[Testers Wanted] ReStock Add-on (WIP)

[PolecatEZ]

After a few days of trying to figure out my niche in this whole mod thing, I finally got it. Here's my fresh contribution to the KSP community.

Ahhh, but you say you've seen some of these things before. Maybe, maybe...but here's how its different:

For 20+ parts already included, this add-on takes up about 30kb in space. No new textures or models. None. In addition, it also does NOT touch or modify the Squad folder in any way. All your stock files are still there.

My goal is to have about 50-60 parts added to the game which take up nearly ZERO additional space.

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Like the KSPX inspiration, all these parts are also balanced well to the original game. No cheats in disguise. Unlike KSPX (or any other parts add-on so far), they actually pull from the Squad models and don't fatten your hard drive.

Testers wanted.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/0-21-restock-parts/

Future editions will make use of Firespitter's re-paint feature to let you choose the skins of just about everything in this pack...again, with no extra textures for you to load.

Again, I emphasize, these are all made using a different method which takes up NO space and does not alter Squad's files in any way. These are very tolerant to most other add-ons except ones that re-shuffle the files into different folders.

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.1b Update – Fixed some minor bugs. Please note you need to turn on RCS and have a source of air for the stabilinators to work properly. Thanks Mihara for the thorough testing. Currently working on a nice tail boom engine, hidden landing gear, rocko-sized bi and tri-couplers, heavy radial decoupler, larger solid booster, medium and heavy ion-thruster, heavy NIRVA. Taking requests always.

Edited August 28, 2013 by PolecatEZ

[The Destroyer]

Could you please actually give an image?

Also, is that 30kb in RAM or memory? If RAM thats awesome, memory *meh* I have 100 GB and most people have more.

EDIT: Nevermind just saw that one picture of stuff, it actually looks well.

[PolecatEZ]

That's one thing to test. My RAM loads fluctuate so much I can't tell whether this is installed or not. I assume the additional RAM usage is negligible...needs testing. Soviet Parts Pack, for example, crashes my system outright unless I take out Squad folder.

[Mihara]

Messing with model nodes, I love those! Let's see what's inside...

[Mihara]

Complaints in order of appearance:

I'm not sure the hatch on the small cupola works visually. It might be possible to weld something else to it to get it to make sense... Also, 0.9t is far too light, should be something like 1.5t.

Air stabilizer does not appear to work beside providing reaction wheels.

There are two copies of MkII nosecone somehow.

The drydock wall with bits of structural wing in it (why are there two objects with the same name anyway) has a visible crack in it.

[BlueSubstance]

I'd like to be a tester and/or a modeller. Can you send me a PM with informations?

[Mihara]

... Oh, and the dry mass on Octo-8 fuel tank is way too high.

[PolecatEZ]

Complaints in order of appearance:

I'm not sure the hatch on the small cupola works visually. It might be possible to weld something else to it to get it to make sense... Also, 0.9t is far too light, should be something like 1.5t.

I didn't think much of it, I may squish it flatter actually so we get the "TIE Fighter" window effect. The standard little black pod has a barely perceptible tiny door as well. Mass could be upped into the 1.1 to 1.5 range. I'll work on it.

Air stabilizer does not appear to work beside providing reaction wheels.

RCS needs turned on and you need a source of air. They work great, try again.

There are two copies of MkII nosecone somehow.

Dupe in the zip. Squished.

The drydock wall with bits of structural wing in it (why are there two objects with the same name anyway) has a visible crack in it.

Dupe name squished. White piece will be squished also. These parts were just proof of concept for making giant space-based dry docks and other superstructures. Not meant to be pretty...possibly useful though.

Octocan was also fixed.

I'd like to be a tester and/or a modeller. Can you send me a PM with informations?

Just need to download it and give me feedback. If you create something you'd like added to the pack, just make a post. You can cut'n'paste using [code ][/code ].

Edited August 25, 2013 by PolecatEZ

[Jaybtlr]

My mediocre contribution: 2 and 5 way rcs ports, even smaller rcs tanks - even cooler if you could make an rcs pack with a tiny fuel capacity, monoprop engines?, more forms of passive power gen ie - prettier rtg's, fuel cells etc.

[Mihara]

RCS needs turned on and you need a source of air. They work great, try again.

Ah, so they use IntakeAir? Could they, instead, like B9 thrusters of the same function, use any atmosphere? Because you won't get IntakeAir in places other than Kerbin and Laythe, but there's no logical reason they shouldn't work there.

[Mihara]

Oh, and speaking of ideas of useful things to make using extant stock graphic assets and the techniques the mastery of which you have already displayed...

1. Short 1.25m NERVA with reduced power, possibly reduced ISP, and obviously, reduced mass -- just shorter than the current one. The look can probably be significantly altered using the different bumpmap trick that you employed on the octotank, and maybe squishing more miscellaneous models in.
   
2. A cubic octostrut with six nodes rather than the usual two and the same properties otherwise. Bonus points if it actually becomes cubic.
   
3. Something flat, thin, light and inert, in 2.5m and 1.25m calibers, with four radial nodes, suitable for attaching pre-generated pieces of procedural fairings to it through Infernal Robotics actuators, particularly hinges -- keeping the actual actuators out of view. It would make an ideal cargo bay base for irregular shaped cargo -- particularly if there was a top attachment node a few meters away from the plate that you could stack the rest of the ship on without attempting to attach it with structural pieces.
   
4. An 1.25m stacked RCS tank with 60 units of monopropellant and appropriately thinner -- right now I'm using the one from FASA Gemini pack, and it's obviously extraneous when a mutated stock model would suffice.
   

[bs1110101]

Can you make something like this?

Also, will you do this with mod parts too?

[PolecatEZ]

Can you make something like this?

-img snip-

Also, will you do this with mod parts too?

I can, but there is one caveat with the Mk1 cockpit. Anything you place in front of the cockpit will fully or partially obscure the view. Fusing it with that particular piece means that anything you put on the nose cap could possibly kill 1st-person view. I could do a test with both that and the white rockomax nosecone pieces, no problem.

My mediocre contribution: 2 and 5 way rcs ports, even smaller rcs tanks - even cooler if you could make an rcs pack with a tiny fuel capacity, monoprop engines?, more forms of passive power gen ie - prettier rtg's, fuel cells etc.

That would be an interesting thing to try out. I'll put it on the docket. The RCS content and thrust generation seems to be a function of the model itself, so this may be doable. On the other hand, it may render it non-functional. We'll see.

Oh, and speaking of ideas of useful things to make using extant stock graphic assets and the techniques the mastery of which you have already displayed...

1. Short 1.25m NERVA with reduced power, possibly reduced ISP, and obviously, reduced mass -- just shorter than the current one. The look can probably be significantly altered using the different bumpmap trick that you employed on the octotank, and maybe squishing more miscellaneous models in.
   
2. A cubic octostrut with six nodes rather than the usual two and the same properties otherwise. Bonus points if it actually becomes cubic.
   
3. Something flat, thin, light and inert, in 2.5m and 1.25m calibers, with four radial nodes, suitable for attaching pre-generated pieces of procedural fairings to it through Infernal Robotics actuators, particularly hinges -- keeping the actual actuators out of view. It would make an ideal cargo bay base for irregular shaped cargo -- particularly if there was a top attachment node a few meters away from the plate that you could stack the rest of the ship on without attempting to attach it with structural pieces.
   
4. An 1.25m stacked RCS tank with 60 units of monopropellant and appropriately thinner -- right now I'm using the one from FASA Gemini pack, and it's obviously extraneous when a mutated stock model would suffice.
   

1 - Sounds doable, though I'm not sure the practical usefulness. Any less thrust and you might as well bump it down to the .5m size category. I do have plans to make a rockomax size NIRVA like found in the KSPX pack.

2 - Took me a second to figure it out, but should be easy as described. There already is a solid cube in the game that can be up-sized as well for the same effect. I'll put it on the docket.

3 - Easy enough, but shouldn't the creator of the fairings have something like this already? Low priority I think.

4 - Easy as well, you want me to stick to the same yellow/white stripy color or try to find something else?

Next big release is looking like Wednesday. Came up with a way to make caterpillar tracks, we'll see if the experiments work.

---Update----

Playing with wheels is utter fail so far. There is probably a way to do fun things with them, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Edited August 25, 2013 by PolecatEZ

[Mihara]

My favorite part in this pack.

1 - Sounds doable, though I'm not sure the practical usefulness. Any less thrust and you might as well bump it down to the .5m size category.

You'd be surprised how often such a thing would come in useful on things that fly vertically in the normal fashion but use a separate set of sideways-pointing engines to land flat on the side.

2 - Took me a second to figure it out, but should be easy as described. There already is a solid cube in the game that can be up-sized as well for the same effect. I'll put it on the docket.

Rather, I was thinking of the small one but not in a "solid cube" way. A big one to match the girders would come in just as handy too, though.

3 - Easy enough, but shouldn't the creator of the fairings have something like this already? Low priority I think.

It's actually more complicated...

Imagine a procedural fairing base, or more specifically, an interstage fairing adapter. You stack a cargo bay payload on top of it, stack the rest of the ship above it, adjust the fairing shape to fit, lock the fairings shape, turn off the internal struts and take off a fairing (or rather, a fuselage, so it doesn't decouple when you don't want it to) piece. That's your cargo bay wall -- three will be walls, one will move to be the door. So you try to put an Infernal Robotics hinge between the fairing piece and the segment of the fairing you want to be the door, while locking the other three fairing segments with struts...

But now you need to prop the other three fairing segments up with cubic struts, because the hinge has a nonzero height and the door sticks out. But the struts don't have the same height as the hinge, so they don't match. And they stick out of the sides themselves, defeating the whole point of having a neat looking cargo bay...

It's still possible to do it, but it's so annoying to edit that I just gave up. What would save the situation is a part that has two sets of nodes in a specific position, one above the other, so that the top ones would serve to attach the fairing pieces, while the bottom ones would be spaced just far enough from them to stick the hinge on so that the four segments still match. And to avoid requiring me to attempt to precisely position the rest of the ship on structural elements attached to the back of the base where the fairings attach, it would need to have a floating top node.

...never mind, I'll try doing it myself, though I guess I need to find a stock model that is a perfect cylinder first to work from...

4 - Easy as well, you want me to stick to the same yellow/white stripy color or try to find something else?

The same yellow-white stripy color with a different bumpmap would look nice, I think.

[bs1110101]

The iva works just fine!

[Mihara]

The iva works just fine!

Navball orientation seems off, though...

[bs1110101]

Navball orientation seems off, though...

Yeah, it's half of why i want it as one part, because of that it's very hard to fly like that.

[PolecatEZ]

The iva works just fine!

If you want to fix the navball problem, you need to leave the cockpit centered under the shell and stretch it to where the cockpit pokes out how you want. I had to do this with the MKII cockpit...this may block your view though. On the other hand, see if Mechjeb can control it properly with the twisted balls...if so, then I could probably live with it. You could also try angling the cockpit under the cone a bit and see if that straightens things out. I'll be happy to add it to the pack when you get it fully ironed out.

----

Ahhh, I see that it was actually a clipped part. I thought it was already fused. I got it now. Let me finish my uni work and I'll take a crack at it. You can also just make a copy of the MkIIb cockpit file in the ReStock pack and change the file names in the top lines. Its fairly self explanatory.

[PolecatEZ]

About to wrap up work for tonight, a few losses but also some major wins for the project.

The RockomaxMk1 Combo worked as predicted. The model looks and functions great, but 1st-person blockage depends greatly on exactly what you stack on top. Some objects don't or barely obstruct the view, others block it completely.

The stabilizer wings look the best when transformed into airliner wings. I needed to put an engine/intake holder there in order to cover the crack, however.

The big win...RCS 5-way block looks ok, but functions awesome! RCS is apparently individually tied to the underlying model, ergo, adding more little thrusters means more thrust. Look for yourself. Now I need to wonder about my VTOL thruster block.

Generic resizes are coming soon also, those are generally pretty trivial. I'd like to do something more elaborate with the Ion engine and NIRVAs though.

All of the above and a lot more will be in an update on or before Wednesday. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not. Lots of papers to write.

[Cloakedwand72]

Can you please add a Mk2 cargobay?And Please a version of this mod without cheat parts?

[PolecatEZ]

Can you please add a Mk2 cargobay?And Please a version of this mod without cheat parts?

I'm not sure you understand what this mod is exactly. If you can describe how to make a Mk2 cargo bay with stock part pieces, I would be glad to do so, but so far all levering mechanisms don't "stick" to other parts. I could try to shape a bay from squished ends and some way to hollow out the middle (wing sections maybe?).

I'm also not sure what you mean by cheat parts, as none of them are "cheating" in any way, just reshapes. All parts combined or modified use the stock guidelines for power, mass, lift ratings, etc. You won't have any real advantage with this pack other than being able to do things you normally wouldn't with stock parts.

The whole point of this pack is that there are no new textures or models. Everything is made with Squad models and textures, using their files (not copying them and modifying). This keeps the whole mod pack to under 100kb or so for 50-100 new parts, less than a single added texture file.

===========================

Updates

- 4 New Engines finished, shorter Nuke, Rockomax nuke, medium ion engine, rockomax solid booster (same size as orange tank).

- 5 New wings added, 3 are resize/stretches, 2 are multi-part mashups...1 more to go I think then no more wings.

To do list:

- Escape Tower (nailing down exactly how to do this, can be done though)

- Tail Boom engine part

- giant Rover wheels

- thinner stacked mono tank (request)

- cubic cubic strut with 6-way node connectors (request)

- mini SAS/ASAS (finishes up the entire KSPX pack redux)

- Large battletank-like body - maybe with crew, maybe not, 2-man with front window and rear hatch.

Next release Wednesday.

[Galane]

Yes! The ThunderMax adapter is just what I needed.

Add to the wish list, engine droppers that hold onto the engines really well so they don't get left behind on launch. That would make stage and a half designs like the original Atlas (which launched with three engines running from the same tank then dropped two) much easier to build.

Edited August 27, 2013 by Galane