iamaphazael

Ever since they announced that they're no longer going to announce when they release new planets, the first thing I do with each new release is to put a bunch of probes in elliptical orbits in the outer solar system, to try to find the new planets when they finally do add them. I haven't found anything yet, but it's only a matter of time

They never said they were going to be adding new parts to the game with this update. They said "...this update will feature yet more parts completely re-coded to the new system...", which just means that existing parts are going to be implemented differently. Granted, they may toss in a couple of new things (they seem to try to add something new each update), but don't get your hopes up for anything spectacular

This, sadly, is not possible. The planets are on fixed orbits ("on rails"), and will not respond to thrust, no matter how much you apply to them. However, Nova said recently that when asteroids are added, they will be movable

A lot of us are hoping that they will add tools that will allow us to mod planets, but currently there is no real way to do it, and there is no guarantee that there ever will be

Did you set the materials to use one of the KSP shaders? When you bring up the material in the inspector pane (the place where you apply the texture to the material), there is a pull-down menu titled "Shader" (I think), whose default value is "diffuse". If you open up the drop-down, there should be a subcategory called "KSP". Choose one of the shaders in there (KSP/diffuse being the simplest)

You mean like this? Yeah, we can do that.

"R" (simultaneous posting is going to derail this really quickly) (edit: see?)

I'll have to look into that. Had you been in IVA at all before it happened? The cap on the LES was one of those things that I had noticed only after the model was done, and didn't see the need to go back and add it. But if you feel like going in and putting one on there, I don't see any reason not to. I don't think that the extra coule-of-dozen faces that that will add is going to break us.

That's exactly right! Yeah, we'll have to think about that. I was just kind of assuming that the action of the ullage rockets would be simulated by modifying the ejectionForce property on the decoupler itself. If people wanted, we could add an explicit srb module to the decouplers. If I remember correctly, the real-world procedure was that the stage separated and then the ullage rockets fired sometime after that? That would be difficult to achieve without making two action groups for each staging event, or to have a separate part to act as the ullage booster, which I'd rather try to avoid. Getting that right will take some further thinking. Anyone have any thoughts?

Hmm. I haven't noticed that. Which craft file are you using? The one that's just the LM, or the one with the full stack? Or does it happen on both?

First of all, thank you so much for the support and encouragement. It's great to get so much positive feedback from everyone in the community, and also great to have talented people excited about the project and willing to help out. I hope that we can keep this momentum going and end up with a really fantastic mod for everyone to play with. Secondly, thank you also for the critique. As it turns out, these are both things that I have noticed, but please continue to point things like these out as you notice them, as I don't get as much time to playtest as I would like. Currently, I've got both the LM and SM tanks set up as advSASModules under the old system, because as far as I know there isn't and advancedSAS partmodule set up yet. So, even though I tried to force them to use the decoupler icon in the configs, it apparently is overridden by the base part type. Once there is an advanced sas partmodule, I'll start using that, and also switch it over so it's part of the command pods themselves, which is where they should be anyay (It can't be that way right now because the pods have to be assigned the CommandPod part type). You're definitely right about the LM pod being over-torqued. I noticed that it was really touchy to maneuver when I did my test flight, but forgot to turn it down for the release. I'll dial that down a bit before the final version. That little floating orb thing is the back wall of the LM interior that for some reason is getting rendered in the flight scene. I had broken that face away from the rest of the model so that I could hide it in blender in order to be able to work on the rest of the mesh without zooming all the way in, and I think that caused it to no longer have the proper layer applied to it in Unity. It should be an easy fix. Again, thanks for the input, and don't hesitate to mention anything else you may notice. Happy landings!

One thing at a time

As razorcane said, we're already working with models that were at least originally based on fairly accurate meshes (the nasa public domain models), but over the course of being de-polyed several times got a little simplified, so he's trying to get them a little more accurate again. That docking port looks great! Much nicer on the detail underneath the cap. Don't worry about the chute itself. That needs to be set up as an animation, so I can just bring your meshes back into blender and then re-do the animation. Just make sure that you keep the cap and the inner parts as separate objects/meshes. By the way, just wanted to say again that it's great to have you working on the project. If you can do textures that look as good as these models (and judging by that SM, you can), these parts are going to look fantastic when they're all done! Most of the configs are already in place, but they will probably need a little tweaking at some point. If you want to mess around with the ones that are there and send me changes you make, I'll certainly consider using them

Ah, I see. The first thing you'll need to do is get the Unity editor. There's a free version which has all the features you need to make parts for KSP. Then you will be able to open the projects by pointing Unity at the folders in the zip I sent you. There are some tutorials around the forums on how to take a part from start to finish, but I've already set a lot of that stuff up in those folders, so I'll try to write up a set of instructions for you on how to modify the stuff that's already there. But for now if you want to get Unity and try following one of those tutorials on the model you made to get a feel for what the workflow is, you'll probably figure it out in no time

That service module looks fantastic Razorcane! And, in fact, it is possible to do specular and normal mapping (well, bump mapping, but it's the same concept, right?). There are a whole range of shaders that come with the ksp parttools, so all you have to do is assign the appropriate shader in Unity to whichever material you're working with. For the specular shaders (also for the ones that apply transparency), it uses the alpha channel of the texture file as the map, and for the bumped shaders, there's a second slot in the material window that you drop the bump map into. If you want I can send you some more specific instructions than that, or you can probably just play with it on your own and figure it out. As for the fairings, I haven't looked at the Soyuz yet, but I suspect that he's using the "engine shroud" module. I hadn't even really thought of that, because I'm used to it just activating when you decouple, but I suppose it can be set up to trigger on an action group. I guess that could work. I'll look into that next time I have some time and see if that will work. It might be just what we need here, since it has the advantages of acting like a single object so it won't wobble, but will allow the panels to actually jettison so we can watch them float away. I'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion, Jack.

It may just be that the cupola doesn't have as much torque as the regular pods. It may be intentional edit: In fact, the cupola's parameters are: rotPower = 30 linPower = 10 Kp = 1.0 Kd = 1.0 And the 3 man pod's are: rotPower = 20 linPower = 20 Kp = 1.0 Kd = 1.0 I'm not entirely sure what rotPower and linPower control, but I'd suspect that if you edited the cupola's linPower to 20, you'd find that it behaves the same as the other pods

No problem. I'm glad to have as much information as I can. It might not all get implemented completely accurately, but it's nice to have someone looking at details like these 1) That is actually how these parts work. There is a part that attaches above the command pod that acts as the docking port and the parachutes. When the chutes deploy, the structure underneath gets revealed. The model that's there now is farily simple. I've never seen something that shows as much detail as that image you linked does. I was working from photos of capsules in museums. Looking at your image, it looks like the cap actually covers the whole capsule rather than just the top part. It might not be practical to do that with these parts, although I suppose it could be done. Hmm. 2) Yeah some of those unwraps are pretty terrible. Many of them are from early in the process and I didn't have a very good idea of how to do it, so I just let blender do it automatically and lived with that. I see from your pm that you work in maya/3dstudio, so I'll converyt my models to .3ds format and send those out to you soon (probably tomorrow) 3) I'll probably keep it separate, just so that people can mix and match parts with other packs if they want to 4) Thanks, I'm glad you like it. I threw that together this morning, so it is still a work in progress 5) It's intended to be a scaled down version. If we used the real-world values, it would be way overpowered and capable of getting anywhere in the solar system. I'm more interested in making it accurately reflect the flight profile than the actual masses and thrust values. If you have any ideas on how to tweak the values to do that, though, that'd be great. Also, if KSP ever has a full-scale Earth and moon in it, I definitely want to do a full scale version of this pack to go with it, so if you want to develop a set of configs that are more real-world accurate, that would be cool too

Yes, and while the death star petition was on there getting hundreds of thousands of votes, serious petitions that were there to do things like increase funding for NASA or mandate a mars mission failed to get enough votes to be considered. I found that incredibly sad

Oh. I built the crafts in 20.1, so if you haven't updated yet, that's probably why. If you just open up the file and change the line "version = 0.20.1" to "version = 0.20.0", they should work just fine (also note that you need to move them to the /KSP/Ships/ folder, or your /KSP/saves/whatever/Ships/ folder for the game to be able to find them.)

I just uploaded the Beta release to SpacePort. I flew the complete mission to test everything out. Here are some highlights: Check out the new version. Textures still aren't there yet, but interiors are started, and things are starting to shape up. Hope you all like it!

Nobody knows, huh? Well, I've experimented with ships a bit, and it doesn't appear that putting a /Ships/ folder in a /GameData/Modpack/ folder does anything. That's too bad. It would have been nice if we could have packaged everything in a self-contained directory, instead of having to make a release with a /Ships/ folder and then a /GameData/Packname/ folder and tell the user to install it in their KSP directory (which is going to cause nightmares for mac users, I think, because of the stupid way OSX defaults to replacing folders instead of merging them). I haven't messed around with plugins yet, so that question is still open

Oh, now that's an interesting idea. I could set up an animation where they detach and float away and then eventually disappear. It would look weird if you detached them in atmosphere, or changed the attitude of the ship while the animaton was still playing, but it might be an interesting approach

Actually, symmetry can be made to work just fine. You just need to set the symmetry parameter on the part that the fairings attach to. That's the way the fairings in the current version of these parts works. The problem is that they're wobbly, so they look crappy at launch time.

Yep, that's pretty much what I've got in mind, except that the panels won't detach at the end; they'll just stay connected to the adapter. In other news, I've been working on the lander legs, and trying to figure out what makes them so wobbly, especially when coming back from the tracking station. I've discovered that the stock legs have the same problem on returning focus, although with the stock parts you sometimes need to give them a little push to make them wonk out. So, I'm not going to worry about it too much more, and assume that it's a problem with the game that will eventually get fixed. So, once I make the new fairing adapter (tomorrow, or maybe the next day), I'll be pretty much ready to do a beta release, that way everyone can go play with it and help me find things that need more work. Keep your eyes peeled!

To expand on what T3E said, if you want to create a new stage for your chute, hover over an existing stage and click the "+" button that appears. That will create a new stage directly below the existing one, then you can drag your chute into it and then drag the stage itself wherever you want it. The "-" button is for removing stages, but only works if the stage is completely empty.