Whirligig Girl

For Hype's sake, shut up about the rocket engines! This is the hype train thread, not the heated discussion thread.

I might suggest that we move discussion of the new rocket models to the Suggestions and Development forum? We're sort of getting sidetracked. (Pun retroactively intended)

These ones. Talk.

The big fat thing at the end is, iirc, a cooling tube, or a turbopump escape thingy. It has a precedent in older rocket engines, whatever it is.

!Body[Duna]{}

Upon further inspection past the "wow!" factor, there are a few bits of criticism I have for these parts. Not gonna touch the boat-tails, they're pretty good, that's all. So these appear to be the revamps and additions for the LV-series 1.25m engines, the low tech ones at the start of the tech tree. First, I have to say that in general I quite like these. I very very much hope that these will make it into the stock game. In fact, I'll go ahead and list everything I do like about them first. They look legitimately low tech, and resemble real early rocket engines. The LV-T45 reminds me of the Atlas sustainer engine as well as the A-7 Redstone engine. They don't look junky or futuristic/modern. They don't look too out of place in a more modern setting. They tend to look a bit like Copenhagen Suborbitals engines as well. Copenhagen Suborbitals uses pre-made plumbing parts instead of making their own, meaning that their parts are reliable and cheap. This makes the Jeb's Junkyard comparison easy. The descriptions for engines could be interpreted in this way. I love that we have two more LV series engines. No tankbutts! Woo! I really hope these make it into the game for 1.2.5 or something. In general these are a definite improvement over the current engines... And now the bad stuff: ...but we didn't really need an improvement for these engines. The LV-series for the most part fits in well with the current Porkalike style. The Rockomax parts do not fit in, and they look pretty awful. In my opinion the Rockomax parts should definitely have been prioritized. I still welcome the improvements. The reflective shader is a bit disorienting, considering that we don't have it in stock. I want to see what these parts look like with the stock part shader. The numbers look wrong somehow. I'm not quite sure what it is, but the super prestine paint coat doesn't look right. Maybe if they looked like they were stenciled on or put on a plaque (like the original models) The 909 looks weird, and I'm not sure why. It might look OK when put on a 1.25m rocket tank, but not a 2.5m rocket tank (like many landers do) The LV-T45 was meant to be a modified version of the LV-T30, not a completely new engine. I would have made the combustion chambers of the two engines the same, and changed the nozzles. (As well as putting the T45 on thrust vectoring hydraulics) I'm really not sure at all what the purpose of the spheres on the LV-303 is. One of the things that in the past made Porkjet revamps so great is that the contained some little details that the original part had. Compare the original and new swept wings for example, as well as the detail on the top of the Mk2 fuselages. This is missing from the LV-T engine revamp.

They remind me a lot of the Copenhagen Suborbitals rocket engines, which are pretty decent analogues of the "Jeb's Junkyard." They use almost entirely prebuilt parts for their rocket engines, which you could interpret Jeb's Junkyard engines to be made from. They also remind me of the A-4 and A-7 rocket motors. I like them. I do wish I could see what they look like without the extra shaders though.

Holy crap those are brilliant. Are those the models in fact? They're terrific, and I really hope to see them in 1.2.5 or something. However, only if Poddle, Mainsail, and Skipper are done as well, or it will be far far too dissonant. Those engines were the bad ones, the LV-series were pretty good. I also see a new one in the form of 303 and 15. It's great.

Any 3D video game is going to have deformation along the edges, especially at higher Fields of View. It's related directly to the fact that you can not map a sphere down to a non-deformed 2D shape. The computer screen is of course a 2D rectangle, and the whole visual view is a sort of a sphere. There's got to be deformation. I said "little" deformed because I didn't want to overstate the issue.

The shading looks fine, and the way the procedural craters along either edge would be consistent with the Mun as we know it. It's just deformed from being near the edge of the screen. Look at some of the stars above Jeb's portrait. Photoshopping in the Mun seems to me like quite a bit more trouble than it's worth.

It looks normal to me. It's a little deformed from being near the edge of field of view, but there doesn't seem to be anything unique about it.

Can y'all please shrink your tickets? When you paste in the image, hold ctrl and click on the ticket, and click the "Edit Image" option. If you do not see the image, try again. Then make the size of the image 200 or so. Thank you.

If there is one feature I want to be made possible, it's stock and moddable axial tilt. OK, maybe not the only one, but in terms of how many possibilities it unlocks... Even without seasons, axial tilt would allow the creation of planets with equatorial arctics and polar tropics. You could also say by word of god what the seasons are like, even if the game won't simulate it.

I don't think it's been abandoned, but it doesn't appear to be coming in 1.2.

Actually this time it will be available on the KSP store.

FEATURES: Note: Some of these may be incorrect or misinterpreted. [Stream]: Even faster loading time. (10-15 second load time) [Stream]: More Game Difficulty settings, including Comm Network, Advanced Settings, and Moddability for the Game Difficulty Settings Panel. [Stream]: Quicksaving and Quickloading from KSC. [Stream]: Weighted Contracts. Refuse Duna Contracts = Get Less Duna Contracts. [Stream]: Some parts have been changed in their purpose. [Stream]: O-10 "Puff" Monoprop Engine has been revamped, as has the little one-way RCS thruster. The Puff is now significantly larger. [Stream]: 5 different Antennas. Antennas break in the atmo. [Stream]: Advanced Tweakables: More Micromanagement, appears to be a system for changing the fuel flow among other things. It has to be enabled in settings. -[Stream]: Parachutes can be set to Deploy Immediately, Deploy when Risky, Deploy when Safe. -[Stream]: Autostrut allows for more rigid noodle rockets. Strut to Root Part or Heaviest Part. -[Stream]: Aim Camera tool to point and click and any part! Aim at the launch clamps or other vessel's parts and still control yours. -[Stream]: Limit Pitch/Roll/Yaw for engines. (Was that actually new?) [Stream]: Upgradeable parts in Career? (This is a modding possibility, not in stock.) [Stream]: Quit to Main Menu from Flight. [Stream]: Better, rewritten Aerodynamics. Seems to be more like FAR. Whole vessel shape taken into account, not just the individual parts. [Stream]: More Debug Menu Options. -[Stream]: Stock Set Orbit tool. Default sets you to 87km Kerbin Orbit. Allow with rendezvous with asteroids or vessels. It's SemiMajorAxis, not Altitude. You have to account for the radius of the planet. -[Stream]: Create Kerbals. Heck yes! No more config kerjiggering. Let's hope TextureReplacer mod will be able to modify this menu. You can even set them to be an orange suited Veteran, for some reason. -[Stream]: Hack Gravity allows you to set the gravity to whatever you want. All the way from 0 to 10 Gees. [Stream]: Experiment Storage Box. No longer require a Kerbal to go EVA to collect all the science from a vessel. It's a box-like shape. I hope we see a mod very soon that will give us a little conical capsule shaped return box. [Stream, Matt Lowne]: When you are out of comm range, you have limited probe control of the ship. Staging, SAS Autopilot, Science, and 100/0 percent throttle. [Matt Lowne]: You can have probes hibernate to conserve power, like how we used to limit battery consumption in the past. [Stream]: Planets and Moons will block communication. This is based on the celestial body sphere, not the terrain, and distant bodies will not block. (Mun will not block you at Duna) [Stream]: Ground Stations linked to Tracking Station Upgrades, and they seem to be fictitious locations rather than anything aboveground. EDIT: They are apparently real models. [Stream]: Looks like all cockpits and command pods have light-up windows now. [Stream]: Remote Guidance Units (circular probe cores) can be used in conjunction with Kerbal Pilots to control distant probe vessels. [Stream]: Hissing Sounds and new beautiful plumes for RCS. [Matt Lowne, Stream]: Antennas are based upon power, not range. Power = (Antenna 1 times Antenna 2)0.5 [Matt Lowne]: The best way to get science from an experiment is to recover, but having a good comms network can improve transmission value. [Stream]: EVA Kerbal Changes -[Stream]: Jetpack thruster plumes changed. -[Stream]: SAS can be toggled on EVA to remove the Automatic Orientation to Camera. -[Stream]: Kerbals seem to be a bit more wobbly, I hope this is fixed. [Stream]: Better Center of Lift/Pressure and Mass indicators for Spaceplanes. [Stream]: Wheels seem to work just fine now, even the problematic small wheels. [Stream]: KerbNet works on Plane Cockpits as well. [Stream]: A new Inline Antenna that will not break in the atmo. 3x heavier than the Communotron 16, won't break, same antenna characteristics. [Stream]: Lander Legs do not explode anymore. Kerbals will walk through them. Looks a little hacky tbh, but I guess it works. Danny is no doubt gonna find something fun with it. [Stream]: The green notification text looks a lot prettier. [Stream]: New Water Physics. Doesn't "Bounce up and down and freak out." Kerbals now stay above water. [Stream]: Something about relay logic. [Me]: Really, this CommNet stuff is really a gamechanger. But it's not gamechangey enough. We should have gotten life support as well, and have a life support/relay dichotomy that makes each have advantages and disadvantages. [Stream]: Best transmitter goes just about out to Eeloo, but it can be modified to allow OPM, RSS, and the like to work. [Stream]: Akinesis Gaming is done, The Read Panda is coming up next. [Stream]: The Rover Wheels work a lot better. [Stream]: The Read Panda on the update as a whole: "The Update to me really feels to me like they've taken the whole unity five thing to another level." [Stream]: MatoroIgnika first on stream to find a tracking station outside of KSC. It looks lower tech and it is more brownish, but it does move and track different targets like the KSC one. There are collidable segments (parts move along with the moving dish parts, but there are pieces of "invisible floors." Kerbals go limp if they go inside the actual dish. [Stream]: Tracking Stations are the same everywhere. [Devnotes]: New Fuel Flow Logic: It seems that fuel flows more reasonably and realistically. [Devnotes]: Telecommunications Network: You will have to have a communications link back to KSC if you want to control your probes. [Devnotes]: KerbNet computer system: A targeting and mapping system that will allow you to set targets and look at biomes. It will, however, require that you are hooked up to a comms station link on Kerbin internet connection, so on the bright side you will be able to play Pokemon Go. [Devnotes]: Additionally, another video of it: http://i.imgur.com/F8Wxvz3.gifv [Devnotes]: New Debug Menu UI and a whole lot of optimizations. (NOTE: I'm not sure if this actually shows the debug console as available to players, or as available to Squad in the editor) [Devnotes]: A whole lot more optimization as well. [Devnotes]: On the orbital mechanics side of things, have you ever noticed how close approaches sometimes jitter back and forth? That's because there's more than just two potential close points. Now all of the orbit crossings (if they exist) will be plotted. EDIT: More info [Devnotes]: Tweaks to SAS to make it act better. [Devnotes]: Wheels have been tweaked and updated, should be less buggy and have less limitations. [Devnotes]: You can toggle the Kerbal Reorientation when using the jetpack using the SAS key. [Devnotes]: Quite a bit of optimizations. [Devnotes]: The green outline highlighting has been enabled in the flight view as well, though I personally will probably be turning them off. [Devnotes]: Space Center Building interiors and exteriors have been retextured to look less awful. (If you ask me, the T1 has a much nicer shade of green than the previous blue, and the grey color definitely suits the T2 facilities better.) There's more stuff than this, and I'll be updating this post whenever I remember what that is. Prerelease I don't have any details yet, because I'm writing this thread in advance of it actually being announced, but we will have a prerelease available for testing at some point. I'd like to remind you--and this is important--that the pre-release version is not for playing in, it's not for having access to the next version early. It is primarily for testing the game for bugs and balance issues. I have been told something quite exciting for some players who want to help test the game: you will be able to get the prerelease builds through the store. Get Hyped my friends, and enjoy your ride on 1.2 Hype Train. Tickets, please. Moderator Note: The forum rule forbidding reaction images is suspended in this thread. Have fun! Keep the reaction images within the carriages at all times, please.

You gotta spam the L key to get the helmet lights working. What the heck did they do to Duna in 0.21? It used to be so much more interesting.

I have always thought of this mod as a way of reconciling the two ideas. The idea being that for any obvious analogues, I try to make them a little closer to their analogues, but for any obvious non-analogues, I try to keep their individual spirit. That's why I threw away the initial idea that I would make Ike brown/grey like Phobos. That's also why I didn't make Laythe into Io, Vall into Europa, or Tylo into Ganymede, or Eve into the size of Venus. The sun is resized into 1/10 G2V size (sun-size) instead of some other type based upon its actual size, because I know where Kerbin orbits and it's about 1/10 of an AU. Therefore the star needs to be an analogue of the real sun if Kerbin is to remain the way it is. Some of the changes are for the sake of both Kerbalness and Authenticity. Jool is green in stock, and there wasn't any way I was going to change that fact so extremely as to remove it. But Jool is the Jupiter analogue. So I wanted to make it more Jupitery and still keep its Joolness. So I made green algae infested cloud belts and white algaeless zones, that look much more like Jupiter's banding than Jool's. But I also wanted to keep some of the cloud structures that Jool has for the latest texture. By its physical appearance, stock Jool actually looks more like a Saturn analogue. It is much closer in gravity to Saturn, as well as size. Even its cloud bands resemble Saturn's a little bit more in stock. I changed this for two reasons: 1: makes it more Jupitery like everyoneme wants. 2: makes the moon orbits less wobbly/unstable. I could go into more detail, but the point is that for almost everything I do that makes things much closer to the stock system, I use toggleable configs. If I were to make kerbal gas giants as analogues to the solar system, I would have their colors determined realistically. The second gas giant will be somewhere between white and brown, just as the Sudarsky Classification would have it. Any further ice giants would be similar to Neptune and Uranus in color: a similar shade of blue. I might make the Uranus analogue greener or the Neptune analogue purpler. Not sure yet. I'm sure you have noticed by now that I take Kerbal planet building perhaps a little too seriously. Always a fan of your input.

Wha... what did you do?

Winter Kerbol. If Kerbin ever gets axial tilt, it would be super awesome if there could somehow be three color maps and land control settings: green, white, and red/orange, and each hemisphere changes depending upon the season. Duna's ice caps could even recede and grow through the seasons.

So yesterday I thought to myself, "could you use a smoothed planet as a runway?" About 6 hours later I ended up with this: (Album of attempted tire-assisted lithobraking) It's actually using a Vall clone as its template. The color is procedural height based + blended color map. The planet is largely procedural, and yet I still have this flat area? How did I do it? It's all thanks to some clever PQS Trickery and this heightmap: I won't show what I did to make this work, I'll leave that as an exercise to the viewer. You're free to use the above heightmap if you want. Essentially, what I do is this: All the planet's conventional terrain stuff. Make the planet Prolate. (stretched out on the poles) FlattenOcean. Remove the Prolateness from the planet. (Essentially making it more oblate and into a normal sphere) Colors. I intended to livestream this, but I just didn't feel like it.

I've had a lot of Kerbals over the years. I don't remember most of them, and those few I remember are long gone. But perhaps the most important is GregSux Kerman. He's been with me for almost a year now, and he's always there to remind me how much possibility there really is in the Kerbal Universe.

Yes, two VertexHeightMap mods, and make sure you use a "name = " in each PQSMod to make sure MM doesn't confuse them for one. I would suggest one 512x1024 map for the superlaser, one 4096x2048 or 2048x1024 map for the rest of the planet, and a maxLevel of 4 or 5 as needed. If the level is too low or too high, things fall through other things.

I've got good news and bad news. Good news is that I've got the Duna Restoration Project pretty much finished. Original HeightMap, PQSMods, colormap blend, etc. (That is, rebuilding it as it was rather than faking it) Thanks to @Van Disaster for extracting the maps from 0.18, and @NovaSilisko for (both making Duna and then much later) compiling a list of the PQS information for 0.19 KSP. Bad news is that we'll have to wait until Kopernicus 1.1.3-2 is released. Bother @Thomas P. about it. no don't actually do that it's mean.

These look way more realistic than stockalike art style. Is this meant to be an extended Real Solar System or an extended stock solar system? EDIT: a read. It mostly does look pretty dang good, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous. EDIT: These near-photorealistic planets would be perfect as a full scale solar system mod. We don't have enough of those. How cool would it be to have an exoplanet mod for RSS with realistic looking planets and moons that look incredible as opposed to mere space engine exports?