panzer1b

I totally feel you there, albeit i just cant stand the way stock looks anymore, too used to SciFiVE+scatterer to probably ever give them up unless by some miracle the devs actually create stock atmosphere effects and things like clouds and dust on planets. That and they NEED to do something about the stock sunflare, its atrocious and looks worse then something out of a early 2000s game. And yeah, while i dont do it quite that often as i honestly prefer stock combat, BDA does make air combat possible (you CAN do it stock, but its just too much of a pain to setup imo so not worth all the effort, mostly use BDA for air combat, sometimes for ground combat depending on what mood im in). So...um...yeah, i think ill stick to my very lightly modded game, visual mods so that i can actually enjoy the visuals, and occasionally BDA when i wanna do dogfights against AI or make sentry guns that fire at me without requiring manual control. As for space and space battles, stock all the way!

You send a armored vehicle to the mun on a SSTO capital ship only to have the rover explode the entire hangar it was in the instant the docking port is released causing the ship itself to erupt into flames... Despite the vehicle getting jammed and creating a spinning kraken, i managed to barely save the crew by blasting the VTOL engines at the correct times. So yeah, my amazingly beautiful ship needs its crew saved and i need to figure out why the damn mako spontaneously exploded and wedged its remains into what was left of the hangar after it stopped exploding like crazy...

Its one of those things i thought about, but couldnt justify the performance by adding yet another texture layer that needed to be rendered to the planets that are already more laggy in general due to volumetric clouds (any planet that would have auroras would also have atmosphere and thus clouds of some sort). If i actually was willing to spend alot of time on this mod id have added a few more additions that people could install if their machine could handle it (originally planned hurricanes as 1, auroroas as another, volcanoes as a 3rd even if itd be screwy looking cause EVE doesnt support glowing volumetrics, ect), but my real life situation leaves me with so little free time the most i can actually say ill do is keep this updated so that it functions in KSP in future updates (mostly because i wont leave the SPH/VAB in KSP without the mod installed as stock KSP looks like garbage and has 0 immersion). So yeah, if you guys really want this stuff, you are free to do it yourself (just copy the effects out of SVE or another mod and run alongside this one, EVE even lets you run SVE and SciFiVE simultaneously if you can bear the lag of twice as many clouds as needed).

I like internal weapons but it comes with a price that im not willing to pay for frontline warships, less firepower, less redundancy as you have less hardpoints, and it requires a larger vessel. Still looks alot better asthetically and most of my prettier ships do have internally mounted guns or at least partially stuck into the hull, but anything thats remotely strong has predominantly external weaponry even if its only the tip of the warhead that sticks outside of the hull. As for my mod, I dont support ckan since its not something i use myself, and with my current real life situation my freetime is so little that i cant and wont work on any mod anymore period unless its something that specifically makes my own gaming time more enjoyable (ill keep ScifiVE functioning as ive gotten to the point i cant play KSP without it as stock looks like trash but thats about it). Sorry if this isnt the answer you want, but you might get some help from other members of the community (post on the mod thread) which are perfectly welcome to put this mod on ckan or do just about whatever with it as ive made the liscense let people do anything with it when i stopped official development a while back. So yeah, been messing a little bit with some truly old warships, and armor development has gone a huge way since then, a ship that was once considered the king on here is nothing more then cannon fodder these days... So yeah, as nice as that thing was back in the days of pre multicore physics, nowadays it just dies to a SRB salvo. Yeah, i should probably just spam nebula classes when i do our upcoming battle. This is what one of them can do with 3 targets, after eating a SRM-6 and a 1.2m torpedo, granted it only had 1 engine left (and a side was shot off) so itd be a sitting duck, but there isnt a single conventional weapon that i can consistently kill one with (G5 torp does pretty well but even that takes 2-3 shots, G7 torp is useless against it despite being 3 times heavier then a G5). I think ill make a supernova class and maybee redo the old nova which is functional but i really dont like its looks so much if you dont mind @MiffedStarfish. Im sorta taking inspiration from your new ship line's nose layout with teh new models, that nose is crazy pretty. Still, to make things interesting, i think ill mount it with a SRM-4/AT rather then the usual SRM-6 like you have. Also have a new dimension class in the works, its already at 300 parts, but its pretty much the closest thing to a destroyer/cruiser ive made thusfar and if i can get its armor right itll be able to take on a whole fleet singlehandedly. Currently equipped with a dedicated internal hangar (no idea why i like that concept, makes 0 tactical sense when u can surface mount fighters), enough G5s to take down like 4 ships, and ample secondary batteries for anti-fighter or when something gets close (or when im out of G5s). Well thanks alot for ur inspiration, ive officially made a ship that is HARDER to kill then my SK-IV at least based on preliminary testing. Its not fully done (this is just a basic skeleton, no asthetic features besides the front), and im gonna make a scaled up version to fit some RT-5s in the nose, but sofar the basic design has resulted in one of the toughest things ive ever come across when it comes to killing it. The new nova (once i figure out how to fit a RT-5 into that style nose) will be a perfect support vessel now that it actually comes with some real protection (and i think ill even be able to add a single kerbal in the same style as my SK-IV has). All because i really liked that nose your ships had and just HAD to copy it sorta, thanks for giving me yet another insanely poweful armor design ... So yeah, after a bit more testing ive come to the conclusion that i CANNOT beat the nebula class in the armor department. Still, the new supernova class came out quite strong for a gunboat class vessel, and i think itll make a fine addition to my fleet even if it has a few flaws (can be knocked out relatively easy from a very specific angle and still prone to loosing its one and only engine when the enemy insists on firing at the ship's arss). Still, nebula spam is prolly going to be the single best strategy since they are so damn versatile allowing them to be used in almost any role on the battlefield with the exception of damage sponges (armor is good, but it can and will go poof when focused with repeated SRM volleys).

Those look really good, obviously hard to tell the armor without craft files (or a few different angles) but you have structural parts so it should hold up to some fire. If its not something super top secret id really like a download (at least for one of the larger ones) just to take a look at it. Ive tried making mass effect ships many times b4 but none of them ended up having worthwhile armor so i sorta gave up on competitive versions of them and mostly stuck to things like SSTO normandys, and made one of those turian cruiser things but also not really competitively viable or even that good. Ive also been experimenting with more armor styles and found some stuff that works (not half bad even without any cargo bays at all), but still cannot beat the SK-IV style hull with its almost non-existent part count and raw efficiency. Its really the part count that kills me and all my developments, ships that look really cool AND perform require too many parts to utilize in a fleet sized battle without going to 2FPS...

Its very very hard to tell from those pics on whether its a good ship or not structurally. If its built around a skeleton made of girders/ibeams then odds are it can at least take a few hits (from conventional weapons), but id need to either have a copy of the craft to open it in my KSP, or pics of the internals. Also, a small suggestion is to add weapons (unless they are hidden internally or something). It doesnt look like there are any actual weapons on this vessel based on pics. Suggestions based on my own testing for easy to make but still effective weapons is the basic RT-5 torpedo (1RT-5 with a structural panel or gider or ibeam on the front of it for extra kick), and the SRM (1 ibeam pushed by 2-4 sepatrons on the sides of the ibeam). For guided weapons, pretty much anything will work for propulsion aslong as itll get the round up to ~250-400m/s before it hits the target. Obviously it needs to have a warhead made up of 80m/s impact parts so the missile doesnt just shatter on the target armor and do squat. Ohh and based on my standards (assuming those wings on side are the largest available) itd be either a very large corvette or a smallish frigate (most of my ships are technically corvettes or even subcapitals/gunboats since i tend to build rather compactly and dont go nuts on part counts). Its pretty much impossible to make anything larger then a destroyer in the stock game without tweakscale or modded parts since the part counts required would be too high for a practical battle (still for a defensive structure its not a bad idea to go insane on parts to lagshield it ).

Yeah, gimme a week or so to make like 2 more vessels for this sort of battle. I dont currently have any good "defensive" ships that are designed to take lots of hits but not much with regards to moving around, and most of my good vessels are designed around mid-long range (2-3000dV), and they are all fairly well armed but lack the armor to be called true tanks. I have a few super long range vessels already finished, but i need to redesign one of them for combat (add some guided weapons maybee). And sure, we can add another player to the fight if anyones interested (and can put up with me not being around every single day so a bit of a wait between my turns).

Made a surveilance station and set it to jool. Nothing too crazy on parts, but i really like all the details i put into this thing (and its bone stock too). Especially like the tube the kerbins use to get from the living quarters to the control room and observation deck...

I own it but have the parts and expansion disabled in my primary KSP install. Main reason for this is that i dont use the parts as i want all the ships i make to be accessible to everyone if they so desire and not have certain people that dont have it unable to use the vessel, and only load them up when i want to try someone elses craft that happens to use MH parts. That and 90% of the MH parts are completely unnecessary or available through mods if i really want to replicate real life space missions (which isnt something im into, ill stick to my capital ships, starfighters and starbases thank u very much). As for the rest of the MHE, missions i never cared for since i have enough of an imagination to make my own up, and ive pretty much stuck with sandbox mode all the time ive been playing KSP (messed with career and sci mode a little but beyond trying it when it came out ive stuck to sandbox). Now if features like launch sites on other planets were available in sandbox, id so be using MH, but until that happens, i just cant justify the resource use (even if it is minor) for something that has no features which i truly care about (most of the new things are cool, but not really necessary for a sci-fi gameplay experience since its not like MH comes with non-circular cross sectional pieces which are something desprately needed in KSP).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/btvqy1nxsdwa2v0/SC%20Void.craft?dl=0 no guarantees whether thats the exact ship you want (no idea what iteration it is), but here is what i have in my massive repository of ships ive collected over the years (pretty much everything that i was able to download or rip out of a save file that was any good competitively speaking i have a copy of). Also, a bit of a question, would you be interested in something akin to battle over jool where we can each have home planets (anything in jool system is accessible) and we actually get a fuel depo to refill ships provided they managed to return to the home planet (since fuel use with interplanetary would be actually a big deal). Then whoever destroys/disables all ships around the enemy's home planet 1st would win the fight. Other then that its same rules as usual, only real complexity with this type of game is that it would be a little bit more of a strategy in ship and fleet composition, as in fuel will be a concern especially if we choose say pol and laythe which are farthest away (but you can always choose to play more defensively and win through attrition by taking down enemy. Finally, a bit of a rule to keep anyone from purely focusing on an enemy's ranged vessels, ships can only be engaged in order of what orbit they are in (cant attack the ships in low orbit before killing those in high orbit just so one cant just avoid the defense ships with lowish range if one ofc chooses to have defensive ships that arent quite capable of interplanetary. I know such a thing would be a bit more complex then your usual battle, but it would be really neat to do something akin to between 2 planets rather then what everyone always does with the pick somewhere and just teleport ships to orbit. If not i can always do a normal fight too though :) If we do that maybee ill actually get a chance to use some of my less mainstream warships like this thing, its got lousy armor (as in no armor), but its got acceptable offense and has stupidly high range when you dont load the cargo bay with a mako (which weighs more then 6 guided torpedoes given its a pretty close replica with jump jets and a sorta weak cannon).

Well i sorta ressurected a very very old ship, probably my absolutely most pretty and detailed ship ever made that happens to be a SSTO. I made a few modernised ones with MK-2 bays instead of the monstrous double MK-3, but everything pales to the old one's interior which is just phenomenal and really brings back memories of the old days when i actually had hours upon hours to spend on KSP and could make crazy insane stuff like this thing ... Yeah, i nolonger have the time to make such monstrosities, but it was such a nice ship, full decked out internals, very good replica all things considered, SSTO capable on kerbin (which is all thanks to KSP bugs that let bomb bays occlude everything inside them when closed), and just plain awesomeness. Now if only i could do something about the 500+ parts that make this thing fly...

Id say im mostly a sci-fi builder, albeit i tend to build things within the realm of "this could theoretically have been made if funding was infinite". While the vast majority of my designs are capital ships, starbases, refineries, tanks, ect, all of them tend to be believable (with teh exception of SSTO dropships as those cant be made stock without abusing certain physics bugs) and i try to avoid unrealistic things like excessive part clipping (i make exceptions for asthetics but in general no clipping, specifically no engine clipping), RCS thrusters inside the ship's hull, CFG edits that alter part performance, ect. I do still put a good deal of effort to make every single vessel i create look good though and not just a fuel tank strapped to an engine with a command pod atop it (no idea why, but i just really dont like the cylindrical asthetic, almost all my craft are more boxy/angly rather then circular like all real life vessels are normally. I also tend to arm almost everything i make (with rare exceptions) and have stock battles with them (generally space as thats alot easier to do stock, but i occasionally do stock tanks as well even though those take forever to setup and half the rounds fired never come close to the target). There is just something satisfying about having your newest capital ship attacked by another vessel i made earlier and seeing both sides take massive damage with debris being shot off. Then after i try to save the crews (if they survived, and no i dont ever intentionally have any ship target another's bridge if i can help it), recover whatever can be salvaged, and bring everything back to each faction's homeworld (which is a mission in of itself). All in all, i think i have a very good balance between engineering my ships, fighting with them, and just flying around the solar system (occasionally in wrecked ships, occasionally in brand new ones). I do also play with BDA on occasion, but i always end up going back to stock as its way more challenging imo to get right and i know that everything i do from guiding my own missiles to target to how i make the ship's armor takes alot more skill to pull off then slappiung a BDA weapon onto a set of wheels and teleporting however many of them i want to fight.

Well ive been making some progress in KSP despite my almost non-existent amount of free time these days (i love my job but the hours i end up working sucks bigtime). Pretty close to finishing the internals of my newest shipyard, i think i struck the perfect balance between part count and aesthetics. Not too crazy detailed or anything, but it gets the look right and it doesnt make my machine lag like crazy. Along those lines ive also finished my newest interior for my smaller vessels. Rather low on parts but it has everything you really need on a warship's bridge, command overlooking the crew, pilot up front, and a few stations to control weapons, communications, and any other aux systems that the commander and pilot cant really focus on. Now i just need to implement this thing on a few more vessels as its currently only on my nebula class corvette. My 1st dropship attempt in like a year or so. Its still super early and im having trouble making it both function AND look halfway decent, but at least ive managed to make a SSTO that can accomodate a extra wide load (2 sideways MK3 bays). More or less abusing clipping as there IS a nosecone on each cargo bay clipped so that its behind the cargo bay and doesnt block tanks that drive into this thing while still allowing me to shut the cargo bays to disable drag on said tank when flying in atmo, but given that its the ONLY way to make a 100% stock SSTO dropship that doesnt weight 500t and can carry something in a double cargo bay im pretty happy with how the concept turned out. And my final craft ive been working on recently, a stealth starfighter that uses ion engines (its literally been 2 years since i used those for anything larger then a ultra long range probe), and i think it turned out good looking and functional. Armed it with 4 light SRMs completely inside the hull (nothing sticks out, and they are reloadable in orbit which is a 1st for the whole internally mounted weaposn concept), as i cant call it a stealth with weapons strapped all over the sides and it also looks amazing this way. Anyone know what this thing is based on (it should be obvious if you watch any sci-fi), not a 100% replica, but i got all the details as close as i could with what i had to work with.

I agree, wanted this feature since day1 since there are many situations i NEVER want an engine to stage like at all (VTOL engines and some engines that are never used say structural SRBs that dont ever get used). We got it for fairings (which many use as structural components), we got it for decouplers (there are also many cases where id rather manually decouple vs staging), ect. Its about time engines got this feature too...

Honestly, id rather keep clouds as a mod (unless by some miracle the devs can make it so there is no noticeable performance loss which is like never happening). First of all the number 1 benefit of EVE is that i can make my own textures if i dont like the ones that ship with mod (which i dont like honestly as they are super outdated by modern mod standards and havent been touched in ages, SVE isnt bad, but even that isnt quite my style visually). I have my own mod for EVE, and thats the primary reason i love the mod so much, i can add my own clloud style, my own particles, my own atmosphere renderer, and tweak everything to achieve the performance i expect out of it and not be stuck running someone else's configs. That and i seriously doubt the devs would integrate scatterer as well (which is at this point in time really needed for me, if only for its sunflare renderer as the default one looks like garbage).

So i decided to try a new visual style for my stations and i think it came out pretty solid looking. Very good contrast between the see-thru girders and wings on the outside, and it looks like a nice hybrid between sci-fi and something that could have at least theoretically existed IRL. Im probably going to redo this from the ground up in order to make it a little more clean and cut down parts (230 isnt TOO bad, but it doesnt help if i actually intend to add to it later). And ofc a nice view from the ship that just deployed from said shipyard.

Well there are a few ways to make good ships, but id start with your armor layout. The first thing to do is understand what makes armor work in KSP. Now there are many ways to make ships, but the general consensus is that every vessel's core structure (skeleton that its built around) has to be made entirely of 80m/s impact tolerance parts, almost always your choice of girders or ibeams since those are the only stock elements that have the required impact tolerance and are long enough to make a ship out of easily. Then there are 2 philosophies that ive found to work, "single core", and "lengthwise spine". These are both rather simple to understand, the former being a single critical component that everything your ship has branches off of (most of my ships are made using this style), so its very hard to cut the ship in half, and the critical section can be well protected inside thge ship and hard to hit in the 1st place. The downside of this approach is that when that part goes the entire ship is kaput, meaning you have little redundancy and if that part does indeed go you will be turned into a cloud of debris. I prefer this style because the odds of being split in half are very low, and 75% of the time a ship that is split in half is for all intents and purposes out of the battle even if its technically "alive". The latter style relies upon a long spine that runs down the entire ship from front to back. Ship components are then attached to that spine and solong as the spine remains intact, this ship can take a rather extensive beating and keep on going. The trick is to not loose the spine, which is obviously easier said then done. Another benefit of this style is that is provides much more useable surface area to attach weapons to it, and is much easier to make viable without quite as much experience as its more or less super simple, make a length of 3+ girders, then build out radially from those girders and place weapons and engines and fuelon the branches or directly onto the spine depending on how valuable the component is (usually command pods and probe cores get directly attached, fuel and such does not). Anyways, my chibi star destroyer is an example of the first style of construction, and as you can see with most of the superficial crap removed, everything in the ship branches off of that one component and is attached to the branches. As long as that part doesnt get hit and explode, the ship will at worst case loose a few engines or weapons to every direct hit, but will remain combat capable to some extent (unless you manage to destroy all 7 engines or knock off like 10 different weapon hardpoints). Technically its a bit of a hybrid though, since it has a root part but it also has multiple spines running lengthwise so i can have something to attach the front to, but since it has 1 component that will result in loss of the entire ship, id put it into style 1. This ship is an example of style 2, it has 3 girders one behind the other, off of which everything branches off and is attached to. As for armor, the simplest solution is to use girders as branches and then attach plates to them to cover the outside (the 2nd ship is a very good example of this even if its got a few weaknesses of its own). anything with 80m/s impact tolerance will do for armor, but some people find it better to use fuel tanks as sacrificial armor (which works pretty well from my experience but isnt quite my style so i stay away from that). Then make sure to tie everything together using struts, and AVOID autostrut like the plague unless the ship is so high on parts you literally have to in order to not crash when the ship loads. Autostruts are super buggy, and ive had very mixed results with some use being helpful but other use breaking a otherwise solid ship and making it the equivalent of unarmored freighter in survivability. Finally, wings are good as low-grade armor of cosmetic filler. Dont underestimate wings as they can and will deflect high velocity rounds, but they offer little if any stopping power so most rounds might change direction a bit when they hit wing, but wont explode completely or stop moving and are likely to hit something behind the wing. Another ship using type-2 construction with MK-2 composite armor (lighter and simpler then panels, but alot harder to get right). Now there are more advanced armor techniques that you can try, for example using MK-2/3 cargo bays which have some really funky hitboxes and tend to desintegrate some types of warheads. Most of my modern ships (like the above nebula class) use this armor as its alot lighter for the same protection, but if its not done perfectly it really sucks (and by perfectly i mean everything is where it needs to be, put 1 strut in the wrong spot and trhe ship goes from insanely hard to kill to 1 shottable by ibeams). that said, for starters i recommend sticking to the tried and true core of girders/ibeams with structural plates on the outside, but feel free to experiment with other styles to see what works for you, aslong as the core of teh ship is a ibeam or girder or some other 80m/s impact part, it should stand up to some weapons fire. Another tip is to have redundancy regardless of the design, always have at least 2 command modules (cockpits, seats, droid cores, ect), and always have 2-3 engines so that someone cant just gently tap the ship's arss and knock it out of the game. As for weapons, its remarkably simple but yet takes alot of testing to see what shapes work best. For unguided weapons, the best choices are RT-5+structural part on the tip (either small structural plates, girders or ibeams), or ibeam/girder with 2-8 sepatrons pushing it depending on how far you are ok engaging at (2 will work if you are ok firing from 300-400m or so, 4 or 8 for shorter ranges). For guided weapons, generally you want some combination of ibeams girders and panels. Different people have results with different parts, but ive found the best choice for simpler weapons are AP solid shot warheads where the structureal parts are all attached to themselves. The other choice is some sort of shrapnel rounds where the girders or ibeams attach to a fuel tank or other soft part, it breaks, and they scatter throughout teh ship. Not as good with new physics as it was back in the really old days, but ist still a valid concept when targeting weaker internals after a hole has been punched through the armor itself. There is alot of variety, and you will need to find what impact velocity works the best for you (i like 200-300m/s relative to target but it heavily depends on the target im shooting, thick targets need more, thin need less). Propulsion isnt really very critical, solong as it can accelerate the round from whatever range you shoot at up to the desired velocity. vernors are nice to help aim it precisely, but are weight that isnt essential if you can aim without them. Anyways, GL with your shipbuilding, and if you want a example craft or 2 to play with ill upload something that doesnt actually suck. Dont try and replicate my chibi star destroyer, its terrible and is purely used as a carrier/flagshipy thing that looks super cool but has lousy combat ability, the other ship isnt bad, but gets split every time it gets hit by my newer G5a torp from directly below it when hitting near the back.

If its the void, then i believe i have a file of it somewhere (i tend to collect people's ships to use as test platforms for various weapons when designing my own ships and weapons). Ill upload it if thats the ship u want...

I made 2 new ships that im actually happy with which brings my total of half decent vessels to 3. I dont really have enough time in my life to do a super serious competitive battle unless you are willing to possibly wait a few days every turn then id be able to do one. As for my half decent ships that i dont dislike because of some fatal flaws or so: First is my rather old but constantly overhauled SK-IV Nebula class frigate which is the defenition of efficiency. It has very good armor and firepower for its weight/part count (~60t, 240 parts) and comes with above average dV of ~2800. Really the only downside of said ship is the fact that it doesnt have a focused role like most of my other craft, and is more of a versatility above specialization (which lets it engage anything but keeps it from dominating any particular fight). After that is the SK-V Galaxy class cruiser which is the first ever cruiser that ive made which im happy with, and it has a good combo of survivability and firepower with a crazy 3150 dV at ~90t. Its also got a really nice fully decked out interior command deck (all ships i make that are cruiser or larger come with interiors as standard). The only real issue is the somewhat high part count of ~320, but considering what it has onboard (interior, tons of weapons, struts everywhere as i dont touch autostrut), its not THAT terrible in this regard. Its only real issue is the fact that it is not very efficient unlike the workhorse SK-IV. It has the exact same weapons (4 more RT-5s, 1 less G5a torp, less and weaker aux weapons), its armor is a tad better, but it also weighs 1.5 times as much so those gains dont really help that much. Finally, the bridge is a massive weakspot which can cripple the ship if someone is sadistic enough to wanna target it and murder the poor exposed crew. It looks stellar, works nice as i can aim the guns from the 2 cockpits, but serves no real combat purpose otherwise (not to mention being a actual armor weakness) and just eats part count. Maybee ill make a combat version of this by replacing the upper deck with another weapons barrel giving it the equivalent firepower of 2 SK-IVs in ammo capacity, but then itd look meh. Finally my fleet's filler ship, the SK-III Nova class micro-corvette which is the only AKS ship im actually happy with that is based around conventional armor layout (its so small that there is no point of doing anything else). Being conventional (and not MK-2 based like all the other ships i have) makes it very weak to anything larger then a small ibeam, but considering it has a SINGLE engine which is pretty much guaranteed to go if anything hits it near the back, why bother spending mass and part count to armor the bugger, instead deploy 5 of them for every cruiser and call it a day. Pretty much based it around the oversized guns strapped to a single engine principle, it has the best firepower per tonnage and part count of the 3, but has no survivability to speak of and doesnt have the ammo capacity to guarantee a kill in of itself not to mention lacks any form of guided weaponry which makes it rely on getting up to the target. At least it also has plenty of fuel at 2800dV so i can move it around as needed. Prolly will arm it with at least 1 guided weapon in addition to its stack of RT-5s. Also the armor makes me wanna rename it the "kamikaze cannon fodder", given that thats what its used for right now in a fleet wide engagement since its armor is really really non-existent. So yeah, i might be able to fight someone, after i finish my assault carrier (always wanted to make a good carrier, but nothing ive yet to try has really worked with that regard, too many parts, bad armor, no firepower, ect).

What i like about minmus is that its easily accessible without making huge dropships just to deploy a single medium or heavy tank. My standard set of city/perimeter defense buildings for all my factions can be more or less plopped down anywhere in the kerbol system, with the exception of places like tylo that require extra boosters on them or certain atmospheric planets, and ofc jool itself is almost impossible to land a building on. Vehicles on the other hand require alot of engineering to get anywhere, and i really really like my smaller line of dropships (which all have nice dedicated VTOL, and actually look pretty), which are able to work on mun or below gravity (albeit on minmus i can use a single one to drop like 3 tanks). Now i like teh challenge of higher gravity as well as long distance interplanetary missions, but in general minmus is probably the most easily accessible body in the entire game if you play something closer to the stock part sets. I can do a minmus mission in like 10 minutes (which is a plus for people like me that work 50 hours a week and cant spend ages playing games), while a mission to duna takes around half an hour if the orbits havent been aligned properly and im launching multiple vessels at once (i almost always send 2 entire fleets of ships with carriers and ground forces in 1 shot when going past kerbin's SOI, obviously you need something to shoot at when u get anywhere and i actually enjoy launching stuff legit and not ALT-F12ing everything to orbit).

Yeah i really like stock space battles, and even with the advent of BDA (which i do use for tank battles) ive never truly implemented mods for space combat as its both a challenge to do (compared to assigning armor values to whatever ship you made and slapping on some railguns), and much more interesting since you actually get to see every single round dealing damage (or failing to do so if it was badly designed) to a ship and tearing chunks off. That said, that thread is super outdated, as most of my "armor development" seems to have stagnated with no design ive come up with able to stand up to my SK-IV Nebula Class (complete redesign of the SK-104 just retaining similar exterior) i made a while back. Its absurdly low on parts (the hull itself without weapons is like ~120 parts), weighs a mear 60-70t depending on loadout, and has almost 3000 dV while retaining acceptable levels of TWR to go interplanetary in a single burn. The other ships on the thread arent bad by any means (a year ago or so they were super strong in just about every way), but compared to the MK-2 armor plated SK-IV they just suck in both part count and survivability, and most of the weapons on them are bad these days. SRMs (short range missile or what i call any variety of ibeam/girder + sepatrons) used to be the best weapon against any ship, now ive found that RT-5 based weapons are the best since they offer the best combination of part count (4 parts per shot is nothing), damage (not quite instakill but a few of them fired in sequence will end any reasonably sized ship), and weight. Only thing keeping SRMs in service for me is the fact that they are insanely small cross section wise and can be packed tightly in a very small area and that RT-5s are super large and you just cant get more then 4 stacks on the front of any reasonably sized vessel, and stacks are always more vulnurable then loads of super tiny ibeam weapons spread out everywhere. I also discontinued the impulse cannons. They were an attempt at making ships more part count efficient (only 3 parts per round, ibeam, decoupler, docking port), but having cfg edited decouplers with super high jettision force felt a little cheaty so i reserve their use only for vessels that are already so stupidly high on part count i cant afford to put any conventional weapons on them (mostly command ships get these as those all have detailed interiors and lag really badly). That and they sucked in general firepower wise and couldnt engage every target as effectively as a sepatron powered ibeam could (engage up close for lower impact velocity which is better against very thin targets). Anyways, sorry for the off-topic stuff, guess i better get back to making a few ships, i have a few ideas that may or may not obsolete the SK-IV which ive been really trying to do recently just because not a single one of my ideas seems to have exceeded that thing's performance level when you look at the entire package (i could always get one aspect superior, armor, weapons, ect, but it always resulted in massive part count and inferior general stats).

Considering this is a mod i wont play KSP without anymore, im never gonna completely abandon it (unless one day i stop playing videogames entirely which isnt gonna be anytime soon). That said, i have 0 plans for further development of this mod (besides keeping it functional when KSP updates) since ive about exhausted every possible effect i can with the mod that is actually supported by EVE itself and doesnt cause massive lag issues when in use. I did sorta consider making a ultra-HD version of the mod a few months ago, but i decided against it since then the performance would be like SVE and thus limited to only running with lower part count warships (and its pretty much impossible to make something well armored and armed under 200 parts regardless of construction style, and i like my fleet scale stock space battles). So yeah, ill keep the mod alive (if only to make myself happy as i wont play KSP without it anymore), but its very unlikely ill be adding anything or doing major changes to the mod itself until EVE comes out with features that support the 2 effects id love to have, properly done rain, and volcanoes (or just glowing volumetic particles in general, currently we only have glowing 2d layers and not 3d layers which is sorta lame).

I second this, unless squad has definite plans to permanently keep the old parts in game (which wouldnt be unwelcome, afterall the oil tanks make much prettier refineries, at least for ground bases, then the new revamped 2.5m trashcans), i strongly urge to replace the older parts (or at least include a sort of autoreplace feature that will allow one to replace all old instances with new part names while keeping craft largely intact even if a few things would need to be shifted around (as in case of geometry changes). Still, things like probe cores really shouldnt have duplicates, theres no reason for it. Having a few styles of the same fuel tank is nice (albeit the current mk1 fuel tanks are so ugly i wont use em even for oil refineries), but even that isnt quite necessary since all it does is increase load times/resource use and clutter up the part lists.

Liscense lets you do whatever you please with the art assets, so go nuts. I just dont have much mod time anymore so i let the community do what they will with my mod and perhaps someday ill make another update, but sofar im fairly happy with what i put together so i dont think im gonna spend loads of time on it (unless EVE comes out with proper support for rain, and glowing fog/cloud textures so i can make actually decent laythe rain, and put volcanoes on moho as i always wanted to do from day1).

I agree, but honestly, id much rather the devs make the texture files easily accessible without having to run mods like texture replacer to override the textures after they are in memory. It really wouldnt be all that hard to pull those files (or even everything) outside of the .assets files where they are currently located and put them in corresponding folders so that the end user can replace any of them or edit them as they please without using mods at all. This would also give people the choice of replacing any texture they dont like with another one of their choice. This is actually the main reason im not so sure i want to see mods like EVE become stock, what makes that mod so fun is that i can make my own damn cloud maps and textures and implement them in game, a stock implementation (if its stuck behind .asset files which are a absolute PITA to extract files from or modify in any way) would likely have a texture id like to change since im a fan of sci-fi and not 100% reality, and whatever squad does will. In other words, just make everything texture wise user configurable and then consider making a skybox texture that doesnt look like it came out of the 90s.