hoojiwana

As has been stated in the thread many times already the Kerbal isn't controlling anything, the player is. Without any player input on throttle, directional controls or staging the Kerbal doesn't do anything at all. If there was a autopilot-esque system whereby the player could order the Kerbal to perform a planned manuever or finish up a docking, then yes, having the Kerbal do better or worse at that would be the Kerbals skill. Though even that is assuming the Kerbals skill effects things like how accurate they are with timing and heading, rather than them getting Premium Jebediah Brand vacuum-optimised RCS nozzles that automatically detach and and reattach as Jeb gets in and out of the vessel.

You're still misunderstanding why people are having an issue with this. Let's say you drive your car to work, every day, and to simplify let's say every single time you drive, you drive exactly the same way. Now one day, you level up! Congratulations your engine now outputs 10 more horsepower and gets 5 more miles to the gallon, even though the way you drive hasn't changed at all.

No one is saying that. They are saying that parts themselves acting better because you have a particular Kerbal on board is violating common sense, which is exactly how Mu described it.

It was described as influencing vessel performance directly through thrust, heat, and fuel efficiency (ISP). Doesn't say it boosts how well the Kerbal can fly, it's very clear about it changing the parts themselves.

From an interview from February 2013; That's not the only place this was mentioned, but it is one example I can give concrete evidence of.

The devs have mentioned wanting Kerbals to be able to fly their rockets without player input for a long time now, and that is almost certainly the end-goal of the KExp system. I don't get why they feel the need to tack on silly vessel-altering mechanics on top of that though, especially after the generally negative comments about the possibility of there being Strategies that did the same thing.

The thing is with that, the player is the pilot. The player is the one who may or may not choose the optimal ascent profile, or plans and executes his orbital transfers properly, or whatever. As the players skill and knowledge increases they fly more efficiently, the game doesn't need Jeb wearing Boots of +10 ISP to give that.

I'd like to know as well, I've just been hit by this bug. Jumped from 100ish a day to 9200, with 1000 of those in just the last hour. There's no additional followers or downloads from my alternative hosting today than normal and it's a bit annoying to see the graph basically be unusable since the real data is barely even visible now. Not to mention the "Most Popular" ranking can't be accurate if mods are having huge jumps in phantom downloads.

Thanks! Engines are always great fun to make, which is probably where there are so many of them in part packs! I didn't make any part name changes for this update, just the one folder name change and the particle texture changes, so your craft should be safe. I deliberately made the changelog as verbose as possible this time around which is why it seems so long compared to say, the v10 update. As Shania_L said though, if you're unsure you should backup your persistence files just in case.

Stockalike 12 is out! The big change is a reduction of Monopropellant engine ISP, as well as the addition of new parts. You will need to delete older versions before installing due to folder and file deletions or renames. Check the OP for a full changelog and download links, and let me know what you think.

Neat idea! I wouldn't use the TGA texture for my parts, sure it's only one but it still takes up more memory than it should and can have problems loading. The latest version of the texture is MBM since 0.25 came out, you're probably better off using that.

You can use MODEL{} to do it. MODEL { model = whatever/wherever/whoever/part rotation = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0 } It's X,Y,Z for the rotation of the parts. Y in Unity is up/down. The rotation in there is in degrees, so you'd need to set one to 180.0. You will also need to adjust node_attach to compensate for the rotated model. Typically just changing positive numbers to negative numbers is good enough. node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, -0.17, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 Becomes; node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, 0.17, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0

I'm not sure if you guys check the screenshots thread, so I'll crosspost it here; Took me a little while to figure out how to get the darn things to face the right way when tracking the sun, but I got there in the end. In other news, I've been going through the particle effects and updating the older ones and adding new ones. The current stock SRB effect looks a little insane on the two Boostertrons! I've tweaked the monopropellant particles for the small and medium engines, removing one texture (smoke particle 2.mbm). and bumping up the emission rates. Also fiddled with the Cutter FX (linearmain.mbm), renamed it and stuck it on the Spinnaker as well. It fits quite nicely and totally puts the 48-7S to shame; As you can see in the screenshot above the large frame is nice and chunky, and the small one is just a hairs width thinner than the attachment part on the smallest rover wheels as well. Both look better than just using awkward square flat panels for making rovers. The lengthwise attachment is great for building stuff, but it does make easy placement of balanced skycranes a tad harder. There's a bug with attachment nodes and MODEL{} (since the two frames share a texture) that prevents me from putting nodes in the middle that face up and down (in the SPH). Thanks! They play pretty great too, the shape makes rovers look much nicer. You got it exactly right, Power Generation and Electric Engines got merged down into Stockalike. I cut the 1.25m electric engines since they didn't add much in terms of gameplay, and the SRGs got cut because they were kinda boring. If you still want to use them the OP still has download links for the last WIP version of each pack, and the SRGs should be absolutely fine to use, except for their cost.

Finally figured out how to implement solar panels that faced the correct way!

The large construction frame, testing it out around KSC on a rover. The attachment nodes for this and the smaller one are different to the structural panels, they're at the "front" and "back" along the shorter lengths of the rectangle, rather than being on the top and bottom. The two parts also appear lengthwise in the editors, which is especially helpful in the SPH. The alternative models pack is still available under the Previous Versions header in the OP. Check the spoiler link for downloads.

A little rover based on a medium sized rover frame in the next Stockalike update, 1.25m x 2m in size. There will also be a 2.5m x 4m version for even bigger vehicles. These are the reason I asked about science storage containers, since sticking a pod on these looks a bit ugly. Those panels will be in the next Stockalike update that'll be coming fairly soon if all goes to plan, but the probe cores will be in a separate pack once I've modelled a few more parts to flesh it out a little. That's the entire point behind the smaller parts, not everything needs to be built huge. You can squeeze quite a capable little vessel inside the cargobays without having to resort to the strangely balanced stock parts.

What are peoples thoughts on science storage parts? I know there's a few hanging about in other mods, but with some planned parts in the next update I might add one myself. The command seat is a bit useless in career without that storage capability that full command pods provide, but I'm concerned about people just adding the storage option to pods to be able to double up on science reports. Is this a real potential issue or am I overthinking it because you could just do this with two pods if you really wanted to anyway? Since those other parts aren't in a previewable state yet, here's a quick mockup of what the new panels would look like in symmetry: Each of those squares in the grid is a meter. The small stock ones do have hinges, but they do tend to end up folding up inside each other. The MP engines are generally lower TWR than their LFO counterparts, which admittedly doesn't make that much sense. The seemingly very high ISP on them shouldn't be compared directly to LFO engine ISP since well, they don't use LFO! Broadly speaking you should end up with roughly the same dV in a vacuum with using a comparable sized engine and tank combination, but the MP combination will almost always be lower mass. In atmosphere the LFO will always win out. The exception to these "rules" is the aerospike since that has no gimbal, lower vacuum ISP and higher atmospheric ISP. I'll be going over all of these stats and may end up changing them completely in the next update, mainly thinking about lowering the mass of the engines and decreasing the ISP to try and get the overall vehicle capability to be roughly the same. Right now you can get away with a smaller launch vehicle for MP vessels due to the overall lower mass. TL;DR: Lower TWR, roughly the same dV capability in vacuum, worse in atmosphere, lower mass, and I might change all that.

I'm looking at the original mod version, that has normals for most of the parts.

The SPP parts have normal maps as well as painted edges, skimping on creating texture depth because you have a normal map isn't going to end up looking as good.

You're not going to get the same quality level with something like that automated. It looks like Porkjets textures are intended to refine the shape of each panel in the texture by setting up directional highlights, rather than being used as scuff marks or similar like in your texture. There is also a tiny gap between the highlight and the dark panel-gap lines, which helps make the edge look rounded. I also suspect he paints at a higher resolution than the final product. You can see longer scratches and worn paint that aren't related to the panel edges elsewhere.

One of the panels on that part up there is larger than the 2x3 stock panels, each of the BoxSat panels are smaller. I might fiddle with the texture some more to make it look more interesting, the Venus Express panels it's vaguely kind-of based on have a gold strip down the center, that might help break up that big repeated texture space somewhat and draw the eye away from the big flat metal part on the inside. That said, it's not exactly a hero part like the engines usually are so it doesn't need to look super detailed. Look up mbm2png on Google, it used to be on Spaceport but since that went down the other hosting options for it are somewhat dubious. Beware that PNGs can lack mipmapping so that can have a negative effect on the appearance of any textures you edit. And don't worry about keeping me from something, brain needs a rest from figuring out all this new stuff I've had to learn to make the solar panels. Animation was totally alien to me before this part, so that's why it's taken so long to get made! As well as that I went through about five different designs before settling on this one because of the relative ease of the shape.

Glad I could help. The MODEL{} system is great for saving memory for the overall pack, but not so great for allowing people to customise things to only have what they want. I probably should've written a more comprehensive changelog so this could've been avoided entirely. Ah well, have a solar panel preview to make up for it;

Make sure you're following the installation instructions properly in the readme, a simple drag and drop overwrite of the older versions is not correct. The texture for the tiny monopropellant tank was replaced in 11.3, along with it's UV mapping, meaning the old TGA isn't compatible with the new model. That part should now be sharing the same texture sheet that the three longer stack monopropellant tanks use (in mp_sml_long), and the model000.png inside the mp_t_radial folder is a 1x1 dummy texture that needs to be there otherwise the game messes up the texture sharing. If you've started fiddling with any of these files (or the configs) then it's liable to break things, the texture compiler is a fickle beast that likes things set up a very specific way.

You don't need to animate the gimbal at all, as long as you put your nozzle model as a child of the thrustTransform it'll rotate when the thrust rotates. As for the fairings, make sure to change their object tag to Icon_Hidden so they show up only when something is connected to them. As a note for the future, all this information is already handily available in the Mod Development Links Compilation thread.

Have a quick read-through of this thread. It's about PNGs but all the issues with TGA are discussed as well.