Just a little update on what I've been chugging away on in January. Nothing "finished" yet (these are big chunks of work) but my in-progress WIP images get buried in Discord so often, I need get into the habit of posting more here.

As we want to eventually get kittens actually flying these ships - the year started with work on our medium capsule's IVA. This is an acronym (from my Kerbal Space Program days) for "Inter-vehicular activity" - a slang term we adopted to represent the internal space within parts. These were cockpits, spacestation modules, cupolas, the works. They were initially not very "useful" as very few people enjoyed playing the game blind (capsules don't often have a great view) but they became more and more important when mods started branching into letting the player navigate freely within them in a form of VR; and Squad itself began to give more love to the Kerbals with crew portraits and cut-away views so you could see what they were doing during flight.
IVA's became a way for you to pilot your ships in first person - meaning you needed higher resolution textures, meshes, and environments that were often four times the standard of the main parts themselves when authoring them. A navigation aide would end up with a texture the size of an entire space capsule because you were physically sitting right next to it - with the requirement to be able to read the altitude and attitude of your craft as you flew. You needed thousands of switches and screens to allude to the control pilots needed in real life. Interior wall textures became 4k to keep assets crisp as they were so close to the camera. It became a joke within the modding community that "if a player wanted a mod to have an IVA - they can make it themselves" as the effort to create one eclipsed what you'd spend creating a normal part ten times over. To get around their complexity; they were often "referenced in" and reused in other parts, and were made of repeating elements that made populating them a little more sane.

...not too dissimilar to the KSA approach to, well, everything!

So in order for us to achieve an IVA that is both high quality enough to act as a flight sim cockpit; immersive enough to fly through in a seamless VR way; and performant enough to have it exist in the same scene as everything else, we'll be leaning on our subpart referencing system harder than we have before. They'll be a single screw, referenced and instanced by the GPU hundreds of times. A single switch done in the same way; placed in banks of sensible rows that can have functions attached to them. Panels that are easily mirrored and rotated to be used in other craft, both for consoles, but also floors, walls, and hatches. And a heavy use of normal map and texture map baking to capture soft, pillowy organic shapes without the polycount ballooning. We might even abstract text into an alphabet atlas; so we only need to draw an alphabet's character set once. Even furniture gets the same treatment - you can even remove it from the capsule yourself (if you really want to!)

I think i'm almost through the bulk of it, but after that comes a lot of high res texturing work; alongside assembling the subparts out of my mess of a scene into a coherent whole within the game. As a plus - this means we then start with a bank of assets to reuse for other interior IVAs - so getting them right the first time is quite important.

Certainly a big job, but the payoff is huge :)

(also Hunter wanted to land with something other than an engine bell)