Absolution

Why are my DDS files so much larger than their PNG counterpart? Is that just the way they work? For example I have a 1024x1024 image. The PNG is 71kb but the DDS is 683kb (using DXT1 and mipmaps). Is that a normal result?

Having downloaded KSP 1.1 and tested my rockets a little I am glad I never bothered to upload CORE to SpaceDock because although my rockets appear to be fundamentally compatible with 1.1 they can't fly worth a damn. I need to go back to basics and try to get my rockets flying right. The first thing I need to look into is making my fairings protect their contents from aero forces which I suspect is the root of the issue (rockets are back flipping in flight). The second thing is I need to tweak the gimbals. Currently they are set to about 0.6 which is what KSP used to interpret as "6 degrees" (iirc) but at some point I think they changed the interpretation to now see 0.6 as "0.6 degrees" which would make sense. Lastly, I need to take a hard look at all the other attributes to make sure they still make sense. Furthermore, it goes without saying that after Harvester rebuilt the wheel mechanics from the ground up that my Dune Raider is now completely broken. I have no idea what it will take to fix it. However, first things first: the rockets.

I absolutely do not mind. Although I don't share your vision I am glad that you managed to tweak the First Light to your liking. You have given me some food for thought, though. The Anvil IX came about as a solution specifically for launching the First Light into orbit as a complete assembly. One of the other concepts was to strap boosters on the sides not unlike the Space Shuttle. Your comments made a little light bulb go off in my head concerning a "self launching" package and I think I will investigate it for the current project I am working on. It will most certainly involve the use of boosters and a non-disposed set of engines, again like the Space Shuttle. For some reason I never connected the dots to reason that if I am going to bother launching a set of engines into orbit they might as well contribute, at least partially, to said launch. I'll also look into making my docking components visually compatible with stock parts. Maybe not 2.5 parts but I'll take a stab at it and we'll see what I can come up with. Lastly, not going to lie. I made the mistake of downloading Stardew Valley last week and I have been playing it nearly non-stop. As a result work has ground to a near halt on my KSP projects. I'm getting back to work on it this week, though. Stardew Valley is a very enjoyable game; look it up!

How is it I am just figuring out that KerbalStuff is dead and has been for over a month? Ha, guess I should pay attention to the news more closely. I really liked the KerbalStuff interface and I am glad to hear that a clone "SpaceDock" is available. Give me a few days to find the time to set up a new account and I'll have CORE Solutions back online. Of course, nobody seems to have missed it enough to tap me on the shoulder but, hey, I know I'm a very small fish in a very big ocean.

Wow! I'm sorry it's taken me so long to notice this. Short answer is, No. The long answer goes a little something like this: Raider is one piece of a bigger puzzle that I am trying to fit together and it's been tough to wrap my head around. My entire motivation is a "proper" mission to Duna mostly using parts that I engineer. The Raider represents step 4 of 7. 1. Launch Pad to Orbit (Anvil) 2. Orbit of Kerbin to Orbit of Duna (First Light) 3. Orbit of Duna to the ground (Fire Hawk) 4. Do stuff on the ground (Raider) 5. Ground to Orbit of Duna (Fire Hawk) 6. Orbit of Duna to Orbit of Kerbin (First Light) 7. Orbit of Kerbin to the ground (???) The problem I'm having is each of these steps relate to the other in some way so a change in any one tends to cascade to the others quickly and I've struggled to find a "starting point". The Raider, being firmly in the middle of the problem has compelled me to leave it be for now. Compounding matters is the promise of a very significant revision on how rover wheels work in the next KSP update which has me utterly paralyzed with fear. --- Since I am here I might as well update everyone else on what's going on at CORE. I've been flying the First Light around and I'm a little disappointed with it. For example, on my first fly-by of Duna I imagined myself riding along in this, relatively, cramped ship for 2 years and immediately began searching for the nearest airlock. Then there's the cargo bay (which is cool) but in hindsight is completely useless for a ship intended to live its entire life in deep space. I suppose one could stow some sensitive equipment in there but the reality hasn't matched up with my imagination. I figured that's where the Fire Hawk would go on round trips between "A" and "B" but the cargo space isn't big enough. Not that I consider the First Light a failure by any stretch of the imagination but I am now viewing it more as a mobile laboratory for short duration trips like between a host planet and its moons or an orbital command post for ground missions. Anything but a primary means of moving through deep space. For that role I have something else in mind. --- More information as it becomes available! Good luck and have fun!

I never stopped. I am just REALLY slow. Thank you for finding CORE again!

The First Light has been released! video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1hvPqQXgMI download: https://kerbalstuff.com/mod/378/CORE%20-%20SOLUTIONS Along with the First Light I have also made some small fixes to the Anvil and Dune Raider. See first post for details! Enjoy! --- Side Note: how the heck do you embed youtube videos in this new forum?

I also agree that much more can be done to make the First Light more visually appealing but I decided not to spend the time over-thinking it. One of the problems I have had in the past is the texturing process was so slow and my skills were improving so fast that by the time I got to finishing the last texture the first texture looked like crap in comparison. This time through I did all the textures in a relatively short span of time to make sure that everything matched. As a consequence they are quite boring. Furthermore, as much as my skills have improved there is still quite a ways to go. I've yet to do any type of strictly artistic flare on any of my textures and I am not confident that they will look as good as I imagine them to be. I envision stripes, vents, and other bits and bobs scattered around the hull but I'll need to practice and run some tests to see what works and what doesn't. I also intend to experiment with more 3D features once I make sure that it runs smoothly in-game. All of this, and more, is hopefully going to happen someday but my priority now is to get it flying. Also, there is no need to remind me about the impending doom that is: Unity 5. I am terrified enough as it is.

Getting pretty close now. The First Light is now remodeled, retextured, and is now heading into Unity 4 for the "make it work in KSP" treatment. While I write the configs and wrestle with the ever-a-pain-in-the-rear emissive textures you may enjoy some out of game renders. ...Enjoy! http://imgur.com/a/cKZfN

It's been a whopping 5 months since my last post and I am sure that anyone who has bothered to check in has probably assumed this thing is dead. It's not and I apologize for making it appear so. The reason for my absence is in large part due to the Unity 5 transition that Squad has been working tirelessly on for several months. In short: I am terrified of what this means for my mods. Will they be utterly destroyed forcing me to start from scratch? Probably not but its a concern that's in the back of my mind. Therefor, I've been very hesitant to commit serious hours into further development until KSP 1.1 is released and I determine what the damage is. I hadn't anticipated Squad taking so long on the update and the weeks very quickly turned into months. I fully understand the giant workload that Squad is dealing with and appreciate their hard work. This is simply the reality of early game development. What's been going on with CORE? I've almost completely remodeled the First Light and put a small amount of effort into redesigning the Fire Hawk. Unfortunately my development cycle has been plagued with iteration as I haven't been able to nail down a good design for the Fire Hawk. Every time I finished drafting a good design I scrapped it the next day because it no longer pleased me. Wash, rinse, and repeat a dozen times and I've gotten quite burned out by my efforts. I hope to start sharing in-progress renders in a few weeks. Finally, I like to offer a big, giant thank you to anyone out there still flying my mods. Even if there's just one person I'd consider my time well spent. Thank you and good luck in all of your adventures! More info soon. :)

Any word on a fix to the emissive issues we've been dealing with for a while? I've been stuck on Unity 4.2.2 because later revisions don't work with the emissive system without tweaking the files (which never solved the issue for me). Reference: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25023?p=921862&viewfull=1#post921862 How does Squad make it work on their end?

Hello and thank you for downloading Raider. I apologize that the wheels are confusing to use. In the VAB or SPH you can rotate the wheels (or any other object) yourself using WASDQE. Unfortunately, the way I oriented the node axis allows a player to install the wheels backwards. I will indeed fix that in the near future but in the short term you can rotate the wheel yourself so that it mounts facing the right way. Try pressing "A" twice. Furthermore, even after I point the node axis a different way you will still need to rotate the part to get it to hook up right. I will simply make it impossible to install the wheel backwards.

It turns out that Lady Luck was with me today. WELCOME BACK DUNE RAIDER! https://kerbalstuff.com/mod/378/CORE%20-%20SOLUTIONS

Update time: I am almost finished with the Dune Raider. All I need to do is complete the animations for the lights and tweak some values in-game. Unfortunately the animations are very temperamental and getting them to work right is an exercise in frustration. I can follow the same set of instructions, to the letter, three times and get three different results. That means I can't promise when I will release but I hope to do it in the next couple of days. Heck, if I am lucky the animations will go smooth and I will be able to get this out the door before the weekend. Everything else is ready to go. I could use some input on a future direction I am considering for the rovers. At the moment I rely on stock solar panels to provide the necessary electricity. This works okay but I'd like to avoid this work-around. Any time I try to design my own solar panels I have found them to be unreasonably fragile and, in fact, that's a big concern even when using stock panels. I am considering employing some form of fuel cell technology to generate electricity from other sources. There are a number of reasons why this makes sense from a game-play perspective. One, a player will have to pay attention to their fuel levels when adventuring. Two, it would be possible for the rover and its mother ship to share the same fuel type which drastically reduces the logistics. It's a direction I am strongly leaning towards. Thoughts?

I've got the renewed Dune Raider all modeled up. Now I just need to redo the textures. These shouldn't take too long considering they are very rudimentary. The first time I did these I just highlighted the edges and added some slight color variations. It turned out so well, IMO, that I see no reason to deviate from that. More updates soon!

That's very observant of you. In fact, the APC from Aliens was a major inspiration for the new tire. On further reflection I think I may have been overly inspired which compromised my creativity. Better? It certainly still has the Aliens look to it but I think it's at least a little more distinct. I raised the tread a little and removed the smaller center tread. Removing that small strip saves quite a few polygons and, honestly, it didn't really add anything to the overall tire anyway. Another thing that will set my tire apart from its inspiration wont be clear until the "rubber meets the road". --- Below is a teaser for the chassis. As before the upper left is the old one and the lower right is the new one. I smoothed out the rounded features and made some significant improvements to the poly count. The old chassis combined with the old suspension arms (for an apples to apples comparison) was approximately 4600 polygons. The new chassis, as you see here, is approximately 2600 polygons. Yay! --- Lastly we have the new chassis with the new tires mounted. It's coming together quite nicely! *I apologize if the renders are hard to look at. I'm new to making renders and I'm still learning all those little lighting tricks that allow a relatively simple object appear to be very real. One must always start somewhere. Good luck and have fun!

Below is a WIP clay render of the new tire (bottom right) and the old tire (top left). Several things should leap off the page at you: 1: Less track-day-bro. More Sci-Fi. There are a couple of reason why I went this way on the new design. First, the new design takes up fewer polygons (~1100 vs ~2400) despite the fact I have 3D tread included. Second, the tire is now bi-directional so it wont matter which side of the chassis you put it on; it will still work. That means no more awkward mirrored tire parts and confusing assembly. I also want to make this tire fit on future body parts I make for the Dune line of rovers. 2: Less suspension? The suspension arms, which were never animated anyway, will become an integrated part of the main chassis. I would love to make the suspension arms travel up and down like the real thing (which I think is possible is KSP) but I only have a very basic understanding where to begin. I choose not to spend my time investigating that particular feature at this time. Hopefully I can do it in a future update but for now it is what it is. Also, by putting the suspension arms on the chassis it helps me make one tire mount to all four corners easily. 3: Real tread! My old tire model/texture was very, very rudimentary. It had no normal, a very crummy texture and no smoothing. It worked okay but was, generally, very indicative of where my skills were at when I first did it (ie no skill). I've learned a lot about normal maps since then and they just wont cut it for what I want to do for my tires. I am forced to use a 3D tread but I think I've settled on a very low-poly but still very neat looking design. It's one of those subtle features that make the tire convincing. Simultaneously with the Tire I have also begun working on optimizing the design for the chassis. The original concept behind the Dune Rovers was to make a series of common parts and the player would only need to swap out key parts to make several different designs. This is how real car manufacturers do things; their similarly sized vehicles tend to be based on one common chassis. I never followed through with the original plan but since I am revising the whole Dune Raider variant it makes sense for me to follow through with it now. Once I am done you will only need to pull off the "Raider" body and then drop on the "Crawler" body to switch between the "Dune Raider" and the "Dune Crawler". Everything else, or as much as I can, will be common between them. Easy. A general note with my work so far is that there should be a significant optimization occurring. I wasted so many polygons on pointless and inefficient design features it's embarrassing! All told the Dune Raider was about 13,000 polygons when fully assembled. I'm not sure just how far I can go with the optimizing but I think I can reduce the poly count by at least 25%. No promises. However, I've never known the Dune Raider to be unstable or cause undue lag for players so maybe I will take the opportunity to add in some more detail and keep the poly count about the same. I am not sure where I want to go with that yet but I have some ideas on some details I would like to add. More teasers as I progress in the re-design! Good luck and have fun!

For the moment they have been removed from my pack due to KSP 1.0. They will be making a return soon. I apologize for the inconvenience.

You're certainly no idiot. The Anvil IX is just a real pain in the rear to fly. It's a very unconventional rocket design and the weight distribution is quite... goofy. The gimbal is negative 2 degrees due to some quirk in its flight characteristics I discovered during testing. When the gimbal was set to a positive number all command inputs during flight were reversed or backwards; I would steer left but the nose would go right and so forth. Fortunately I was allowed to set the gimbal to a negative number and it fixed the steering issue. Relatively speaking the Anvil IX has a very high gimbal range compared to its two smaller cousins. I found that no matter now many wings/fins I put onto the body that I couldn't develop enough aerodynamic counter force to fight the inevitable tip-over during flight. I'm not sure where that came from considering all of my rockets flew like a bloody dream before KSP 1.0. As a result I needed to overdo the gimbal to allow the Anvil IX to use it's engines to keep it pointed in a straight line. The side effect (which I am sure you experienced) is that about half way through the launch the Anvil IX becomes very, very sensitive to steering input. That is caused by a combination of the massive thrust to weight ratio coming from burning all of that fuel and the high gimbal range. I was able to solve that issue myself by progressively backing off the throttle little by little during the launch and keeping the T/W manageable. I'm actually surprised you were able to fix your launch challenges by simply locking the gimbal. Did you also add other control methods (wings/fins) to offset the loss of engine steering? I'd love to see your variation of the Anvil IX and to understand how you managed to make it work for you. --- The First Light will be coming back for sure. However, it's towards the end of my current to-do list. I've been neglecting the Dune Raider and Fire Hawk too long and I want to bring those up to my current standards. It also makes sense from a development standpoint because the Dune Raider fits inside of the Fire Hawk and the Fire Hawk fits inside of the First Light. I need to design all of them before I can design any of them if that makes sense. Might as well start at the little guy and work my way up.

After many, many years of trial, error and learning I present to you: ANVIL, The Definitive Edition: https://kerbalstuff.com/mod/378/CORE%20-%20SOLUTIONS The Anvil series has been completely rebuilt from the ground up using all of the knowledge I have gained in mod making since first discovering this game 4 years ago. I still have a long way to go and much to learn but I am blown away by how far my work has come. It has been an honor and a joy to work on this and I give a grand salute and thanks to anyone who has chosen my mods for their KSP adventures. My next task is to modernize the Dune Raider, re-imagine the Fire Hawk, and then to deliver a fully functioning First Light. Again, thank you all for your attention and support! Good luck and have FUN! *On a side note: my videos have gotten a heck of a lot better lately. I attribute that largely to "kerbCam"* http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/24757-0-23-5-KerbCam-v0-13-%28camera-pathing-tool-for-videos%29

So here's a small update: All of my parts were broken by the 1.0 update but only in small ways. There are three main elements I need to address: 1. You could load up my current version of Anvil but you will find that none of the nodes seem to work. In fact, they do work but SQUAD changed the way the node logic works. I now need to "point" my nodes in the correct direction in relation to each other in order for them to hook up right. I've spent the last day or two conducting some trial and error on my config files and found the right combination to make it all work again. All I need to do is flip some numbers from a positive integer (+1) to a negative integer (-1). Easy enough but I need to do it for most of my parts and then test them to make sure I did it right. That's proving to be time consuming. 2. The Aerodynamic update has made my rockets significantly more powerful than I intend them to be. I can launch a payload up to about 400km and I only want it to be able to reach 100km (that's my personal benchmark). This means I need to go back to my spreadsheets and start playing with my values to get the rockets to perform at a desired level. There's no quick way to find the "sweet spot". All the math in the world is great but you never can tell quite how a rocket will behave until you put it through a launch cycle. I've launched 5 test rockets and each time I get a little closer. So far my test rocket has shed about 1000m/s worth of dV or approximately 20% of what it was before. I will need to do this for each of my three rocket classes and my two SRB's. 3. The Aerodynamics update also has created quite an interesting challenge to my launches. At about the trans-sonic stage of the launch at the same time I begin the gravity turn the lateral wind forces on the nose of my rocket cause it to pitch over violently. Translation: the entire rocket starts tumbling, nose over tail, uncontrollably. Fortunately there is an easy fix: add stock winglets. The added aerodynamic control surfaces allow the rocket to remain pointing in the right direction. Doubly fortunate is the fact that the stock winglets match my rocket design almost flawlessly. They look like they belong there. I haven't tested this fix on my big Anvil IX yet so hopefully it works otherwise my whole "end-game" will be ruined. Everything considered I can't complain. It's annoying to have to go back into a design after you've finished it but that's life in the big city. I should be able to sort everything out in a few days. No promises but I'm doing my best. Good luck and have fun!

After 20 minutes of trial and error I answered my own question: Question: How does one correctly align a "node{}"? Answer: The Zaxis of the two nodes you intend to attach to each other must point towards each other. So in a classic vertical stack up the attach node of the bottom part must have its Zaxis pointing UP and the attach node of the top part must have its Zaxis point DOWN. The Xaxis and Yaxis do not appear to have any significance in how the two parts attach so it doesn't matter how they align in relation to one another as long as the Zaxis are anti-aligned (point in opposite directions). I'm not sure if the above is an absolute answer. You might be able to get away with pointing the attach node of the bottom part DOWN and the attach point of the top part UP. It might be that you only need to anti-align the two Zaxis (point them in opposite directions). However, my test part (the bottom part in the example above) attached to a stock part when I pointed its attach node up.

So my old way of defining nodes is out of date and nothing seems to be working. I can twist and turn my two parts around every which way and they refuse to connect. How does one correctly align a node{}? Must their gameobject axis point in all the same directions? So if i were to overlay the node of part A and B would all axis point in the same direction when correctly assembled?

I'm not sure I understand. what's the difference between a collection of other parts and a single part? Lets just say I make myself a single nose cone. Would I use the cargo bay module to get KSP to recognize it as a "shieldedfromairstream"? Or are you saying that, no matter what I do, I must write a plug-in.

Bummer. I think I can work around that but first I need to know how I define a part such that the aerodynamic system understands it. Is there a Unity flag? Layer? A new type of mesh (like a colider)? config entry? I looked at the configs for the stock fairings but nothing really jumped out at me as saying "this relates to aerodynamics".