Payload Fairing Comparison

[mhoram]

I am looking for AddOns that contain payload fairings.

So far I found

- KW Rocketry V0.22

- NovaPunch V0.22

- Procedural Fairings V0.22

- Anvil Rockets V0.22

- AIES Aerospace V0.21.1

- Fairing Factory V?

Are there any other payload fairing mods out there or a comparison of them?

So far I could not find any.

[Philster07]

At the moment I think that's about it. Personally I prefer Procedural over KW Rocketry's and Fairing Factory.

With KW they are all standard sizes so if you make something that has alot of external parts they clip through the fairing and it looks pretty bad. Also with KW when in IVA mode and at launch you tend to see gaps in the fairings.

Fairing factory is better than KW but for each build you have to restart KSP to install the new fairings, which is all well and good if you have a PC that can restart KSP quickly.

Finally, Procedural pretty much combines the customization of Fairing Factory (holding R while hovering over the fairing base causes the outline of the fairing to change) and the stability of KW (however it doesn't contain the actual rockets). From what ive seen of Procedural so far I haven't noticed any part clipping, unless I made the fairing too small, the IVA mode seams pretty solid and can't see any cracks and finally procedural has 2 different types (a conic version and eggshell version) which looks pretty sleak

Hope I helped.

[sumghai]

I use KW Rocketry fairings, as I personally prefer limiting my payloads to realistic sizes and shapes - no oversized eggs perched atop a tiny lifter, y'see.

[mhoram]

@Philster07 thanks for the overview!

So I did some testing on fairing-masses with the four AddOns Procedural Fairings, Anvil Rockets, KW Rocketry and Novapunch.

I did not test AIES Aerospace because there is no recent version and Fairing Factory because I don't like restarting KSP for each new fairing.

For this test I made up four example payloads and tried to suirround it with the smallest possible fairing in each AddOn. The following tabls shows the resulting masses.

Primary results are:

- Fairing masses of the AddOns differ quite a lot

- KW Rocketry provides only a single height of fairings, in contrast to the other AddOns

- For Anvil, KW and Nova: the heavier the payload, the smaller the fairing mass fraction

And here are screenshots of the test:

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Edited August 7, 2014 by mhoram
Updated Image Link