Two Meshes - One Part

[Absolution]

How picky is the KSP engine with regards to single parts and the meshes that they are composed of?

Am I able to overlap multiple, but independent, meshes under a single part or will that throw an error? I understand that KSP requires that each ship component be 1 'object' but that does not, necessarily, mean that that one object cant be composed of multiple meshes.

For example, I\'m modeling a fuel tank and would like to add some detail features. In particular I am aiming to model a small hose that runs down the side of the tank. Can they be individual meshes or must they all meet at common verts at some point?

[sal_vager]

You definitely can have several separate meshes, it\'s exactly what I did with the Propane tanks I made for Tosh\'s tiny rover and I intersect meshes with no problems, you can only ever have one node_collider per complete part though and that collider cannot have concave surfaces.

Edit:

0.15 allows multiple colliders? that\'s cool but I bet you have to use the .mu files and Unity3D to make that work, same with the normal maps, bump mapping and all the other fancy new stuff, no chance of any of that for me, I can\'t run Unity3D on Linux

[Cykyrios]

Just think of C7\'s landing gear: it\'s one part, but it is composed of several meshes (you can watch his tutorial on Unity).

With 0.15, you can even have multiple mesh colliders for only one part, which means REAL cargo bays with working doors are now doable (in a single part).