X-ray your craft to find lost struts

[katateochi]

Hi Guys!! I've been having a break from KSP (RL's fault, nothing to do with KSP) but I've had a bit of time this week.

I thought I'd mention something I randomly discovered a couple days ago; a way to X-ray your craft.

Sometimes when building space planes you get a strut that is asymmetrically placed and it causes all kinds of problems (the least of which is it veering off the runway). It can sometimes be a real pain to locate that problem strut and before now I've restarted designs just because I couldn't find that one rouge strut.

BUT if you take a large part (best with one that doesn't radially attach) and hold it in front of the craft you get an X-ray view inside the craft and only certain parts are visible.

Take this plane (which actually was a complete fail!)

And then hold the large RCS tank infront of it;

You can see through the wings and some of the tanks, but the struts and some other parts remain visible. I have no idea what governs which parts become see-though, it seems like it makes the parts you have a direct line of sight to see though, but that's not quite it, otherwise it would have hidden the intakes.

Whatever it is, I've found this really useful in checking my strut placing in planes.

[aeTIos]

This is pretty neat

I already knew this bug thing, but I hadn't realized that you could use it for this.

[Tw1]

This is brilliant! Will be using this.

[dazhat]

Holy cow. This is amazing.

[csanders]

Great find! I'll be using it.

[Giggleplex777]

Damnit. I was using this for a while now but I've never posted it on the forums.

[Apollo13]

Nice. Thanks for posting.

[Stone Blue]

Nice tip. Thanx.

[goldenpeach]

Thank you!

I have made a plane with rover wheels(for taxi) and had a lot of bugged struts.

I had to search manually for all the struts,the process of finding struts will be much shorter now!

[Sapphire]

What is this sorcery? Magic, I say! Thank you!

[Brotoro]

Oooooo... nice tip!

[Accelerando]

This is good advice. It is also extremely helpful when clipping fuel tanks and other parts inside each other, I have found.

[astropapi1]

Awesome tip!

[lajoswinkler]

I thought people knew about this. I mean, it's right there in front of your noses every time you do several hours in VAB.

[Zeroignite]

I'd noticed the bug, but never thought of using if for strut-scanning. Awesome tip, and a +rep.

[Whackjob]

Found em!!

[lajoswinkler]

Whackjob, you must be the craziest user I've seen here.

[alacrity]

whackjob there must bu\e moving pictures of that last one lifting off the ground... I want proof your computer doesn't simply shoot itself in the face...

Alacrity

[kiwi1960]

Kat, you are brilliant. You are a God, for this wisdom, so I declare myself your first follower.

Whackjob.... what can I say... except, I don't think it will ever fly..... go on, prove me wrong.

Edited October 2, 2013 by kiwi1960

[Aqua667]

Yup I like using this when my sturts go missing, and I'm tool lazy to go back to the structural tab and grab new ones. I perfer using the large structural panels as a "x-ray machine" cause they have good amount of surface area and most of my rockets don't use them (So i don't confuse them with an actual part of the vessel).

[katateochi]

Found em!!

I sat and stared, I laughed, I cried...now I'm going for a drink. I'd buy you one, but I'm worried about what you'd do with it!

[Guest]

Squad, please don't fix this. This is one of them good bad bugs.

[Whackjob]

Here it is taking off. Was an attempt to lift a heavy rover into orbit back in my earlier days.

I've done much, much bigger things since then. This is a lil' one.

#EDIT: See coffee thread in my signature. Has a nice running history of most of what I've done since I only started playing the game.

Edited October 2, 2013 by Whackjob