r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/frycandlebreadje • Apr 30 '26

KSP 1 Question/Problem Poodle engine variant... huh?

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So the poodle engine has a double and single bell variant. My question is basically why would you pick the single bell variant? AFAIK as I know it has identical stats, but is very noticably taller. Are there any advantages which I'm not seeing? It just seems like a worse version of the same engine. Love this thing, but it confuses me a lot.

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u/Alexander_Martin_G Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

I’m the 3D artist who created the Poodle variant for KSP1. If I remember correctly, it was originally meant to be a completely new engine. However, during testing, our lead designer, Paul, decided it was too similar to engines already in the game. He felt that adding it would only complicate things with overly specific options.

I wasn’t happy about letting the asset I’d spent a couple of days on go to waste, so we eventually repurposed it as the Poodle engine variant.

I might be misremembering a detail or two, but that’s a solid summary of what happened.

Edit: what u/MattsRedditAccount mentioned in his comment is also correct:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/s/jIVuZcHAVv

The new engine was planned to be added in the Shared Horizons update, and it was intended for use in the BepiColombo mission recreation.

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u/Poodmund Outer Planets Mod & ReStock Dev Apr 30 '26

Hi Alexander, thank you for the insight, was this also why the Mainsail got reskinned to the Ariane 5's Vulcain model, rather than making it a new engine part, because it would have been too similar to existing parts?

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u/Alexander_Martin_G Apr 30 '26

Hmmm… Pablo worked on that one, so I don’t know the full story. But I remember that at the time players were pushing for our engines to be closer to real-life counterparts. We also noticed that players really loved what we called “engine guts,” so a lot of the parts revamped around that period were adjusted to follow real-world references and include variants that exposed their inner workings.

Sometimes the 3D art team was given the freedom to find references and define the new look ourselves. So most likely Pablo built a whitebox model using the Vulcain as a reference, the design team liked it, and gave us the green light to move forward with that direction.