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This one goes out to the Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak fans! I decided to take a little break from Star Wars Replicas and found inspiration in the cool-looking lander bi-planes from the Khashar Plateau mission. Video of the "real" deal in action below, MAJOR SPOILER ALERT if you haven't already played the game, the video contains a pretty big plot spoiler. Here's the kerbalized SkunkTwerks Homeworld: Kharak Lander. Like most cool-looking sci-fi designs, this one posed an interesting set of challenges: the natural center of lift of this design is rather far forward, while the natural center of gravity is rather far aft. It took a lot of flight testing to get the balance right. Wing shape and angles took some serious fine-tuning as well. But it was a fun project, and I suspect a few more classic Homeworld crafts (especially from the original HW1 and HW2 games) may be in my future. -SkunkTwerks

Any homeworld fans here? I noticed a new homeworld game was coming out, and it got me thinking about my fond memories of homeworld, even just reading the manual. The manual was actually pretty good sci-fi, and kept the handwaving to a minimum, with a *lot* of backstory (that was almost completely irrelevant, but fun). I never played homeworld: cataclysm. Homeworld 2: was pretty good. I like that they dropped the whole Taiidan/Kushan thing (as I played through the original game having the taiidan as the exiles/kharakians/hiigarans, and a lot of the background fluff actually supports that, but the cannon gods decided to take a side, and even re-wrote some of the background fluff about the ship names), but indirectly established Kushan as cannon through the mothership design. I wasn't wild about the ret-con of the hyperspace core they found in the Khar toba as being some special "uber core" that was directly used in the mothership (as opposed to a reverse engineered and scaled up version as stated in the original). Or of Sajuuk not being the empire that had exiled them (as strongly implied but never explicitely stated), and instead being some progenitor warship... but overall it was fun This latest homeworld game also does a bit of retconning, in the form of a prequel. Compared to HW2, or cataclysm's storyline, its pretty minor though. The thing is... *there are no spaceships in the game* Its not a prequel about the great war before the exile, or leading the exile fleet to Kharak. Its about a war on the surface of Kharak. Its not about the Heresy wars/ Kiith Nabaal intervention mentioned in the backstory - which could make for a pretty good Age of Empires like campaign, playing as Kiith Nabaal, with a little bit of retconning to have them advance technologically as the campaign progresses, rather than WTFpwning the other Kiiths with repeating rifles, steel plating, and steam driven cannons... defeating armies 20 times their size, and having a huge proportion of the population side with them after they came out of hiding to put an end to the heresy wars that had gotten so bad that it was destroying the already marginal ecosystem (the Nabaal were the "good guys", always with very generous surrender terms, and the only goal was ending the centuries long war... after the end, they again withdrew, rather than maintain a hegemony) Nope... its about the expedition to the Khar Toba. What the original story described as a farily straightforward archaeological expedition to something a satellite detected in the middle of the desert has been turned into *spoilers follow* a military expedition that turns into full scale warfare, and a race to reach the khar toba for the Diiamid, and before Kiith Galasien (and another kiith that betrays you, believing that they alone are worthy to have its secrets). Yea... Kiith Galasien which in the original backstory refused to accept the technological progress and unity brought by the Nabaal, who lost almost all their strength, and basically became small scale raiders and sabateurs... now command massive war machines with advanced technology scavenged from *other wrecked spaceships* (I don't have such a problem with this, as the exile fleet did have multiple ships, a cutscene in the original game did show more than one ship going down there, and the backstory did mention lots of other debris in orbit... its plausible to say that the khar toba was the only one to make it down more or less intact with its systems [at least the fusion reactor] still functioning). Also... something about an imperial weapons satelitte and an imperial carrier in orbit around the planet when all this went down. Which would mean that the empire was aware of them finding the khar toba, recovering the hyperspace core (fine with me if we forget that HW2 re-write about the core being some super special irreproducible progenitor core, which would have made the empire go nuts trying to get it if they knew where it was), and the >100 years it took them to study the technology in the khar toba, build orbital infrastructure, mine stuff all around the system, test small hyperdrives, and build the mothership. Which would mean they sat around doing nothing just waiting for an excuse to wipe them out... when a simple message would already resonate with the various kiiths whose religions were ultimately based around the prohibition against developing hyperdrive technology. As opposed to the original storyline which its implied that the empire more or less forgot about them, and then were surprised by the massive hyperspace signature from the mothership's test jump, at which point they over reacted and basically nuked the planet, which triggered an internal rebellion over their brutality, of course made the mothership incredibly hostile to them, and ultimately triggered the intervention of the poorly described galactic council (as the empire wasn't the only player on the galactic scene, even if it did seem to be the most powerful)

I'm hoping to add in additional skybox textures, adding on to the work I've previously done. The problem is that I still don't have a program that can convert this kind of texture into a suitable cube texture for KSP. If you know of any photoshop plugins or external programs (I already have CubeTheSphere but it doesn't convert it correctly) that can turn a texture like this into a cubemap texture, please, please, send it my way. It would make a veteran very happy - Joe