[WIP] German WWII rockets including never built absurdities

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Before I embarked on the revamp, there were RO configs included in the mod.  I've been working on those recently, as I noticed RO has almost caught up to stock versions.  The configs aren't quite ready for prime time, and I haven't even revamped the A10 yet, but the RO configs would live here when done https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/blob/master/configs/RealismOverhaulWernhers.cfg

The old non-revamped A10 still works.

Tis looking a bit ugly next to the new parts.  Also, you'll need hot staging.  But it will get you above the Karman line.

 

Edited January 25, 2020 by TiktaalikDreaming

[captainradish]

The A-2 is REALLY expensive. I chopped two zeros off the price on each part, which puts it at about the stock prices.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

1 hour ago, captainradish said:

The A-2 is REALLY expensive. I chopped two zeros off the price on each part, which puts it at about the stock prices.

I've never got around to balancing the prices.  Usually I stuff up and get a negative price somewhere if the part's empty of propellant.    Generally not a good look.

General production A-4 price = expensive for war time, but not bad.  First A-4 is nation cripplingly expensive. 

But, part of that includes the development work that went into the A-1(dud) A-2, A3(fizzle) and A-5  But realistically, the A-2 should be pretty darn cheap.  It's a glorified dual propellant bottle-rocket with a gyroscope.

[captainradish]

2 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

I've never got around to balancing the prices.  Usually I stuff up and get a negative price somewhere if the part's empty of propellant.    Generally not a good look.

General production A-4 price = expensive for war time, but not bad.  First A-4 is nation cripplingly expensive. 

But, part of that includes the development work that went into the A-1(dud) A-2, A3(fizzle) and A-5  But realistically, the A-2 should be pretty darn cheap.  It's a glorified dual propellant bottle-rocket with a gyroscope.

Yea, the A-2 tanks and the A-3/5 tank are at 13000 each, which makes it impossible to use in early career, unfortunately. Also, I didn't have the launch rails spawn in my game, although it may be due to my mods. I'm unsure.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

41 minutes ago, captainradish said:

Yea, the A-2 tanks and the A-3/5 tank are at 13000 each, which makes it impossible to use in early career, unfortunately. Also, I didn't have the launch rails spawn in my game, although it may be due to my mods. I'm unsure.

I suspect it's pretty obvious I haven't played career much.  I'll take a look in the next few days hopefully.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Twas a slightly long few. 

Did up a spreadsheet with costs, and worked on rough guess based on similar parts from stock.  I also set all the entryCost values of WWII era parts as 0.  I'm working on the assumption that these parts are pre-existing in the KSP stock campaign.  That would obviously change if using a variant tech tree with nodes suitable for very early rocketry.

[KAO]

Quick question: 

I'm playing my 1.6.1 Realism Overhaul installation. By what values should I set the @rescaleFactor for the A-9 parts? The winged fairing and ramjet aren't scaled. 

On another note, I'm wondering what's up with the gaps in the A-10 top fairing? Is that for wings?

[TiktaalikDreaming]

38 minutes ago, KAO said:

Quick question: 

I'm playing my 1.6.1 Realism Overhaul installation. By what values should I set the @rescaleFactor for the A-9 parts? The winged fairing and ramjet aren't scaled. 

On another note, I'm wondering what's up with the gaps in the A-10 top fairing? Is that for wings?

Neither of these have been redone for the revamp yet, so I'm not even sure it'll function in modern RO, or link to the right node placement anymore.  scale should also be set to 1.0, but I can't make any promises it'll function (a bit like the real thing I guess). 

The A-10 fairing gaps are for wings and the cool looking non-functional swept wing thing the A-9 had.  Also, if there's a staging issue and you decouple without droping the fairings, and everything is perfectly linear (ha) it'll let the fins through.

 

The old RO patch file is here;  https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/blob/a01113396bba10414784e0afaa747a315835103d/configs/RealismOverhaulWernhers.cfg

Again, where things are supposed to match revamped parts things might have changed a bit, and it was last tested in RO maybe 3 years ago.

RO warning: LOX+Ethanol with low TWR engines and general horribleness means you end up staging early.  Lots of drag slamming you back into the earlier stage.  And ruining your propellant flow.  Expletive tonnes of ullage or hot staging are needed.

Edited June 7, 2020 by TiktaalikDreaming

[KAO]

Thanks for the heads up! hot staging seems to be the way to go. The parts rescaled by 2.0 looked a bit out of place. I had a the Russian knock-off as a frame of reference.

I did try version 0.19.1 but the the nodes were completely off from where they were in 0.19.

I scaled up the A-10 fairing slightly to close the gaps since I play with FAR, it's voxel model should consider that part an enclosed hull. 

Edited June 7, 2020 by KAO

[TiktaalikDreaming]

I suspect the big issue is the weird mix of editions. 0.19.2 has a mostly updated configuration for ro, but still has the issue with unmatched parts, for the ramjet and the A-9 swept wing. I don't know if the wing is easily adjustable, but the ranker, being only placed once, can be shifted easily enough.

I think one of the last things I fixed up were some ro things.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

I remember now.

After I did the A-4, I did the A-2,3,5.  Then I turned my attention to doing a combined A-4b cockpit with landing wheel.  I'm still not sure that's a good idea in KSP with how wheels work, and it gave me no end of grief.  And I got sidetracked with my Nexus revamp.

I've re-opened my A6-9 files and adjusted some things.  Will be progressing the revamp on those.  Starting with the annoyingly awkward to place ramjet.  Which is now matched (in blender) to the correct stack node, re-UV mapped, and test AO baked (I do that to check a bunch of things).

 

Some slight mesh improvements happened.  The base shroud piece was just removed and replaced with a new copy from the A-4 revamp.  I fixed the mesh up around the weirder curves.  The internals are no longer floating.  Looks like I can probably get all the A4b-A6-A9 extras on one 2k texture as well. 

A fair way from in game yet, but progress.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Nodes are now rearranged so things fit without doing silly things;

Mostly re-unwrapped.  I'll be unwrapping the other wing parts and so on before any real texturing starts though, to make sure they're arranged on the texture atlas nicely.

 

https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/releases/tag/0.19.3 for anyone following along at home

Edited June 8, 2020 by TiktaalikDreaming

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Basic work done for the A-4b wing, and the A-6 wing now as well.  I had lost the unity set-up for all the wings and the ramjet, so there was a bit of trying to get nodes right and so on.

The 3 wing types, and the ramjet all fit on one 2k texture.  I very much doubt the cockpit will fit on as well, doubly so with an IVA.  I'm going to ditch my attempt to make a combined cockpit and landing wheel, as it was a disaster.  But I do want to have a bit of bonus liquid fuel (or kerosene iff real fuels is installed) on the cockpit part, so when using that, the ramjet has something to work with.

Next up is dumping UV maps out and starting a bump map.

Here's a (less crazy than I thought it would be) craft using the A-9 wings, the A-4b wings and the A-6 wings, with a ramjet.

 

https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/releases/tag/0.19.200610

Edited June 10, 2020 by TiktaalikDreaming

[TiktaalikDreaming]

And adding some colour to the ramjet,

 

Edited June 12, 2020 by TiktaalikDreaming

[TiktaalikDreaming]

I still have a bit of work to do, normals for the A9 body wing, and specular, plus the paint variants, but I now have the three wing variants looking OK at first glance;

A-4B

A-6

A-9

 

 

 

[TiktaalikDreaming]

The long delayed A-4b+ cockpit has started being redone.

Or as I like to think of it, the self cremation unit.  I tried to organise it like a WWII German fighter cockpit, but between giant kerbal heads and the fact that there's very little space up top there, it consistently looked stupid.  There's just not enough length, so the canopy ends up looking like a cartoon plane.  By sinking the kerbal further back and deeper into the part, and just accepting that visibility will be fairly bad, this semi space age looking thing emerged.

The IVA will emerge as well, and I have a version of it, but the walls joining the canopy hatch and the rest is fairly awful at the moment.  All parts with IVAs take a bit longer to get into game.  But it should be too long to get a basic version up and running to replace the old cockpit

[halowraith1]

looking really nice, will you be overhauling the A-10+ parts as well?

[TiktaalikDreaming]

3 hours ago, halowraith1 said:

looking really nice, will you be overhauling the A-10+ parts as well?

Eventually.

Some of those are a bit embarrassing, with seams showing clearly etc.  And a lot of textures could be switched out for a 1 pixel green spot.  It's like I made the 3d models and never got around to texturing them or something 

[TiktaalikDreaming]

I've added a specular layer, keeping it fairly basic for now, and a second colour variant, cheap old green.  I basically had to add the green to get the painted areas all mapped out to do the specular.  And I had to do the specular because the non-shiny canopy was annoying me.

Still testing with my Asterisk Wing "space fighter", A-4b-6-9 hybrid.

 

 

 

To Do list based on things so far.

IVA - at least the basic shape, a chair, kerbal transform, etc - except I seem to have broken my PartTools in Unity and can't spawn an IVA or prop.

Edgewear and general grunge - to match other A-4 parts

Emissive for window toggled with light

Fix wing controls, the wings need rotating to have the controls along the axis, meaning attack node needs shifting and rotating. <- started, trying to remember trig from decades ago

Do that camo pattern.  That's gonna be a bit of a pig to have it all match up.  <- done

 

Edited June 18, 2020 by TiktaalikDreaming

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Camo pattern done.  The surface attach wings aren't able to always be matched up with the fuselage camo pattern obviously.  But broadly they fit.  In fact, the A-9 wings don't exactly match, as the two sides of the main tank aren't the same.  It really doesn't seem to make much difference in game though.  An extra line along a seam between parts is just more camo pattern

Also, I noticed I forgot a bit of yellow on the ramjet.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

New variant;

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Jeb finally fits in,

Even if his compass is upside down,

Current git commit has the cockpit, but the A-4b wing is part way towards having itself rotated and the attach node is extremely wonky.  

[TiktaalikDreaming]

Cockpit unit added.  It pretty much all still fits on one extra 2k texture for all the A-4 "bonus" items.  I'm probably happier about that than I should be. I blame the Nexus.

Jeb's test flight of the new IVA mask, and returning my A-4b wings from experimental attach nodes unfortunately happened at the wrong time/angle for good photography.

I returned the A-4b wings to non-experimental so I could pack a dev release via github, https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/releases/tag/0.19.200621

The IVA is still fairly  basic.  It's the basic space, plus a seat and a dash panel with some basic gauges.  I can't say the digital speedo is totally in character for the part, but it's the only speed indicator in the base squad props.  I will add a secondary dash to show IFF the game has something else, once I decide which mod adds the most suitable bits.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

And now an IVA using ASET props.  Although I need to switch out the speedo.  There's times I guess when you need a velocity indicator (esp in a space game) with increments of 1kmps, but probably should have checked that before sticking it on the dash of a WWII era rocket plane.

That's the view doing a ramjet powered cruise at around MACH 4, no discernible shift in the speedo clearly designed for orbitable work.    I think I'll go look for something called an air-speed-indicator.  No-one should be doing 100kmps in atmo.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

OK, better ASET based IVA.

I caved in and used the NASA style resource gauges.  I would have preferred olde style round gauges. But at least it's functional.

The other option would be to do my own props, but I just want to get a basic functional IVA for the moment, and move on to some landing skids.  Looking at the cockpits for WWII era Messerschmidts, there's virtually no text, just gauges, and no colour.  So you needed to know before hand which dial showed what.  I guess that's OK if you already need to know, it's pretty harsh on kerbal players though.