A new line of parts

[Wjolcz]

I'm a fan of sci-fi ships that also look like actual usable vessels. Now, I've recently rewatched Pitch Black (again) and noticed the parts of the big ship had the cross section shape of a recangle (more or less; pics below).

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTdlz1yh60__3VC8wAlQjk4m19MAvDUhet_GayLZ7PONUxRPBFV

I have no idea what's with the top picture. Probably because mobile Opera sucks. Just google 'pitch black big spaceship', or sth.

Anyway, why I think such parts would be great to have:

-Bases. They have nice walls instead of being cylinders. that way they can stand either horizontally or vertically and still look good, and, what's most important, have walls perfect for landing gear, antennas, parachutes and all that useful jazz.

-Space stations/cargo/colony vessels. They would stack together really nicely to create a square-ish cross section (one on the top, one on the bottom). That makes them perfect for compact designs that could nicely blend into shapes of other parts (ideally, two roof-to-bottom stacked modules would have more or less the same cross section size as the huge rocket tanks). Crewed modules would have windows on each side, of course.

Why the MK3s aren't great for this kind of thing:

-They have the roof and bottom half-cylindrical bits which makes them not ideal for side attachments. Attaching gear on the bottom makes its CoM high, thus messing with (sometimes) buggy landing gear/prone to leaning to one side.

-Simply too big to stack them side-by-side.

The truss on ISS has more or less this shape, except it's not as elongated in one axis as this Pitch Black 'container' part. There would probably be only 4 needed: empty truss, cargo bay (<- these two could actually be one part with doors sliding/opening outwards creating additional floor), command/crew module and the lab. Since KSP is meant to be 'near future-ish' then having more actual near-future-ish parts would be nice to have. And we need some base modules anyway.

Edited December 26, 2016 by Veeltch

[Kerbinchaser]

I completely agree with you. 

[adsii1970]

Look up LackLuster Labs - continued. It's got all the shapes you're looking for, but it's not quite 1.2.2 ready
 

 

Edited December 26, 2016 by adsii1970

[SpacePilotMax]

The USI system does have something that looks quite like the top image. But for ships of that size, you need orbital shipyards because building a single-launch one is nearly impossible and docking... you know how it works in KSP. These would still be good to have in vanilla. But I'd rather see base parts and mechanics.

[Wjolcz]

7 hours ago, PilotMax said:

The USI system does have something that looks quite like the top image. But for ships of that size, you need orbital shipyards because building a single-launch one is nearly impossible and docking... you know how it works in KSP. These would still be good to have in vanilla. But I'd rather see base parts and mechanics.

What I'm talking about is not the whole ship though, but the middle container-like bits.

[SpacePilotMax]

I'll agree with you on that part. But considering that ship's size, you really do need to build it off world.