked better/similar to the stock parts and that difference can also be seen in the first image. The nozzle on this engine has also been reshaped and the new version of the model isn't shown because I have to reshape the other parts around it, which I haven't done yet. This engine has a smaller vertical profile and is intended as an additional lander engine. As I said, these parts are intended to run alongside, but not replace the stock parts and I feel an additional lander engine would be useful for heavier payloads. The changes made to this that are not seen are a nozzle reshaping (I showed the untextured images on reddit and it was suggested to reshape some of them so they abide by our guidelines IRL more, so I obliged since I was asking for feedback) and extrusion of the fuel line and bracing joints so they have a more physical feel. Just another engine. I might nix this as a 1m engine and bump it up to 2m since I don't want to crowd the parts as packs like NovaPunch have sort of done. It's great to have variety, but you really only need so much for each stage and I want to provide variety, but keep utility in mind so parts do not become unnecessary or unused. Each engine will have a specific purpose and I've worked enough with configs and testing when I converted the NP to .16 values that I feel I can achieve this. Again, this engine has had its nozzles slightly reshaped and the joint extruded to give it more character. Final engine I'll be showing in this first post. I need to add a few fuel lines/connectors and the joints have been extruded for aesthetics. Nothing special to note here besides it needs a few small touches to finish it off, and the nozzles have been reshaped as on all of the other engines. Anyway, that's it for this first post, even if it's a lot of text. I still have a bit of small work to do on each engine in regards to tweaks and have yet to decide upon a texture for the tops where they will connect to the tanks. I've yet to import any of these into unity, though I have downloaded it but not the KSP part tools. I've seen some stuff on doing that and it doesn't seem overly complex, but any help would be much appreciated. I'm also going to be doing some small radial engines, adapters and SRBs, but the modeling for them will be cake compared to the engines with the experience I've gained in my short time. The biggest hurdle is getting the textures sorted out so I can just copy/paste everything onto the UV files. All in all, I'm happy with what I've gotten so far and will have fun making the pack. I'd be interested in working with a coder for some purpose-built stuff for the interplanetary missions we will undoubtedly be carrying out if anyone out there is looking for a willing modeler/texturer. I know what I have here is pretty preliminary, but better and more complete stuff should be finished by tomorrow night and I'll post the updated images of the parts tomorrow night. Cheers and all that and if you can give me some guidance on getting these things into unity it would be much appreciated.

Yes, it would be incredibly helpful. I tried using this tutorial as learning material, but it's horribly put together and nothing is really explained. I looked at the video and it doesn't help at all, either. I appreciate the attempt at help, but this fails horribly in explaining anything at all for someone with no experience with any of the software involved in this process. I ended up going to youtube tutorials to figure out most of the stuff I have now. This tutorial is also incredibly out of date and I'm not sure how accurate it is with the changes that have been made to KSP, Unity, and Blender since it was created.

I'm not entirely sure myself on adding the collision mesh and what needs to be done afterwards, but I'm taking it step by step and just working on some modeling and textures for the time being. I also looked at the tutorial and it doesn't explain it very well, and it's also quite old and I ended up trying to learn it all from scratch. It really ought to be unstickied and updated to be more thorough and explanatory as well as being accurate. The nodes you have to do in the part.cfg, but you can derive those numbers from the model since KSP uses the same scale as blender as far as I've interpreted. Hopefully someone with some experience can chime in and give us some help since we both seem to be in the same place. There's another guy on reddit that's asking the same question and I unfortunately can't give him an answer either. I'll let you know if I get it figured out.

Cool stuff with the model, but you're probably going to want to consider redoing the UV Map to make it easier on yourself. I was having a bit of difficulty working with it, so I can give a few tips. First, thanks to Nutt I learned that you can individually map parts and grab them/move them around at your leisure. You will want to do this with the cylinder projection option when you highlight what you want to map and hit U for the uv map options. On the left toolbar there is a pull down menu labled Direction - choose align with image as the mode and it should flatten the cylinders out you chose to map. Grab those maps on the UV map window and move them around like you do with the object window and proceed onto the next part. Cylinder projection will basically take all the faces of the part(s) you've selected and flatten them out for you, and Align with Image will straighten them so they're rectangles instead of oddly shaped blobs. Do this with the different sections of your engine body and line them up vertically so when you're texturing you can smoothly transition from one to the next. Use faces as your selection mode and alt click the ring you want to map. If you get a vertical strip, move the cursor closer to one of the vertical edges of that particular face and it should select the ring instead. Also, use seams. Seams are ways that the program breaks down complex objects and decides where to cut when uv mapping and functions as you'd expect, much like a zipper. Those circular parts that breach the top plate cylinder would be good candidates for this. It looks like you used rotated cylinders for this instead of manipulating a normal one to make it curve. That's fine, I guess, and I'm going to assume that those parts are complete rings that join somewhere inside the model. Highlight the edge that bisects the rings vertically and on the toolbar you can click "Mark as Seam" on the toolbar, and it will change it to a red line; do the same for the bisecting line on the interior of the rings. The edge will still function if you want to manipulate it, so no worries. Now, you should probably mark that first edge that you can see on your rings where they protrude from the engine body. Mark it as a seam so it should be a circle selection, that's the edge I mean. Now when you map those parts, it will cut along the bisecting seam to split each ring into two parts, and then the last seam you chose will allow those parts to be mapped flatly instead of in rings like you have. This will make texturing them a whole hell of a lot easier. Remember that you can move all of the stuff around in the UV map window like you do with the object window, so place things where you know what they are and don't have to reference the model too much. After you've mapped everything, select all in the object window and you'll see all the different projections show up on the UV map as you did them, instead of allowing the program to do it for you and not necessarily getting it right. This makes for a much more organized UV map and it's a billion times easier to work with than just letting the program do it for more complex shapes. Hope it helps, good work, and good luck. I'm just getting into part modeling too and I know it can seem overwhelming at first, but it's a good feeling to see that first part come together. Edit: I took two screenshots of what the difference is when you do the individual mapping versus letting the program do something like smart uv mapping or just using seams yourself. The big key is the cylinder projection option and aligning to model, then just moving stuff around and all that jazz. Smart UV Unwrap with a few seams: Manually using Cylinder Projection for each section and using seams: You can see a huge difference in how easy it would be to work with and just avoiding headaches. Hope I helped.

Nutt: The reason I went with this color is because so many parts packs out there use grey/white (especially KW Rocketry and lots of people use that) and I wanted to do something a little bit different. Nothing's set in stone since I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do, but if you had a reference image or something you'd like to see emulated then I'll consider going with it. I just don't want my parts to look like everyone else's, I plan on doing a bit of work over the next week or so to throw something together. I was also considering a dark/gunmetal grey color for a base coat and a lighter grey or white for the accents, but that'll be easier to do so I went with this to get reacquainted with layering/texturing. I'm all ears, though! orson: Yeah, most of the smallest sizes for the textures it seems are 1024x1024 so free works just fine for me. I'm having issues making my own brushes with GIMP, some kind of permissions error that shouldn't be happening, but whatever, I've got a workaround for the couple of brushes I was trying to make. I've never really looked at dA for brushes, so I'll take a gander in a bit. Thanks again

Oh man, thank you so much for that tip. It took me a bit of finagling around in blender to sort everything out, but it's so awesome being able to put the different faces where I want in the uv map and having them flattened out and all that jazz. Thank you so much again. Got some preliminary textures on my first engine model. And here's how I had the uv map sorted, thanks to you guys. Now I just need to decide if this is the style I want to go for. The textures are just preliminary, but should I continue with the rusty look? I'm not going for a military look with the green, or a rusty Rusky (haha?) look either, though I do plan to model some parts after some of the stuff from the Russian programs since I think they look pretty interesting. And I want to thank orson for that website referral. Great place and tons of textures to play around with. I haven't played with photoshop or gimp in a few years, so this is a nice little project to refamiliarize myself with the software and there's almost too many textures there to choose from. It's tough to find an easy to navigate site with a good selection with so many out there.

Alright, I've tried the cylinder projection with a basic cylindrical tank with some vertices and such and that definitely makes it look odd, which I'm assuming is remedied by the Align to Object option. However, I can't find this Align to Object option. Which list is it in? I've only been using Blender for about 10 hours now, so I still don't know where all the menus and options are or what they do. I've looked under the UVs list in the bottom menu bar and see some align options, but no Align to Object and none project the UV flat. Thanks again, I'm messing around with some textures in the meantime. Edit: Alright, I found the align to object option, but it doesn't seem to acknowledge my seams on a simple cylinder. Am I supposed to unwrap each of the cylinders individually using this method or something?

Thanks for the reply, and your English is fine. I've been messing around this morning/afternoon and managed to work out some stuff. I'm going to leave the simple engines I have now at 24 faces since there's not a lot of other geometry going on in comparison to some models I've seen, so they should be fine. I'll start making them smaller when I get into adding more surfaces and such to keep the poly count down. The reason I went with ortho view is because the tutorials I watched all seemed to suggest it over perspective, so I've been using it. Haven't noticed any "weird" stuff going on, could you elaborate a bit so I know what to watch out for? Went and downloaded GIMP and am working on re-familiarizing myself with image editing software, and remembering how much simple geometry, brushes and layering can actually pull off. I was just asking that because so many of the textures looked similar, but I guess once you get something decent down for each type of surface, it just becomes a matter of copy/pasting, rescaling and some minor tweaking. Anyway, I do have one more question and I'm hoping you can answer it. Again, this is UV map related. In these images you can see that I have some sections of the UV map shown, they are various sections of the cylindrical shapes from the model in the 2nd image. I see that in the texture files for pretty much every part, the different areas of the texture map are all flattened into some form of a square or rectangle. I know that I can move the edges and vertices around on the UV map to flatten the parts out, but is there a way to more easily flatten out an entire island (as it's called in Blender - all connected faces of one area) rather than having to move and rotate each edge by hand? What about the really oddly shaped part in the upper-right hand corner? Those are the "fuel line" looking bits just below the top plate in the model. Anyway, that's it for now and thanks again for your help. I'm picking this up pretty quick so I'm hoping in a few days I'll be able to have some engines and decouplers to test before moving onto more complicated parts.

Hey guys, I had downloaded Blender a while ago and hadn't been able to find a decent starter's tutorial on how things work and just got overwhelmed, then put it away for a bit. I looked again last night and finally found someone who actually explains stuff on youtube, and decided to take another crack at it. Here's her channel since I've looked through a few tutorials of hers and I feel she does a great job of putting things into perspective for beginners, and not just going through steps so you can't intuitively deduce what you're exactly doing when you do it and how to apply the new knowledge like so many other "guides": http://www.youtube.com/user/vscorpianc?feature=g-user-u Anyway, onto my questions. I'm not worried about collision meshes, adding nodes, and textures yet. I've done a bunch of .cfg editing and know how nodes work, I figure collision meshes will be easier if I know modeling since they're basic geometric shapes, and I've enough past experience with photoshop to do the texturing part. First, some images: That's the first part I did, decided to go with an engine since it's more than a basic cylinder. How is that for size? I took a default cylinder, which I'm assuming is 1x1m (and the scale in blender is proportional to KSP to my understanding) and just edited it from there. So from the top of the "plate" to the bottom of the engine bell is 1 in height and 1 in diameter. Secondly, how am I for face/vertex count? I looked at the stickied guide and it said for 1m parts to use 24 faces, so I used that and worked off of it. I know there's much more complex parts in terms of geometry that don't seem to lag particularly, so I think I'm good. Now, some technical questions. Do you guys smooth surfaces in the program or use a rough model like I have? Add more faces and vertices to make it smoother or is something like that fine? How can I attach the small fuel line looking part that's separate in the first two images? In the third image, I selected all the points and moved it so both edges on it were touching the main part and then just went to object mode to take the snapshot. When I get to rendering, is Blender going to keep them together like that? I saw in a tutorial for an older version where you would attach the objects like so and use ctrl+j to join them, but that doesn't work in the newest version. I guess that's it for now. I'm just looking for a bit of help on a few things. I understand most of the commands and want to get some models down before I move on to giving them collision meshes and the like since I figure it'll be much easier. What do ya think? Cheers and thanks in advance Edit: Alright, I've done a bit more playing around and watched some vids on youtube and figured out how UV Mapping pretty much works. I'll try to upload images of some questions regarding seams later or in another post or something since some of the layouts were stretched and I was having issues. Regardless, is there a way to make the UV export higher res? It came out extremely low res and some of the areas were basically just a jumble of pixels where I'd like them to be more defined. And I also realized that the size was being measured from the radius and that I was basically building 2m parts to start with, so that's sorted and understood now. Also, where do you guys get your textures for the rockets from? The tanks seem easy enough to do, but I've seen some really good stuff for the engines and it just seems unlikely that everyone would be good at modeling and textures. I know some guys have teams who work on stuff, but I still feel like there's some repository where I can get some CC textures or fair use ones or something I could alter to get me started. Thanks again.

What you have to do along with adding the rescaleFactor line is to change "name" under General Parameters, otherwise the game will assume it is the same part as the original and revert it back to its normal size. You can just tag "small" or "large" or whatever you want onto the end and you should be set. Just for reference, the parts are scaled at 1.25 in .16, so if you want double size you do a rescaleFactor of 2.5, and if you want half size it's .625

I don't know what Tiberion's going to do, but I'm reworking the thrust and time lengths of the SRBs that are in NovaPunch right now to be more multipurpose. As an example, there are two SRBs with 600 thrust and 3 SRBs with thrusts of 350, 300, and 320. If I include the Silisko Edition SRBs, that makes for 3 SRBs with 600 thrust and adds another with 250. I think that's just clutter and repetition with parts, as we already have stock boosters of 250 and 400 thrust, with more likely to come in the .17 update. I think the SRB you are referring to has a thrust of 80 and I was planning on keeping that (though editing the weight and time of burn to be more appropriate), but I could possibly rescale it to be slightly smaller, but I'd have to think of re-texturing it at that point as I don't want people to be confused. I could just go with matte white, but that's kind of boring. For the time being, there are radial SRBs in the NP pack (which I'll also be tweaking) that burn at 50 thrust for 20 seconds you could easily .cfg edit to work for you. If there's a place for one of the larger SRBs to be like a 100 thrust for a long period, then I'll consider making the 80 thrust one something like 50, but I don't know if I feel it's necessary with the existence of the radial boosters. I gotta send Nova a PM and see if there's anyone else I need a nod of approval from to link the download on the forums. There is a post on the subreddit on the frontpage with a link to the first version which contains the regular engines and tanks with edited values (ISPs for the engines instead of consumption rates - they vary between parts and the engines are setup to be more efficient in certain circumstances - and mass values for the tanks that coincide with those of the stock engines) for .16, but I want to make sure everything is okay before posting it up here, but it shouldn't be a problem. I'll put up the next version with the radial thruster and possibly some SRB and part edits tomorrow if I get the okay.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsGOcjQcSRf4dFo3OHZxdHpBTTZpbkNsRDZaR2NuYmc I decided to do the spreadsheet with what info I had at the moment so you can sort of see what I'm doing, but I've still got like half the numbers from the initial run of tests to throw up; I only put up the 1M engine test results and I haven't tested the SE engines yet. Remember that the numbers are rough (mostly for altitude) because it's hard to time hitting ESC perfectly to pause as soon as the tank runs out and the altimeter is often between numbers at that speed. I'll get around to putting the rest up after I eat dinner and get some more tests done with the radial thrusters. I'm thinking I might want to use the idea the guy who made the counter/test weights and make a bunch of tiny parts that weigh a bunch just to strap onto the test rockets so they are all tested against a set weight balanced against the engine weight. Mechjeb can give me a thrust to weight ratio, but it won't give me the numbers like I have listed

I think I have some version of excel that I could use to write up a small spreadsheet with them. If not, I think I have a google account and I would imagine that google docs supports spreadsheets. If you know of anything else I could use, let me know. I actually have a bunch of numbers written down (they're not entirely accurate as it depended on how close to the tanks depleting entirely I hit ESC to pause and interpreting the altimeter between heights, but they work as rough figures) and need to do a few more tests to get a better range of data. I used the KW rocketry parts as a basis (along with the stock ones) for setting the figures, and I attempted to make the engines somewhat purposeful so that people aren't just using the strongest one all the time - some are better in the thicker atmosphere, some are better in a vacuum, some are equally good throughout but weaker and would serve nicely as an intermediary stage for establishing LKO and stuff like that. I haven't really tested the lander engines, but if everything else works out then they should be fine. The NERVA engine and the NP Aerospike were kind of tricky and I just sort of guessed, but they seem okay for now, though the NERVA might be OP if it's used solely for injection stages. They seem to fall in line with the numbers I got from KW (tested them along with the stock ones using the same parameters as the NP engines), but even then the KW stuff feels a bit OP to me, but I'm also pretty efficient with my burns and fuel usage so it's really hard to gauge and I don't want to underpower stuff. I also did the Silisko Edition engines and tanks since Nova said he wasn't going to work on that pack anymore either. I need to go through in a little bit and do the radial thrusters/boosters now. I've done all the engines for the main tanks, and am considering redoing the SRBs. I redid all the tank masses and engine weights so they were in line with the stock parts, using some leeway for making them heavier/lighter based on better ISP values (I think I increased NERVA by like 2.5x or something) and gimbaling. I also changed some stuff where it looked like it was perhaps a typo (mostly with the 1.75m engines) in regards to gimbaling. I'm also thinking of going through and changing the text to give the players a bit more of an idea about what each engine is meant for since ISP values aren't 100% straightforward for the average person. I went and looked up some info on wikipedia and asked on the subreddit and got a decent response before I really started messing with them. Anyway, sorry for the little ramble, but I figured I'd be thorough since you had a hand in creating some of the parts in the pack. I can toss together a spreadsheet somehow maybe in a few hours. I want to take a break from testing for a bit, figure out how I'm going to test them in vacuum, and do some work on the radial engines. Right now I've only tested them by each engine lifting the same tank/pod up and recording altitude/velocity/time for depleting the fuel and then altitude/time at AP when firing straight up. For atmospheric testing I'll probably toss them onto something to get them to like 100km orbit with mechjeb and dump everything except for the control tank/pod and the engine. For the radial thrusters I'll probably put them in 4x symmetry and test them the same way. But yeah, give me a few hours (It's 5:18 EST now, maybe at like 10:00 EST?) to get some stuff together and I should have something for you. Also, I've posted what I did so far over on the subreddit, so you can take a look if you want; it should be on the front page. I hope this isn't a problem, I've left everything else in the files as is and put a disclaimer in the post. I opsted it like an hour ago and it's got 2 downloads now, but I won't put the link here until you, Nova, and whoever else okays it.

Try rotating/flipping it while it's "stuck" onto the part you're trying to fix it to but still is a red silhouette. I know with the Kosmos pack the attachment node is on a particular face and they're meant to fit together a certain way depending on which axis you're trying to connect them on. Just hover the part so it "sticks" but won't connect, and rotate it so you cover all of the 6 directions it can face and one of them should turn it green. I can't promise this will work because I've never really used the BACE pack, but that's how it works with Kosmos nodes.

It's easy enough to edit the .cfg files. I'm actually doing edits of the NP pack and SiliskoEdition so that the tanks have the correct mass for their fuel capacities and so that the engines use ISP rather than a straight number for fuel consumption. I'm using the numbers from the stock parts and the KW engines with ISP values as a guide, but I'm actually using numbers where they might seem a little bit underpowered if anything. I'm trying to make the parts more purposeful, if anything. As for doing edits for other parts in the pack, I'm making them more functional with more appropriate stress/weight values and adding nodes to certain decouplers so they're more functional. I'm going to send a message to Nova and Tiberion after I get more work done and see if they'll allow me to release a file. There's lots of good engines and models that shouldn't go to waste simply because the authors have decided not to update or have moved on to different projects.

Just FYI, Charon is pronounced pretty much exactly like the name Karen. Although the second syllable has a bit of discrepancy with its pronunciation, it's pretty much accepted that the Ch represents a hard C as in cat or commando. Anyway, some solid ideas thrown around in this thread but I'm not sure how I even feel about it. This is one of those things I'd have to brainstorm over a bit especially with the new planets, but I'm definitely a fan of Minmus(s)ian for Minmus stuff. I roll my eyes enough when people call it Minimus, never mind leaving the latter half of the moon's name out of its descriptor.

Alright - flew my mission and landed Methodios Base Alpha on the far(currently dark) side of Minmus since the near side was fairly occupied with something on a frozen lake and the big plain thing covering that part of the moon. I didn't want to advance time a whole bunch, so I just landed it after a single orbit. If I have to refly this because I had the wrong persistence file, let me know with the correct link and I'll go ahead and do that. Got a 5 man crewtank on this thing so anyone who's looking for a home feel free to join the crew. Here's some photos and the persistence. I hope it's alright that I uploaded the persistence to my mediafire account. Persistence: http://www./?zdnrkdthent6hqd Added no mods Methodios Base Alpha after landing and the crew initially disembarking Here is where we are located on the plateau - I was considering moving closer to the edge but I wanted to get back to my main persistence. I might move it during my next flight. And here is a screenshot of the orbital map screen and where Methodios Base is located on the dark side of the Mun. There are some nearby frozen methane lakes and mountains/canyons to explore. Sign me up for another flight - next time I think I will be tossing a crewable rover up there. By the way, you guys leave a lot of space debris

Cool, I'm messing around with some .cfg edits tonight so I should be up for a while and might get my persistence up quickly. I think I'm gonna go with a Minmus landing and will make my decision based on what I see up there. Let's do eeeeeeeeeet. Edit: Alright, I'm gonna PM Khyron just to make sure, but I downloaded the "updated" persistence in the first post and I see no vehicles on Minmus, so I'm assuming it's the wrong one. I'm going to download the last one posted in this thread, by Khyron, since it seems as though Cardinal's turn was skipped so he didn't add anything. Let's see...

My bad, thought you had started work on SE2 as something on the side after stopping work on NP. Thanks anyway, I guess.

Hey Nova, I want to say I really like the Silisko Edition II in the little bit that I've played around with it. I've managed to make a few rockets using just those parts but have a few questions and suggestions. Firstly, I'm trying to figure out the purpose of the 1m to .5m adapter. I understand the .5m Nosecone fits on top of the Spartacus SRB, but I can't think of a reason I would ever need to use the 1m to .5m adapter. Any hints? I guess it might be suitable for the Probobodyne cores and fueltanks, as they are also about the only thing that fit without clipping inside the 1m and 1.5m fairings (even the stock landing legs poke out, but if you use the parts for the Odin lander from NP then you can make it fit). Secondly, what made you go with 1.5m parts? I think I've heard you roughly quoted as stating you weren't happy with NovaPunch and that's why you stopped working on it, does this have anything to do with why you used 1.5m parts instead of 1.75 which already has some fuel tanks and engines (from NP and KW Rocktry respectively)? In regards to that, do you have any plans to add adapters from 1.5m up to 1.75 or 2m? I've rescaled the 1.75m to 2m adapter (at 1.07 it fits closely enough) from NP to fit my purposes and then have the 1.75m to 2m adapter for another upscale, but it would be nice to have something that fit nicely and was meant for the pack so it worked easily with other mods. Lastly, landing legs? As stated above, I'm assuming the fairings are meant for probes and things like that since not much else will fit inside them, but a 1m pod will fit as long as you don't build out. The original stock legs mostly fit, but they clip a bit on their feet. Is it possible we could get telescoping legs similar to the new stock ones (albeit smaller to fit on a 1m pod inside the fairings) or sturdier versions of the Odin ones? Anyway, I enjoy what's in it so far and your aesthetic style, and appreciate your work both on mods and in the stock game. I will say I had to edit the thrusters that have minimum thrust and cannot be shut off entirely, but I understand why you may have configured them that way. It feels like these parts and engines were meant for a specific payload weight to function as intended, i.e. getting out of atmosphere as the tanks run dry in the larger engines that cannot have the throttle cut entirely and using the smaller ones exospherically. Cheers