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Crewmember Trait: Doctor


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I've been toying with the idea of creating a doctor crewmember trait. I've tinkered with the persistent.sfs and traits.cfg files just to see if I could get the word "doctor" to show up as a crewmember as well as to learn a bit more about the programming. The thought occured that others may be working on creating this Kerbal crewmember. I'd like to know if there is anyone currently working on adding a doctor trait to the list of crewmembers as well as the thoughts and feelings of my fellow KSP friends.

Jerry

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Delta144 began a similar discussion thread:

Maybe something useful for scientist

Started by delta144, January 28, 2016

I'd like to express some of my thoughts on the matter of creating and modifying Kerbal traits:

There seemed to be a lack of concensus with those who responded to the thread. Also I didn't notice anyone replying to that thread attempting to modify the game files.

I've managed to add some eye-candy when I changed the name of a Kerbal to Dr. Lily Kerman, made her a crewmember and display the trait "Doctor" instead of Pilot, Scientist, etc.

She has no healing effects, likewise no Kerbals get sick or (from what I can tell) sustain injuries - unless you can say (gulp!) "...getting killed is a injury."

To make a doctor useful means to add a health gauge to every Kerbal created by the game as well as a healing ability to the doctor crewmember. I don't know how the programmers

built the Kerbal character code into the game. Adding something that requires every created character may require too many work-hours to turn a profit.

There does seem to be a consensus about the Kerbals becoming useless as Career mode comes to its end. The only consensus I can find is the consumer wants to have fun,

and the creators of this game wants to produce it and get paid too. However, programmers need specifics and spoken to them in computer architecture terms. Managers need consumer

feedback and spoken to them in (micro) economic terms. These are not things I want to think about when I want to have fun (again I'm just thinking outloud here).

I'd like for those reading this to express their thoughts on the matter of creating and modifying Kerbal traits; in this case a Doctor would be nice. However, there are others which may provide interest: miner, geologist, computer programmer (couldn't let that one slip by : )).

Please sit back and express your thoughts!

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3 hours ago, Bisbeejim said:

in this case a Doctor would be nice. However, there are others which may provide interest: miner, geologist, computer programmer (couldn't let that one slip by : )).

It would be nice, except it wouldn't do anything in the stock game except become an extra person to carry around unless some sort of life support and health system is implemented. Also, these other occupations seem kinda useless to carry onboard a ship. Why do I need a geologist when I already have a scientitst? And why do I need a miner? Kerbals in the stock game can't build anything. In addition, you really want new players to a) figure out what each trait does (sure it would be on the wiki, but it might not be intuitive) and b) basically carry around a colony ship of people with many specializations? I don't think that works. Besides, current space programs have very few people aboard any one ship, with the most I can think of being 7 on the shuttle. The people, therefore, have to be able to do many things good enough, instead of many specialized people on the mission.

TL;DR - Would be nice, but not needed and maybe too much.

I'm sure others could also chip in to this discussion.

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Perhaps kerbals should have health bars that get drained because of passing out in high G, being injured in falls and collisions, and it also slowly depletes in zero-G if there's no doctor around (you can't lose your last hp this way, but any careless sneeze towards a kerbal brought down to 1 hp with microgravity would kill them)? This way, the doctor kerbal with the ability to restore the health bar should be useful. The 0-level doctor merely prevents hp loss due to microgravity, and doctors with levels heal some hp per level.

 

You could also add spinning sections which stop hp loss and make kerbals regain hp, as slowly as they lose them, as opposed to instant healing by a doctor. You can also make certain parts of space irradiated, so the kerbals should lose hp twice as fast as normal, or cancelling hp regain if spinning sections are used.

Edited by ave369
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16 hours ago, ave369 said:

Perhaps kerbals should have health bars that get drained because of passing out in high G, being injured in falls and collisions, and it also slowly depletes in zero-G if there's no doctor around (you can't lose your last hp this way, but any careless sneeze towards a kerbal brought down to 1 hp with microgravity would kill them)? This way, the doctor kerbal with the ability to restore the health bar should be useful. The 0-level doctor merely prevents hp loss due to microgravity, and doctors with levels heal some hp per level.

 

You could also add spinning sections which stop hp loss and make kerbals regain hp, as slowly as they lose them, as opposed to instant healing by a doctor. You can also make certain parts of space irradiated, so the kerbals should lose hp twice as fast as normal, or cancelling hp regain if spinning sections are used.

This is an interesting idea and possibly something worth looking into. However I see one flaw with this right out the gate: it turns "doctors" into pseudo life support modules.

And if we go down that route, we may as well simply add life support.

Edited by Greenfire32
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I'm going to sit back, sip my coffee, and speak candid. Most of what I have to say may come across patrinizing but that is only because I'm thinking outloud as much as wishing to express how much work goes into make fun for others. I'm paying the creators of KSP so I can put aside my studies, allow my brain to rest, and escape to the KSP environment. However I think about these things but I never really discuss them with anyone. Here's my chance.

If I wish to have fun I don't want to concern myself with Nash and Von Neuman's Game Theory (wikipedia), the American (or World) Medical Association, nor the American Psychological Association and all 56 Disivision (AMA 2014 - www/apa.org/about/division/index.aspx). How much fun is it to dig into the physiological, perceptual, cognitive, personalities, and social orders of Cultural Psychology? How much fun would it be to build a society, give each member of that society medical and psychological numberical quantities, logical (and some illogical) internal personality traits as well as external social traits, then mesh it all together in a workable program. I assume all of us has someone we don't get along with - imagine trying to program it.

I am allowing myself the nonreality in this KSP game to call the Pilots, Engineers, and Scientists these titles, though in our Earth reality, pilots operate the controls of aircraft - not space craft. Scientists do not reset experiments themselves, they order their technical underlings to actually DO the work. Scientists are busy digging through the mathematical data attempting to discover something unknown with the purpose of sending that mathematical data to an engineer. The Engineer takes the mathematical data and attempts to build something useful without it costing a fortune. Manager's are there to ensure it's profitable while always humbly asking for more money from those who write the checks.

There is much discussion about making this game more fun, but I have yet to see anyone offer so much as an acceleration gauge. I have to get out my  stopwatch to calculate velocity = velocity + acceleration * time (Newton's acceleration formula) just so I can predict where my rocket will be. I have to convert kilograms to newtons just to see if my rocket will lift off the ground. At some point after I get through calculus I can predict the position of the rocket's orbit with greater accuracy. I ask an open ended question. Is this program about eye-candy or offering a reality game that doesn't insult one's intellegence? Orbiter, I like because it doesn't break (almost) every law of physics. Unfortunatly Orbiter is too unstable and can't handle the excessive tinkering I like to do with the program. KSP I like because I can tinker which inevitably will cause all kinds of program errors but without damage to the original file (safely inside it's .zip file).

Personally I don't like having a bunch of useless knobs and buttons in the cockpit. Being an ex-pilot myself I never found a button or switch in an airplane that was without purpose. I mean if it doesn't DO anything than don't have it in there (which is the cousin of the saying, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it."). If the cursor doesn't change to a pointing finger over a switch, knob, or button, then leave the damn thing out of the cockpit.

So, anyone else wish to sit back with their favorite drink (put your feet up) and spill, vent, or candidly discuss your thoughts and feelings. I probably won't agree with everything you say, but I'll be sure pleased you said it!

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From a gameplay perspective, even the existing skills for kerbals are pointless. Adding a new one would require something to actually do with it. To be useful, kerbals would have to be given acute medical problems that could reasonably be fixed in very short time periods. So presumably surgical treatment and maybe bone-setting. The trick is the condition must be something that would prevent them from functioning or kill them, and the doc has to fix it now. Short of that it doesn't do anything. Radiation exposure? Well, the kerbal might get cancer in 20 years (if he shows symptoms immediately, he's already dead, he just doesn't know it yet).

So you need a list of acute conditions to fix first, then you need to see if it matters if you lose crew. People don't even want life support generally, so losing a crew member randomly to disease?

I'd say make sure to bring a scientist, and image he/she is a doctor, and just pretend, that's about as useful.

 

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19 hours ago, Greenfire32 said:

This is an interesting idea and possibly something worth looking into. However I see one flaw with this right out the gate: it turns "doctors" into pseudo life support modules.

And if we go down that route, we may as well simply add life support.

I don't see adding minimalistic life support as anything bad at all.

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8 hours ago, ave369 said:

I don't see adding minimalistic life support as anything bad at all.

I don't either. I was just pointing out that that's basically what this is and we might as well not call it by any other name.

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I like the idea of adding minimalistic life support, perhaps as a precursor to a doctor character. I'd need some help from one of the programmer's to guide me to and through the code that makes and creates Kerbal characteristics. I'm not sure how they would feel having me fiddling around with guts of the main play. If I get enough interest I could use it as leverage to bend management to give up some of the programmer's time to show me around the program.

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