[WIP] RadBox Engineering LTD. Development Devision

[salsathegeek]

Hello all and welcome to RadBox Engineering's Development Division! Please keep an eye on this board for announcements, test packages, and new product lines.

I have some plans for various things, but for right now, I'm just going to be focusing on two of the ideas that I have. The first is the Konformal Kontainer System (KKS). The second is the Modular Lander System (MLS).

Design Goals:

-Aerodynamic and compact to fit in a variety of use cases.

-Various lengths to cut down on ship part count

-Lightweight mesh and textures to keep the memory footprint low.

Phase 1:

-KKS Kontainers for all stock resources.

-KKS Kontainers for TACLS, Snacks, and USI-LS

-KKS RTG that looks nice on the side of a rocket.

Phase 2:

-KKS racks for mounting KKS modules similar to Universal Storage

-KKS Modules that attach to nodes on the KKS racks.

-KKS Kontainers that have integrated decouplers.

Post-release:

-Maintenance and refinements

-Adding support for other mods to be released in separate packs.

Design Goals:

-Heavy, industrial looking parts for landing on airless bodies and bodies with thin atmosphere.

-Fits well with other similar parts such as LLL, Hex Truss, and NF Construction.

-Also fits well with the stock sizes

-Works in conjunction with and as an alternative to UKS

-Lightweight meshes and textures to keep the memory footprint low.

Phase 1:

-Tanks in 2, 4, and 6m

-Adapters to stock parts

-Engines in both vertical and horizontal orientations

-Service bay

-Trunk ala Space-X Dragon

-Drone core

-RCS Modules

-Decoupler

-End caps

Phase 2 (Post U5 update):

-Landing module (A module with sides cut out for installing landing legs and engines)

-Basic UKS integration

-Reactor module

-Landing Legs

-More Engines

-CLS Support

-Crew tank

-Command modules with IVAs

Phase 3:

-More complete UKS integration

-Mining and processing modules

-Greenhouse modules

-Lab module with IVA

Post-Release

-Maintenance and refinements

-Integration with other mods I have planned.

Obviously, this is subject to change as suggestions are made and changes to the game are made. For example, if the U5 upgrade comes out before I'm finished with the MLS Phase 1 development, I'll go ahead and get the legs done.

No download yet, but I'll be releasing these under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Feel free to post any questions or suggestions. I'm always open to new ideas. I'll be adding pictures as I go along.

Edited June 18, 2015 by salsathegeek
Added Dev Roadmap

[artwhaley]

What program are you building in? To get rid of the faceted look, if you're building in Blender(and probably most other things!) you want to set your faces to 'smooth shading' and then in Unity, in the model's import properties page of the inspector, you want to set normals to 'import'. You also may get satisfactory results from leaving your model alone and setting normals to 'calculate' in the unity model import settings.

Normal maps and specular maps can add a lot of 'realism' to your texturing, though they're not essential. Look up how to create a normal map from greyscale in unity. The basics are - you paint a texture where the low parts are black and the high parts are white and anything of medium depth is grey... and then let unity figure out how to make it a proper rgb normal map. And always get the part into space before you decide how to adjust the specular settings and map. The VAB has very different lighting than the flight scene.

[ZodiusInfuser]

Hi!

Always nice to see new modders come forward . If by faceted look you mean hard edges, then that's something that can be fixed without normal maps. If you're using blender, you'd set the part to be completely smooth and then apply the edge split modifier to have edges over a certain angle be sharp (and can specify individual edges with the Ctrl+E menu). Other modelling packages should have this functionality too.

Edit: To add, normal maps can give you extra surface detail without extra geometry, but for most KSP parts this is unnecessary. I've certainly not done it on any of my parts.

[salsathegeek]

I live!

Stopped playing for a bit, but then came back and also got back into modeling parts. I never was all that happy with the design I originally posted, I was mainly happy I got it in the game. Anyway, I've gone back and I've redesigned them, and this time I'm much happier with how it turned out. The tanks are between 2-4m long (the shortest is about 1.9m,) 20cm high, and 60cm side for the narrow ones and 75cm wide for the wide ones. I've included the stock tanks widths for some scale. The cube with sawed off edges, though, that's for something else I'm working on and will be posting an update about when I have some more work done on the modeling.

[salsathegeek]

And this would be the other thing I am working on. It's just the tanks for now. I'll be working on the RCS module and unwrapping the KKS Kontainers this weekend.