[WIP] Super Eve Planet Pack

[Cooly568]

Super Eve? What the heck is that?

It's a planet pack I'm creating with Kragathea's Planet Factory Creators Edition mod.

Hang on, you can make planets!?

Oh yeah, right here.

So, what is this "Super Eve" you speak of?

It was a personal challenge I gave myself to create a planet that would be harder than Eve to land and return from, but I ended up creating something that I quite liked and wanted to keep working on, and decided to try to make it into a mod pack for Krag's PlanetFactory CE mod.

Harder than Eve? Then how the heck are we supposed even get there?

Super Eve has many moons, it's easiest moons to land on are roughly as easy to land on as Minmus. You won't have to go to Super Eve's surface.

How many moons?

Currently, 8, in a orbital path that would make intercepts with them very common if you were a passing ship.

What else?

I hope to do some integration with Custom Biomes and Kethane, I already have made biome maps for four of the moons created.

The planets look kind of... bleh

That's the reason I decided to create a thread, so I could get some feedback on what I was doing.

Download?

It's currently pretty buggy and Super Eve's surface lags my framerate to 20 FPS, and I have a powerful machine, but I hope to release it eventually, even if it is just a buggy mess when I do.

Can't Kerbtown place models and make easter eggs?

Yes and this is something I was planning, however because of Kerbtown's lack of being in 0.23 I don't plan on making any yet, even though 0.21 kerbtown still works in 0.23, at least the model placement does. Making easter eggs possible at this current time. To answer the question, yes, it is something that can be done in 0.23 and I eventually want to do.

Images below.

Edited January 26, 2014 by Cooly568

[Cooly568]

Images of the development

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[Spica]

For the super eve, the heightmaps look a little unpolished, and could be improved. I have also started a planet mod, I would recommend using Space Engine for the heightmap, normal map, and color map. That would give a much nicer and more realistic look to the super eve. If you cant find a planet that suits your needs exactly, edit it in Space Engine's built in planet editor.

Spica

[Cooly568]

The heightmap for Super Eve was a highly edited version of a heightmap from space engine, but I agree, I really don't like it's current look, at all.

YEAY CONSTRUCTIVE CRITISM

[Captain Sierra]

Couple of things. Kethane integration should be as easy as getting Kethane to know your planets. If I understand it correctly, it will automatically procedurally generate the deposits on save file creation for every planet it's told to. I THINK yours can be added in a config file somewhere and that it might be doable with modulemanager. I've never gone looking for that so don't quote me on the last bit.

Now, here are my opinions on the planets.

Super Eve looks interesting. I think more variation would be nice on it but that's must me. I think there needs to be more normalization in the inclination of the moons so that transfers between them don't require stupidly high amounts of dV for inclination changes. As a general rule of thumb, I'd keep the inclinations to no more than +/- 20-25* maximum.

Moon terrain thoughts going down the list.

Tuolea: Looks too mountainous. While I like the concept, I think the mountains need shrinking. Regular planet factory adds worlds that are stupidly hard to get to and land on. To me, trying to find a landing spot that isn't at a 40* angle doesn't sound like a pleasant kethane scouting trip. While the flat side that was blown off (the mountains, not mantle) look flat, the way KSP handles gravity mean you'd need to manually offset the center postion to something more remeniscent of the center of mass, otherwise, landing there, which should theoretically work, would be like landing on a wall.

Lopoer: I like the concept, but if you know how and feel like exploring it, I think the planet would benefit from getting some wavy terrain and voronoi microcratering. Perfectly smooth isn't really a challenge, but not too hilly or rocky makes for great kethane bases.

Eros:This planet, and also Tuolea, may not be possible realistically. Solids don't necessarily behave like solids at the planetary scale. Gravity and rotation would conspire and round out both of these worlds. While I like the idea of a craggy canyon world, the perfectly north-south ridges look too artificial. I would suggest adding a few plateaus, some near bottomless pits,and making the ridgelines and canyons seem more eratic. "God does not build in straight lines". Devout christian or not, the universe does not make things naturally that straight.

Noal: I think the north pole (haha, I see what you did there) is cool, but I think it would be more interesting to have an Olympus Mons size volcano there, as well as possibly a nice craggy canyon or two in the highlands, and add some dormant volcanos in the lowlands. They got flat for a reason, probably massive laval flows. It might also sell it better if it wasn't 'perfectly' flat but seemed close enough and appeared formed by lava coming from fissures, volcanos, whichever you decide to go with.

Agoa: This one looks almost perfectly done. The lines on it look mildly unnatural, as it's rare that such coherent features would ever form in the universe, but that aside, I like this one a lot as is.

Ghoa: This one also looks good. I think there needs to be some more variety as to the cratering size, perhaps some defining feature (single large impact crater maybe), and some more height and texture variation.

Okay, /rant.

That spew of information was a lot. I hope I don't come across as blunt. Those are my first impressions looking at everything.

Also, you have 5 orbits (the equatorial and polar ones have two moons in the same orbit, rare, but not impossible; also makes Hohmann transfer between them impossible), 7 moons, and only 6 pictures. I'd curious to see the seventh and to know how you redo the orbits, they kinda look eratic and unnatural right now (though not super unbelievable).

[Cooly568]

Kethane automatically would generate deposits on planets, even if they were modded.

Okay I should of specified more, when I said "kethane integration", I meant adjusted deposit quantity and kethane deposit capacity, along with new resources and some other tweaks to fit kethane into the planets. Probably.

That's actually really great advice, and it wasn't blunt at all to me, I'll take that into consideration as I change things around.

Oh darn, I did forget to add Archad to the album, gimme a second and I'll put that in the album.

Minor edit, the orbits of the moons were supposed to be opposite, so if Tuolea was on one side of Super Eve, Eros would be on the other, but because of some glitches I ran into they were shoved around a bit when I got the images.

Edited January 19, 2014 by Cooly568

[blizzy78]

On the topic of "stupidly high inclinations," I'd like to contribute this fine video. It tries to explain why you generally don't see such high inclinations in the real world.

[Cooly568]

This is why I love the KSP community, they give great advice instead of just negative hurtful criticism.

I'll take this into consideration when I change up the planet's moons.

[Captain Sierra]

Speaking of great advice, I had a moment of epiphany. I've seen the Eve terrain map before (or at least a very similar one). It was an archipelego word in SpaceEngine that was the first place it spawned me at in the latest universe I had it generate. Reminded me of Lathe there but the height map is so similar. So this begs the question, are the low-lying areas on Super Eve going to be ocean, effectively making it ~70% liquid surface and NO land above 1000m? That would be a complete and utter b**ch to take off from.

[kiwiak]

Two small suggestions:

-change colour from violet to something else to make distinctive from real Eve... maybe to orange?

- change name to something oryginal... If there is Eve than how about Lilith?

[Bekiekutmoar]

Tuolea looks like a giant popcorn ... Nice project ... ! Possible names for the Super Eve: Qrotesque, Gordo, Liethul.

[Cooly568]

Okay this is kind of random, but I'm deciding to livestream some work on this.

Ignore the youtube, I'm on twitch now.

http://www.twitch.tv/cooly568

Edited January 20, 2014 by Cooly568

[Cooly568]

A little bit of a update to the state of this, I made Tuolea's mountains much less extreme, now it's smoother than before, I decreased Ero's ridge size and changed it's color, and added minuture craters on Lopoer.

Sorry I can't get any pictures up at the moment, I'll get some up as soon as I can.

Edit: I also decreased the inclination of the outer moons to 20 degrees.

[Tery215]

More moons, please.

Otherwise it's just a small Jool.

[LostElement]

This looks promising! I suggest more moons, without that kind of inclination maybe, at most, one or two that have the inclination of Minmus. Also if this is super Eve make if have more moons than jool. And make a moon have a moon orbiting it if that's possible.

[Cooly568]

I was planning much more moons then this, maybe even around 16 at tops, these were just the first seven.

[LostElement]

16? Oh myyyy... You should try to make Eve 2x-4x Larger than it is! You should also add volcanoes with Lava near it that will overheat your craft if you are too close.

[Cooly568]

I'm not sure if I want to make it any bigger than it currently is, as it already lags out my computer, which as I said, is pretty powerful, but that is something I wanted to try out at some point.

I don't know if I can add volcanoes that would overheat ships without some plugin of some crazy sort, but the atmosphere does present a heating element, and is some 1600 on the thermometer at sea level if my memory serves me right.

Edited January 22, 2014 by Cooly568
Garmmer

[Cooly568]

Since it's been a while since any update, I feel I need to give one.

I've updated the album at the top with some changes and a new moon.

[ETHANW]

You should make one moon where it has a crater going all the way through like a doughnut if possible. That would be interesting and cool to go through.

[metaphor]

Looks cool.

One thing I'll mention is that your atmospheric height should be about 14 times the scale height. If you make it lower than that, the top of the atmosphere will be a lot denser than the surrounding space, it will be like hitting a brick wall.

One way you could make a volcanic surface is to put in an atmosphere, cut it off at like 10 meters, and raise the temperature coefficient. That way any ship that gets close to the surface at 0m altitude will overheat (assuming all the lava lakes are at 0m altitude).

[LostElement]

So when can we expect to download this for testing?

[Garek]

You should make one moon where it has a crater going all the way through like a doughnut if possible. That would be interesting and cool to go through.

I'm not sure since I never tried to edit planets myself, but afair KSP simulates planetary gravity without regards to the actual mesh, but simply from the center. So a donut-shaped planet won't work, because the gravity would actually pull you towards the (empty) center instead of towards the actual mass. Since gravity gets stronger the closer you get to it's origin, actually passing through a gravity origin would then propably break physics.

[Cooly568]

You should make one moon where it has a crater going all the way through like a doughnut if possible. That would be interesting and cool to go through.

I actually experimented with this while making Lopoer, but while the game DID actually render a hole all the way through, the game didn't know what to do when I passed 0 meters and the planet mesh disappeared

One thing I'll mention is that your atmospheric height should be about 14 times the scale height. If you make it lower than that, the top of the atmosphere will be a lot denser than the surrounding space, it will be like hitting a brick wall.

One way you could make a volcanic surface is to put in an atmosphere, cut it off at like 10 meters, and raise the temperature coefficient. That way any ship that gets close to the surface at 0m altitude will overheat (assuming all the lava lakes are at 0m altitude).

I wasn't sure how the scale height worked, so thanks for letting me know!

Well... I don't know how you could get two atmospheres in one, but I did think of doing what you described on Tuolea with it's exposed mantle.

So when can we expect to download this for testing?

I want to hold off a release until I get at least the base of all the moons done, then release it, get feedback, and change from there in updates.

I'm not sure since I never tried to edit planets myself, but afair KSP simulates planetary gravity without regards to the actual mesh, but simply from the center. So a donut-shaped planet won't work, because the gravity would actually pull you towards the (empty) center instead of towards the actual mass. Since gravity gets stronger the closer you get to it's origin, actually passing through a gravity origin would then propably break physics.

Last night when I was testing one of the system's two 1km asteroids, I accidentally deleted the planet mesh and fell through the gravity origin without the game breaking, but like I said above, I think the game doesn't render planet meshes under 0 meters.

[Cooly568]

A bit of a spoiler towards two of the newer planets.