Morphisor

In the meantime I have been working on some small edits to my own installed version of this mod: Removing cross-national dependencies - USA missions not depending on Soviet missions and vice versa. Effectively making this into a modular contracts pack so one can remove other nations' contracts without affecting the remaining ones. Adding missions that are present in the RSS catalog but not in the stock catalog. While doing this I noticed the opposite is also true, some missions are only present in stock version. Haven't touched those yet and as a whole it's far from done. If anyone else is interested in these modifications and @Frylovespi is ok with it, I can supply all my changes to the Github, either for a pull request or new branch, whatever is preferred.

This planet pack looks amazing, compelling and exciting to explore. I have been watching it's progress for some time now and love seeing all the screenshots. The only thing that's stopping me from getting into it right now is that I'm currently on JNSQ which is the other awesome planet pack currently available. But I can promise this: I will be playing this next!

Re: tech trees, the Unkerballed Start tech tree seems to work well with BDB and is less unforgiving than with stock.

During my previous posts here I was just building whatever cool package this mod offered my eyes to feast on next. Earlier this week however, I suddenly realized: hey wasn't there a big historical contract pack that would go swimmingly with these rockets? And oh boy there is. Enter 'History of Spaceflight': all the major launches in history all together and even with semi-accurate mission parameters that can be applied in a non-RSS game! Of course, it covers far more than just the US space program, so I admit I pruned the non-US contracts out. The result however, is absolutely fantastic. With BDB being perfectly balanced for the JNSQ scale, the rockets provided by this mod allow an exact reproduction of the historical mission profiles - or at least, as exact as possible considering my primitive, non-engineer abilities and the not-quite-accurate simulation. This also makes for a perfect run throughout all the variations of the rockets represented, which also means the new 1.7.0 stuff is getting thoroughly tested according to historical specs (sorry Zorg, without MandatoryRCS and Engine Ignitor - they don't play nice with Gravityturn) And I am learning huge amounts about the history of all these programs in turn, I never knew before how fun these 'boring' early missions could be! Of course all this ranting means nothing without a little proof, so here's where I am right now, all major launches from 1958 (the year it all really kicked off) completed:

Thanks @linuxgurugamer & @Red Stapler, my game got more lively cause of your work! One curiosity though: whenever going to launchpad/runway from ksc, a new piece of music starts playing as the screen goes black. It then stops again as soon as the new scene is entirely loaded. I guess this is a situation/location oddity?

Hey there, I am trying to see if this pack works out well for a new JNSQ career save - using BDB to actually build many of those rockets accordingly! For this purpose I figured the stock version is needed, since JNSQ is basically upscaled and improved stock system. Retrieving the latest master build from github, I am quickly finding however, that there's quite a few missions found in the RSS version that didn't make the cut to stock. I skimmed some of them and don't see why they wouldn't carry over?

Thanks! Trying it out

I find it quite handy to have information like that with me on my phone to prevent alt-tabbing and destabilizing the game. Also apply that to other wikis for the various mods, such as build guides for BDB.

I absolutely love the body-specific strategies that this mod provides and they are the main reason to always have this on my modlist. That said, I consider basically every other strategy available to be severely overpowered and avoid using all of them, with 2 exceptions only: 1. Contract standards (first level only) purely for the removal of reputation loss on decline. Sometimes the contracts generated just stink or don't match your current ambitions. Being penalized to get better ones is just evil. 2. To boldly go - this strategy is still highly overpowered in stock or stockalike systems. However, using up-scaled systems where the costs to go to far places increase exponentially (such as the excellent JNSQ I am playing now) I can really recommend this as a rewarding strategy that makes up for the sometimes extreme costs.

Ah nice, I see it's been updated for the new parts! Will adjust accordingly.

Then is the avionics module supposed to be included? Right now it does fine without it. And you mean to tell me the raceway positioned this way is historically correct... Great, no love for autism in the 50's it seems.

Playing with dev build (version from earlier today) a bit, starting with Vanguard in career again: With a slightly reduced final stage fuel load, 2 stages to orbit - if barely. I assume the small amount of monoprop in the new Easton 100 fuel tank (2nd stage) is for the new Easton control module? It's not mounted in this version - doesn't seem to be needed? The ill-fitting clamp was needed because otherwise the thing just falls over on the launch pad. My inner autism is struggling to handle the fact that the protruding side structure of the new Eaton fuel tanks is not aligned with the engine I'll leave now...

The guys over at Bluedog Design Bureau consider me a loony for even trying to mix these two mods, but I do, so here I am... I found a particular & peculiar compatibility issue between KSPI & B-DB. As you may or may not know, B-DB has a bunch of tiny probe cores with very small amounts of EC storage, even going as low as 5 ec for the most basic ones. When combined with KSPI however, every probe core from B-DB that has LESS than 30 ec starts out with exactly none when proceeding to the launch pad. In the VAB everything shows as it should. However on the launch pad the EC storage is 0. And of course the probe is uncontrollable as a result. Any probe with 30 or more ec was tested to work normally, strangely. The problem resolved itself when I uninstalled KSPI and the Interstellar fuel switch, so it's due to something being done by KSPI. It's not a major issue that cannot be overcome, but I figured it may be a symptom of a larger issue behind the scenes and worth mentioning.

Finally applying the pointers given by @Zorg, I adjusted my Juno II IV-B rocket by unloading the 2nd and 3rd stage fuel tanks by half. The result was a beautiful and successful launch to orbit, with almost 3.000 Delta-v to spare! Fixed! From here I will be doing stuff using the latest dev branch.

This sounds awesome, would it currently work for JNSQ? Doesn't need to be 100%, cheat menu works - as long as I can justify it to myself that I'm good enough -- Update: gave it a try on a new career save, so first impressions are for the 'First steps' contracts only: I feel there are way too many small steps in separate contracts here, AND they each have a very large reward for an early contract, especially considering the ease involved. I had the funds slider set to 60% and was getting almost 40k per contract, when the first four contracts are no more than getting off the ground and doing science in air/on launch pad. That's 150k+ profits before even going beyond the very basic first tech node. Looking at the rest of the contracts in this group, it's the same small steps, while 2nd science node already gives anyone easy access to achieving orbit. I did however appreciate making the stayputnik and some batteries experimentally available for the first 2 (unmanned) contracts, why those things ain't unlocked right away in stock are beyond me. My suggestions for adjustment: Aggregate the first steps contracts into a smaller number, where steps that fit logically together are milestones within a single contract instead of separate contracts. Decrease the reward for each milestone significantly; the overall reward can be higher, but all together the rewards should be reduced by AT LEAST 50% and possibly even 75%.