Questions about stock engine fairings

[Randazzo]

I have many questions! Hopefully someone will have the knowledge, or can direct me where to look to find out.

Do the fairings that generate around engines (both stock and modded, actually) actually function as a fairing, or are they cosmetic?

If they do function, how are they produced? Is it procedural or a model somewhere?

Is it possible to modify the dimensions of these fairings?

and finally

Is it possible to add automatic fairings to parts other than engines?

[ManuxKerb]

Hi

Yes it is possible to use fairing on other parts in 1.0 and up.

See: https://imgur.com/a/REm8c#27

I think they are cosmetic, and i guess they are made out of the collision mesh of the part.

I dont think you can modify the dimensions why would you want that ?

[Tiberion]

The engine fairings are an actual model (or pair of models, in the case of the LV-N) located within the same .mu file as the engine. It works with the ModuleJettison module in the config file, where you name the fairing "object" or model there. That module hides the model until such time that the bottom node of the engine has a part attached to it, then it spawns the model and activates it. During flight you can manually eject them, or when the bottom node gets decoupled from, the fairing will fall away with the part below automatically. The panels themselves become debris and won't persist through a reload. Since they are models, the only way to modify their size is to edit them. It's possible to load the fairings with a separate MODEL {} node in the part config, so they load from their own .mu, which means you can also independently set their scale and locations in the MODEL {} node. I have used this in Novapunch to use one model file for several different parts, you just need a texture that can handle the scaling without looking bad.

So yes you can use it on any part that has stack nodes (it doesn't have to be the bottom node, you can specify it in the ModuleJettison module config) and you can use the module to eject any sort of model you want, it doesn't have to be a fairing.

As such, its not really a "functional" fairing but for most of the currently implemented engine fairings, the difference it would make to drag performance would be negligible.

Actual interstage fairings would be wonderful at some point though, for sure.

Edited May 6, 2015 by Tiberion

[Randazzo]

*Smart stuff goes here*

Excellent, thank you for the information.

I was actually thinking of the Odin/Thor/Huginn fairing model while asking!