Opinions about life support mods?

[onlinegamesz]

I am thinking to get a life support mod but i'm worrying that every time when i'm sending for example a probe to another planet I need to worry every single time if my kerbals are not dying in my space stations and bases but it does sound realistic and fun when you need to send supplies to your moon base.

What are your opinions about life support mods? Do they bring more fun or more challenge into the game?

Thanks

[JadeOfMaar]

Life support mods are a great thing to have and come in an array of varieties and difficulties. Whether thy add to the fun of a game is completely subjective, but they absolutely do add a challenge. All of the LS mods have a UI button and will show a window that tells you how much food is remaining on all of your ships and how long each ship's crew (and each kerbal on EVA) is expected to last until the starve.

If you only play sandbox, LS mods keep things interesting by giving you something very important to manage continually.

This thread thoroughly dissects a whole bunch of them so I encourage you to read and understand them all:

The most popular or most current ones are:

Closed Loop Life Support
The newest and simplest but an obscure mod while the rest are very popular. Kerbals basically photosynthesis to stay alive in this one (and they keep very small tanks of their massless food) but you'll need to be familiar with nuclear reactors if you plan to go very far from the Sun with crewed ships. Kerbals die in this one.

Snacks!
A very basic one in which kerbals don't die but become unusable when they've starved enough and you get a reason to mine Ore apart from refilling on fuel.

USI Life Support
A flashy and beautiful and mildly complicated one. It has several greenhouse parts and systems for making food usage more efficient on top of simply making sure there's plenty food. Kerbals can get homesick in this one and don't die from starvation (by default but you can change it). They become tourists.

Kerbalism
A life support that considers many irl challenges that astronauts have to face like radiation belts, cramped quarters, atrophy and atmosphere in the ship. It involves the highest number of resources at once, too.

TAC Life Support
A life support system that's pretty raw and is arguably the scariest of them despite how complex Kerbalism is. It involves a couple of resources including food but unlike the other 4 life support mods it doesn't include its own means to make Food off-world. Shipping food out from Kerbin is the only way to keep stomachs full and keep life signs going.

DeepFreeze & SETI: Greenhouse
Essential addons for any life support game especially with TAC. DeepFreeze is the cryo-sleep mod. Freeze your crew during the long travel to save your vital resources.

 

 

[onlinegamesz]

Awesome! Thank you so much for the big explanation. I am still doubting which one to take, do you have a specific recommendation or is it really personal taste?

[Streetwind]

Just personal taste. Pick one and go!

Though, I would recommend not going with Kerbalism for your very first try, since it introduces a large number of new concepts. Also, it changes a lot of parts and if you want a game where things are consistent, you can only install other mods which offer specific support/integration. I'd see Kerbalism more as a total overhaul than a mere life support system. You can try it later if you get an appetite for something that is quite unlike stock gameplay.

[Gotmachine]

In KSP, the fundamental gameplay element, the thing you have to plan for and make decisions about is delta-v. In stock, to achieve what you want, you essentially have to worry about two main factors : mass restrictions and the TWR of your propulsion system. Then, you are free to do anything with mission planning to cut on delta-v requirement : you can cut it in half by doing ten-years long gravity assists or always use a perfect hoffman transfer. With life support, there is a new gameplay element that come into balance : time is limited. This introduce a decision process to balance the two consequences :

• longer mission duration = potentially less deltav needed to go to the destination (because longer more efficient trajectory)
• longer mission duration = more LS mass = less deltaV

To me, this is the main point of life support : add limited time as a new element in the gameplay. But this is relevant only for long duration and consequently interplanetary travel, and this is why I don't like life support mods that involve managing LS for short missions. I don't like having to micromanage multiple resources or having to think about a complex resource production chain, so my primary choice is Snacks which keep things plain and simple, and is easily customizable to your taste with simple in-game settings. My opinion on the others is:

• TAC :  a super-realistic representation of life support. For people that want a simulation and not something fun and simple.
• Kerbalism : very complex, realistic, with a lot of new features (a lot more that simply life support). It's a great mod but if you want something not too involving I don't recommend it.
• USI-LS : Unless you are using MKS and other USI mods, it offer nothing more than Snacks in terms of a life support system. It also include a "Habitation" gameplay element : the larger your vessel habitat is, the slower your kerbals will get homesick (and go on strike). It's an incentive to build bigger ships and stations, and to manage missions durations.

Edited April 1, 2017 by Gotmachine

[theJesuit]

If you are new to life support and simply want to try it our without, then I recommend IFI LifeSupport, as the units are basic, but balanced for mass.

I'd also recommend investing your RAM in Kerbal Alarm Clock, as you will then be able to set alarms for resupply runs on your long time warps to other planets, making accidental killing of kerbals less likely.

Peace.

[goldenpsp]

3 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

In KSP, the fundamental gameplay element, the thing you have to plan for and make decisions about is delta-v. In stock, to achieve what you want, you essentially have to worry about two main factors : mass restrictions and the TWR of your propulsion system. Then, you are free to do anything with mission planning to cut on delta-v requirement : you can cut it in half by doing ten-years long gravity assists or always use a perfect hoffman transfer. With life support, there is a new gameplay element that come into balance : time is limited. This introduce a decision process to balance the two consequences :

• longer mission duration = potentially less deltav needed to go to the destination (because longer more efficient trajectory)
• longer mission duration = more LS mass = less deltaV

To me, this is the main point of life support : add limited time as a new element in the gameplay. But this is relevant only for long duration and consequently interplanetary travel, and this is why I don't like life support mods that involve managing LS for short missions. I don't like having to micromanage multiple resources or having to think about a complex resource production chain, so my primary choice is Snacks which keep things plain and simple, and is easily customizable to your taste with simple in-game settings. My opinion on the others is:

• TAC :  a super-realistic representation of life support. For people that want a simulation and not something fun and simple.
• Kerbalism : very complex, realistic, with a lot of new features (a lot more that simply life support). It's a great mod but if you want something not too involving I don't recommend it.
• USI-LS : Unless you are using MKS and other USI mods, it offer nothing more than Snacks in terms of a life support system. It also include a "Habitation" gameplay element : the larger your vessel habitat is, the slower your kerbals will get homesick (and go on strike). It's an incentive to build bigger ships and stations, and to manage missions durations.

Wow very detailed and almost as inaccurate.  USI-LS is nothing like snacks and the only thing that makes TAC more "realistic" feeling is it breaks out food water and oxygen.  However with the exception of edge cases most people will leave all three of those sliders at the same spot as all three go down at the same rate.  So from a gameplay perspective  it could just be one slider called "lifesupport" and most of the time you wouldn't know the difference.

[Gotmachine]

3 minutes ago, goldenpsp said:

USI-LS is nothing like snacks

I never said that, only that USI-LS offer nothing more. It is my opinion, but I think that USI-LS suffer from being designed as the LS system for MKS, and not a standalone mod. It introduce too much parts and resource for the purpose of a simple life support system. To someone that only want to add life support to the stock game and not extend the game too much, it still is an allright option, but I would recommend Snacks.

As for TAC, it is realistic because it use realistic values (not gameplay balanced ones) and do not provide a recycling / greenhouse option like others, something that's needed maintain the possibility of interplanetary mission duration with stock engines/ISP/parts.

[blakemw]

I'd tend to recommend USI-LS if you want a forgiving and stock-a-like life support system well-suited for a "fantasy space program" involving big stations and bases and stuff. It's good if you like to run many missions at once (i.e. managed using Kerbal Alarm Clock) because it's exceptionally low in scripting, using stock mechanisms.

Kerbalism is awesome but it is quite exceptionally unforgiving, it introduces many, many ways for kerbals to die (and of course, the ways to keep them alive). I find it a rather "micromanagement" orientated mod, lots of details, lots of things which can go wrong. You definitely don't want to use it if you want to run two dozens missions at once (both because of the level of attention required, but also because it's scripting-heavy so you'll possibly run into performance issues or annoyances if your space program is too big), but if you want to run a "real space program" and get the feeling of having overcome the challenges of staying alive in space I'd super highly recommend Kerbalism. I find the progression in Kerbalism to be very reasonable, progressing from Orbit->Mun->Minmus->Duna/Eve, you'll experience new hazards each time. Getting to Jool and home again would be a super accomplishment.

I find TAC to be like a rather easier version of Kerbalism, for example in Kerbalism along with having to provide food, water, oxygen and EC there's a good chance your kerbals will die of radiation poisoning on a round trip mission to Duna, unless you put a lot of effort into radiation mitigation (shielding, short trip times etc), they can also go insane, furthermore parts can malfunction which can also obviously be lethal if it's something that keeps your kerbals alive or which they need to get home, malfunctions can be mitigated through redundancy (at last a reason for triple redundancy) and setting part quality to high and usually a kerbal/engineer can repair a malfunction (I could see some players would get frustrated with malfunctions, but it's probably one of my favorite features of Kerbalism - it's really well implemented). With TAC you basically just have to bring enough stuff to keep them fed and watered, it's a lot more predictable and less hazardous.

Edited April 1, 2017 by blakemw

[goldenpsp]

1 hour ago, Gotmachine said:

I never said that, only that USI-LS offer nothing more. It is my opinion, but I think that USI-LS suffer from being designed as the LS system for MKS, and not a standalone mod. It introduce too much parts and resource for the purpose of a simple life support system. To someone that only want to add life support to the stock game and not extend the game too much, it still is an allright option, but I would recommend Snacks.

As for TAC, it is realistic because it use realistic values (not gameplay balanced ones) and do not provide a recycling / greenhouse option like others, something that's needed maintain the possibility of interplanetary mission duration with stock engines/ISP/parts.

Fair enough.  Just making the distinction that USI-LS doesn't perform anything like snacks.  And I would still disagree that it offers nothing more.  If Lifesupport = food in your mind then maybe, but the addtitional habitation requirements add an element of life support realism as well.  Shoving someone into a 1 seat capsule for a year isn't very realistic from a "life support" point of view.  And even without MKS this adds interesting design challenges as you can't build a super compact vessel with no room to move around anymore.

Also, most, if not all LS mods are based in reality.  @RoverDude built USI-LS around NASA data so it isn't just some arbitrary numbers he came up with.

Edited April 1, 2017 by goldenpsp