The upcoming 1.0 version of KSP will natively support DirectDraw Surface (DDS) textures, which can be directly loaded from disk and pushed to graphic cards, resulting in significant load time savings (compared with MBMs, PNGs and TGAs, which need to be decompressed and then recompressed to the correct format).

As such, it would be wise to transition to this texture format in the next release of this parts pack.

Notes

• It would be wise to wait for KSP 1.0 to actually be released, so that one could actually evaluate the new DDS format stock part textures, and determine how to best perform the conversion
• According to KSP developer Mu:
  • RGB Diffuse textures need to be DXT1, RGBA Diffuse with Alpha textures need to be DXT5 and normal maps need to be DXTnm
  • When converting, the -flip command is required, as DDS uses a different coordinate system to PNG/TGA

KSP 1.0 has been released, and all stock parts now officially use DDS textures.

Since I currently don't have access to a laptop capable of running the game, I'll need to get volunteers to test converted SDHI SMS textures.

Interesting observation from forum user blowfish:

DDSLoader previously required textures to be flipped. That may not be the case with the stock loader now (haven't checked). If dds4ksp is causing in-game flipped textures, toggle the flip textures settings in the conversion options before reconverting (it defaults to true).

KSP to DDS texture converter looks like the tool for the job - it's an standalone tool, automatically handles PNGs and performs the correct format conversion / flipping.

Textures converted to DDS, awaiting feedback from user testing.

User feedback suggests that diffuse and normal textures look OK.