Whirligig Girl

Whirligig World has been unplayable in the new version for too long! This week I hope to release a 1.8.1 and 1.7.3 compatible version of Whirligig World. Unfortunately the 1.8.1 compatible version won't have the following features: EmissiveFX (glowing lava) for Yalthe's lava lakes. New fancy terrain shaders on Mesbin.

@AloE Scatterer changed how its scaledspace rendering of atmospheres works in a recentish update, which is why the configs no longer make sense. Scatterer also now takes into account starlight color, which is another thing that will need to be changed if the scatterer configs would be updated.

here's a big button to press to bring you to the discord channel.

unfortunately no, I haven't set up the configs for those. I love your cinematics by the way! Great work, I especially like the poem in the beginning of the second video! I don't check the forums so often these days, but if you want to get real-time responses to any questions you might have, you can come to my Gregrox Mods discord server linked in my signature.

Kopernicus has been updated! Time for much rejoicing, right? Wrong! Whirligig World requires Kopernicus Expansions: Regional PQS and EmissiveFX. These mods are not updated for 1.8.1 and will not work as is. Also SnailsAttack just remade Mally for me because I couldn't be bothered. Not gonna show y'all any pics because that'd spoil it, but it looks a lot cooler than it did before.

When I release Limnel, sure. It's already added to the readme's object list. Worldligreg Worm isn't dead, y'all, don't worry. Here's a new planet called Troymun, which will be a new trojan of Kerbmun. i'm really proud of it fits in really well with all the other planets in the mod, from a realistic and stylization standpoint Think it's real good, right? WELL YOU'VE BEEN FOOLED! TRICKED! BAMBOOZLED! This isn't Troymun, this is Themis, from my friend @SnailsAttack's Dauntless Planet Pack. This was a sneaky advertisement this whole time! Similar to Whirligig World's Kerbmun Homeworld option, Dauntless Planet Pack puts the space center on an Earth-like homeworld orbiting a super-earth called Orpheus. Except this isn't just a binary--it's a ternary, since the homeworld Eurydice has a trojan moon called Themis. I've been following Snails' planet pack development for the past over a year now, and have long been impressed by the exaggerated and stylized terrain forms he's come up with. It's a far cry from the attempted pseudo-realism of Whirligig World, but it sure looks cool. Snails actually beat me to the idea of putting a red dwarf in a close orbit around the Sun (As Limnel is in the upcoming Whirligig World). His M dwarf looks great, I gotta say. You can follow the development of Snails' Dauntless Planet Pack by going to my Gregrox Mods Discord Channel, which there are links to in my signature and in the OP of this forum thread. You can also see updates about Whirligig World.

No uh that referenceBody = NH/Sun needs to be there lol. This is a workaround to a longstanding bug in KSP regarding reparenting the homeworld! That has to be referencing the Sun or you get severe problems. PostSpawnOrbit is used to put the homeworld around Sonnah. PostSpawnOrbit was literally made for New Horizons and Alternis Kerbol Rekerjiggered. If it causes hangs in 1.8.1 that may be because PostSpawnOrbit broke in kopernicus' 1.8.1. I haven't tried NH in 1.8.1 so I can't check.

same as above

Doing another livestream now.

let's do a random livestream here why not? EDIT: livestream finished.

@linuxgurugamer @OhioBob instead of working on separate forks, why don't we merge our versions of the project so we don't have two competing versions? My version has working support for Interstellar Consortium as well as a patch that makes the NH sun a unique new star rather than an impossible stock-Sun clone.

I supported Interstellar Consortium, which makes all planet packs installed share a universe. Galactic Neighborhood's support of NH just removed the stock bodies from the NH system, but this solution wasn't acceptable for Interstellar Consortium, for which one of the goals is that you could play starting from any planet pack that by default has a homeworld. So I renamed all the planets, both internally with NH_[name] for name and identifier, to preserve compatibility with IC and the stock system, and when IC is installed I also change the name displayed in-game. I don't provide any compatibility with GalacticNeighborhood in my version. Using :FOR[MyMod] is the standard for patching in planet packs, afaik you shouldn't be doing @Kopernicus:AFTER[Kopernicus].

Can you please clarify what the problem is?

Tweet thread going into some more detail.

A few months ago, my internet went out, and I used that time to make a planet mod. It was designed to answer the question of what a space program on a super-earth-mass terrestrial planet would really be like, what would the limitations really be? It's not an unpopular meme in the space flight community that if the Earth were even a little bit bigger, space travel would become impossible, or at the very least impractical. Why let the math speak for itself? Here's an RSS-scale mod that adds two different homeworlds: a world with twice the mass of Earth, and a world with twice the radius of Earth. Ultragaia is a planet with twice the mass of Earth, but it is not twice as wide or twice as heavy. Its atmosphere is denser than Earth's, but not by much. Ultragaia has two moons: Duarph, which is a Ceres-sized moon in a low eccentric orbit; and Circumlune, which is very similar to Earth's Moon. Dubulrad is a strangely colored planet with twice the radius of Earth, but it is 9 times the mass, and has 5 times the atmosphere. It is an altogether different challenge to launch from. Dubulrad has four moons which are roughly analagous to the Jovian moons, though around half the size--subject to change. They are Oye, Euor, Galan, and Calid. Galan is currently just a Tylo Clone. In addition to those two homeworlds and their moons, there is also the planet Derjulan, a tiny sub-neptune with only 2 Earth masses, with an additional Earth mass in the form of its moon Aquarii, which is nearly identical to Earth. All of this is in orbit around the K-dwarf Caldos. Pics: https://imgur.com/a/pLoBoc9 Recommended mods: Realism Overhaul OR SMURFF Kerbal Atomics (And maybe an Orion Drive) Required mods: Kopernicus (And ModularFlightIntegrator and ModuleManager) Kopernicus Expansions: Regional PQS (Included with Super Earth Space Programs) DOWNLOAD: https://github.com/GregroxMun/Super-Earth-Space-Programs/releases/tag/0.0.1 click "Source code (zip)" To change homeworlds, go to GameData/SuperEarthSpacePrograms/Settings.cfg and open that file with a text editor. Then change "homeworld = Dubulrad" to "homeworld = Ultragaia" or vice versa. Incidentally, my analysis from a bit of gameplay is that conventional rockets are challenging to use on Ultragaia, but not to the point that space probes are impossible to launch. Conventional rockets are unusable on Dubulrad. I was able to use the Kerbal Atomics nuclear aerospike to launch a few rockets comparable in size to a few Saturn Vs strapped together that had probe payloads capable of launching from Dubulrad and landing on some of Dubulrad's moons. One day I'd like to try with waterlogged open cycle gas core NTRs, which have much denser propellant, but I'd need to mod in that functionality. But it is my opinion that on super-earth-mass terrestrial planets, the result is actually more capable space programs. Since chemical rockets are unusable, they will require powerful rockets such as Gas Core NTRs and Orion Drives, and those are also extremely capable rockets in space as well. A space program on a super-earth would start later, technologically speaking, but once it did get started it would be very powerful. Incidentally real super-earths would likely have much thicker atmospheres than either Ultragaia or Dubulrad, though with worlds like Ultragaia, the earthlike atmosphere is at least plausible. Real super-earths seem to be almost like Neptune and Uranus, rather than Earth and Venus. Realistic super-earths would likely have very thick oceans that are extremely unlikely to result in technological civilizations, and that's the real reason that the inhabitants of super-earth-mass planets wouldn't have space programs. Super Earth Space Programs is very much still a work in progress. There's not really any science experiments, the solar system is poorly fleshed out, and I haven't really worked on it in 4 months. But I've decided to release it early since otherwise I'm not sure when if ever I would release it. But if you want to have a go at launching rockets from super-earths, definitely give this a go. I'd be interested in hearing about your results, especially if you were to play using Realism Overhaul from Ultragaia.

You can take your suggestion now, with your current project.

it's ok bae your senpai notices you

scatterer is not properly supported. Uninstall scatterer. Derbin and Valyr should have clouds with EVE, I'll try to look into that. It might be related to you playing on Kerbmun. KSC being too bright is unfixable. There's a LOT of KSC-related bugs whenever you reparent Kerbin, which is what we've done to make Kerbmun into a homeworld. Same with day/night cycles and KSC indicator wobbling in tracking station. Dessert and Woomerang launch sites can't be used with Mesbin, and aren't on land on Kerbmun (IIRC), so they've been removed. The heatshield exploding is gameplay, not a bug. Derbin's atmosphere scale height is very short due to its high gravity. Take a shallower approach. "Being able to see a huge water world underneath Mesbin if you look at just the right angle" if your camera is clipping through the terrain to see this, I don't care. But since there shouldn't be water, I'm guessing it's actually scatterer's fault, like I said uninstall scatterer. Transfer Window Planner can be used to get a delta-v map, though I don't believe it can be done from a moon to a planet. That being the case, you can always plan maneuvers in Kerbmun orbit with a probe (either cheated into orbit or not) to get an idea of delta-v for transfers. Kerbmun Kerbals have acclimated to the thin oxygen over many centuries of inhabiting Kerbmun. At first (and if you were playing from Mesbin) the Kerbals had to breathe oxygen canisters. COMING SOON TO A STAR SYSTEM NEAR YOU Whirligig World 0.11.1. I had intended for the next update to be 1.0. But I had to address Kaywell. When I invented Kaywell, I thought I had invented a realistic star, the goal having been to make it more luminous that most stars of its mass, so that I could put Mesbin and Derbin as far apart as I could. I thought, for a long time, that I had succeeded. The WW version 0.11 was meant to be the last version before 1.0. In the reddit post announcing the update, a player commented that Kaywell wasn't luminous enough. I told them they were wrong. They were right. It turned out that, somehow, my star was MUCH less luminous than it should have been--closer to 6-10 Lsol rather than 2.52. For a long time after I struggled with trying to reconcile my star--and the very much already finished system--with the unrealistic mass/luminosity ratio. Most people would probably never notice... but it would always nag at me. I came up with several different possible ways to change Kaywell, and sat on those for a month or so. I had resolved to keep Kaywell as it was, unrealistic, until I remade the system from scratch when KSP2 was released. Then KSP2 got delayed, and I realized Whirligig World would have perhaps another full year of relevance. So I decided to go ahead and fix the star. I made it more luminous, and moved all the orbits out. And finally Kaywell was realistic, and it didn't even take that much effort! But there was one small problem: those new orbits sucked. They were almost three times slower, which would have slowed gameplay down to a crawl, ruined any missions planned or in progress to the planets between the updates, and it just wouldn't have been fun. I felt defeated. Here it was, a more realistic system that was worse than the original. I have long maintained (and generally still do) that realism doesn't detract from gameplay in most cases, and can actively produce interesting situations. But extremely slow orbits isn't interesting, it's just boring. So I undid my changes, and resolved yet again that yes, I really would keep Kaywell as it was. Then I woke up with a start on December 1st 2019. "MAKE IT BINARY!" I said, and I made a note of it to deal with later. The reasoning is that two main sequence stars of a given total mass will almost always have a lower luminosity than a single star of the same mass. So all I had to do was find the right mass and luminosity ratios and do a lot of last minute work splicing an entire star into the game's configs and lore. And so Limnel is born. That's right. Kaywell is now a trinary star. (Kaywell, Gememma, and Limnel) By default, the mass of Limnel will be added to Kaywell, so Kaywell is effectively identical to as it was before (planet orbits will be identical). There is, however, a new setting in the settings.cfg to make Kaywell and Limnel binary, with a barycenter that both stars and the planets will orbit. In this case, Kaywell will use its new, more realistic mass of 1.17 Msol. Kaywell will also be 1.17 Msol if Principia is installed, but will not orbit a barycenter. Also of note: using an unreleased and unfinished (so don't ask about it.) development version of 1.8 Kopernicus, I was able to play around with the new terrain shaders, but I expect to make a release for 1.7.3 before I release the 1.8 terrain updates. Unfortunately there seems to be a bizarre lighting bug that prevents me from putting the new terrain shader on Mesbin, which is very sad.

it can be played if you backdate your KSP to 1.7.3.

Kopernicus has not been updated for 1.8 yet.

I have uh... I've decided not to change Kaywell after all. Whirligig World 2 is gonna be a thing someday (in KSP2), and when that comes, Kaywell and Gememma will likely be very different.

You could do variants where the models look old but they use more modern color pallets, like those from ReStock. For instance, the yellow here is quite ugly, but a *slightly* oranger yellow might look better, or one without the black stripes perhaps. And the bluish grays could be replaced with white, perhaps. Just as variants of course, that classic old color scheme is iconic. Also the version of the ancient tanks that had the thick lips on the end didn't have the ability to be radially mounted. They were remodeled to be more cylindrical when the radial mount capability was added. It's funny, though, because I remember when 0.18 was coming out and the first part revamps were being done, I was so excited because they had revamped the SRB and it looked great, but still looked like the original part. When I downloaded the update I was disappointed to see that the tanks had been completely redesigned. Now of course it didn't take long to get over that, I am soooo glad the art style went in a more realistic direction (it paved the way for porkalike styles including the amazing ReStock, and just generally allowed for better stock replicas of real crafts, which are more often painted white than cool gray). That said, these parts represent a strange and interesting "what if" to satisfy that middle schooler's craving. I look forward to seeing more (even if I never actually download it it's still really interesting to see), and I'm sorry @Consta your thread never got any attention when it was new.

I'll be making a relatively small patch with a pretty enormous gameplay change soon. Turns out two years and 9 days ago, when I created Kaywell, I made a mistake. Kaywell's nowhere near as luminous as it should be for its mass. I am really kicking myself for not noticing that before, and it was only a comment (on a reddit post announcing the 0.11 update no less! You know, the "hey I'm almost done" update. The one that I intended to not make any major changes to.) by a skeptical redditor /u/OctupleCompressedCAT that brought this oversight to my attention. OctupleCompressedCAT, if you're reading this: screw you and more importantly, thank you. I could have gone on my merry way never knowing the massive realism flaw hiding right under my nose, but now at least can fix the problem. Basically I don't want to move Gememma too far away, I like the current brightness as a dim night-light and bright star everpresent in the sky. But if I make Kaywell more luminous, I'll have to move every planet's orbit outwards. This will push Reander firmly into the realm of Gememma's sphere of influence. Similarly if I keep the current orbits the same but reduce Kaywell's mass to make its current luminosity reasonable, the mass ratio between the star and all the planets will change, which means not only might there be instabilities in the planets that weren't there before, Gememma will also have more of a gravitational influence on Reander and again, Reander will be made unstable. Now I may be able to fiddle with compromises between lowering the mass, raising the luminosity, and moving Gememma. But I am leaning towards a solution that pretty wildly changes the nature of the system. I could move Reander to orbit Gememma. If I do so it would orbit in the gap between Gallant and Mandrake, and likely tides from Gememma might tear Yawer off, so I might need to find a new orbit for it. There's something so... wrong about moving Reander after all this time, I mean after all, it was in the very first release of Whirligig World! Though there isn't really anything fundamentally Kaywellian about the system. No matter what I do (unless I decide to suck it up and let Kaywell be unrealistic) there will be significant changes to gameplay, delta-v, and transfer times for anyone beyond the Mesbin system. If you're staying in the Mesbin system you might not notice much of a difference, though. So either finish your interplanetary missions before updating, or wait until the update to launch them. I'm really curious on the thoughts of my players regarding these changes. Let me know here on the forum, or discuss in more detail on my discord server.

Sep 10 and Oct 17 streams are now on YouTube:

I find it somewhat amusing that you've connected "planet modder" and/or "live-streamer" with "computer person." I don't use Ubuntu and I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to help lol.