Kurld

Yeah, I hate having to mount them one at a time, but that would do it. I'm wondering if there is some kind of tomfoolery I could do with a plugin where it looks at the named node the fin is attached to and sets the texture appropriately. The fairings do have retro rockets underneath. I actually went to the trouble of modeling them and if you peek up under the fairings you can see them in there. Playing a full BDB Apollo mission is on my list of things to do once my modeling fever ever breaks...

I like those domes a lot. Is there a convenient way to place things on Kerbin at some location other than the launch pad?

Far out. I'd probably vomit if I built something that extensive and had it blow up like that.

Hey @Sharpy what's the idea with the launch clamps stuck all over on top of things?

LOL, you guys are killing me. In case anybody else is wanting or trying to read anything into anything... please stop. The BDB crew have all been excellent towards me, so no worries, OK? Yeah, this is kind of what I am wondering about. I've looked at source for several different mods that switch textures and it seems straightforward enough. But the symmetry is a big wrinkle. I haven't really looked at the mesh switching much. At some point I need to start actually playing this game again... It's been several versions now where I haven't gotten past Minmus.

This add-on is a set of parts I created because I wanted to learn some things about creating engines for KSP. It's main feature is a model of the Rocketdyne F1 rocket engine used on the Saturn V. After I built the engines, I wanted a five-way adapter to mount them under. So I built a model of the thrust structure from the Saturn V S-IC. This includes aerodynamic engine fairings and integrated retro-rockets to help separate the stage from the rest of your rocket. I probably should have included a decoupler, but I didn't. When you mount the F1 engines, the non-gimbaling version goes in the center. After that, I noticed the thrust structure does not really line up all that well with the stock 2.5m fuel tanks. So I took leave of my senses and modeled the entire S-IC stage. This part is ridiculously over-detailed, and uses a boat-load of texture memory. Again, there are the two sizes available. Finally, what good is a rocket without the right fins to really set it off? So, I also modeled the proper fins from the Saturn V. Then I decided I wanted the markings to look correct. The included plugin will detect what node on the S-IC or thrust structure that you are sticking the fine onto, and draw the appropriate marking. Here's some screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/3sm97 (not recent) Here is the download on Spacedock: http://spacedock.info/mod/1184/PEBKAC Saturn V Parts (compatible with KSP 1.3). Caveats: The models were built to real-life scale and then scaled down to "Kebal size" of 0.64. So the S-1C tankage is roughly 6.375 meters across. The configs are all pretty much a first-draft and may or may not be reasonable or realistic. Since probably nobody has 6.375m parts, I also included "mini" versions of the parts that should fit with other 2.5m parts. I'm still wondering about swapping out meshes. For instance, I have two separate F1 parts, one which gimbals and another that doesn't. Instead of having two variants in the parts bin, it would be great to be able to right click the part, and choose whether or not the engine should gimbal and thus have it load the correct mesh based on that setting. There is still some more detail I could build into the S-IC part. For instance the launch hold-downs are not correct and there are no umbilical panels, etc at the bottom. The UV mapping and texturing for the S-1C badly needs a second pass to greatly reduce its memory footprint and to clean up a few things. I don't plan to do any of this any time soon, if ever. But I may go crazy again, who knows. Enjoy!

For the Saturn V, they fired the inboard F1 followed by 2 of the outboard F1s at a time in a crossing pattern. IIRC this all happened within one second. They wanted to avoid placing too much stress on the rocket all at once. After all five engines were spooled up (< 2 seconds) , they released the launch clamps. The rocket was actually still held by soft metal rods that were threaded through the bottom of the thrust structure. As soon as the launch clamps let go, the rods were pulled through their sleeves, releasing the rocket into flight. Again this was avoid the sudden application of force all up and down the stack. Near the end of the first stage, they shut down the engines before the tanks were completely empty so that they could shut them all off at the same time.

Mainly I play the game because I like to build models. Building them from electrons is a lot cheaper than any other way I've found. Plus I get to fly these models around in outer space... The Kerbals are kind of funny looking... but their comedic impact faded for me long long ago. For the longest time they were nothing but props. At least the crew can sort of do stuff now. But I am always wishing for more depth... that crew selection and development made more of an impact to success. In sandbox they still seem mostly irrelevant to anything. On the other hand, I've spent a lot of time developing the PEBKAC Launch Escape System mod so that the little googly-eyed freaks have an even chance of making it back when things go pear-shaped.

I've released version 1.2.2.2 of the PEBKAC Launch Escape System on Spacedock, which should be fully compatible with the next release of SDHI SMS. Cheers!

Version 1.2.2.2 is released on Spacedock. This includes some plugin tweaks so that it will be compatible with SDHI SMS. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!

Maybe you can convince them they've won a contest and the prize is permanent residency on board this brand new space station.

Sounds like a good time to learn how to do orbital rendezvous and send up some rescue missions.

Me too! I probably won't do anything soon on my end with the RCS, due to free-time constraints. I get some vacation around New Years so maybe then.

No sir. Your LES is controlled by its own plugin, courtesy of @Jso Sorry to leave you hanging, but again.. I am not getting notified in a timely manner (or at all) when people have posted here or quoted me or anything.

OK I see. There are a couple of ways we could go on this. One is super easy, which, given that (in my experience anyway) the escaping pod tends to flip itself anyways, is to just leave things alone. My experience might not be the next persons and I suspect the behavior of the escaping pod could vary quite a bit depending on all kinds of things. A ten second delay may or may not be enough for the pod to turn itself about properly in all cases. So the other way we could go would be to only jettison after the delay AND also when it's surely pointed approximately retrograde. This is probably something I could commit to making happen within the next week or so. Really simulating the Orion system would involve 1) solving the inherent instability of the escaping pod and 2) figuring out how to automatically control the RCS engines so that they perform the pitch correction. Step #1 is probably a hour or so of fiddly config tweaking until the escaping craft flies straight and true. I'd guess the CoM of the assembly of parts is too far aft. Step #2 is something I'd be interesting in learning how to do, but I can't commit to it in the short-term unless somebody can point me at an already-working example.

@sumghai Thanks for doing that. The jettison is actually at a specific time interval after abort. IIRC, this is 10 seconds. I should probably expose this variable so that folks can set it to what they want. Also in this case, the angle of the CM is very much accidental. If it strictly needs to be within a certain approximation of retrograde (as with the Apollo system), I have a little more work to do there as well. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do (if anything) with the RCS. I still haven't looked into the specifics of the Orion system. I assumed that any sort of control input here would be in the hands of the user/pilot. I'm happy to look into it further if this is not the case.

I've made some tweaks to the PEBKAC plugin code to accommodate using it with SHDI SMS. To use this beta plugin, you will also need to make some minor changes to the config files for SDHI's LES rocket and BPC parts. How to do that is explained in the readme file in the download. You can download the beta release from dropbox. This download only includes the modified plugin and its source code. Eventually I will make another official release for the PEBKAC LES and include these changes. Mainly I want to give @sumghai or anybody else a chance to verify it's working well with the SDHI parts before I do all that.

I've made a few minor tweaks to the plugin code to accommodate using it with other mod authors' LES parts, specifically, the parts included with the SDHI SMS by @sumghai. I have a design goal of making it generic enough to use with any LES parts anybody else creates as well. If you fall into this category, let me know and I'll try to help you if you hit a snag. To use this beta plugin, you will also need to make some minor changes to the config files for the LES rocket and BPC parts. How to do that is explained in the readme file in the download. You can download the beta release from dropbox. Eventually I will make an official release. Mainly I want to give @sumghai or anybody else a chance to verify it's working well with the SDHI parts before I do that.

I seem to remember something about each transform has to be named something unique, and you have to have a separate entry in the config for each one. I won't swear to it though.

I only meant "problem" in the sense of making it work with the existing PEBKAC plugin code :-) If only I had thought ahead like you did. I'll see what I can come up with over the next few days. I don't think it will take long. I'll make it work with either flavor of Engine modules so no worries there. And hopefully now the PEBKAC plugin will be flexible enough to use with any future LES parts anybody else cares to make.

The main problem is the BPC and the LES escape rocket are two separate parts in the SDHI SMS. Unfortunately, neither of the PEBKAC plugin versions support this scenario. The other relatively minor problem is that the SDHI LES uses ModuleEngine instead of ModuleEnginesFX. I could probably throw together a new version of the PEBKAC code to solve both these issues by sometime next week. @sumghai would still have some work to do to his part configs to support it. Basically that would entail adding reference to PEBKAC module and inserting the correct engineID in his ModuleEngine entries so the plugin can fire the correct engines at the right time. What the user gets for all this is the Abort is automatically wired up in the VAB and then, after an abort, the LES and BPC would automatically jettison after a time delay. The RCS would continue to function as normal, as far as I can tell. I won't proceed unless/until sumghai is on board with taking on the extra work on his end. Arguably, it's not much, but it's up to him to decide if it has any priority or adds value. (And) Happy Thanksgiving! to any of my fellow Americans. Among many other things, I am thankful for this game and the very interesting things that people have done to extend and modify it. I have learned a lot and developed some new skills from hanging around here these past few years. Thanks!

OK, for some reason I am only now getting notified by the forum software regarding this. I can take a look at the SDHI LES again over the holiday weekend and see what would be required to have it work with the PEBKAC plugin. I need to get educated on Orion anyways.

It's been a lot of fun to see come together and I've learned a lot about how to do stuff in Blender while working on it. Somebody else on the forums made the model several years ago (can't remember who) and said "do whatever you want with it." Little did I know I'd get the F-1 fever... I've reworked/replaced 95% of it by now, comparing it to photos from all over. I didn't realize at first how much these things evolved over time. One thing that I discovered once I started looking into it is that they actually insulated these engines a great deal for flight. All examples you see in museums and even in most photos, don't have that insulation in place, just the bracing and brackets to mount it. It's ironic that all the glorious detail folks have built into these models was actually almost completely obscured when these things were doing their jobs...

I guess this is just a weird thing about Unity, or something. I removed rotations and in both cases the particle effects are aligned as expected, just shooting out 90 from the way I am used to looking at parts. Everything exports fine... I have to rotate and re-position the engine part 90 to work out the sizing, etc. which is annoying. But I did get my fx showing up in KSP which was the goal. I'm not going to mark it solved.. maybe somebody has some insight as to why Unity acts like this. If so, I'd like to hear it.

Hi, folks. I've been dinking around making my own flame effects for an engine model I've been working on. Everything seems to be what I expect until I uncheck "simulate world space" and then the rotation is wrong. I have a root game object with part tools and an empty with the particle emitter script as it's only child. The engine is an entirely separate game object. With Simulate World Space checked: With world space unchecked: Why does the direction of the emit change? What's even weirder, to me, is that it to get it to emit in the expected direction, I have to rotate the X axis by 45 degrees, rather than 90. If I set X axis to zero, the particles emit in exactly the opposite direction! Thanks, K