PolecatEZ

I see there's some demand for it. I'm currently procrastinating on a beta release for the D12 pack by toying with a good design for over-sized ship parts. Maybe just a 5m round is all that's necessary. Also, when you change the scale, if you multiply in 3d you need to take each dimension into account - 1.25x bigger in 3D means ~2x bigger fuel capacity (and raw mass tonnage). The only thing to be careful with is that the base part never exceeds ~10 tons dry weight, I think KSP still has an issue with that. For the thruster blocks, you can scale them up with a simple resize factor and increase the thrust power and mono usage accordingly if you want to use fewer parts.

For this pack I took about 15 different aircraft and tried to make it so you had enough varieties of everything to make each fairly close, and keep enough modularity so you could mix and match without too much trouble. Wings are done completely, about half the cockpits are in (re-worked them last night so the staggered tandems shared internals), today are intakes (all 3 stock intakes are redone - the air scoop became an A-7 style long belly intake, the hypersonic now has multiple glowing internal and multiple cowling colors to pick, and the basic round black has multiple cowlings and a blade that spins with air speed), B-52 engines are (cheaply) done, drop tanks now have multiple models and optional big explodiness if Romfarer is installed. All that's left is the big job of the 45 degree landing gear, texture asset cleanup, and optional Skillful/ScanSat/MechJeb/Lazor integration if ID and/or Romfarer ever get back to me. The science pods, chopper blade re-works, B-52/HL/3.75m cockpits and bomb bays will need to wait until next version.

Its part of the pack coming out. One catalog item, about 7 varieties to toggle between. Same for the winglets on the tail, and most of the wings.

Those are just concepts I'm toying with, there will be another row of side windows forwards of the door and a cargo bay big enough for a 1.25m object comfortably. 3.75 is BIG. The internals alone will be a few hours work. Also not shown is a 2.5m B-52 style cockpit, and probably an HL bomb bay to go with - I did get the engines done for it though (B-52/B-58 style). Anyways, halfway through the cockpit exports. I'm having issues color matching the grays with the original B9 parts, I'm not sure what alpha shading he used in Unity. Guess the B9 fuel tanks won't match the wings and cockpits exactly, but its close.

I got to about 98% finished (just needed to do an optimization pass at the texture file system) and realized this is just not a very exciting pack. I'll roll everything back into D12 Aerotech, including now cockpits (lots to pick from and delete what you don't need), a few engines and intakes, rotors will get a second pass and included, the entire Squad/Parts/Aero folder is going to be replaced (already done). For wings we have Squad replacements (with 6 to 9 variations each), 2 different swing wings, folding wing set (FAR friendly). Most of these are at a near finished state. The HL and Mk1 SBS are still in concept phase, the rest are done with internals done (just no props). I may make a few more variations for mesh switching. Landing gear will be my challenge tomorrow. After this release I'm done with airplanes for a while. You'll get a choice between weapons pack (Skillful compatible Battletech universe stuff - PPC, AC20, SRM6, etc) or B9-style modern weapons, or naval ships, or space odds and ends. Also working on spaceship parts and trying to come up with a good size configuration...want something organic looking but still look like it belongs in the B9 universe, Mon Calamari shipyards style - still toying.

They are sexy little beasts. I figured out the problem with the design, should anyone attempt to make those wings in real life though. Basically, there's nothing bracing them extending under the wing, the basic geometry of the situation prevents it. Using FS code and realistic measurements, they do have an incredible amount of lift when they're swingin'. In the pic, that's about 5 tons of aircraft and 12 tons of ordnance. She got off the runway when I swept em out and not before.

Looking at the diagrams, those may turn out better than the inverted swing wing set I have right now. I can't find the original concept where I grabbed it (there are some very prolific artists on Deviant Art), but the results are not as clean as I had hoped when translated to 3d. They look a lot better as end caps for other wing builds, but naked they could use more work or scrapped altogether. The silhouette shadow looks like a plucked chicken when flying. I'll also probably use a standard wing color as the base instead of the HW21. I guess I could have some fun tonight and replace the placeholder - and push release to Wednesday. I have a very good X-02 diagram to work from, results should be pretty clean.

Swing wings are now pure sexy. This pack is so close to done I can smell it. I'll open it up to a vote in a few, as I have about 4 other packs in the works and need to prioritize. Got another swing wing (inverted style), forward swept advanced wing, and the intakes to Unity-ify, stock code on the ailerons, then a graphics optimization pass...then full beta release.

I don't think stock KSP can handle multiple animations on a separate trigger, but you can do it with separate instances of FSAnimate.

If he's good at internals, we can work together. I have the outer shell almost done - just need the cargo bay doors underneath. I may also do a breakaway/ramp combo for going into the bay behind it. Fits both HL and standard 3.75m hulls using meshSwitching: What I'm bad at is making nice prop layouts for cockpits, and it looks like that's one of his first steps.

Folding wings turned out better than expected...I had to take a few minutes out just to play. I used animations, so they're still FAR compatible. They're a little big, but that's to compensate for the fact that you can't really build other wings with them. I got about 25 tons into the air using a fair accounting for their size, but it took a lot of takeoff speed for that. I also did a canard articulation on the fold, so they have some elevator capability. Its about 3-5 degrees though, so it doesn't look bad at all. Swept wings, canards, and winglets are also done. There's 6 or 7 varieties of each in a single entry. I also used stock lift/ctrlSrf code to keep them FAR friendly. All that's left are the intakes and a revisit of the swing wings. I may not do a heavy pass at those, as I'm getting a little tired of wings and the cockpits are calling my name. The only thing in the pack that won't be FAR compatible will be the swing wing setups. FAR users can just delete them, or use them locked in the "extended" position.

Canopies are easy: - Make a sphere, 5m radius, about 16 sides should do it. - Chop off the bottom. - Cut out a hole in the top. - Duplicate the whole thing. - On the duplicate, flip normals, scale it down barely a hair. - Link the vertices along the bottom lip. - Select every 2nd vertex along the bottom lip, pull it down about half a meter. - Make cylinder, 6 sides, .02m radius, from 5m to 8m long. Color it black from your texture. Duplicate it for every vertex you pulled down. - Connect them to the chute, bringing them to a point somewhere below the chute. - Color the parachute inside and out. You can make stripes or checker patterns as you like easily from the way the faces are cut. - Profit. If you know what you're doing, this whole project takes about 15 minutes tops, especially if you know how to mirror.

You do it this way so it all basically gets nicely packaged in the same Unity scene/project. Theoretically, you could do it as 3 separate projects with no issues, but if its all in the same scene, changing up something for one export lets you easily orient for the other and copy/paste things between the internal and external model. Having the props exporter there helps you better orient to the internal instead of guessing. If there's a particular internal bulkhead or something that also photo-bombs your camera view and its on its own mesh, then that would be used also. Sometimes you want a dark cockpit but you want the faces lit up in the portrait, so lights can be done this way as well. Camera transforms are simple empty objects so far as I could tell. The collider to click on to orient to the camera can be its own simple box collider. In your mesh editor (like Blender), when you make the internals by duping and flipping normals, you also separate all the windows into their own mesh (select the faces of just the windows, hit P). Depending on the effect you want, you can delete this mesh entirely or use a translucent alpha shader with its own special texture.

You need to make sure Blender is using the same texture instance throughout the mesh. Blender likes to make a million copies of a texture for whatever reason, and assigns them numbers. You'll see it when you scroll down the UV list of textures. You need to make sure every piece of the mesh is using the same "number" of the texture. If it does that, you'll see multiple materials are needed for your mesh in Unity, and removing it will still let the object look ok in Unity, but when you get it in KSP the missing texture assignments make bits of your mesh disappear. You need to go back to Blender and select the faces of the problem areas, checking to see if the UV texture assignment changes, then scroll to the proper texture instance (whatever the rest of the mesh is using). Then go back to Object mode and save. This should fix it.

To notbreak existing saves: - PART names need to remain the same (not the catalog name, you can change that all you want). - Nodes need to remain in roughly the same place and keep the same name. Small location adjustments are ok. - Any parts that allow surface attach should remain roughly the same shape/size. Again, micro adjustments are ok. - Some changes you make to the .cfg will not be adjusted for vessels in flight, I think node sizes and fuel amounts fall into this category (maybe). Other than those points, go nuts.

Also, if you want to save space without making a bajillion new textures for just a color, try this: 1 - Open the texture, also create a blank new texture next to it with whatever software (even ms paint will work, doesn't matter). 2 - Cut from the original texture just a small piece of the color you want to change. Paste it into the new texture and blow it up to full size so it covers the board. Try not to disproportion it, if there's some blank sides, that's fine but try to cover the whole board. 3 - Shrink the new texture down to 64x64 or less. If its just a simple color with no shading, shrink it down to 4x4 and save it. Now open your Blender (or other mesh editor). 1 - Import the .mu and use the original texture on it so it looks nice and normal. 2 - Edit it and select the faces you want to change the color. It should correspond to what you ripped out of the texture when you did the previous step. 3 - Separate just these faces into their own mesh ("p" in Blender editing mode), but don't move it. 4 - Back in object mode, parent it to the original mesh and give it a simple name, no "_" or "." 5 - Throw the simple color texture onto it (it won't change - yet). 6 - Go back into editing mode and change the UV to target the new texture, it should show up on the list. Scale the UV map accordingly. 7 - Save it. Now into Unity 1 - Nothing special here, just make sure your meshes are still together (will be if you didn't move it). Make sure each points to the right texture. 2 - Export! Now into the .cfg 1 - Now make as many copies of the tiny texture file you want. In each, change their colors to what you want and give each one a unique name, like modelBlue, modelPurple. 2 - Use the FStextureSwitch MODULE in your .cfg and set it to switch between the colors of just the separated mesh. Now you can switch between colors for about 1kb per color (and keep a single catalog object) instead of a whole new 1MB+ texture OR a 1MB+ texture AND a bloaty catalog object. There's an even less bloatier way to change it using the FSmeshSwitch MODULE, but its slightly more complicated to set up and requires a little unused space on the original texture.

Its basically all in the second post here, there isn't much else to it. To get any more basic would be to do a general Unity tutorial or a general animation export/import tutorial. Did you have a specific question?

He's got a pretty heavy bevel that goes around curves, but a good edge cut/smoothing combo could cut it down. He might hit 700 per engine if the details go up (toriodals around the engine bells, for example).

From the look of it, you could easily bust that thing into about 5 or 6 modular parts at < 700 tris each (engines will use the most). With the right shaders, you won't lose much detail. I'm looking forward to having more than just B9 stuff in the game, so if you need any help with the Unity setups or configs, or chopping it into modular parts/morphing new ones, send me a PM. Blackheart is quite the busybody with texturing, so it looks like you're in good hands there.

TT hasn't updated his Mk4 parts in a while, and there are some little rules he put on the license. For that, instead of doing anything with the TT parts, I just took the adapter and made a cargo bay and ramp part for it (should be pics somewhere in this thread). Works well in testing, but trying to figure out where to put it for release. Single engine Mk2 adapter is a stock part, but I also made a B9 version that's kicking around somewhere already released. I'll find it an stick it in the next release also. I sort of backed off the Mk2 as PorkWorks is making an excellent lineup for that, and Bac9 also mentioned a part or two he was going to make for that line as well. The canards and articulated winglets are done, I split time between those and the HL cockpit. I added a second set of windows above the first and canted them forward, so now we have a command bridge. The underside will have doors for a small cargo bay that can accomodate easily a 1.25m package up to 2-2.5m long (escape pod, KSPI fusion thingy, TAC supplies...whatever). I'll put a third set of windows side-lined forward of the doors. Should be able to do a crew of about 7 to 10 kerbals that way. Designed with meshswitcher in mind, so there will be a 3.75m and HL version as part of the same catalog entry.

In TT's cockpit tutorial he mentions two different layers, one that only shows up for Kerbals, and one that shows up for everything in IVA. You basically set up the whole IVA, then flag the parent with which one you need and the child objects should pick up the same flag.

1. MF parses the PART configs for everything. 2. If it sees a resource it recognizes (as defined in its own config), it deletes that resource module and uses its own logic. 3. The MaxAmount of the deleted resource(s) on the part becomes the default MaxAmount total for any modular resources that can be used. If multiple resources were deleted, these are added up. 4. Specific Parts can have a config over-ride defined, MF will use those settings instead of the Max Amount it calculated based on the original part's Max Amount. Often these are the same thing, but can be tweaked. 5. The override config can also define a Tank type (TANK_DEFINITION), which restricts which fuels can be placed and/or adds multipliers (and/or base additives) to the mass or volume of the fuel when put in that tank...the total of which cannot exceed the "MaxAmount" as defined or calculated.

Answer to the first part: Same way I figured it out...lots of reloading with Alt-F12 menu until something looked good. As for the fuel drain issue, its just the way things work in KSP. There's no fix for it as of right now. In other mods with these types of parts, they just disabled the fuel flow completely. Self-disconnecting is probably a node size issue that is easily fixed. I don't think they had working node sizes when I made that mod. Feel free to do what you will with that mod - even repackage it. It hasn't been in my own game in a long time and I'm surprised its still in use. - - - Updated - - - Answer to the first part: Same way I figured it out...lots of reloading with Alt-F12 menu until something looked good. As for the fuel drain issue, its just the way things work in KSP. There's no fix for it as of right now. In other mods with these types of parts, they just disabled the fuel flow completely. Self-disconnecting is probably a node size issue that is easily fixed. I don't think they had working node sizes when I made that mod. Feel free to do what you will with that mod - even repackage it. It hasn't been in my own game in a long time and I'm surprised its still in use.

No fix, its just how KSP does nodes, something about all the nodes with the same stack label need to be going in the same direction, and the game only recognizes top and bottom for stacking...ergo, multi-connectors are wonky.

Are you happy now? By my estimate, even being very liberal with leg room, you could still jam between 16 and 30 kerbals in there. I could probably also finagle it to mesh-switch between a 3.75m round and HL fit, though the window placement would need to move ahead of the door for both versions to work. Specifics - I like specifics.