TGApples

Thanks for the update. It's going to be my first time trying DRE so I have a few questions: 1) It seems I have both the stock and new heat shields. What's the difference? It seems that the new ones can handle less heat flux but are cheaper? Is there any reason I shouldn't delete them? I like to keep my part count down and as far as I can tell they don't add anything signficiant. 2) Just how deadly is deadly? If I used 40 ablator in stock should I be prepared to use 80 now? It seems the model is more complex so I guess it's not that simple, but if there was a rule of thumb that'd be nice. 3) Are the ablator and "ab" resource essentially the same but "ab" has lower maximum ablation rate?

@Benji13 What are the range on the omnis? The default settings use min(range1, range2) to determine connection range which means big dishes don't pair nicely with small omnidirectional antennas. There's an alternative model that uses min(range1, range2) + sqrt(range1 * range2) - the root range model. For this model they recommend you half the power of all comms (as if you don't you basically get 2x range). With this model you'd be in range.

The nodes are there. It's possible that there's something stuck in the save. I did test with a fresh save but I'm not 100% sure I started that save on 4.0.1.

I suspect there may still be some issues with 4.0.1. When using Kerbalism I'm seeing the fuel cell placed in the wrong place in the tech tree. Works fine with 3.1.3.

Am I correct in saying that before I have researched the upgrade for my control station the only way to collect the data is to send a kerbal?

I'd be interested in knowing if you can get this to work. This is actually one of the main reasons I wanted to use KOS in the first place.

I like using multiple small engines from time to time, mostly for fine-tuning thrust:engine weight/cost. For example: I may use two sparks instead of one terrier as it's 0.2t instead of 0.5t, but one spark doesn't have enough thrust to get me going. Or maybe I'll use a ring of 8 ants to top up my terrier thrust. That sort of thing. My issue is that the game seems to use additive volume for these engines, with a single engine being roughly the same volume no matter the size. This means that when you have many engines firing the game gets disproportionatly loud. 8 ants should not make nearly as much noise as they do compared to something with over 10x the thrust. Is there any way to tweak this in a configuration file or the audio settings? It's really rather annoying.

I hit the issue again. When I activate SAS I get a huge spike in oxygen used (from 0.310/m to, ~2.3/s). This is not reproducable: most of the time everything works as expected. As I said, I have a fuel cell but it's off. It also wouldn't use that much Oxygen even if it were on. Nothing else but basic life support (humidity/pressure/scrubber).

I moved to the dev build and that fixed my issue with the planner and life support. Now life support modules are a lot more powerful and seem to do what they say on the configuration screen. More issues, however: 1) I seem to be consuming much more oxygen than I should. I don't know what the cause is. I have suddenly noticed very sharp spikes in oxygen consumption when nothing should be using it but kerbals breathing though I've not figured out why. I seemed to be able to work around it by switching on and off tank flow until it fixed itself. The amount of Oxygen I packed should last me ~38 days according to the planner (4277 for a 3-kerbal crew). I was running a fuel cell for some time time, consuming a total of 1637 Hydrogen (and hence 829 Oxygen) and I'm 11 days into my mission, so that should be another 1130 spent. 4277 - 829 - 1130 = 2318 Oxygen remaining, which is fine. In reality I have 533 left which the planner correctly predicts will last me 4d 4h. That means ~1800 Oxygen has vanished somewhere and if I wasn't willing to do all this maths and hack my persistence file, my crew would die. That's not cool . EDIT: I should mention this is the first craft I've had with this issue and the first craft where I have three crew capsules, one with habitat disabled. Maybe related? 2) I don't believe the nitrogen issue (EVA/crew transfers burning nitrogen) is fixed in the latest dev build. My 11 day mission has used 2300 nitrogen. That's much more than it should have used due to leaks which are meant to be 0.073/m. It should come to 289 used. There's no docs on how nitrogen is meant to work with EVAs and internal crew transfers (both of which I have done). Is this a bug or a feature? FWIW I would argue one of two things should happen: either we depressurize the cabin we're EVAing from (and not others) and in doing so fill up any remaining tank capacity, or cabins should just never depressurize on EVA. Non-habitat cabins are trickier. It seems to me they can either be depressurized into tanks, or leak out. The gas shouldn't just disappear though. 3) Fixed solar panels do not play nice with the background processing. It appears that for some reason my ships are being rotated under background processing which can lead to the engine/nose facing the sun, and no solar flux. This isn't how space works. If I'm in a vacuum in Kerbin's SOI then tidal forces/solar wind aside (which I'm guessing aren't modelled ;)), my craft should not turn. I should take a quarter of a year for a solar panel facing the sun to rotate 90 degrees and not face the sun. Can I request that the background processing treat fixed solar panels a bit more optimistically: if it should automatically rotate it should keep at least one panel facing the sun.

Are there any plans to make the flight computer controls restricted per probe core? For example, the Stayputnick doesn't have any SAS, but because the flight computer provides all of this, that's not actually a hinderance in any way. Similarly the OKTO has no prograde/retrograde hold... and I could go on.

My method was to attach all parts to the ground then link them up. I had terrain detial on medium when I placed it! That seems to be the only relevent option. I have it on high now and they're no longer floating, I'll keep an eye on it and see if they refloat.

I'm also seeing issues with bases staying put. I popped it down, all was good, went away, came back, and now it is suspended a metre above the ground. It's still working, it's not exploded, but the game won't let me switch away as it believes the "ship" is in freefall.

On top of automation not working on my fuel cell that I posted about before I'm hitting a few other issues: 1) The values for configuration of life support system varies per part. That's cool. Unfortunately, according to the planner this doesn't seem to be true and everything has a flat rate. I can't figure out how the planner and the values in the configure screen are meant to align. My ECLS scrubber claims to clear 0.374/m of WasteAtomsphere (and produce 0.374/m CO2). My Mk1 Command pod is meant to do 0.125/m - about 3x less. With two crew the ECLS scrubbin is "inadequate" at 0.075/m scrubber and 0.149/m breathing. Switch that off and switch the command pod scrubber on, and I see the same. It just does not work. 2) There doesn't seem to be a way to switch off pressure control. If I'm doing a lot of EVAs I don't want to burn nitrogen repressurising the cabin every time I get out, so I switch the pressure control and air pump off. This does not seem to do anything and my ship burns nitrogen like crazy. EDIT: Actually, maybe it's not getting out that's the issue but transferring crew between connected parts of the ship? Might be because the ship loses control if I don't have anybody in the pilot seat? I can't really figure it out, but in any case I'm doing a lot of repressurising in situations where I should not be.

I suspect there may be an issue with the thrust reduction failure mode for liquid engines. Specifically, after leaving the craft and coming back to it I was able to set the thrust slider back up to maximum in the GUI, which seemed to reset the steady tick-down of thrust. It may be that reloading wasn't needed and just cutting throttle would reset it. EDTI: I'm also seeing my generation 31 new terriers come out at "safety rating 1". As far as I can tell the number isn't correct, and failure part highlighting doesn't pick it up as the worst part: it picks a tank with rating 8.

It seems one of the issues with using negative funds is that it gets cheaper in harder diffculties. I notice the config has "advanceFunds = -100000", whereas I'm paying 25000 at 20% funds. Not quite sure why it's not 20k, but still...

Some balance feedback: IMO suborbital contracts pay too much. They pay twice what you get for LKO contracts, I guess there are four types of these: 1) Near KSC. Example: K2. This requires less delta-V than LKO and have a pretty easy mission profile. Should pay less than LKO IMO. Maybe 0.75x? 2) Near the equaltor. Example: The Great Desert. It's basically LKO with the rentry burn timed shorty before the waypoint. Should pay the same as LKO. 3) Off the equator and off KSC. Example: The Northern Mountains. For these you need LKO+inclination, and the pay still seems a bit high. Maybe 1.5x LKO. 4) The poles. Current pay is reasonable as you need a polar orbit which is expensive.

Personally, I don't feel the need for static testing. I'm fine with that abstraction being rolled up in KCT. For me the main good way this mod could go would be more failure modes: mostly geared toward softer failures rather than mission ending/kerbal killing failures. I may even download the source and have a tweak. For example: Parachutes that don't fully deploy rather than failing outright. ISP/thrust reduction/large heat generation in engines and SRBs. I notice from the source there's a thrust reduction failure mode for liquid engines though I've never had it in game. These would make it harder to reach orbit and may trigger an abort, but right now off axis engine failures (especially SRBs) are hard to abort nicely from. If it was just a 20% reduction in thrust it'd still really hurt, and might force a hard abort, but would be a lot more managable. Alternator failures on engines. Clogged pipes in fuel tanks. Right now fuel tank failures are really brutal on later stages or in cruise. During launch it's not too hard to just flip the priorities a bit to drain that tank quickly.... but after launch it's much more deadly. "Clogged pipes" could maybe limit fuel flow (but that sounds hard to mod), or just disable flow. I don't know if it's easy to modify reaction wheels by pitch/yaw/roll, but failing one axis may be interesting. Power consumption increases for SAS/antenna/probe cores due to "bad wiring" or something. Drills/refineries/fuel cells failures. I guess several of these are a bit more complex than just switching something to "off", but it would add a lot more flavour to the mod, and increase the "every mission is different" and "plan for failure" feelings the mod currently does a great job at adding.

I'm seeing a 404 on both links in the OP.

Does KCT correctly check for unavailable parts when you add to the construction list? It seems if I have a ship with a part I only had access to due to a test contract I can continue to construct that using KCT. I'm not 100% sure what the default behaviour is, but I strongly suspect it would prevent me from launching.

The in-game toolbar lets you see all the consumers of EC in-flight and automate enabling/disabling them under certain criteria (eg. low charge/high charge/sunlight/shadow). Unfortunately it doesn't give consumption amounts. I've also found one bug with it, so I guess there may be more.

I'm having some issues with automation and my fuel cell. I have automation set such that the fuel cell switches off at >80% EC, and on at <20% EC. Fuel cells are kinda heavy duty for small probes and I don't have solar panels yet in my career, so it's really useful to be able to preserve their lifespan. Here's what I see: 1) The automation triggers fire successfully and I get a message saying so! 2) The tweakables menu on the fuel cell successfully flips. 3) The fuel cell does not change its behaviour. As I said, the tweakable flips from stopped to running, but no EC is produced and no hydrogen/oxygen is used. The "devices" section on automation also believes it is running. Same behaviour when going from stopped to running. 4) If I go back to the tracking station and then back to the craft then if the fuel cell tweakable says running it fires up. If the fuel cell tweakable says stopped it does not stop. Manual control of the fuel cell works, but is clearly a lot of work. Any ideas? Automation seems to work with other things: scrubber/pressure control/air pump/antenna all behave as expected.

I think there may be an issue with electrocharge and potentially Oxygen in 1.6. They don't show up in the "life support crew roster" tab, unlike food and water, and I'm pretty sure one of my kerbals should be dead due to an electrocharge issue.

I've had no problem running in 1.6.

Am I correct in saying that damaged communication parts still can act as relays on inactive (ie. out of physics range) craft? It seems that way. I guess that's a bug?

The problem with the current implementation is that game time is not a resource. Once you hit the lab you can make the whole science part of the game pretty much obselete if you're willing to warp like crazy. I was hoping for an overhaul with 1.2, but alas It's made even easier by the fact that parts don't consume power when not in physics range, so you don't even need to have enough batteries for the dark side.