[1.12.x] MissingHistory v1.9.3: Handy parts to complement Making History.

[Snark]

Hi gang,

I'm pleased to announce the release of MissingHistory v1.2.  This adds a gray/orange variant to the Kerbodyne 3.75m tanks (the S3-3600, S3-7200, and S3-14400).

...Before anyone gets too impressed, I hasten to add that this was done in fine half-assed MissingHistory tradition by simply cloning/rescaling the gray-orange variant of the 1.875m tanks from Making History; it's config-only, no actual artwork done here.  (This also means that you won't get these variants unless you have Making History, since it's using models from there.)

Enjoy! 

13 hours ago, Muetdhiver said:

In that line, how hard would it be to add the orange/gray textures for 2.5 / 3.75 / 5m parts ? I find it quite sad that there is no way to use the gray/orange color in an harmonious way past 1.85m rockets. I have no experience in modding ksp so maybe what I'm asking about is quite hard ?

Well, adding an actual texture would be an art task that would take both talent and quite a lot of time.  In the case of the reskinned 1.25m parts, we had Porkjet's free textures to work with; the black/white texture was free from Porkjet, and (since it's free) Jarin was free to use that as a starting point when he put together his excellent gray/orange reskin.

In the case of these other tanks, we don't have such a free texture to work from, which means producing a new skin would require actually producing a completely new texture from scratch, which is a fairly tall order.

...On the other hand, of course, if one is willing to take the practical-but-half-assed approach (as I am) ... one can achieve much the same effect by cloning/rescaling Making History parts, at the cost of having not-very-original-looking artwork.  That's what I've done for the 3.75m tanks in this MissingHistory 1.2 update.  I might look at the 2.5m tanks later.  The 5m tanks, I left alone because they're so much bigger than the other parts that scaling up a regular small-part model just ends up seeming ... kinda off, to me.  Something to consider for the future, perhaps.

5 hours ago, Kwebib said:

Do you think the Swivel and Valiant should be swapped in the tech tree, though?

Considered it when first putting MissingHistory together, decided not to.  For one thing, for game balance reasons I prefer to leave the stock parts in their stock positions on the tech tree, unless there's a good reason otherwise.  For another... having the Valiant be slightly after the Swivel just feels better balanced, to me.  Getting to orbit is a key milestone for early KSP career, and a major advance towards that is having some small, lightweight engine for an upper stage.  That's why the Terrier is a higher-tech engine than the Swivel, for example, despite being dinkier.  So making the Valiant be higher-tech than the Swivel just made sense to me.  It's in between the Swivel and Terrier in size, so making it in-between on tech also seemed to make sense to me.

[Kwebib]

3 hours ago, Snark said:

Getting to orbit is a key milestone for early KSP career, and a major advance towards that is having some small, lightweight engine for an upper stage.  That's why the Terrier is a higher-tech engine than the Swivel, for example, despite being dinkier.  So making the Valiant be higher-tech than the Swivel just made sense to me.  It's in between the Swivel and Terrier in size, so making it in-between on tech also seemed to make sense to me.

Makes sense. Thanks for the update!

Edited March 25, 2018 by Kwebib

[Rassa Farlander]

Thanks so much for this mod and the great updates! This is a must-have mod for me in 1.4.1. w/Making History.

[Jarin]

On 3/24/2018 at 3:49 PM, Snark said:

I'm pleased to announce the release of MissingHistory v1.2.  This adds a gray/orange variant to the Kerbodyne 3.75m tanks (the S3-3600, S3-7200, and S3-14400).

And here I was coming to apologize for not having anything to show yet on original skins for these over the weekend, and then you just go and just knock them out with a config. 

Looks better than I would have expected with the resize, too. Very nice.

[Muetdhiver]

The rescaled 3.75 grey/orange tanks looks great to me. Pretty happy with it and it allies for cool looking soviet styled rockets. Thx again for your work.

I'm a bit surprised that they only released the 1.5 size truss decoupler for 1.85 but not any other size.

Question to all : does anyone know of a way to change the color/style of the engine shrouds from the default white grey to something more fitting to dark grey / orange ?

 

 

[Snark]

On 3/27/2018 at 4:11 AM, Muetdhiver said:

Question to all : does anyone know of a way to change the color/style of the engine shrouds from the default white grey to something more fitting to dark grey / orange ?

It's hard to say for sure, since documentation for all of this is practically nonexistent and there aren't a lot of examples to compare.  However, having done a bit of digging, I'm inclined to think that it can't be done.

(Unless Squad were to heavily overhaul the design of ModulePartVariants, which seems unlikely, or unless some modder were to write plugin code to try to support this.  And to be clear, if such a modder exists, that modder would not be me, as I don't have the time or inclination to try to solve that particular problem.)

The reasons why I think it would be hard-if-not-impossible have to do with the fairly inflexible design of ModulePartVariants.  Technobabble in spoiler section.

Spoiler

As far as I can tell, ModulePartVariants lets you do one of the following:

1. Pick a different set of meshes to display, as long as they all have different names and you're not changing any textures on specific ones.  (This is what the variant engines, structural tubes, and engine plates do in Making History.  They turn various meshes on and off, but they don't change any textures.)
2. Pick a different texture to display, as long as your part is just one model and you're not changing any meshes.  (This is what the variant fuel tanks do in Making History.  They get new paint jobs, but the geometry doesn't change at all.)

That's it.  You can have one, or the other.  Switchable geometry, or switchable paint job.  Not both.

Asking for "change the color of the engine shrouds" means you'd need to have both things, so it doesn't work.  Also, the variant engines in Making History are actually composited from multiple models (one for the engine, one for each of the various shroud sizes), so that also won't work.

I'd put this solidly in the "ain't gonna happen" category.

And before you ask, yes, the engine plates and structural tubes suffer from pretty much exactly the same problem, so you're not going to get gray (or any other) variants of those, either.

I think it technically would be possible to add variant-shroud-color to non-variant engines, e.g. the Porkjet models for Pug, Valiant, Swivel, Reliant, Terrier.  However, I'm kinda reluctant to do that, for a couple of reasons.  First, it feels like sort of a halfway job (why bother prettifying those if the main Making History engines still stick out like a sore thumb).  Second, I still harbor fond dreams of going back at some point and giving those engines a variant so they can switch between the "regular" version (what you see now) and the "boat tail" version that Porkjet made... and if I were to do that, then for the technobabble reasons described above, it would become impossible to have a variant shroud color.  And given a choice between "regular / boat-tail variant" and "different shroud color variant", I'd take the former over the latter.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I think them's the breaks. 

[EDIT]  Of course, the above discussion is only relevant to this mod.  If one is willing to write a bunch of code and put significant work into it, things can be done.  Check out the Decoupler Shroud mod-- perhaps you may find it useful?

Edited August 2, 2018 by Snark
Add link to Decoupler Shroud, for the curious

[Muetdhiver]

Ok cool. thanks for the explanation it was clear enough. I'll keep using my workaround : no shrouds and using struts to build a soviet strut styled shroud when using such tanks ;p

 

 

 

[MaxwellsDemon]

This might be part of the issue:  I've noticed a few texture-loading problems, where a texture is dropping out and a neutral blank gray is showing instead.   I have observed this with both engine shrouds and with flags; I am not clear on what could be causing it.   When the engine shroud is that sort of flat neutral gray, it looks quite odd on the rocket (tolerable, but odd, and I'm of the opinion that it's some sort of bug).

[CobaltWolf]

@Snark my solution is usually to just fall back on mesh switching, with duplicate (but separately named) meshes that have different textures assigned to them. Maybe inflates the .mu ever so slightly but shouldn't matter much during gameplay.

[Snark]

7 minutes ago, CobaltWolf said:

@Snark my solution is usually to just fall back on mesh switching, with duplicate (but separately named) meshes that have different textures assigned to them. Maybe inflates the .mu ever so slightly but shouldn't matter much during gameplay.

Yes, and that's fine, except what if you need to change the geometry and the paint?  Do you want a Mastodon with six variants on it?  I sure don't.

• Full, White
• Mid, White
• Bare, White
• Full, Gray
• Mid, Gray
• Bare, Gray

Personally, I don't care much about coloration for cosmetic purposes (and I always use the "white" color scheme anyway, so it doesn't affect me), but I do care, passionately, about UI clutter; I loathe it.  So for me, a solution that requires N*M variants in order to "solve" the problem would be a cure worse than the disease.

Of course, different people have different priorities.  I know that there are plenty of people who do care about the colors, quite a lot (plenty of them in this thread) ... and who may not care about UI clutter, so much.  (If everyone felt about UI the way I do, then lots of popular mods like KER wouldn't exist, after all.)  So someone else might like such a thing... but that person would not be me, and my motivation to tweak the mod to do a thing that I like less than stock is, shall we say, minimal.

Not to mention the fact that the stock (including Making History) engines aren't free, which means it's not okay to copy them.  I'd have to re-model the shrouds from scratch for this approach to work, which isn't going to happen.

[Snark]

Hi everyone,

I've released MissingHistory version 1.3.  This one adds 1.875m ore and xenon tanks.  Here are all the 1.875m parts, with a Mk2 command pod for comparison:

The xenon tank is handy for when you want to build a somewhat-bigger ion craft-- stick a 1.875m engine plate under it with three or four ion engines, and you can really go to town. 

I've also added an optional "tweaks" directory to the config file, which you can install if you so choose.  That's going to be my place to put little modifications to Making History parts to address certain... peculiarities.

Since these tweaks are changes to the base parts, they can affect compatibility if you share .craft files with others, which is why they're provided here as optional components.

Currently, the only tweak included is a fix for the Cheetah, so that its bottom attachment node isn't dangling down in space practically half a meter below the bottom of the engine (it just bugged me, okay?) Other tweaks may be added in the future.

Enjoy!

[theonegalen]

Thanks for this, @Snark. Now I gotta make updated tech configs for all of these to work with Unmanned Before Manned.

Seriously, you've knocked out the SETI Part Overhauls from my install, and I've been using those since they were released.

[ddavis425]

Would it be possible to edit the stock Gemini service module to be conical shaped like the real one? Like 1.875m on top and 2.5m on the bottom. The one in game is cylindrical and looks terrible.

Edit: Also if that is possible to do, then some upscaled Cheetah and Bobcat engines to 2.5m would be good to fit the new size of the rocket.

Edited March 28, 2018 by ddavis425

[OhioBob]

34 minutes ago, ddavis425 said:

Would it be possible to edit the stock Gemini service module to be conical shaped like the real one?

That would take a whole new model, which @Snark has said he's not doing.  This mod is just doing stuff that can be accomplished through config files.  It's possible to rescale parts, but not reshape them.  I.e. it's possible to change diameter and length, but not go from cylindrical to conical.
 

Quote

Edit: Also if that is possible to do, then some upscaled Cheetah and Bobcat engines to 2.5m would be good to fit the new size of the rocket.

You can you Tweakscale for something like that.  Though I haven't checked to see if the DLC parts are tweakable.
 

Edited March 28, 2018 by OhioBob

[Snark]

10 hours ago, ddavis425 said:

Would it be possible to edit the stock Gemini service module to be conical shaped like the real one? Like 1.875m on top and 2.5m on the bottom. The one in game is cylindrical and looks terrible.

Yeah, that's solidly in the "not gonna happen" category, for a couple of reasons.

First, as @OhioBob points out, it would require producing an entirely new model, since you can't change a cylinder to a cone just by rescaling.  And making new models is a ton of work, even if you have the talent and skillset for it, which I do not.

Second, I just don't use the part myself.  Rant in spoiler.

Spoiler

In general I love most of the new parts in Making History, but I have to confess that I don't have any use at all for any of the service modules.  I simply don't see the point.  Given the way I play and the way I design my rockets, I find them neither necessary nor useful.

In particular, they've got all this internal shelving stuff that as far as I'm concerned just gets in the way, and they don't provide me any design options that I find that I actually need in my gameplay.  Yes, I guess it's possible to stick some small radially-attachable stuff in there, I suppose?  But I don't need that, because small radially-attachable stuff is, well, small.  And radially attachable.  Which means I can just keep on sticking them to the surface of my rockets the way I've always done.

The one thing that I need service bays for in my own gameplay is when I need a good place to put stack-mounted parts inline in the middle of a rocket.  But I can't do that with any of these Making History service modules, because they've got all this (to me) useless shelving in the way that prevents that, and in any case I already had the stock service bays since forever.

What would have been useful to me would have been if they added some cylindrical, rocket-friendly cargo bays, i.e. like the Mk2 and Mk3 spaceplane bays but in a form factor that works well for rockets.  That would have been useful to me.

Please note that I'm not criticizing the parts themselves.  They look cool, and I'm sure that a lot of players can find good uses for them.  They're just not my personal cup of tea, at all, because of the way that I happen to build my rockets in KSP.

Since I personally don't have any use for the part itself, it means that I have very little motivation to spend time and effort trying to optimize it.  Bear in mind that modding's just a hobby, and I mainly mod for myself to "fix" those little aspects of the game that bug me.  And I share the mod just on the off chance that something I find useful might be useful to other folks as well.  

 

10 hours ago, ddavis425 said:

Edit: Also if that is possible to do, then some upscaled Cheetah and Bobcat engines to 2.5m would be good to fit the new size of the rocket.

Yes, it's easily doable, and no, I'm not gonna. 

Rationale:  we already have plenty of 2.5m engines, both in stock and in Making History.  The Cheetah and Bobcat are fine as they are, in my opinion, and I don't see that any useful purpose is served by up-scaling them, other than cluttering up the parts list.

(Well, "fine" except for the Cheetah's bottom stack node, which for some odd reason is dangling nearly half a meter down in empty space below the bottom of the engine, which bugs the heck out of me, which is why I added optional config to fix that in MissingHistory 1.3.)

[Jarin]

7 hours ago, Snark said:

In particular, they've got all this internal shelving stuff that as far as I'm concerned just gets in the way, and they don't provide me any design options that I find that I actually need in my gameplay.  Yes, I guess it's possible to stick some small radially-attachable stuff in there, I suppose? 

Addon to mini-rant: it doesn't even bloody surface attach properly, and the lack of radial symmetry means shoving stuff into the shelving with the offset tool just leads to unbalanced rockets.

/rant

Yeah, the new service bays... I am not a fan.

[Snark]

50 minutes ago, Jarin said:

Yeah, the new service bays... I am not a fan.

I actually had an idea "hey, let's look at the model to see if by any chance the shelves are modeled as a separate mesh within the part", so that if they were, I could use some config to add a variant to these modules so you could turn off the shelving (and add an interior stack node) if you want.

Alas, having inspected the model... no dice.  The entire part is cast from a single piece of iron, so to speak-- one mesh for the whole shebang, it's impervious to variants.  Oh well, it was a nice idea while it lasted, which was about two minutes. 

[theonegalen]

The Apollo version has internal stack nodes, and I use it to make my CSM. I haven't taken the Gemini version for a spin yet, though.

[JAFO]

@Snark...  thank you, thank you, thank you for this mod! Very rarely does a parts mod make me happy the way this one has.

 

On 3/17/2018 at 12:57 PM, OhioBob said:

I still think the "gray" color scheme in the DLC looks green.  Don't know why but it just does.  For some reason my eyes tend to perceive gray as slightly green, at least when there are other colors in the image.

Heh.. you should try having colours appear to be different shades depending on which eyeball you're looking through! Pretty much all colours appear 2 or 3 shades lighter when I focus on them with my left eye, instead of my right. Dunno why.. I speculate that maybe the left pupil is open a tiny bit more than the right, allowing more light in and washing out the colours slightly, but I've never been able to actually see any difference in pupil size when I look in a mirror. Just one of those weird things that happen, I guess.

[KSPrynk]

On 3/28/2018 at 11:19 AM, Snark said:

Rationale:  we already have plenty of 2.5m engines, both in stock and in Making History.  The Cheetah and Bobcat are fine as they are, in my opinion, and I don't see that any useful purpose is served by up-scaling them, other than cluttering up the parts list.

I agree, Squad will eventually sort out the Cheetah and Bobcat, and there are plenty of larger scale engine mods.  I really think @Snark hit this out of the park with the Pug, Valiant, and Stomper.  I'm enjoying the challenge of 1.875m scale "only what's needed to do the job" rockets for unmanned exploration, now that I'm over my "how big can I make it" phase in KSP.

[Kaa253]

Unfortunately, I have discovered that the Porkjet styled 1.25 m tanks have broken drag configuration.

I have tried to fix it but the solution seems to be beyond my skill level.

Edited April 8, 2018 by Kaa253

[Snark]

On 4/8/2018 at 7:36 AM, Kaa253 said:

Unfortunately, I have discovered that the Porkjet styled 1.25 m tanks have broken drag configuration.

Thanks, will look into it.

[Snark]

Okay, @Kaa253, I've taken a preliminary look, and as far as I can tell, everything looks fine, at least when I try it, in the scenario I tried.

I built a simple, deliberately overpowered rocket with a Mainsail on a 32-ton tank.  I mounted four 1.25m fuel tanks sticking out radially from the middle of the ship.  There's a stock Mk1 liquid fuel tank on left and right sides, and an FL-T400 (Porkjet's variant) on top and bottom.  Turned on the drag arrows and let 'er rip.

Result:  as you can see, all four tanks are generating drag.  The drag from the modded Porkjet FL-T400's was about equal to that of the stock Mk1 liquid fuel tanks, as expected (since they're the same size and shape).

So that seems perfectly reasonable and normal to me.  I don't know if you're running into a bug, or whether you're seeing normal behavior that you're interpreting as a bug, or whether maybe you're testing some scenario significantly different from what I'm testing.  So at this point it's hard for me to tell whether you have a legitimate issue or not.  One thing that would help, with bug reports, is if you can make them detailed and comprehensive (i.e. don't assume that I know what you're thinking of, or that I'm necessarily going to observe the same things that you do).  Specifically:  exactly which parts have you tested, and what did you observe, and how was that different from what you expected to observe, and did you try running the same scenario both with the stock tanks and with the Porkjet versions.  Yes, that's a lot I'm asking for, but having that info would really help me a lot, and please bear in mind that there are a lot of you guys but only one of me.    So the more specific and helpful you can make the information, the higher the likelihood that I'll be able to get the time to figure out what's going on.  (For example, in your bug report above, you simply said "broken" and provided a screenshot, which might seem self-evident to you but isn't super useful to me, diagnostically speaking.)

Bear in mind that I didn't generate these part models myself; I just downloaded Porkjet's.  So if there's something wrong with them, there's little I can do about it-- dissecting models isn't really in my skill set.  Also, they don't specify custom drag cubes or anything, and as far as I know the way the game works is that it just automatically generates the drag info based on the shape of the part's model, and the shape seems fine, so, first, I'm honestly puzzled how they could have a bug, and, second, even if they did, I have no idea how I'd go about identifying why, or trying to fix it, unless someone who's a whole lot more familiar with part modeling than I am could step in to thelp.

[OhioBob]

3 hours ago, Snark said:

Bear in mind that I didn't generate these part models myself; I just downloaded Porkjet's.  So if there's something wrong with them, there's little I can do about it-- dissecting models isn't really in my skill set.  Also, they don't specify custom drag cubes or anything, and as far as I know the way the game works is that it just automatically generates the drag info based on the shape of the part's model, and the shape seems fine, so, first, I'm honestly puzzled how they could have a bug, and, second, even if they did, I have no idea how I'd go about identifying why, or trying to fix it, unless someone who's a whole lot more familiar with part modeling than I am could step in to thelp.

It sounds like you really don't need to change anything.  But if you did, couldn't you just copy the drag cubes of the stock tanks in PartDatabase.cfg* and add them to Porkjet's cfgs.  I think KSP would then use those drag cubes rather than generating new ones.

* Of course you would need to use PartDatabase.cfg from an KSP installation that doesn't include any tank modifications.

[Snark]

10 minutes ago, OhioBob said:

It sounds like you really don't need to change anything.  But if you did, couldn't you just copy the drag cubes of the stock tanks in PartDatabase.cfg* and add them to Porkjet's cfgs.  I think KSP would then use those drag cubes rather than generating new ones.

Yep, I'm aware of that.    Really prefer not to do that unless there's strong evidence of a specific problem and this seems to be the only way around it, though-- it's less maintainable and adds more cryptic gobbledygook to the configs.