jd284

Flow priorities are a setting for each resource, not for the part. So that'd have to be done in CRP (and IMO should be set for Supplies, Mulch, Machinery, Recyclables and Organics). (This was for @dboi88, forgot to quote)

Here's something I noticed about the Agriculture converter of the Tundra Ag module. tl;dr version: Lock the organics resource of the Ag module once it's full. The Agriculture converter is kinda weird in that it requires 400 Organics for maximum load, and also uses some for both input and produces more of them. So to have useful production at max load you need another Organics container once it's full. However if you also have an Organics consumer (like ColonySupplies), it will take organics from all containers including the Ag module, so if your Organics production is just about enough to satisfy the consumers, the organics supply of the Ag module would drop continuously because its organics get stolen, rather than taking from the other containers first. And the more this goes on, the more its load drops and consequently organics drops even faster. Or ever worse, what happened to me then was that the Substrate drill lost ground contact, but I didn't notice until the Organics were down to some 50 units, so it only had 12% load and it took forever to get the organics back up to full and I had to turn off ColonySupplies for a few months. My Kerbals were not happy. However I have found a way to fix this: once the Organics is full at 400 units, you can "lock" the resource by clicking the green arrow. That way neither the Ag module not the ColonySupplies will remove Organics from it, and they only take them from the other containers until those are empty. This means that if you have a temporary problem with fertilizer production or substrate for the Agriculture, at most the extra organics from other containers will get used up but the Ag module will keep its 400 units, so when the problems are fixed it can resume at full load right away.

Recyclers used to be shared though, at least until one of the updates in the past few days. It would be nice to find out if this change was accidental or intentional, whether I need to fix my base or just wait for an update.

The RT-5000 is also the most massive per kerbal supported of any USI recycling part including the kerbitats. (The only exception being the Orca all-in-one command module.) Still, it has its place due to the high recycling percentage, but generally only when I plan ships with 2 or 3 crew. For 4+ crew the Kerbitat is better and for much larger crews the Orca.

OK, I uploaded the fixed craft. It should only need Stock+MKS now.

Sure, here it is: Lode Collector.craft.zip However it needs the trusses from Infernal Robotics. I deleted everything else from that mod but I liked the structurals too much (and they're in pretty much every craft I have). Apart from those it's just stock and USI parts. If you want I can try to remake it with stock trusses though, but they were heavier and I always like to save my MK/SP.

I just saw that the lode is generated at up to half a degree of latitude and/or longitude away. So the actual distances depend on the size of the body you're on. On Minmus, it'd be max 740 meters, on Mun up to 2.5 km, and on the Moon (RSS) that I play as much as 21.4 km away. For actual RSS planets it will mean a lot of driving around... oh well, RSS isn't supposed to be easy.

@RoverDude, the MKS release zip contains two more 40 MB large pre-release zips, you should probably remove those and not just because of the tripled download size. They're going to confuse people.

The newest one was almost 12km away... But I found a working rover design: Turns out my only problem was that when you have the claw in front, it shifts the center of gravity so much that all the rover controls get weird. So this design avoids that. And I can just raise the rear wheel when grabbing the lode and the raise the lode with the legs.

In situ? You bring the sifter to it?! And all the storage and logistics... Because they spawn 5+ km away from my base and from what I can tell they need to be attached to the sifter for it to process them, right?

How do people grab the resource lodes? I tried making a rover with a stock claw, but it was overwhelmed by the 25t mass of the lode. Tried lifting it with the forklift but it rolled off every time I tried. I haven't unlocked the crane and PAL claw yet, and don't have any spare science at the moment, so I'd appreciate some ideas. Short of a party of a few dozen kerbals to KIS-attach it to the rover...

@RoverDude, is it intentional that efficiency parts benefit/suffer quadratically from (lack of) engineer levels and kolonization bonuses? What I mean is, when I have e.g. a 2-star engineer, the efficiency part has a load of 65%. These 65% then contribute to the Tundra part, which itself runs at 65%. So basically, the effective load increase of the efficiency part is 65%*65% = 42%. Whereas when running on its own, not as efficiency part, it contributes 65%. Conversely, with 4/5 star engineers, the nominal load is over 100%, so the efficiency part contributes much more than its own nominal load. I think this is the reason why I was seeing less production by using efficiency part + Tundra module rather than both parts working on their own. It seems like when configured as efficiency part, the load should always be 100% regardless of engineer levels or kolonization bonus. Should I make a ticket?

Isn't that just PL in action? One container pushes to PL whenever it's >75%, the other one pulls whenever it's <25%.

The small ISRU can make fertilizer at a decent rate.

The only relevant parts are the cradles, which are used to stabilize Tundra modules on the ground. Maybe it would make sense to move these to MKS and not require Konstruction. I don't know if MKS depends on anything else from Konstruction, in any case I can't come up with anything. Sounds like a bug, actually. I suppose initially the reason was that the Tundra modules were originally designed for space stations where there's no power distribution, but since they're equally useful on the ground the Tundra PDU should have this function.

Have you maybe started the game without CTT and unlocked them there? They'll stay in that node if you install CTT after unlocking them.

You always get 50% of the dry mass in MaterialKits, so 500 MaterialKits per ton of dry mass.

I'm afraid my workaround was to abandon the spot and find something flatter. If I'm bored this weekend I might try to take your savegame and remove all non-stock parts from the base and then see if the problem is still there. And if so report it on the Squad tracker. Yes, during catch-up the base is in the air. So there'll be no background production like this.

If you figure it out, let me know. I had to abandon another base on the Moon (RSS) because of this. Can you check your debug screen and see if a message like "ground contact! - error: -4.920m" is there. At least then we're talking about the same thing. I thought it was an issue related to RSS or Kopernicus though, but if it happens on Duna it'd be worth investigating to see if it is actually a stock issue. In my case, after some investigation I found out that this "hop" appears to be an error in the height map. The base always loaded at the height of the top corner of the ground "tile" it was sitting on, and then teleported to the ground after the ground contact error message. So the further it was away from that corner the more severe the hop was, and of course also the steeper the slope also made it worse.

Works fine here now, although I had the same problem a while ago. The reason was that the base did a little hop on load and the drills lost ground contact and stopped. Simply mounting them a little lower fixed that. I think you'll have to try and find the reason the drills turn off, try to open their part menu before physics kicks in and there may be a clue like "no ground contact" or overtemperature and whatnot.

I've noticed that there was a bug when loading saves, the last KSC location wasn't set properly. The actual KSC was always in the default location even though the tracking station showed the right location. I was able to fix this, so here's an updated version. Download - same deal as above

Maybe the modules haven't changed, but surely the underlying code has gone through some revisions? Both use USIAnimation which had some changes I think. It might be worth testing with an older USITools release (which will have other bugs but maybe not this one).

@RoverDude, thanks for the quick bugfixes! I have a question though regarding drill efficiency, they aren't getting bonuses from kolonization stats. Is this intentional? It seems like they should be benefitting from the geology bonus... or should I be adding more drills instead as the refinery gets better? That's odd then, I have no explanation for that jump in efficiency. I took the 5% and 20% from the part config, I'm pretty sure the actual efficiency calculation is in the KSP ModuleResourceHarvester code though.

Probably a kolonization bonus of 179% you have on that moon? Check your kolonization dashboard. There are four things that affect efficiency: efficiency parts highest level of the required skill (5% for level 0, 20% for each additional level) machinery level kolonization bonus

@RoverDude, the combining of several bays/bits to the same output still doesn't work properly in 0.50.10. It only works for the vessel you switch to from the tracking station, not any others in physics range. I made a new ticket about it. The issue was reported before by @Gilph for just Hydrates on the ASM but it actually affects all ModuleSwappableConverter parts. Basically you can never have combined converters on more than one vessel in a disconnected base at the moment, and then only if you switch to the right one every time from the tracking station (or F5+F9).