[WIP] KewtSAT Development Thread

[FreeThinker]

What would be realy cool if we could bring the Planetary Society  cubesat into KSP

What is so cool about it? Well its a cubesat with an solar sail

Which when unfold into this

which enables it to go where no cubesat has gone before and do real exploration interplanetary missions collecting new science

Ideally you combine it with beamed laser network, allowing you to launch it at much lower orbits and arrive at your missing destination faster.

A lightsail and beamed laser propulsion might sound like something hard to achieve, which is correct , but I already have that covered

As you can see it even supports beamed power and takes into account  drag effects, it allows this tiny craft to travel anywhere in the solar system up to the furthers reaches in the ort cloud.

Now the only thing that need to be done is someone to convert this PDF into a working animated ksp model, and we are in business

Edited June 10, 2018 by FreeThinker

[Nivee~]

6 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

What would be realy cool if we could bring the Planetary Society  cubesat into KSP

What is so cool about it? Well its a cubesat with an solar sail

Which when unfold into this

which enables it to go where no cubesat has gone before and do real exploration interplanetary missions collecting new science

Ideally you combine it with beamed laser network, allowing you to launch it at much lower orbits and arrive at your missing destination faster.

A lightsail and beamed laser propulsion might sound like something hard to achieve, which is correct , but I already have that covered

 

As you can see it even supports beamed power and takes into account  drag effects, it allows this tiny craft to travel anywhere in the solar system up to the furthers reaches in the ort cloud.

Now the only thing that need to be done is someone to convert this PDF into a working animated ksp model, and we are in business

I can surely make it, given some time! I need to finish the core parts of my Mod first. 

[kerbinorbiter]

For me the hardest part of modding is texturing but well im no artist and id say a 1700 polly count is good? But im no expert

[Nivee~]

2 minutes ago, kerbinorbiter said:

For me the hardest part of modding is texturing but well im no artist and id say a 1700 polly count is good? But im no expert

Thanks! I managed to lower the poly count to 1050 after removing some unnecessary faces.

3 minutes ago, kerbinorbiter said:

hardest part of modding is texturing

I can relate! I have the artistic skills of a Mountain Gorilla!

[FreeThinker]

3 minutes ago, kerbinorbiter said:

For me the hardest part of modding is texturing but well im no artist and id say a 1700 polly count is good? But im no expert

Well you don't have have to worry about high fidelity textures on a cubesat to mach because the closest distance you can get to cubesat is 1  - (0.1 /2) = -.95 meter

[kerbinorbiter]

No im worse all i do is open up paint and use the fill tool

[DeltaDizzy]

18 hours ago, kerbinorbiter said:

No im worse all i do is open up paint and use the fill tool

wow

[Nivee~]

13 hours ago, DeltaDizzy said:

wow

I take its not the right way to texture??

[kerbinorbiter]

No it isn’t

[Nivee~]

Two solar panels for our lil cubesats!

But something seems off....any ideas what it might be?

[qzgy]

21 hours ago, Nivee~ said:

But something seems off....any ideas what it might be?

Not super qualified or anything, but I would hazard a guess that I think you might need some more shading on the actual little photovoltaic cells to distinguish it from the background yellow which is also looking a little flat on the edges. White lines could also be made maybe a little wider? Might also help to add more yellow to the top and bottom and reduce some at the edges since it looks quite uneven at the moment.

 

Like the look of things so far though. Good luck.

[wasml]

On 6/13/2018 at 2:21 AM, Nivee~ said:

But something seems off....any ideas what it might be?

The frame seems a bit wide to me - I'd make the cells a bit wider or shrink the frame a bit (says the modder with the artistic skills of a low land gorilla)

[Nivee~]

I made this yesterday(Yesternight?)

The 20x20x40cm camera, a science payload for the cubesat!

[SpaceMouse]

On ‎6‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 2:06 AM, Nivee~ said:

Thanks! I managed to lower the poly count to 1050 after removing some unnecessary faces.

While it's a good habit to keep poly counts low, you don't necessarily NEED to, this isn't 2005. You can make stuff that's like 3 or 4k, You can get away with something much higher if it's only going to be used once per ship. You just need to think about what the average count on the ship is going to be. I made a Mach Effect thruster for FreeThinker that I couldn't really get under 30k, although that was a special case.

[CobaltWolf]

Worth remembering that in this day and age, it's usually easier to get details such as bolt heads in the normal map, as opposed to modeling them in.

[FreeThinker]

On 6/10/2018 at 5:16 PM, Nivee~ said:

However, the 2 wires that I have drawn on the side, will they be of any importance, considering that the part itself is only 20x20x10cm?

 

I don't think the 2 wires add anything

Instead, it would make sense add some shielding

[Nivee~]

On 6/19/2018 at 6:56 PM, FreeThinker said:

Instead, it would make sense add some shielding

Like radiation shielding? But I doubt it will eject any radiation.....

[Dafni]

7 minutes ago, Nivee~ said:

Like radiation shielding? But I doubt it will eject any radiation.....

Sorry for yet another case of obsessive nitpicking, but radiation gets emitted, not ejected

 

[Nivee~]

11 minutes ago, Dafni said:

Sorry for yet another case of obsessive nitpicking, but radiation gets emitted, not ejected

 

Oh! But I follow Newton! And I believe in the particulate nature of electromagnetic radiation .and particles are 'ejected', waves are 'emitted'  So ejected is correct, if I don't follow the wave-particle model of electromagnetic radiation.

Spoiler

NEWTON FOREVA!

(But yeah, I should say 'emitted'... its not 1600s anymore! )

[Dafni]

  I knew somebody would play the wave-particle card on me. Well played my friend.

[Enceos]

@Nivee~ It's always a pleasure to see new modelers in our community. When I made my first part I just couldn't get the texture look right, it was just looking fake and painted on the part. I started looking closely at all the details our best texturers of the community add to their parts, it really helped. But I couldn't reverse engineer some effects like splatter and scratches, then I found quite a bunch of source files of the textures, just studying them closely upped my texturing skills tenfold. Some mods had them published, but I can't find those links now.

[neistridlar]

With regards to using solid works or other cad types of modeling software. If you make the model so that it only has flat faces, I.e. use polygons in stead of circles, and don't even think about fillets, you can get reasonable meshes it of it. Or you can do like I do for my airliner parts. Design it in cad like you want it to be, or close enough, then use that model as a reference for building the actual model in a more suitable modeling software (blender in my case).

As for not being able to animate in Wings 3d, you can do animations in Unity, so no worries.

And one last thing get the first parts into the game as fast as possible. Better to find out now if things are going to work then to put weeks of work into it just to find that you have to do it all over again.

[Nivee~]

On 7/7/2018 at 8:15 PM, neistridlar said:

And one last thing get the first parts into the game as fast as possible. Better to find out now if things are going to work then to put weeks of work into it just to find that you have to do it all over again

That's a good idea! I never considered it this way! I will do that, thanks!

Edited July 9, 2018 by Nivee~