Snjo

Engines that run on pure Kethane aren't very efficient though. Kethane weighs more than the fuel produced from it last I checked. And I already don't require oxygen, just atmosphere for the intakes. a folding electric propeller is a good thing though. Gotta play with Kerbtown now for sure. Does the Launchpad allow you to launch directly from the hangar to the new location, or does it require you to load the craft while looking at the launchpad still? Cause if so, you would need to fly the first launcher out to the alternate runway first. I really do want more air strips for sure!

Yeah, I haven't made the blur mesh for those parts yet.

Oh cool! I had heard rumors of that thing, but never found it.

Whatever I do is usually driven by wanting to take on new challenges, which is why I haven't done many new models. It's basically a solved problem. Coding is a constant barrage of new challenges, and it seems like a quick thing to do. (it actually always takes a lot more time than creating a part, so I'm just fooling myself). It's also about making stuff I feel like I'm missing. I missed propellers and wings so I made them. Now that I have them, the urge to create more is less. That doesn't mean I won't make more of the kinds of parts that I've already done, it just means it tends to get neglected. Right now all the modders are probably in damage control mode, I know I've been working with InfiniteDice for the last few days fixing float code and Move to Water code. (which I think I just nailed) If you're talking about stuff outside Firespitter, I would like some more stuff in the world. I've been thinking about houses and stuff for a long time, and I've made some basic assets, but never threw it all together. I'd like there to be either player placed or pre-placed cities, refuel stations, NPCs, fetch quests and all of that. Basically, a game is never good enough until you can exit your apartment, enter an elevator, go into the street, get in your car. Drive over to a farm outside the city, get in your crop duster and spray the corn fields. Pick up a crate of goods, put it onto a truck, and deliver it to a mountain hermit. After that you hang glide off the mountain, Far Cry style. Don't hold your breath

In the Hangar: Go into action editor mode and click the VTOL engine. A menu will pop up to set the preferences for the engine. In flight: Right click the engine and click Next VTOL steering mode or something like that. The modes are Off, Single Pair, Double Pair and Custom. Custom will give you the pop up menu, the others are auto configured based on the engines' positions.

Another Pre-release to fix floats not working Download New code on the seaplane floats removes the stock floating ability entirely, relying solely on the module FSbuoyancy. I've only spent a few hours on it, and it needs some more polish, but it should see you not sink at least. I still need to tweak the drag values so the floats have some more water resistance probably. For the moment they are probably indestructible in water, and might not set your vessels Splashed status correctly for the flight tracker. v5.4 pre-release 2 -Texture switcher module. Switch textures in the hangar for: --Bomber nose art -new landing gear functionality: motor, roll retracted, friction overrides, etc. -VTOL steering (pitch and yaw through engine rotation, roll through thrust variation) -Support for arrays of values in cfg files through FSnodeLoader -New float code to combat the new KSP versions inability to float things.

I'm guessing you omitted some curly braces, cause defining the name twice in the same MODULE section won't do any good. If you have some reworked cfg files I'd love to include those in the official version once you know they work well. The thrust position issue was because I had two instances of a thrustTransform object in the unity file, on out on the edge of the propeller, so it used an average position between them. I guess I duplicated it at some point to check some coordinates and didn't remove it afterwards. If you change the axis in the cfg it might help with the rotation. E.g from node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 0.0 to node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, or something like that. Otherwise, you might have to rotate the thing in Unity. Remember that thing should point upwards in Unity as if they were on a rocket. For positioning thing correctly on the global axis I have my rule of thumb for the coloured axis as they relate to the craft directions. Blue Water, Green Hills, Right is Red. (Get your belly towards the blue direction, your nose towards the green, and the right side towards red)

As far as I can tell so far, the only thing that's broken is the water launch module, and that's because they changed the way craft height is set on launch to look for solid ground. As far as FAR bugs go, I haven't tested that in a long while, and my mod is already know to be only semi-compatible. Thanks for the error reporting though. ( assume those points you listed were all with FAR, and not a problem with choppers in stock+FS) Gotta check the floats... If they are broken in stock, I gotta go ahead and make separate float code, which InfiniteDice can tell you is not an easy thing at all. edit: they float just fine in my Seahorse. Is the craft you tried very heavy or something?

I tried, it didn't fly well.

The surface attach points on the oblong fuselages are on the top or bottom, not on the flat side. I doubt anyone uses them surface attached much. Maybe I should move the attach point to the side instead... Does anyone else use them surface attached in a way the requires the attach pint to be on the top/bottom?for the small connectors, I guess smaller wing extender kind of bit could do. For now, you could take the huge wing extender and scale it down with rescalefactor, and edit/remove the lift. There isn't really a good way to make the rear connected wing between the tails though.

Pre-release v5.4 Download -new landing gear functionality: motor, roll retracted, friction overrides, etc. -VTOL steering (pitch and yaw through engine rotation, roll through thrust variation) Different control modes: "Single pair" uses rotation for pitch for regular VTOL setups when using additional tail surfaces for stabilization. "Double pair" uses thrust variation for pitch for Quadrocopter setups. "Custom" pops up a menu to set any control mode on or off, plus setting the forwards/aft assumptions for thrust pitch. "Off" is the default. Just regular VTOL action, no steering. -Texture switcher module. Switch textures in the hangar for: Bomber nose art (More coming) -Support for arrays of values in cfg files through FSnodeLoader -Increased wing lift of the fighter wings a little bit to compensate for landing gear drag. (The old value is listed in the cfg) Bugs I think I got all the bugs, but I did see one odd thing where I loaded up a quad craft, clicked on the left engine in a pair, and both were deleted. Picking up the opposite engine did not cause both to be deleted. I have no idea how to nail it down though... edit: haha, silly me, adding the part to its own symmetry list If there are any other bugs, it's likely to be GUI related, cause there have been a lot of odd edge cases with the menus and updating values and symmetry pairs.

No, just change the rescaleFactor, and possibly the thrust output and fuel use. I know I've promised this long ago, so I 'm sorry I haven't done the rest of the parts yet. New f-86 textures for the texture switcher and some wings/tail is still on the old todo-list. Vacation starts in four days, so we'll see what happens then. For now, I'm just messing around with the wheels and the VTOL, adding advanced steering to them:

I've created new functionality for the landing gears, scrapping the stock landing gear code, and creating similar stuff, but with a lot more functionality. Most importantly, the wheels now have motors on them, just like rover wheels, so it's much easier to taxi on the runway/carrier (especially since the wheels already have steering). The stock code needs everything to be just exactly to its expectations, or it will break, disabling the wheel. This new code can skip stuff like the wheel mesh rotation, suspension and animation, and even the collider itself without freaking out, and most importantly, it supports any number of wheels in a single part, so those four wheeled jet liner gears, or even a single part car axle should be good to go. A problem with the stock rover wheels is that they lack enough friction to get up steep hills and ramps, so here you can also adjust any property of the wheel colliders friction and spring from the cfg file (Not that this module supports the rover wheel setups though, that's a whole different kind of crazy) It only took half a year, but the tail wheel can finally roll when retracted again, since disabling the collider on gear retraction is an option, as well as different drag when deployed/stowed. The drag stuff is actually interesting. It's much harder to take off with lots of drag on the bottom of the plane, so I set it as low as any other part (which all weirdly have about 0.2 drag, even the Rocomax tanks and such), and it takes off OK, but with three deployed landing gears, it slows the plane down from 124m/s to 104m/s. It actually helps a bit as an air brake, even though it's no more draggy than any other part when deployed. (Stock gear code applies 0 drag in all situations) The end result is that you will want to stow your landing gear when you are flying to go faster, which is a good thing.

These naval guns are the best!

As long as you don't use the prefix FS, that's mine Originally I didn't have prefixes for the plugin classes, but I figured there was a good possibility two people could end up creating modules called solarPanel for instance. That would create a conflict. In v5 I was finally able to get rid of the last modules without the FS prefix. So when I've co-created a plugin class with someone else, and both parties wanted to include a variant in their mod, I'd name mine FSawesomeThing, and the other guy would name his IDawesomeThing, and then we'd both be able to tweak bits of it without creating problems for people using both mods.

Not at the moment, but I know InfiniteDice (Boat Parts Man) has some in the works. I've tried them, and they promise to be quite deadly.

CBP just asked me the same thing, and I've been thinking it over. The problem is in the handling of animation layers and finding animations in the stock module. The only way I see it working together is by creating some extra code, so the animations would be handled by my module, and the collection aspect would be handled by the solar panel collector code. However the collector would also need to be fed an animation with no content, and have their Events hidden by code. The extra code would have to handle the collector codes extend/retract, AND making sure those events don't fire at the same time ever, because of the animation layer issue. The ideal solution would be a whole new collector code, but that requires handling the solar tracking and the actual energy production and delivery to the vessel, which I don't know how works. If you don't make new code , and use one set of blank animations for the collectors, and one set for FSanimateGeneric, you can get it working, but the collection aspect would be independent of the deployed state. Also you would need access to his model/unity project to put additional models in the part. edit: If you are comfortable coding, you can retool my code as long as you change the class name to avoid plugin conflicts.

That's an interesting design. If I get around to making wing/surface mounted jets, I should try to make them in such a way as to look OK mounted on the fuselage like that. Still would be tough to integrate without a tall nose too... It's pretty quiet on the modding front right now, cause I've got lots of work while my colleague is on holiday, but hopefully it will quiet down, and some interesting new challenge will pop up, forcing me back in gear. I made voxels in unity yesterday, but that doesn't really help my mod any I gotta get some new alternate textures going for the texture switcher. Hope I didn't mess up the UV unwrap too badly on the old parts.

just beware that it's easy to get an error that will break the hangar UI if you do a config node save on a part if it's the very first part loaded (i.e. command module) when loading/starting a craft. Loading nodes is no problem though. I have some code you can look at if you want.

Texture switching is in! What does this mean? Well, not only can you switch stuff like the nose art easily, but you can have variants of the fuselage or wings parts for instance without filling up the parts view. So you don't have to be limited to the boring old gray texture for the oblong parts, but using the same actual parts, you can make BOTH a gray mustang, and a a flashy f-86, just by switching the texture in the SPH. And if they use a material set up for it, one can be shiny (specular), and the other matte. The cfg file just needs the textures used listed like so MODULE { name = FStextureSwitch moduleID = 0 targetObjectName = noseartplate textures { name = Firespitter/Parts/Command/FS_bomberCockpit/noseArt/ozymandius_model003 name = Firespitter/Parts/Command/FS_bomberCockpit/noseArt/early_bird_model003 name = Firespitter/Parts/Command/FS_bomberCockpit/noseArt/swift_demise_model003 } } This also means they can steal textures from other parts.

Great investigative work! If you have made edits to the FAR values that I can pop into my cfg files, send them my way, and I can update the ones in my pack, and add comments to the cfg files for stuff to disable. Maybe I can also do a check to auto disable the wingletRangeAdjustment if FAR is present. Added rescaleFactor to the info part.

Oh wow! you're right! That explains the rebalancing I had to do on one of my planes. Turns out I had two thustTransforms on the model, on eplaced correctly, and one at the edge of the blades. The result was a mix of those two positions. Fixed it now, will upload a new version!. edit: new version is on spaceport.

Looking mean as hell

The older model doesn't have the blur disc in it. I could of course include it and make it an alternate part... I don't have time to test stuff for both stock and FAR (and still kep things relatively bug free), so the only reason the FAR cfg values are in there is because someone (Fennec?) created those values for me. I never heard about all these winglet problems before last week, so I thought all was good. Since I'm not doing any wing code, but just using the stock winglet stuff, there's nothing I can do about these bugs, it's up to Ferram to make stuff more compatible with stock stuff. Mod cross compatibility is a tough issue, especially when it spawns bug reports that don't actually explain that people ARE using two different mods at the same time. I had one user report that lcok/unlock bug before, but I figured he was doing something very odd, cause he never mentioned he actually used FAR. Now I can see that the problem is that the FSwingletRangeAdjustment adjusts the max range when you load the craft, if it's not already set. So that explains the conflict. The only way around that is to either remove that module if you are using FAR, or include some extra variable to allow you to keep the module, but skip the setup stage. I imagine FAR has range adjustment though. The way the control surfaces move is dependent on where the center of the wing is in relation to the Center Of Mass. If things are inverted, try moving the wings a bit. This way of figuring the control direction is also the reason for control surfaces freaking out when the CoM changes during flight, and the control surfaces no longer know reliably which side they are on. I wish they could be locked down, but I reckon FAR has already solved that problem, so if I create my own wing code, it might break stuff even more... Go ahead, texture away! I used to pack in UV maps guides with the older parts, but I forgot, and no one has been complaining. If you need one. let me know.

Thanks,Kate, lots of great feedback as always. I was wondering why there were two intakes, but never looked into it. I tried making an air intake in the nose section, but it looked real ugly every time. Also it didn't exactly help relieve the cartoony look to have a smiling mouth at the front. I might revisit it though, and fix that. Ideally the nose section would be a working engine powering the blades, but that would kill so many other designs that I'm not gonna do that. The old cone shaped large propeller model and texture is still available in the legacy mod files for 0.19, or, since I forgot, it's actually still the model used for the electric engine. So you could make a custom part by copying those over, since the scale and attach point is still the same in both models. I can make a longer float for sure, putting it on the list. Oh, and what's the best engine configuration? I feel like Kerbals would use a single cylinder engine