General

General Information

This page features general information about Sol. I've tried my best to compile the main idea of Sol, why you should use it, and why it was created in the first place.

What is Sol?:

Sol is the result of nearly a year of work building our solar system from the ground up. Every celestial object in Sol features new textures and utilizes the latest advancements in KSP planet technology.

This includes

• Parallax Continued terrain shaders and scatters
• Custom parallax scaled shaders derived from real photometric models
• EVE Volumetrics V5 to create immersive environments
• Custom PQSMods that allow for higher-quality 16-bit maps and filtering methods
• Asset bundles for fast asynchronous texture loading.

Unlike previous projects which had a very narrow focus on a small subset of celestial objects in the solar system, Sol treats all objects equally, ensuring each one has parallax compatibility and volumetrics if necessary

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Why Sol?:

Sol is intended to be a more flexible and higher quality alternative to both RealSolarSystem and KSRSS. Every texture in Sol has significant improvements compared to its predecessors.

This includes higher quality and more accurate mosaics for many objects, true-to-life colors and better texture formats. Along with new textures, several new bodies have been added. A gallery of all of these objects can be found on the forum page.

Sol supports various configuration options including:

• System Scales (Real, Quarter, Stock)
• System Reference Frames (ICRF, Ecliptic)
• Luna Reference Frames (Ecliptic, Equatorial, ICRF)
• Icon Display Modes
• Asteroid Orbit Display Modes

All of these options can be found in the Sol-Configs/Sol-Configuration.cfg file but can easily be changed through CKAN.

Another example of uniform quality in Sol is launch sites, which now feature high-quality 100m/px topography and color maps for their surrounding areas, along with handcrafted topography surrounding the space center, ensuring clipping and PQS disjoints are a thing of the past.

As stated prior, uniformity is seen with parallax scatters and EVE configs. Titan now has several cloud layers and hazes, and various scatters to make exploration interesting. Earth has a diverse set of biomes and foliage, Ceres and Miranda have rock litter scattered about, Ryugu has boulders covering its surface; every object in Sol is treated as equally valuable.

Sol also features a variety of accuracy improvements, ranging from minor details to fixing massive flaws. I've worked hard to ensure that every object in the solar system properly aligns with its IAU-designated coordinate system, ensuring that when you teleport to a known mission location, it will accurately line up with the terrain. Many objects lacking DEMs now feature high-quality terrain models, and many objects that were previously rotated incorrectly are now properly aligned.

Orbital ephemeris has been updated from BK4 to J2000 to align with newer standards. Certain parameters, such as semi-major axis and eccentricity, are now century-long averages, while others remain instantaneous at the epoch. All of this works to ensure that if you fly a replica mission in Sol, you should see exactly what the real mission saw.

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Why was Sol made?:

This question was asked by a good bit of RO and RP-1 folks throughout Sol's development process, and I would like to answer it in the clearest way I can here.

1. RSS and KSRSS are fundamentally the same mod, and having separate versions of each is confusing to players and makes extra work for both development teams.

2. RSS, in my personal opinion, has stagnated to the point that I would deem it "functionally abandoned." The RO Team does occasionally support RSS and RSSVE with new updates, however these are few and far between and drastically differ from the full capabilities KSP planet tech has to offer. This isn't meant to be a jab at those devs either, this isn't their forte and they've done their best while managing a massive community and one of the most impressive and functionally complex overhauls for KSP.

3. To hopefully put to rest the age-long tradition of starting new graphics packs for RSS. I do not intend on leaving Sol any time soon and I plan on improving upon every aspect of it over time.

A very common question that has been brought up in response to these is: "Why isn't Sol just a PR?"

Primarily to distance myself from the RP-1 community at large. Sol has gone through dozens of save-breaking changes over the last 12 months of development and something like that would be simply unacceptable for a major mod like RSS. I do not feel the need to enforce my changes on other players. Sol is harder to run, it features fancier graphics and textures and isn't supported on all platforms; for this reason, I elected to not make Sol a pull request.

A follow up question to that is: "Will you ever make a PR to RSS for general improvements?"

Possibly. KSP is an incredible game with simply unmatched potential to inspire engineers and scientists, regardless of their background. For this reason there is a need for the main "lightweight" branch of RP-1 players to have accurate planets, however the cost-benefit analysis of focusing on a PR in what could be spent making optimizations to Sol has to work out in its favor.