How To: Part resizing basics

[Kerba Fett]

I see quite a few posts of 'I wish this was bigger' or 'great part if only it was smaller'.

There's only a few of basic things to do to make larger or smaller copies of any parts.

1. Go to your parts folder, find the one you want to resize and copy then paste it's folder. Then change the name of the copied folder so you'll know what's in it. (eg. stacktricoupler copy becomes stacktricoupler 2.5m)

2. Open the part.cfg file in a text editor and look for the line: Name = This is what the unity engine calls it. Give it a new name.

Then later: Title = This is what you see in the game. Give it a new name as well.

I usually just add the new size to the end of their names.

3. Look for the line: RescaleFactor =

If it's there, then the number in it becomes the basis for your resize.

For example, the stock stacktricoupler is a 1.25m part. It contains the line RescaleFactor = 1.

If I change that to RescaleFactor = 2 it becomes a 2.5m part and RescaleFactor = 3 makes it a 3.75m part.

And of course RescaleFactor = .5 makes it a .625m part.

Now the fun part:

If the line RescaleFactor = is NOT in the part.cfg file then the game uses the stock 1.25 rescale factor. In fact if you add the line RescaleFactor = 1.25 to a part that didn't have any rescale listed it wouldn't change size.

So if you want to double the size of a part you would add RescaleFactor = 2.5 and to triple the size of it you'd use RescaleFactor = 3.75.

And of course to make it half the size you'd use rescaleFactor .625

Recently I needed some landing gear and the horizontal legs in the HOME mod kit looked like they'd work. They were 3.75m and I wanted 2.5m. There was no rescalefactor listed in the part config so it was using the default value.

2.5m is 2/3 of 3.75m so 1.25 (default value) * .66 (how much I want to resize it) = .825.

I copy and rename the directory, edit the part.cfg to give it a new name, title, and add RescaleFactor = .825 and my 3.75 meter parts have a 2.5 meter copy that works just as well as the original.

Resizing parts this way keeps the connect nodes where they should be and I haven't found any connection issues that didn't exist in the orignal parts.

If you're trying to play a fair and balanced game you probably want to increase the mass of parts that you make bigger and decrease it on parts your make smaller. And this is where it becomes a bit of a guessing game. A cylinder that you double in size gets 4 times the surface area and 8 times the volume. So do Spheres and probably cones. (didn't work out cones)

For fuel tanks dry mass is surface area so you'd quadruple the mass and increase the propellant capacity by 8 times.

For something that's a mix of empty space and machinery like a station module you pretty much just have to make an educated guess.

Have fun with your new variety of part sizes.

[The Tempest]

What about the breakingForce parameter? Does that scale with it or do you have to manually adjust it as well. From what I understand the rescaleFactor only adjusts the size and node positions, so if I was making something bigger I'd have to manually change the other parameters.

[Eric S]

Yes. I'm not sure what the proper scaling for breakingForce is, but you do need to manually adjust it.

[The Tempest]

I'm having all kinds of trouble with connections lately, some parts just don't even have a breaking force. You can make a fuel tank (breakingForce~200) and attach that to a command pod root (no breakingForce) then put a command pod on the bottom of the tank. Drop that at all kinds of angles and the bottom pod will always fall off while the root pod will stay. I could add a breakingForce to the pod, but there are tons of parts that don't have a breakingForce and finding them would be a huge pain.

[Atanar]

This is the wrong forum section. This clearly belongs into the tutourials.

[kiwiak]

so rescalefactor allows me to resize parts.. but where is original size stored, that one rescalefator works on? inside 3d model file?

and what does "scale" do?

for example

scale = 1

rescaleFactor = 0.85

Edited May 11, 2014 by kiwiak

[rkman]

"Scale" applies only to attach node coordinates. Usually no need to change that.

If no rescaleFactor is defined, it defaults to 1.25.

And then there is the TweakScale plugin

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/72567-0-23-5-Goodspeed-Aerospace-Parts-TweakScale-plugin-v2014-4-1B