Kommitz

Ah you could have just messaged me, I'm not too concerned about these things. That aside I'll put up a temporary download on mediafire in a bit (a day or two or three) and probably tweak the particle effects while I'm at it.

I've got a half finished Blue Streak that I could lend (when finished). I've also got a few pictures of Europa concepts lying around too, moving on past the Blue Streak based launcher.

I'm probably going to completely break this mod when spaceport goes down. Sorry about that. I'm considering moving the thread over to the Add-On development forum and working on integrating the parts with the new features in the firespitter plugin so that I can offer more parts without bloating up the parts menu Consolidating similarly sized parts into switchable tanks etc. I might also change some of the part sizes a bit (making adapters shorter for a start), and will add some wider and thinner truss systems to work with the core 2.5m parts. I'll get to it when I've finished re-sorting things.

The new additions for texture switching & mesh switching look fantastic for structural parts sets. I'll definitely consider making use of the plugin myself now, lots of features I've been looking for for a while now.

This looks super. Are you doing a whole new IVA too?

It's actually based on these drawings for the NERVA II that I found with some googling, they came with dimensions and it looks good so I went with it: (The only downside is that I'm not entirely sure of the propellant cycle (and what particular pipes do what), but that's just me worrying about details that don't matter in game ) As for the height I'm considering altering the design a bit for the sake of practicality and making the nozzle partially retractable. Will have to see how that would work with all the pipes.

It's mostly the nozzle that contributes to the size, and I was thinking of changing the design a little and adding a partially extendable nozzle. The reactor itself isn't any larger than the FTmN 280. Also I'm just deciding how to unwrap it at the moment:

Err, I'm not really sure what's happening there either. Try a clean install? All that I could imagine is that you updated from a really old version of the mod and the engine is entirely different. But I'm not sure. I think I will change up the balance between parts in my next update. It'll be a while though. ~Future Updates~ With Spaceport going away I'm going to take the opportunity to change up the engines significantly, so the next update will probably replace the old engines outright and be balanced with the new stock parts sizes in mind. I'd like to (finally) switch them over to dedicated fuel sources (either LiquidFuel or something new and stock themed like CryoFuel (as a kerbally Hydrogen)) and therefore make a few tanks to go with them/package a fuel tank plugin with them. I'll probably re-do the toroidal and clustered tanks and post them up in my other release thread too. I'll try to keep the new part IDs seperate so that you can continue using the old engines for as long as they continue working. While I'm working on updating the fatmen, you can take a look at some side projects that I'm doing for fun: Nuclear Rockets [WIP] I'm also thinking about whether I want to host my parts on Curse or elsewhere from now on. I'll likely just start using mediafire and keeping the downloads indexed in the first post.

WoooOOOooOOOOoo ghOSt tHReaD comes back to haunt you all I'm making a stockalike 4-nuke-cluster now that we've got 3.75m stock parts, you're in luck! Very late luck. Briefly faced down the dilemma of whether I should just make a bigger engine and decided that symmetrical clusters look cool and suit the game. What I really wanted to post was this, which I'm fixing up for the chaka monkey mod conglomeration thing: Based on dimensioned NERVA II design illustrations. It's huge. That means it has huge thrust. Most of the height is in the massive exhaust nozzle which puts it at about the same height as an orange tank, and believe it or not it's been scaled down (0.64x) to Kerbal size. I'll probably release a real-scale version too because I know there are nutters out there that like playing with such things.

I think you'd do well to make a set of parts that can be built as capital ships, rather than just making a single, non modular ship. Individual ships have a small amount of novelty value but don't mesh well with the rest of the game. You should think about the variety of things you can do and build with a pack if you want to garner interest from people. If you have a few designs, you can identify the key components that can be shared between them as a start.

Edit: Durr never mind.

What way are you attaching it? KSP makes it fiddly to use parts with more than two attach nodes, so the hub will only attach initially from the bottom node i.e. it will attach fine if you put it on top of something. If you want to attach it to a part in a different orientation you'll need to rotate it until the bottom node is the one that's being used to attach. Or maybe you know this already and it's a different problem in which case I'm not sure what it could be.

Update released! Check the first post for the spaceport link. Important note: Make sure you delete your old 'kommit_octostrut' folder before you install the new one. Your save games should be safe. Main additions: Half-Size LFO Tank Xenon Tank Monopropellant Tank Half-Size Truss 6-Way Hub Two Docking Ports - Large port, for matching the rest of the trusses and a small port that can be added in case you need some help with aligning things. In addition to the new parts, the textures have been changed around and I added some extra geometry detail to the round adapter and radial attach point.

This thread is pretty much spam, but... nuclear thermal propulsion is a very real technology that was developed by the Soviets and the USA. Varying reactor prototypes were ground tested during the 60s and 70s.

These look handy. Nicely done.

They seem to be, so long as you rotate things http://i.imgur.com/Ib1FIlQ.png Also day or two more until the update drops, here's the fueltanks. Trusses are to be re-textured as I completely reshuffled their texture sheet:

Well I can't because the only code I know is about half an introductory course to Python... As far as I know StretchySRB doesn't work in a way that'd be applicable to stretchy trusses; the fueltanks are stretched primitives whereas trusses would need to be duplicated mesh sections with distinct caps. I might look into the idea eventually though, I'd just need to find someone willing to do/help with the code. I can't do that with the standard truss sections because they're made to fit in line with 2.5m parts. Instead I'm working on a slightly larger cargo holding section, with some adapters down to standard truss sizes. As for what I'm working on, I'm changing the layout of the texture sheet and models so that I can more easily put in different fuel tanks and should release an update once that's done. Should include: Smaller fueltank in Monopropellant, Xenon and LFO options. Docking port. I've opted to make a docking port that you can, if you want, put additional guide ports on so that trusses can be aligned more easily. I initially wanted to just make a port that used guide vanes for alignment but the collision physics don't seem to be accurate enough for that to work well. 6-way hub. Cargo truss, with adapter and attachment points. I'll get some screenshots later.

The polycount is probably fine considering the sparsity of geometry in general in the game, but a lot of the smaller details aren't really needed at all. Chamfers are a minor detail that just chomp through polygons like nothing else, and they're rarely going to be noticed on the size of details you've put half of them on. Stubbles covered most of it. Looking forward to see some delicious bakes and textures soon.

This is great, and really what I was hoping for in the stock implementation. Finally we're able to scale things over time (which really should have been in the basic implementation), and also the atmospheric modifiers are great. I'm looking forward to updating my own parts to take full advantage.

Yeah that's true, it can be used for such things (by myself mostly) as having one fairing that you just call up in the cfgs for all your engines. Also these parts look well nice.

There shouldn't be any problems with the latest versions of each.

I'm working on some, although it'll be a cluster of smaller tanks inside the truss rather than a super-squashed 2.5m tank. I was just trying to keep the part counts down, and as such just went with a 2.5m standard height. Figured that having a 7.5m one would work for large constructions, and the small ones could be stacked for the times that you need a 5m tall bit. That said, it's only really to keep the VAB menus less cluttered as I've made the parts so that they all use the same texture sheet so far so it'd be easy enough to just add the 2/3rds parts in. I've been thinking that too actually. I'll just add some tubes next update.

Oh, err sorry about that. I should've mentioned that in the first post. It just slipped my mind and I was working on the assumption that people would just drag & drop the folder without deleting the old install first. I'm just in the process of re-texturing and making a couple of other tanks to go with it. EDIT: Re-added the tank to the pack for now.

I'm balancing some stats that are more Methane-NTR styled at the moment, but I want to wait until my next new engine before I re-stat them all and release. Try updating your pack, the new particles are much more dense so should look better on slower machines. The issue before was (I think...) that there were too few particles that spawned for too short a time. Not yet...(...but there may be a plugin coming along that could enable effects more like that. Later though.) Anyway, bump for the latest update. Changed the particle effects and a couple of textures (very slightly).

I've released the basic truss parts first because I'm using them as a base to tie all the other parts together, which is why they're a bit barebones right now. Crewed components will come along eventually though.