CaptainKipard

My mod requires a kerbal to be able to pass through a hole in the side of the cargo bay. Does anyone know the minimum height and width that a kerbal can pass through?

Will the Phoenix have warp drive?

Why the tires?

It's a good start but it looks like you rushed a bit, because it's missing some things and some details aren't proportional.

I'm not saying this to be offensive but objectively I think you should start with something simpler. It would give you a chance to develop your skills without stressing about too many things. Let me tell you, a whole plane is no cakewalk. One of the side projects for Skylon is the Personnel & Logistics Module. I was hoping to start on it right after finishing the plane itself, but if you're up for it then that would be a big help. You can (and please do) google schematics and dimensions for it and keep everything proportional. If you're having problems I can point you in the right direction. Only do the model for now. Don't unwrap or texture it, because I'll need to import your model into my skylon model and correct things so it all fits. I hope you consider helping with this, but if you don't want to then you are absolutely free to make a Lapcat, but then that would be your own project because we only talked about the Lapcat in passing. We might or might not do it. In any case, we need to finish the Skylon first.

Here's some progress. It's a nose gear obviously. It's all designed to animate and be neatly hidden away inside the nose. Whether or not we'll be able to get it into unity is another matter. I've glanced at the Mini Shuttle thread and it looks like even that guy is having problems with unity implementation. In addition to the nose gear I've also unwrapped most of the model. -- Image Deleted --

If you want to contribute to the community then all power to you but you really should have done a forum search. I'm already doing a modular Skylon with EatVacuum. Would you like to join our team instead?

Look. I know it's been weeks but I haven't abandoned this, I'm still working on it. The problems I have are: a) Skylon blueprints are non-existent in the public domain. I'm having to effectively design parts of this plane from scratch, e.g. Landing gear configuration, precise angles of various part of geometry, etc. If I had proper blueprints and schematics I would have probably been texturing it by now. Modding documentation for KSP is woefully inadequate and I've never used Unity before. The only modding experience I have is modelling and compiling art assets for Half-Life 2. Now I'm kind of close to finishing what I think is the most problematic part of this mod and that's the landing gear. I had to use the Concorde for reference. I know I'll have problems with it because there's very little info on how to set this up and what info there is is rather vague. I'll send a message to the guys who are making the mini shuttle. Maybe one of them can write a proper tutorial for it.

I've used MapZone before and it's pretty decent. http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

I'm trying to figure out how animations work. I need to decide how to proceed with modelling the landing gear depending on what resources are available to me.

I'm way ahead of you. One of the first things I did was create edge loops where the cross sections have standard diameters. If you think that's best.... I'm just curious why you think that's the best way to go. That seems reasonable. I'll have to check the Scimitars dimensions, but if they're similar to the Sabre then I'll try to make the intake and engine compatible with both precoolers. Actually it just occurred to me, that the Scimitar intake would not be the same as for a Sabre because it doesn't need to be closed. I'll need to look into it. No, I was playing Skyrim during the server change. Now that we're back up I'll get back to modelling. Please, no false modesty. I really hate it. I understand people love to put "K" in front of everything but I don't think that's really necessary. Hydrogen is the same wherever you go, and the only reason the name "Kethane" works is because Kethane is a fantasy resource. Of course if the devs decide to implement a lightweight fuel similar to hydrogen and name if something then we can go with that. Absolutely. Firstly in addition to black, in recent weeks a new render has appeared showing Skylon sporting a more traditional Shuttle-type black and white colour scheme. Secondly I'll want to make some stockalike textures too. Thirdly I'm thinking of implementing the flag texture functionality into the vertical stabiliser, which would allow players to put unique flags on it for every plane they launch. I'll have to think about the best way to do that.

The manual says the take-off speed is "close to Mach 0.5"

I'm just guessing but maybe this represents the velocities of your orbit around the sun. Is the first number always the same?

I'm glad you're making this. The asymmetric doors on the stock one are really annoying sometimes.

Current progress [image Removed]

Can't I just add deflectionLiftCoeff to every part?

To be fair the space computer thread has a specific goal in mind. There's no good reason why there shouldn't be a separate thread for snippets and general tips and discussions and stuff and junk.

Are they SSTOs? That first one only has 2658m/s of dv.

Lift is just an arbitrary number in the cfg; it has nothing to do with the shape of the wing luckily so you can cheat a little there if you need to. I'm pretty sure adding a custom resource is relatively easy. There's some info about it in the tutorial thread, but if you have a problem you can always post a question. Well some materials refer to an auxilliary fuel tank so it must be a rocket. It's actually a pair of double exhaust rockets but that's not important for implementation. Good point. We should allow a powered approach and when we do then there wont be a need for a seperate auxiliary fuel tank. I'm sure players wont care about details like that. Looks like a plan. Since Skylon is meant to be capable of docking, then simple attitude control is not enough. Like I said before I think adding some seperate RCS parts is the best way to go. I've seen Skylon animations showing propellant being ejected from both the nose and the tail but the docking animation doesn't show anything. It's not that important. When we release the pack then in the craft file we can just add some surface mounted RCS thrusters which I'll also make. The RCS Build Aid mod will be helpful for positioning them, and also making sure wet and dry CoM is in the same place. I don't really want to do it that way; I would rather have them built in, but it's going to be too much work getting the whole thing balanced enough to translate without changing attitude. You forgot the control core. Actually it's even more complicated than that. I'm working on the mid section right now and it's proving to be deceptively difficult. It looks simple and the overall shapes kind of are, but I have to constantly keep in mind that I'm going to break things up into sections later. It's a bit of a balancing act. e.g. the wing base extends beyond the ends of the cargo bay in both directions. Now in order to make the wing mesh look smooth I can't just slice the whole thing exactly where the cargo bay ends. I'll have to cut a bit further. Luckily the Skylon cross sections show that's where the oxidiser tanks are so I'm thinking the cargo bay part should double as an oxidiser tank. And there's still the issue of the heading/prograde discrepancy. I have one idea for that but it's a bit of a hack. I was hoping there's a more elegant solution by using something in the cfg. Could you look into that too? Here's how I see it. -Nose/Core 1 -Core 2 -Forward Monopropellant tank -Forward Hydrogen tank -Cargo Bay/Oxidiser tank -Aft Hydrogen tank -Aft Monopropellant tank -OMS -Vertical stabiliser -Rudder -Left wing -Left aileron -Left intake -Left "precooler" (Just a structural part) -Left engine -Right wing -Right aileron -Right intake -Right "precooler" (Just a structural part) -Right engine -Canard -Nose gear -Left rear gear -Right rear gear -One or more RCS thrusters (depending on how they will be placed)

My knowledge of aerodynamics and physics is only at college level but I think I can explain this. Green represents thrust vectors. Orange represents prograde vectors Fig. 1 just shows you which way the exhausts are pointing. The tail engines aren't visible in this particular picture, but higher resolution pics do show a very slight angle. The Sabre exhaust angle is larger. Given the relative positions of the OMS and Sabre engines it's easy to understand why they're angled the way they are, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that intersection of both thrust vectors must be where the CoM is. It looks to be almost in the middle of the plane, which is exactly what you'd expect. Fig. 2 shows you the rough angle of attack and the prograde vector during the initial air breathing part of ascent. I'm assuming the angle of attack needs to be so large because the wings are relatively small, but I could be wrong. It doesn't really matter, what matters is that the intake cone must be aligned with the relative motion of air to get as much air into the engine as possible. That's why the intake cone is pointing "down". I'm pretty sure that at this stage the main force propelling the plane up is the lift generated by the wings. Fig. 3 shows you what happens after the intake is closed and the engines go into rocket mode. By this time the angle of attack is not as important because the main force propelling the plane is the thrust of the engines instead of lift. Since that's the case then the prograde vector drifts "up" in relation to the nose of the plane. Of course the plane pitches up too to gain altitude quickly. Fig. 4 shows you what happens during circularisation. The Sabres are not used for this (although I really don't understand why) instead we have the OMS, which has a different thrust vector, and now to move the plane in the right direction the nose must point up a bit. I suspect players wont bother changing engines for this but there's no really good reason not to include it anyway. If they do decide to use Sabres for circularisation then the nose will of course have to point down relative to prograde by the exact amount as in Fig. 3. Don't worry I'm not making it full scale. I posted this question before I started. Most people suggested I scale it down to 64%. I took the fuselage diameter from the Skylon manual (6.75m) and after scaling it I got 4.32m. Rounding it to a standard size I could have gone for 5m or 3.75m. I went for 5m because: a) I wanted players to be able to lift 2.5m payloads into orbit. The way the Skylon cargo bay is designed doesn't actually use all the space in that cylinder. The space is smaller because you need some space under it for the rear landing gear. As it is right now there's space for a 2.5m part with some small radial attachments. Skylon has gone through three designs that I know of. There was C1, C2 and D1. Each was larger than the previous one. I'm modelling it using C2 reference material because D1 is still a bit of a secret, and there aren't any images of it. But D1 is even larger than C2 so choosing 5m over 3.75m makes sense. Ok I'm sure he's a nice guy but it might improve our chances if we wait until I post some decent progress pics before we ask. I don't see why not, it's just a simple animation.

I take your point, and in other areas we'll definitely work to fit into KSP. In this case however we can't ignore physics, because KSP is based on it. If I don't angle the thrust, the ship will tend to spin out of control, or at the very least be extremely difficult to control in space. If you look at an image of Skylon you'll notice the engines sit below the center of mass. There's just no other way to make it work with the exception of redesigning the whole look of the ship, and I really don't want to do that. Not only would I have to raise the engines and wings, I'd have to lower the tail because the tail also has a pair of small orbital engines. The wings house the landing gear so now the gear would have to be placed somewhere else and redesigned. It's too much work. I'm no engineer, and REL have already presented a design that's workable. The only difference to KSP players will be that the nose will not be pointing prograde, but hopefully EatVacuum and I can figure something out to make this as painless as possible.

Hmm I keep hearing good stories about this...Bee(?).. Nein(?), is it? I should probably download it and see what that engine looks like before posting spammy messages about how I'm going make a realistic model. LOL *sigh* I love useless naysayers like you Mekan1k. Decent entertainment, thanks. 0 for effort of course because vacuous comments are easy to make, but a solid 6 for attainment.

Of course. If that's true then that will solve one problem, but that's only half of it. The other is that because Skylons Sabre and OMS (Orbital Maneuvering System) thrust vectors are both angled to intersect the center of mass (Sabres are angled down, while OMS is angled up because it's above the center) then the actual heading of the craft will NEVER be aligned to the prograde vector. Now I know that all pods and cores have a "forward" direction (it's what determines what you see on the navball), but I don't know if that's determined by the model importer or the cfg. If it's the importer then I have an idea for solving this particular problem. If it's cfg then that's your area. I'll keep a record of all the important angles and dimensions and if it's necessary then I can always tweak the model later when we start testing. Also if there's no way to change the "forward" direction of a single part at runtime then I'm thinking we might need to create two seperate control cores both with different "forward" directions and allow pilots to choose which one feeds info to the navball (by simply clicking "Control from here") depending on which engines are in use. Mine too. Initially i thought I'd build them right into the nose and tail, because that seems most realistic, but that has it's drawbacks when trying to balance a craft with a full cargo bay. And yeah if they haven't figured it out then i guess there's nothing wrong with allowing players to place RCS wherever they want. I'm thinking of making them somewhat similar to those flat B9 RCS units. The only drawback of doing it this way is they'll have to stick out a bit from the fuselage in order to be visible. Actually I had a look at Lapcat before I even started and I think you're confusing two different engines. Skylon uses Sabres (which are hybrids), but Lapcat uses Scimitars. Scimitar (that's the straight one) is based on a Sabre but it has all the rocket parts taken out. It's just an advanced air breathing jet engine. I don't want to promise anything. I'd like to make a Lapcat one day, but let's concentrate on this first. What do you think? Also one last thing. I'm curious how you'll make the Sabre behave like a hybrid without programming a plugin. Does that functionality already exist in KSP? Because when I first decided to do this I though I'd just make it an addon for B9 and use his module(s) in the config file.

[table] [tr] [td]Reaction Engines Limited Skylon C2 Announcements I'm currently waiting for KSP 1.0 so I can develop this further for the new aerodynamics model. resting my tired brain. An alpha version for stock aerodynamics is now released Download Skylon Alpha for Stock Aerodynamics Released under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license Extract KipEng to GameData. If you have any of my other mods windows will ask you to merge the KipEng folder. Dependencies: Firespitter (plugin only) Community Resource Pack Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (Might not be necessary. If anyone wants to risk it let me know how it goes) If you don't want the parts from Firespitter, you can delete all the files from that folder but keep the plugin directory structure the same just in case. Recommended LoadOnDemand OR Active Texture Management. Not both. [/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table] It flies well and can be used effectively, but is far from finished. Showcase video by White Owl. Thanks! White Owl's Module Manager file for the tweaks he made to various parts as mentioned in the video Download Usage: Skylon Control Core 2 has an animation that allows you to change the "Control from here" vector between the Sabre engine thrust vector, and the orbital engine thrust vector. This will change where the navball is pointing to be in line with the corresponding engines. The Sabre vector is selected by default. Skylon Control Core 1 is a regular part. Selecting "Control from here" on this part will let you control the craft easier with the RCS thrusters and reaction wheel since they are aligned with that part. The included craft file has all the parts and action groups set up as follows: The control surfaces are set to use specific user input Main landing gear has the brakes on by default Sabre engines are set to Manual Switching. AG 1 set to change Sabre engine mode AG 2 set to toggle Sabre engines AG 3 set to toggle the Skylon Orbital Maneuvering Assembly In order to perform a successful launch with the Skylon you need to do the following. Load the included craft file and launch Right-click on the Skylon Control Core 2 and click "Control from here". SAS on, Breaks off. Stage. Towards the end of the runway pitch up as far as you can without destroying the tail. As soon as you leave the runway, pitch up more to start gaining altitude and retract the landing gear to decrease drag. Fly in air-breathing mode to about 20km and accelerate to about 900-1000m/s. Watch your IntakeAir. Switch to rocket mode, and continue as you would with a rocket. The craft has enough resources to achieve an orbit of ~300km with a heavy payload. If you want to use the SOMA engine you must change the vector on the Skylon Control Core 2. If you have a dockable payload in the payload bay and you want to dock using RCS, you need to click "Control from here" on Skylon Control Core 1. Remember to switch back to the correct core and vector before returning to Kerbin. Current progress Modelling - 95% Colliders - 95% Unwrapping - 0% Rigging - 50% Animations - 70% Texturing - 50% Unity Import - 10% Config - 80% To-do list (subject to change) Remodel control surfaces Unwrap everything again Re-do RCS placement Tweak the steering curve Configure the parts for FAR and DRE, and release MM configs Finish adding colliders Fix Main gear animation Configure intake animations Add solar panels to the cargo bay doors. Fix cargo bay mechanism and animation. Finish the texture Look into changing over to DDS format for textures Configure techtree placement Consider ModuleMirror for wings, canards and main gear Better engine FX Consider using LFO for the RCS. Create the Skylon Personnel and Logistics Module as the first addon for this mod Current list of parts Nose/Core 1 Core 2 Forward Monopropellant tank Forward Hydrogen tank Cargo Bay/Oxygen tank Side doors Aft Hydrogen tank Aft Monopropellant tank SOMA (Skylon Orbital Maneuvering Assembly) Vertical stabiliser with rudder Wing with aileron (Left and right) Pre-cooler (Hopefully using the plugin from Interstellar) Intake Sabre engine Canard (Left and right) Nose gear Main gear (Left and right)

But only 12 years until it dies.