[WIP] US Probes - Old and New - Dev Thread

[raidernick]

Ok Pioneer 0-2 is done. Before an initial release I want to try and get pioneer 3-4 done also.

[Guest]

The texture looks odd. What are you using for a reference? Also, the gray parts look like they're very much untextured, most notably SRM nozzles.

[Buzzou]

Pioneer 10/11 is done. You'll notice I even put the golden plaque on it.

Your should ask Timmon26 if you can use his plaque, i'm sure he'd let you. His original post is here:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/23358-Kerbal-Space-Program-s-PIONEER-PLAQUE?p=292517&viewfull=1#post292517

[raidernick]

The texture looks odd. What are you using for a reference? Also, the gray parts look like they're very much untextured, most notably SRM nozzles.

You are kidding me right? I built it DIRECTLY by looking at the reference photos. Everything is textured and it isn't "odd" that is exactly how it looked even down to the EXACT screw/bolt placement. I even normal mapped with with the "snakeskin" texture you see in the photos. The engines are textured with a brushed metal and the real ones were the same color on the inside as outside so I did mine that way too, again exactly as the reference shows. The only difference between mine and the museum one is that the museum one is blue, which I'm pretty sure is not how the real one was colored.

Edited September 4, 2014 by raidernick

[raidernick]

And again with some reflection added to show it is infact normal mapped.

[Guest]

I confess I've never seen Pioneer 1 in color like that. Where are those pictures from? When I looked for pictures of the probe, I couldn't find anything remotely close in quality. I happen not to have much data on early pioneers.

Anyway, the gray parts could likely use a reflection treatment. Matte gray is exactly how KSP renders missing textures, and there's not much to go on those parts with regards to texture.

Also, the thruster ring was jettisonable. It also imparted a spin that stabilized the spacecraft. I'm not sure if there is any point of doing that in KSP, but it might be interesting (especially with that mod that preserves momentum through timewarp).

Oh, and if you don't believe me, here's the source: http://www.sdfo.org/stl/Pioneer%20Part%20II.pdf

It also mentions the reason for an unusual pain scheme - it was tailored to keep the spacecraft warm. So it could've as well been blue.

[Guest]

Bah, forgot to refresh. It's good now. I wasn't speaking about normal map, though. The probe still looks odd, but that's apparently because it looked odd IRL. Early spacecraft were the strangest things...

[sirkut]

I confess I've never seen Pioneer 1 in color like that. Where are those pictures from? When I looked for pictures of the probe, I couldn't find anything remotely close in quality. I happen not to have much data on early pioneers.

Anyway, the gray parts could likely use a reflection treatment. Matte gray is exactly how KSP renders missing textures, and there's not much to go on those parts with regards to texture.

Also, the thruster ring was jettisonable. It also imparted a spin that stabilized the spacecraft. I'm not sure if there is any point of doing that in KSP, but it might be interesting (especially with that mod that preserves momentum through timewarp).

Oh, and if you don't believe me, here's the source: http://www.sdfo.org/stl/Pioneer%20Part%20II.pdf

It also mentions the reason for an unusual pain scheme - it was tailored to keep the spacecraft warm. So it could've as well been blue.

That particular one resides at the Udvar-Hazy Center, National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/leonandloisphotos/12894755713/

[raidernick]

Also, the thruster ring was jettisonable. It also imparted a spin that stabilized the spacecraft. I'm not sure if there is any point of doing that in KSP, but it might be interesting (especially with that mod that preserves momentum through timewarp).

Oh, and if you don't believe me, here's the source: http://www.sdfo.org/stl/Pioneer%20Part%20II.pdf

Already knew that and it's already done.

[raidernick]

Your should ask Timmon26 if you can use his plaque, i'm sure he'd let you. His original post is here:

It looks good but I'm trying to keep all of my stuff 100% to real life. I don't like "kerbalized" versions on things, like on the "stock-alike" type packs.

[Magnabyte]

Given that you've done Pioneer 10, one of my favorite space probes (even if she was built just to see if Jupiter would fry the Voyager probes systems) I was wondering if I could humbly request a development of the Galileo (in the future of course), would really love to recreate the Jovian atmosphere drop on Jool

[raidernick]

I actually have that probe. I have just the orbital module, the asmosphere probe is just a placeholder. I will need to build the atmospheric probe from scratch.

[Magnabyte]

I always thought she looked beautiful, such a shame about the main dish (hoping you will do a "real life" and "intended" like you did with skylab)

[raidernick]

Does anybody know of a plugin that allows you to flip the control direction on a ship? A lot of the probes I am working on, and this includes the soviet ones too, are launched upside down. This means you have to control them in one direction on launch and then flip to use the engine which is placed on the opposite side. Right now I am solving this by making a tiny little box/probe part and adding it upside down to each of the ships that need this. I don't like doing this.

[RedAV8R]

Fwiw irl the, launcher had its own control. So wouldn't it be better and more realistic to begin with to have a part on the launcher in the correct upwards direction then the probe upside down. It would still require a control from here action but I don't see issue with that. I'd build probe and save as a subassembly. Then build launcher and add the subassembly to it.

[raidernick]

The problem is you know there are going to be people who don't understand something simple like that and will come here complaining I messed it up. I wanted to fix that problem before it started.

[RedAV8R]

This is true. You can engineer stupid out of a design all you want. People will just stoop to even more deeper levels of stupidity. You can't fix stupid.

[raidernick]

Ok I guess I'll just go with the control from here on the upper stages then, and hope people don't get confused. Is there a way to make the part appear rightside up in game but have the control upside down? I have it rightside up in blender and flipped it in unity but it then shows ingame upside down.

[RedAV8R]

My gut says no, but I honestly have no idea. I haven't touched blender or the whole modeling side of things.

Out of curiosity, what launched 'upside down'. I haven't really looked into much of the unmanned stuff yet.

Edited September 6, 2014 by RedAV8R

[raidernick]

pioneer 10/11, molniya sats. The dish pointed up on launch but faced backwards after that as the thrusters pushed from that direction

[RedAV8R]

That makes sense, dish has gotta point back to Earth:)

[NathanKell]

I'm pretty sure that module command's control from here just pulls from the part transform, not some extra transform. Docking ports, now, docking ports you can add a "control from here" transform separate from the part transform. So maaaaybe you could for ModuleCommand? Dunno, and never seen it done.

[raidernick]

The modeling on Pioneer 3-4 is mostly done. I still need to animate the weights that were used to slow the rotation down. Because of the extreme difficulty and resource intensity of modeling an actual cable that bends like a real cable, I am just going to have a straight cable that "rotates" and grows to unwind. It also won't detach like the real cable because of how tiny it is, I'm just going to make it vanish. This probe is modeled is 1:1 scale which is 58cm x 25cm. When I scale this to KSP size just imagine how tiny that will be.

Also looking for any good pictures of the underside of pionner 3/4. So far every picture I've found only shows the side angle and now what is actually underneath.

[raidernick]

Animations are done, now I just need to texture it.

[raidernick]

Pioneer 3-4 is done. The animations work, but unfortunately I am having the same problem I had with luna 9, where they start half deployed between each animation instead of at frame 0(using firespitter animate). I STILL don't know why it's doing this or how to fix it.

I also made this gold colored because all the museum photos show it this color. I believe that wikipedia is mistaken on the color because the one color photo of the actual probe(the one with the red background) is clearly overexposed. I believe this overexposure makes the gold look white. If you look closely at the "white" it has a goldish tinge to it.

Edited September 7, 2014 by raidernick