Part Clipping

[Procyon]

I have looked and did not find much on this. I know how it works and all. My question is. Is Part clipping, in general consensus, an accepted practice? If you submit a craft file with clipped parts in it do you need to specify that it has clipped parts? Or is it considered cheatin?

I had heard in one of the twitch streams that it was ok but I cant find the thread for the discussion.

Thank you

Procyon

[Giggleplex777]

IMO, I think it is not cheating. I use it all the time to make designs not possible without it and rockets with clipped parts work even if you have part clipping off.

[zpox357]

A lot of people use it due to a glitch where you can't place parts on radial decoplers, but for general design, as far as I can tell, most find it acceptable. It adds a bit more flexibility to the editors without making the game any easier. However, if you decouple two parts that were merged together, all hell can break loose. Thats all I know.

[Sir Nahme]

Does part clipping help at all with rendering lag? I'm starting to see slow down with lifters/payloads passing the 350 part mark...

I "could" turn down the graphics but I don't wanna XD

[M5000]

I use it all the time and it's definitely not cheating in my book. It should be allowed by default, really, or at least there should be a bit more tolerance for clipping.

However, be careful because it can cause some WEIRD things to happen. Like, for example, upon physics-enable, having your entire craft literally explode into a ton of different pieces and have them fly over 2 kilometers away in all different directions.

Yeah... That...

[dr_jt]

Kerbals are not well understood

Edited June 6, 2013 by dr_jt

[toric5]

no it is not cheating, think of it as irl engineers embedding a strut or a fuel tank into a nosecone.

[katateochi]

I don't think part clipping is cheating. Especially if its done without turning the option on in the debug console. It just makes for much more interesting design possibilities but as zpox357 says, woe betide you if you decouple parts which are clipping.

No Sir Nahme, I don't believe that it would reduce the lag, all the polygons are still present even thou they are out of sight.

[rkman]

Does part clipping help at all with rendering lag? I'm starting to see slow down with lifters/payloads passing the 350 part mark...

That's probably not rendering lag but physics lag.

I'm not sure how KSP deals with intersecting hit boxes (clipping parts), so i don't know how (if at all) part clipping affects KSP physics performance.

[katateochi]

I've seen this mentioned before and what is part clipping? How does it benefit construction. How is it enabled?

Its where one part is inside or partially inside another part. You don't have to enable it. If you take for example a radially mounted part and put it against another part, then using the WASD keys rotate it about, you can make it sit inside the other part or stick out of it.

I think that mostly it is beneficial from an aesthetic point of view. it doesn't alter the weight/drag of the craft. It may have some impact on where your centre of gravity is.

[Sir Nahme]

I assumed it was rendering rather than physcis due to the fact that the effect was apparent even in the VAB, hmm might need to tweak my system or invest in a new graphics card. Thanks for the quick answers

[Procyon]

That's just "Kerblizing".

[Procyon]

alt F12 and tick on part clipping allowed

[Procyon]

thanks for the feedback all

[Mastodon]

Its where one part is inside or partially inside another part. You don't have to enable it. If you take for example a radially mounted part and put it against another part, then using the WASD keys rotate it about, you can make it sit inside the other part or stick out of it.

I think that mostly it is beneficial from an aesthetic point of view. it doesn't alter the weight/drag of the craft. It may have some impact on where your centre of gravity is.

wings are also very easy to clip without having the debug enabled. in fact, its hard not to.

[thetommygunyeah]

I dont know many people who are fussy. If a craft works it works, I don't care how it looks

[Spatzimaus]

I don't think part clipping is, in and of itself, cheating, given that the game is in beta and it's not complete. However, it depends WHY you're clipping; there are a few cases where the game is just not well-designed for the parts it uses, and clipping is the only way to make an effective design. The most pronounced example of this is jet intakes; barring the huge radial intake, the others all need to be placed on the front of a tube. However, the intake capacities of these are so low that you need many intakes per engine to provide enough intake air. So, if you try to make a spaceplane that has enough intake capacity to function well, it has to be constructed in ridiculous ways... or you clip the intakes. Another situation where this comes up is with RTGs, which are extremely useful as a source of electrical power for all the minor things you need it for. But, the things are awkward in shape, and just look horrible hanging off the sides of your ships. So, I stick them inside my fuel tanks, where they're out of the way. Same goes for Avionics modules; some mods have added a pseudo-ASAS that uses the avionics steering constants, but without that the stock avionics controller is just awkward to place, so I've taken to placing it inside my cockpit.

Now, we currently don't have a drag model, so sticking something inside another part doesn't actually make any difference to your performance; it's purely aesthetic. But once we get a real aerodynamics model, I'm hoping that the core game and/or mods will provide us with the means to do without clipping abuses. In the long term, we should be provided with things like high-capacity stack intakes, or stackable 1.25m RTG rings, so that we don't need to do stuff like that. So once the game is released, then I'd say yes, part clipping WOULD be cheating.

[pinolallo]

Everything can fly and can easily launched is fine (clipped or not), is a sandbox game so cheating is just meaningless.

Just don't share ****ty ships.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

Everything can fly and can easily launched is fine (clipped or not), is a sandbox game so cheating is just meaningless.

Just don't share ****ty ships.

It isn't going to be completly a sandbox game for long, but I think clipping is "merging two parts together" or "shaving a bit off the side".

[loppnessmonsta]

I can't even figure out how to actually do it. The parts that can do it naturally, sure, but parts that should attach but stubbornly refuse to.... it's been just a matter of luck. Everything I've found says "ctl+shift+alt+D" but that doesn't do anything.

as for whether it's OK or not, that's really up to you. there's no such thing as cheating in sandbox mode. Just look at hyperedit. Personally, I won't use either. I want to do part clipping because, as I said, parts that SHOULD attach, even by vanilla mechanics, sometimes just get a bug up their butt and refuse to co-operate. And I'm tired of their crap. YOU ARENT EVEN AN INANIMATE OBJECT, DONT GIVE ME THAT ATTITUDE

[ROFLCopter64bit]

"ctl+shift+alt+D" but that doesn't do anything.

In 0.19 and 0.19.1 it has changed to right alt-f12.

[loppnessmonsta]

in 0.19 and 0.19.1 it has changed to right alt-f12.

thank you!

[CalculusWarrior]

I prefer to think of it as the Kerbal engineers taking a hacksaw to the stock parts in order to make them fit better. Given the standards of my space program, this is an entirely acceptable practice in my books!