Anyone know how to make your ships look cooler

[cebu516]

Hi ive been playing alot of ksp recently and i started to see that my ships were going a bit bland. anyone got any ideas?

[KaliDitzy]

You can right click fuel tanks or other parts if they have variants and choose different colors and forms, that's about as customizable as it gets without adding unnecessary weight and parts, I like the dark/orange variants of parts, they look pretty cool to me. 

[steve_v]

2 hours ago, cebu516 said:

anyone got any ideas?

If you're not adverse to mods, you might look into ReStock. IMO it's a vast improvement over the stock (even with the recent revamps) art style.

[FleshJeb]

I find "cool" comes from the restrictions you place on the design, and then the style evolves out of that. It gives a path to focus on, and narrows your choices. You find this a lot in art and poetry. (I'm thinking of you, iambic pentameter.)

My personal restrictions (entirely vanilla, and minimum graphics settings):

• Must be very capable of doing a mission I pick. Performance comes first, because functionality is the coolest. Whether this comes as limiting dry mass, or making something aerodynamically sleek, or very survivable against heat.
• Must not do "everything". Craft that are under-specialized become an ungainly mess full of compromises.
• Must be easy to pilot and operate. Having a robust craft informs where you can place parts. Sometimes a craft or a set of craft are so fiddly or so fragile, you don't want to play with them, and this is the uncoolest.
• Every part has to have a functional purpose. Parts don't get thrown on because of aesthetics. There's an old axiom about getting dressed to go out: Put on all your stuff until you think you look good, and then remove one thing.
• Must be at least somewhat "realistic". The structure and shaping usually start with an impression of a real life craft, and I try to restrain my clipping to what is "volumetrically sane".  On the other end of that, I think hyper-realistic recreations are boring and fly like crap. It's Space LEGO, and it's OK to leave things up to the imagination.

As a result, I tend to come up with some fairly understated, but very sleek designs. And they move like absolute bats out of hell.

Of course, I know a dude that builds some very spiky anime mecha, and another one that builds almost nothing but micro-craft, and they're super-cool, so do what you want. Pick the restrictions and parameters that make you happy, and your personal style will flow from there.

[Vanamonde]

My ships are always bland. I started playing on a weaker PC and any non-functional parts made it run slower, and it's a habit I can't seem to break. 

[jimmymcgoochie]

The answer is probably mods, as there are only a few stock paint options for the fuel tanks (2-4 at most). A few part revamps are out there- Restock and Ven’s stock revamp are two that I know of- and there’s also a mod out there that lets you recolour stock parts using TUFX, though I can’t remember the name and haven’t used it myself.

[VoidSquid]

I follow the old Bauhaus mantra "form follows function". Sure, my constructions are all looking bland, but they WORK.  

[Guest]

Tbh the better craft tend be ones that look less cool. Whereas IRL you have a long, slim, sleek rocket, on the game a design like that would result in a horrible wobbly mess that probably spins on launch etc. As mentioned above, mods is really only going to help imo.

[KaliDitzy]

1 hour ago, VoidSquid said:

Sure, my constructions are all looking bland, but they WORK.

I tend to usually follow this path as well, I only really mess with the paint if I want it to look differently.

[theJesuit]

18 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

My ships are always bland. I started playing on a weaker PC and any non-functional parts made it run slower, and it's a habit I can't seem to break. 

I hear you and wish to say that you are not alone.  Do you have a self imposed  upper part count on your craft too?

[Starhelperdude]

I personally don't use part clipping, because it makes ships IMO look just bad (again, IMO), though stuff like clipping stuff in places where there is theoretically enough place for it is allowed IMO

[cebu516]

thanks

[Vanamonde]

1 hour ago, theJesuit said:

I hear you and wish to say that you are not alone.  Do you have a self imposed  upper part count on your craft too?

No, I used to run 550 part missions even in the old days, which made the game run terribly slowly and is why I couldn't have any non-functional stuff on there.  

[theJesuit]

3 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

No, I used to run 550 part missions even in the old days, which made the game run terribly slowly and is why I couldn't have any non-functional stuff on there.  

Sheesh.  550 is heaps.  I wont go above about 200.  150 for a launch.

[Ethanadams]

making lattices out of struts looks pretty neat but adds a lot of unnecessary cost and weight so mods it is.

[Kernel Kraken]

Depends on what you're building. Rockets themselves look pretty bland, and we just have to accept that. It's a tube with a point on one end and a bowl on the other- not a lot of room to improve. Planes? There's a lot of room for creativity, from box wings to absurd rotor contraptions to hypersonic "planes" resembling our pointy fire tubes from beforehand. When building planes, I like finding weird concept art from old magazines or just straight up ripping Matt Lowne builds. When building rockets, I just don't.

 

[Stormpilot]

One my 1.5m landers and 2.5 meter landers, I like to put tiny Oscar-B fuel tanks on the side, and then add struts. This makes it look cool (I mostly use x2 symmetry). Also if done right these can give you more delta V and can even act as landing gear.

Edited March 6, 2021 by STORMPILOTkerbalkind

[Stormpilot]

On 3/5/2021 at 11:06 AM, Kernel Kraken said:

just straight up ripping Matt Lowne builds.

 

Me in a nutshell.