Payload

I use them as lower atmo lift helpers where I may not have enough thrust form the main engine because it is purposefully undersized. I jettison them when my TMR reaches an excessive amount. Engines are incredibly heavy in this game. Dropping them off asparagus style when you don't need them anymore is useful. Doesn't hurt that they have great efficiency in dense atmosphere. They are the most efficient way to do asparagus according to my testing. May not be the cheapest though. Solid boosters are probably the most cost effective.

It uses heading mate. You have to build the rocket in the right orientation from the get go.

Do I have to have Module Manager for this to work? If so, I'm out. Really. That Mod is known to break things all the time. No thanks is what I say. Why would you do this? Please stop making mods dependent on other mods I don't want/need/care about.

Mother of god! Dat porkchop plot! Amazing. I got the fuel. It's the time I don't have. It works perfectly from what I have tested of it. One small problem. The landing auto pilot bug is back. The one were it freaks out at chute open with the large random number on the bottom. That is strange too. I haven't had that bug in ages. Now it happens almost every single time trying to land at KSP. As always, if you catch it and disable the auto pilot and then re-enable it, it works fine after that.

I tried it. Not working for me. The toolbar isn't working for me either. I checked to make sure I got the versions that were supposed to work. Nada. Oh well, looks like it will be a few days before this is sorted.

I used to play use B9 for a long time. Now it has become so full of dependency and bloat that it has turned me off. Any chance we can get a light version of this that doesn't require every single mod under the sun to work?

They sell your small lightweight pressure vessels in stores all over the world. They come in two different kinds. Some of them hold Nitrous Oxide for whipped cream dispensers. Some of them hold Co2 for airguns. They look like this. The plus side is they are safe and pre-filled.

If is definitely the compression setting. For now, set it to the highest quality available. It was giving me fits also. Until I did that.

Not sure what that video was advertising but terrible FPS in shooter games that looked like they where made a decade ago. Fancy audio mixer. Too bad that doesn't fix the problem of literally every other PC engine being ten times better in terms of speed and quality.

If there is no vertex there for you to select, then you need to select the bounds vertexes and move the 3d cursor into position. Then press SHIFT+S and select cursor to selected. That will move the 3D cursor into the position center of the selected items. You can then use that directly for node position numbers. Ultimately, the coordinate and node system is explained in detail in the WIKI. I know that most of that info is dated but the node setup description is still accurate. Also, it sounds like your part doesn't have a collision mesh.

If you have configured blender to use metric units and have modeled at 1:1 scale, then blender will tell you the exact positions of highlighted objects. It's a case of you deciding where you want those nodes to go. The nodes them selves are setup in the config file. As far as I know, you can also define config nodes in Unity but I have never done it that way.

In whatever editing software you use, you need to create an emptyObject and place it at the position you wish to constrain and make it a child of the armature mesh. The same needs to be done for the look constrain and these are called in the part's config file and configured there under the module wheel. The CONSTRAINLOOK/FXModuleConstrainPosition are essentially empty objects that are children of the armature. You would configure them with targets in the actual part.cfg. I am sorry I can't help you on the multi-axle problem. Though maybe the guys that are updating the tank tracks mod can help you with that one. Edit: I forgot to add that that all depends on the objects global and or local position. You may or may not want to apply any global rotations. I have only ever made a single armature suspension with a single wheel and it wasn't even really a wheel. It was for a landing leg. YMMV.

I think the main problem is most of the Blender tutorials available on youtube and such are not targeted at teaching someone to use Blender for a video game project. I see a severe over use of subsurface in most of these tutorial videos. Subsurface is great for full render CG work. You never actually have to apply the modifier when your project never leaves Blender. There are tons of these videos out there. They are likely to not contain subject matter that is of much use to you as a game asset maker. The only reason I would ever use Subsurface in a game asset would be when I am setting up Objects that will be used for a texture normal. They will not be in the final model. So again, it doesn't matter. I also see people in these tutorials use 4k+ textures and generally fail at Correct UV mapping and get away with it because of that 4k texture. There is also the fact that the needs of the two mediums are different. If I am making a CG movie, I need enormous UV maps and all unique texture coordinates. A video game asset is pretty much just the opposite. Your islands needs to be large and efficient. So lots of UV mirroring tends to happen. Try to focus on the videos that are about making video game assets in Blender. You might also want to try searching several different strings like UV mapping in Blender or even KSP and Blender. Eventually you will hit upon the videos that drop nuggets of info that pertain to your application. Don't be afraid to use several root primitives as entirely separate pieces. Your model isn't required to be seamless or to be all one part. Use that to your advantage to keep poly count low. Every single face and vertex needs to be doing something useful for your models visual appeal. Here is a cabin that I am working on for a new SSTO shuttle craft. You can see that I have used a baked Ambient Occlusion map to judge which parts of the mesh need to have unique texture coordinates. All of those things you see are actually modeled, yet the poly count is low. That small bit of space left on the texture card in the top right is perfect to add plenty of small details in actual polygons. There is even room to stuff more in the cracks. That is where using geometry efficiently can help you. There is still plenty of small detail that will be added to that. Such as grab rails and hand holds. I could safely model in panel lines and believable six sided bolt heads if I wanted to take it that far. Though I find that normal mapping handles those sorts of details convincingly.

Just make the part you want to put text on a separate mesh from the rest of the part. Make a couple of loop cuts to segregate the part you want to have text on and select the area and press "P" and click By selection. Now select that part and move it in the UV space. You will have to unwrap some parts again maybe, but that will allow you to have your text on that one side. You could also re unwrap so your part has all unique UV coordinates.

OMG this! Dealing with Euler rotations in KOS nearly drove me insane. I got around it by using a lot of vector math and thus normalizing the data input so it could be used by regular people and not just mensa members. A few generations later KOS was finally updated to use Quaternions and everyone rejoiced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion P.S. My wife claims I still curse gimbal lock in my sleep.

Are we sure that a copy of the texture is being used? If the file has the same name it seems to me that KSP would just use the one that is in memory already. Though, I actually have no idea how KSP works on an engine level. If indeed we are getting something like TexIVA.TGA being used for internal of one shuttle and then another TexIVA0001.TGA being used for another shuttle IVA, with both files loaded into memory, then that would be a bad thing. However, if both are using just the latest file to be loaded into memory then what we are really talking about is a SOD issue and it's not really of much concern. With a centralized texture folder, I can see using a lot of smaller seamless textures for all things and not just IVAs. That saves a lot of black space. Currently, my textures have to be a lot bigger than I would like. I feel that no matter what I do, my use of them is in-efficient at best. I think before we get our panties in a bunch over this, we need more information about how this is handled by the actual game. Maybe this isn't so much a Squad problem as it is a Unity one.

Your English is perfectly fine. About your extra question. KSP default part sizes in diameter are as follows. Smallest. .625 meters. Standard. 1.25 meters. Largest. 2.5 meters. That is probably why they look a little small. I think everyone makes that mistake at first. I know I did.

I thought it was awesome. Dr. Tyson preformed well just as everyone expected. Watching the old Cosmos all day on the lead up really made me miss Dr. Sagan though.

I took some time to play test it a bit. I must say I am already wanting something bigger. It will hold quite a few of my Proton Nymph SSTO shuttle craft. Jeb and Bill were the first arrivals. Plenty of room for more shuttles in here.

Like I said guys, I am no artist. I can see about getting the workflow packed up in a zip. I am not sure it will be small enough that I will be able to host it. Maybe I can host the image files on Imgur and just zip up the .blend and the .unity files. I left plenty of room for more geometry to be unwrapped on the texture sheet for the doors. You guys can have a go with whatever you would like to try. It's not intended to be anything more than a giant space garage. Making an external texture on such a large surface look half decent is not easy. Trust me, even tiles does not look flattering on such a large boxy ship. That is why I went with the offset tiles. It breaks up the lines a bit and keeps it from looking like a steam room.

KSP has hundreds of parts mods for just about everything. One thing it doesn't have many of, is carrier hulls. After spending a day welding structural panels and then still ending up with a heavy crappy carrier hull, I had made up my mind what part I would work on first. BEHOLD! Bay doors open. Warnings and all that! This part has large textures! A big part requires large textures or it looks really terrible. I mean even worse than it already looks. I am pretty terrible at art in general. I take no responsibility for the over use of bump mapping and procedurally generated textures. KSP does not like how big it is. The launch clamps don't hold it very well. So use lots of them. The part is not much heavier than an orange tank, but KSP sometimes throws a fit at scene load and it falls off the clamps. If that happens then just reload to launch. That fixes it 100% of the time 90% of the time. Download link: http://files.enjin.com.s3.amazonaws.com/29856/modules/forum/attachments/POS_1394033194.zip Enjoy!

No I was trying to use a separate texture sheet on the inside of the mesh. There are no problems with normals. I set the inside of the mesh to have a separate material than the outside. I just had to separate the two parts. No problems all is well. Clearly there is a way to setup VAB toggles without a plugin. The stock parts do it. I was just asking if anyone knows how to do that. I would like to be able to open the bay doors in the VAB. You can just clip inside and place anything you want inside with no problems but I would still like the option.

Oh yea, that was definitely the problem. Separated out the mesh and it works just fine now. So you have a choice to use all of the same materials on a single mesh or to separate the mesh and use more than one material. This kinds sucks though. I generally generate procedural textures using a lot of material trickery and then bake them. I guess I can still so that I just need to be sure to leave most of that for last after the model has been processed in Unity.

You need to separate out the mesh that you are applying the other materials too. I just found out the hard way my self that KSP only allows one material per mesh. For instance, the outside of my Carrier hull and the doors are all fine in KSP but the inside was still part of the main mesh and I added a separate material so I could use a whole new sheet for the inside. That works fine everywhere else but KSP. I had to separate the inside mesh from the outside using separate by selection in Blender. Then I was able to use another sheet and not have invisible cargo bay. The Hotkey is "P" in edit mode.

I wish I could help you sir but my Texture skills are severely lacking. The one thing I can tell you is that UV unwrap is the most important thing. I tend to unwrap using a test pattern to be sure that I don't have any really bad stretching going on. Also unwrapping in Blender is easier to me than the commercial counterparts, but you will still find yourself manually unwrapping individual faces quite a lot. That is where learning to use the different transforms can really aid you. I usually cheat the artistic bits using procedural texturing in blender but KSP doesn't play well with more than one material per mesh. I find that you have to unwrap with all the same material and fit everything on to one texture sheet unless you separate the meshes in blender first.