Star maps?

[Esme]

Apologies if I've been blind and missed a reference to one somewhere, but is there a map of Kerbin's night sky anywhere? As in one showing lines of Right Asenscion and Declination? (or even if it uses something more like 0-360 degrees equatorially and +90 to -90 degrees N-S I'd still be happy).

Failing that, can anyone tell me how I can extract the night sky textures into .PNG's or JPEGs, please, so I can start making my own map?

[HafCoJoe]

I'm not sure if this is useful as its not night, but this is what I use when planning landings without actually going to the planets: http://www.kerbalmaps.com/

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

I'm not sure if this is useful as its not night, but this is what I use when planning landings without actually going to the planets: http://www.kerbalmaps.com/

I don't believe that's what the OP means, I think he means something more along the lines of a celestial sphere.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Earth_within_celestial_sphere.gif

[Esme]

You're correct, SpaceSphereofDeath, it's a star map that I'm after. There's a couple of personal projects I have in mind that would depend on having a reasonably accurate star map. If one doesn;t already exist, my favoured choice would be to extract the relevant texture(s) from the game and manipulate the images in a paint program to produce a usable star chart. If I HAVE to I'll just screenshot the entire sky over time, but I;d rather not have to!

I'm female, btw. :-)

[GoatRider]

You're correct, SpaceSphereofDeath, it's a star map that I'm after. There's a couple of personal projects I have in mind that would depend on having a reasonably accurate star map. If one doesn;t already exist, my favoured choice would be to extract the relevant texture(s) from the game and manipulate the images in a paint program to produce a usable star chart. If I HAVE to I'll just screenshot the entire sky over time, but I;d rather not have to!

I'm female, btw. :-)

What! That's unpossible! There are no girls in gaming!

j/k, I'm in a WoW guild that is about half women.

It should be possible to dig into the game data and find the texture map.

EDIT: Try GameData/Squad/Spaces/GenericSpace1/*.mbm

I found this tool to convert the mbm files to png:

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/mbm-to-png-file-converter/

Edited May 11, 2014 by GoatRider

[Esme]

(laughing) Many thanks!

(added shortly after) Hmmn.. turns out the stellar background isn't in there or another folder with some mbm's in that I tried. I suppose it might be buried in the program code..

Edited May 11, 2014 by Esme

[Claw]

You know, I've never even looked to see if the stars are constant. Have you verified that much? It's possible that they're generated during game launch.

Although as I'm typing this, I sort of recall seeing seams in the starfield. I don't know if that's because it's using textures, or just that it's repeating a procedurally driven sky.

[GoatRider]

Darn, everything in the "Spaces" folder seems to be cockpits. They are big files, I thought for sure that was it.

That doesn't seem like the kind of data a developer would compile into the executable, there has to be a file somewhere. On the other hand, I don't see the planet textures anywhere either.

There are a bunch of generically named big files in the "KSP_Data" folder, but those look like binary files that we probably can't decode easily. I'll bet they are there.

[GoatRider]

This looks promising: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/60961-0-23-5-TextureReplacer-1-5-%281-5-2014%29

Down in the config, there are items like "Default/GalaxyTex_PositiveX // skybox right face", so maybe this tool can extract as well as replace. I'll take a look.

EDIT: Nope.

Edited May 11, 2014 by GoatRider

[GoatRider]

Here we go, I think this will give you what you want:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/44135-0-22-Universe-Replacer-v4-0/page35?p=577055&viewfull=1#post577055

[Esme]

Thanks very much again, Goatrider!

Claw, yes the celestial sphere is a texture - it becomes quite obvious if you zoom in on it (try using a Mk1 cockpit clicking on a window, then using your scroll wheel to zoom the image). When I was still getting to grips with KSP, I judged Mun intercepts by aiming for patches of the Milky Way a certain visual distance ahead of where the Mun was in the sky, and as a result became reasonably familiar with some of the Kerbaloid Milky Way's features. features. What I'd like to do now is to produce a proper map of it and the rest of the sky.