[1.3] Starshine Industries: Extendable Nozzle

[wasmic]

Hey Ganinian, I've noticed that all of your parts use 1024*1024 textures. This is wasteful for all but the biggest parts, and the smaller parts in this pack, like the sepratron 2, could look just as good with 256*256 textures, which use only one sixteenth as much RAM. Also, while the Twofold is incredibly useful, it uses 5 or 6 1024x textures. The textures should be resized to no larger than 512*512, due to RAM hogging.

EDIT: I see that a remodel of the twofold is scheduled.

Edited December 29, 2013 by wasmic

[Kerbal01]

Have you started on anything new?

[Helix935]

is the LADEE still being worked on?

[Guest]

So how's it going? I found some interesting stuff that could help expand Athena pack. First, it seems that there is an "Athena III" rocket concept, using a 2.5 segment SSRB derivative. Also, Ic and IIc would only require making a new upper stage (Castor 30), with the rest of parts being the same.

[ganinian]

Trying to work out how cockpits work, and yes, the LADEE is still being worked on, but is delayed due to i have no idea how solar panels work.

[Guest]

That's nice to hear. If you got tired of this, you could always make two more SRBs for Athena. I think it should be about 1.51m in diameter. Right now, it's a bit big, bigger than the real thing, actually. 1.51m would allow it to fit 1.25m probes with side attachments, not to mention it'd be realistic 64% scale. Athena isn't a big booster, but there's market for those, too.

[Kerbal01]

LADEE panels are static.

[ganinian]

I know, what I mean is I can't get them to work. No electricity is being generated by those panels

[ganinian]

Athena pack v2.0 released! Working on Athena III and those SRBs you want now

[Guest]

Nice. But now, we can't build the original Athenas. Could you re-add the Orbus-21D for that? Regardless, the revamped pack looks lovely. Looking forward to Athena III. Oh, and BTW, the Athena II had a slightly flared fairing available. It'd be probably be a better choice for Athena III than straight fairings.

[ganinian]

Alright, adding that to the todo list too.

[Kerbal01]

New athena looks amazing!

also: are you the creator of kalaxy aerospace ULA pack?

Edited February 11, 2014 by DarthVader

[ganinian]

Yea, that was some old crappy first attempt, now its kinda like looking at my kindergarten scribbles. I cut it off becuz chimer4 took was also working on it, but I could renew it if you want.

Edited February 12, 2014 by ganinian

[Guest]

Well, Chimer4 stopped expanding his Atlas family, so if you could do a proper Atlas V and maybe Atlas III (the only difference is the first stage), it'd be appreciated. Delta is being worked on by Blazing Angel, but I haven't heard from him for a while. I'd say, start with the Atlas. Chimer4's is a good example of how the basic layout should look, but the Centaur (both SEC and DEC) needs to have a movable nozzle skirt. Check CBBP's RD-0146D for an example of how it works.

Later on, you could also try making the Delta I family and earlier Deltas/Thors. I have gathered quite a bit of info on the intricacies of the family, in fact it should be possible to create the entire lineup with surprisingly small amount of parts.

Also, a few notes on the Athena:

First, it should get to orbit on solids only. As it stands, OAM works as a full 3rd stage, which shouldn't be the case. It's merely an adjustment module to fine-tune the orbit. Also, in reality, the OAM doesn't have a single engine, but four small MR-107 thrusters mounter along the inside of it's rim. They're pretty much RCS thrusters, used for attitude control and orbital adjustments.

[Kerbal01]

The atlas v from chimer4 is pretty amazing IMHO, though atlas III needs work

[ganinian]

alright then, but I'll finish up the athena pack first, and also I'm thinking of doing the minotaur to go with the LADEE

[Guest]

Minotaur is a nice idea, too. Do you need any additional info on HAPS upper stages? Those are small, monoprop-powered stages much like OAM, but smaller.

Now that I think of it, could you also take a look at Minotaur I and Taurus? Minotaur I uses an Orion 50XL stage. The entire Orion family doesn't really differ from this stage, only be length. So you could have, for the cheap, Orion 50, Orion 50S and Orion 50SXL. That and a Castor-120 adapter would allow you to make Taurus and Taurus XL. You could also model a set of wings and rear fins and make a Pegasus and Pegasus XL rocket. That would pretty much sum up Orbital's current small launcher lineup.

[Mecripp]

With your Athena the nose when you click on it and move it you can't see it, it go'd blank you can get it back out of the menu and the 1 with 2 stages don't have a decoupler on top stage well it's more like a 3 stage.

[Guest]

Solids don't need additional decouplers - you can ditch them by firing the next stage. IIRC, it also works like that IRL.

[ganinian]

The fairings are a bit of a problem, but the decouplers works as what Dragon01 explained

[Absolute Human]

Hi, I want to say some words about your Stock-Like Parts Project.

These part are nice without any doubt, but the download weights 81.6 MB!!!

Isn't it way too much? Still not sure why you get so few downloads on Spaceport, but 82 MB for 6 parts, really?

Not all people have enough free space and power to run such heavy packs.

Maybe, you should consider some redux textures and even low poly models?

For now they are more like some 3D models for a si-fi film than parts suitable for a game.

Just IMHO, of course, but I would really like to use them if they were less memory heavy.

For example, the whole RLA stockalike pack weights 12 MB and it contains few dozens of parts with reasonable quality.

Most of them are rather small, but anyway.

Ah, I got it! You don't have any links from here to the Spaceport page, that is why nobody downloads it from there.

But the parts are still very heavy.

Edited February 16, 2014 by Absolute Human

[NathanKell]

Did you check actual memory usage, or just look at the disk space usage and think it's at all meaningful...?

[ganinian]

Yes I know they are that heavy, the blender exported files weighs only about 3 mb at most, but exporting from unity somehow enlarges the texture files. I'm fixing it right now, although it's going to take a while, since i lost my source files and is forced to build them up from scratch.

[NathanKell]

Don't worry about it; it's just people not understanding how textures in KSP work, and the difference between an uncompressed file on disk (huge) and a compressed file in memory (same size no matter what file format is the input). What I *do* suggest is maybe cutting down your texture resolution--you really, really don't need 5 1024x1024 textures (with alpha!) per part!

[Guest]

Yeah, you could probably cut down on resolution, maybe use MODEL nodes for texture sharing.