It would have been so nice if there was a smaller cockpit I could have used. I’m even considering making a small block cockpit on future designs so the scale of the plane doesn’t have to be quite so big.

Anyway, things are a bit tough right now so I’m focusing on what comes naturally and trying to put the finishing touches on the Cosmo Messer.

The changes I’ve made so far are listed below:

• Added 3 additional hydrogen thrusters (Messer can now pretend to be a VTOL in 1.2g gravity)
• Increased hydrogen tanks from 6 to 12 (to compensate for the additional thrusters and increase the range)
• Added a magnetic plate on a hinge near the cockpit (in case a connector isn’t available or compatible)
• Trimmed back and smoothed out the sloped areas around the engines
• Finished adding navigation and strobe lights to the ship

The current unmodded build

A lot of other considerations have gotten sidelined for aesthetics, so the Cosmo Messer is heavier than it looks; extra plating to pretty up the default paint scheme and so on. There are some areas inside I left completely empty to try to balance this out, but in order to hover on Pertam I needed nine hydrogen thrusters. That’s not a huge number, but I feel like any less than that and the ship would be dangerously sluggish at low altitudes. Either way she flies. The range still isn’t great, but there are a couple of free programmable blocks left that might be able to hold a ‘fuel management’ script or something.

All bottom thrusters are externally mounted

Originally the Cosmo Messer only had six thrusters in pairs of two. This wasn’t enough. I tried landing on Pertam and wound up crashing. The engine shrouds took the brunt of it, and only because I was trying to point the tail downward to enlist the main thrusters for help. twelve thrusters trumps six. Anyway, the Messer has some strategically placed heavy armor in the form of its nose and winglets, so even after smashing up the tip of the tail and the engine shrouds and falling onto its stomach, there wasn’t much damage.

I couldn’t take off again though, so in a way the ship was completely totaled.

After laughing at myself, I upgrading one of the copies I left up in orbit and tried again.

Success.

I love those engine shrouds~

The Cosmo Messer is based on the Cosmo Falcon, but it was never intended to be a Space Reich copy of the thing. There were going to be some major differences from the get go since the Falcons have actual landing gears and a lot of pointy bits. Without the Plane Parts mod, there was no way to come up with anything decent for a vehicle this small, which is weird because the ship is too big in every other regard. I tried a lot of things and broke a few copies, but in the end, only the modded versions are ever going to have proper landing gears. The base model will just have to make due with that connector and the magnetic plate.

If the cockpit were just a little bit smaller, I’d be a little bit happier

If I can finish this thing up soon I’m planning to upload it to the Steam Workshop. Whether or not that happens, I’ll be writing on PR about it the hour it’s finished.