Stock fairings: Procedural or not?

[klgraham1013]

Are you kidding? Do you have any ideas how many different parts they'd have to make if the fairings were non-procedual. Just having one or two fairing bases would make life so much easier for everyone.

I do! KW already does it!

[RainDreamer]

Procedural is easier to use. It would be plug and play with less memory impact.

[Bill Phil]

You need an algorithm to morph the fairings to the payload... Could be pretty complicated.

[KSK]

Procedural with limit+1

A rocket with a cake head is silly.

Maybe there will have MK1/2/3 fairings, their cross section size were limited, but not the length

I'm guessing that cake head rockets would suffer under the new drag model, even with a fairing. After all, we already know that asparagus will still work after a fashion but just be much less efficient.

Your idea of a range of cross-sectional sizes but procedural lengths sounds good to me, but I've never played with either fairing mod, so don't really have an opinion about it one way or the other.

Edited January 26, 2015 by KSK

[cpast]

Are you kidding? Do you have any ideas how many different parts they'd have to make if the fairings were non-procedual. Just having one or two fairing bases would make life so much easier for everyone.

KW does it in 18, AFAIK (sizes 1.25, 2.5, 3.75, both wide and normal; can't remember if they have 0.625, but don't think so and it's not needed in stock since you don't really launch 0.625-wide stacks). Note that 6 of these are literally just sectors of a cylinder, and 6 are tops to a cylinder. Those 12 could really be done as 2, just with the part scaled. The remaining 6 have 2 formats (wider than stack and same width as stack), and could probably also be done as 2 with model scaling (just would be a bit iffier, because that has more than zero detail required).

[Pthigrivi]

I do love the KW sizes. I wonder how/if they will handle inline fairings. Rather than even being procedural you could have 6 cone fairing bases and 3 inline bases, and right click and drag them up to the height you wanted (with a cap).

[Frozen_Heart]

I'd much rather have standard sizes like the KW ones. It takes away any engineering challenge if the fairing fits around any sized payload.

Plus the pfairings are ugly.

[Superfluous J]

I'd much rather have standard sizes like the KW ones. It takes away any engineering challenge if the fairing fits around any sized payload.

Plus the pfairings are ugly.

Your first statement is untrue and your second is an opinion I don't agree with. In the stock aero, yes, procedural fairings do not suffer from any ill effects other than adding the same useless weight and drag to your vessel that standard fairings would. However in FAR (and with any luck at all in the revamped stock aero) ridiculously sized and shaped fairings DO suffer problems that you either have to engineer around or fly through. These issues get worse and worse the more oddly shaped your fairings and at some point you simply cannot get your thing into orbit.

There is a reason we (humans) don't use ball-shaped fairings to lift massive pancake-shaped objects into orbit and it's not "they look funny." And it's surely not "We couldn't make the fairings because we're stuck with these 8 pre-made cutouts." It's because it won't fly. Just like (I hope) will happen in KSP 1.0.

[Alshain]

KW does it in 18, AFAIK (sizes 1.25, 2.5, 3.75, both wide and normal; can't remember if they have 0.625, but don't think so and it's not needed in stock since you don't really launch 0.625-wide stacks). Note that 6 of these are literally just sectors of a cylinder, and 6 are tops to a cylinder. Those 12 could really be done as 2, just with the part scaled. The remaining 6 have 2 formats (wider than stack and same width as stack), and could probably also be done as 2 with model scaling (just would be a bit iffier, because that has more than zero detail required).

KW fairings are incredibly limited in design. You can't build even slightly mis-shapen payloads, let alone something like this (which does fly in FAR). Now the picture below is an extreme case, but with KW Rocketry fairings your payload can't even be slightly wider than the fairing base, which is a severe limit.

[Parkaboy]

I'd like to see something between fixed sizes and procedural. Here's how I envision it:

- Rather than the several parts needed to build a shroud that we have in KW, we should need only the fairings bases (in 1m, 2,5m and 5,75m sizes).

- The fairings themselves would be added via a tweakables menu, such as the open/close action in the cargo bays;

- This tweakables menu would have a few options to increase width and lenght of the fairings, with a few fixed sizes, such as: width +25% or +50%, and lenght +25%, +50%, +75% and +100%.

This way we could get the best of both worlds: less clutter on the parts list, like with Procedural fairings, and a few fixed sizes (not so few, considering the combinations) that challenge builders to make payloads that fit. And having fixed sizes makes it easy for them to create textures that fit - that way we wouldn't end up with the plain white fairings from PF. We could even have flags in the fairings.

[Alshain]

I don't think you can do it with only the fairing bases. Unity works with parts, so if you want it to decouple and maintain the pieces you have to have parts. I don't see how you could do with less than ProcFairings has. In fact I think it is likely that Squad will end up with MORE parts than ProcFairings. While they may be doing procedural fairings out of necessity, I'm thinking they will likely have 3-4 standard sized fairing bases that are not procedural like ProcFairings has.

This is just a guess based on Squads previous implementations of course.

Edited January 26, 2015 by Alshain

[Vindaloo]

I use KW Rocketry fairings and I like them, I would be OK if something like that became stock. On the other hand a more stock-like Procedural Fairing option would be nice too, and the fairing shape will impact how the rocket flies with improved aerodynamics. So in short, I am OK with either option.

[Pthigrivi]

I like it Parkaboy. Id be totally cool with that. Keeping the parts number down sounds great. It's fitting within a module that makes it a challenge. I'd still love interstage fairings though.

Also I'm in total agreement on foldable things for packing. Most of the parts do a good job of this already but Id love to see the M1 wheels deflate and fold up. It would be a great balance element over the M2s.

[r4pt0r]

could the things inside the fairing add their mass to the fairing part, and not be loaded until the fairing is opened? to reduce part count on launch?

[Pthigrivi]

Hmm.. there could be some weird stuff with using parts while inside the fairing. Like what if you want to run science experiments in flight or change the control module?

[Alshain]

Yeah, I agree. One of the uses in ProcFairings is the structural fairing. This is a fairing that simply shrouds the cargo without the decoupling function. It basically works like a cargo bay with no doors. It's good if you plan to recover the entire payload (for science) and the parts inside are accessed by camera clipping. If you didn't load the parts, you wouldn't be able to use that. That assumes Squad plans on adding these structural fairings.

[Hydrazine_Soup]

I'm okay with procedural as long as they throw a bunch of tweakables at them

[CaptRobau]

Some people have been saying that procedural fairings mean that you can launch a ridiculously wide, bulbous payload on a rocket. So I tried it out using NEAR and MechJeb (for reproducible results):

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The payload is the same in both cases. The heavier fairings on the bulbous version results in a slightly lower TWR, but not enough to really influence the outcome (1.55 to 1.51).

In conclusion, if you want to have a successful launch, you need to make your fairings streamlined. I imagine the bulbous fairing would be even worse with FAR. I chose NEAR because I think it'll be close enough to what Squad is doing: not too complicated, not too simple.

[Paul Kingtiger]

I use KW fairing in my games because I love the look of them and the constraint of getting a payload to fit.

However for stock I can see procedural being the better option as it's much easier to use and on part count (fairing base for the 3 sizes of rocket, with the fairing being automatic).

In fact I'd make it easier that procedural fairings and not have the fairing sides as a separate part. Instead I'd just have the base part and then a tweakable to show / hide the rest of the fairing.

I also hope we can place 2 fairing bases top and bottom to get inline fairings for Saturn V style craft.

[m4v]

I prefer discrete parts, no procedural stuff. Fairings aren't designed for a payload anyway, the payload is designed with the space available in mind.

In conclusion, if you want to have a successful launch, you need to make your fairings streamlined. I imagine the bulbous fairing would be even worse with FAR. I chose NEAR because I think it'll be close enough to what Squad is doing: not too complicated, not too simple.

That's assuming the new aero model will work like FAR/NEAR, which we don't know yet but if I had to take a guess I would say it won't.

[Pthigrivi]

Im also curious about how the blow-away animation will look.. its so good with KW.

[Tuareg]

I prefer discrete parts, no procedural stuff. Fairings aren't designed for a payload anyway, the payload is designed with the space available in mind.

i wouldnt be so sure...

[CaptRobau]

I prefer discrete parts, no procedural stuff. Fairings aren't designed for a payload anyway, the payload is designed with the space available in mind.

That's assuming the new aero model will work like FAR/NEAR, which we don't know yet but if I had to take a guess I would say it won't.

We've gotten some more info on the aero model recently and I think there will be enough overlap between FAR/NEAR, real aerodynamics and KSP's future system that it's a valid enough comparison.

[Jouni]

In conclusion, if you want to have a successful launch, you need to make your fairings streamlined. I imagine the bulbous fairing would be even worse with FAR. I chose NEAR because I think it'll be close enough to what Squad is doing: not too complicated, not too simple.

This goes to orbit in FAR:

I've never tried NEAR, but I've understood that it's simpler but more difficult than FAR.

[Louella]

This is the bottom part of the lander I mentioned earlier. as you can see, the legs are on girder segments that stick out quite a bit. A fairing to cover that would be quite wide.

But if they had hinges, they could have been folded up against the sides of the upper part of the spacecraft.

This isn't quite the same lander, but it's developed from it. as you can see, the lander legs stick out pretty wide, but there's space available for them to have been folded up against the upper part of the spacecraft.

So, if aerodynamics changes means fairings are important (drag and/or heat), then, we really need to be able to fold up payload bits.