Paint-on ablator material

[yorshee]

I had an idea earlier and I thought it would be cool so...here it is!

I was thinking about how you can't make a stock shuttle look like a proper shuttle because the spaceplane parts lack the black ablative tiles on the bottom. A solution for this could be to have a paint-on ablator tool (and eraser tool) that lets you draw ablator onto where you want to place it - changing the camera angle to be able to paint different parts. I think this method of adding a paint-on ablative using the mouse cursor as a paintbrush would be super user-friendly, just like how fairings were implemented.

Using this adds onto the amount of ablator resource on you have on your craft (thus making it heavier) and you can't tweak it as the paint-on ablative itself wouldn't be considered a seperate part, it's just a texture overlay, so right-clicking on it does nothing other than display the normal right-click menu for the actual part you right-clicked on. Also, you can't put ablator over windows.

You could also change the colour of your crafts with this too, you don't have to use just black or wooden-brown ablator. You could use lots of different colours to give your ship a fancy heat-resistant coat of paint, which will make peoples' crafts a lot more unique! The ablator could turn black after being ablated away, though I'm not sure about that, some people might not want their carefully-painted ships ruined.

[Whirligig Girl]

Absolutely yes.

[CaptainTurbomuffin]

I would also like a more expensive, maybe heavier, but reusable version, that's not being abalated away. But currently, spaceplane parts do have something like that, as they have an especially high max. temperature. And for the black? Kerbpaint, I would say.

[Yukon0009]

I think there is a mod for this but it dosent make parts black.

[DSKY]

I had an idea earlier and I thought it would be cool so...here it is!

I was thinking about how you can't make a stock shuttle look like a proper shuttle because the spaceplane parts lack the black ablative tiles on the bottom. A solution for this could be to have a paint-on ablator tool (and eraser tool) that lets you draw ablator onto where you want to place it - changing the camera angle to be able to paint different parts. I think this method of adding a paint-on ablative using the mouse cursor as a paintbrush would be super user-friendly, just like how fairings were implemented.

Using this adds onto the amount of ablator resource on you have on your craft (thus making it heavier) and you can't tweak it as the paint-on ablative itself wouldn't be considered a seperate part, it's just a texture overlay, so right-clicking on it does nothing other than display the normal right-click menu for the actual part you right-clicked on. Also, you can't put ablator over windows.

You could also change the colour of your crafts with this too, you don't have to use just black or wooden-brown ablator. You could use lots of different colours to give your ship a fancy heat-resistant coat of paint, which will make peoples' crafts a lot more unique! The ablator could turn black after being ablated away, though I'm not sure about that, some people might not want their carefully-painted ships ruined.

I like the idea, but I have to point out one technical detail: the shuttle tiles were NON-ablative. Apollo and its predecessors used ablative heat shields.

[Feradose]

I absolutely love this idea, I'd love seeing my carefully painted spaceplanes slowly char and get dark while reentering and going fast!

Sadly the idea seems a bit difficult to get go stock game..

[Tex_NL]

...

Sadly the idea seems a bit difficult to get go stock game..

Yes and no.

If you actually want a paintbrush tool to spray ablator on to parts things might become difficult. The game would have to keep track of each and every section of everything that is or isn't painted. This could potentially slow the game down to seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

However one could do it along the lines of B9 Aerospace. Cycle through a number of pre-painted textures each with their own set of ablator settings. This will limit your options slightly but in turn keeps the game playable.