CessnaSkyhawk

Hi everyone - I'm glad to see that even nearly two years after SSS's last update people still are very into the mod! You'll hopefully be seeing a lot more of me around the forums in the next few months, so I figured I should probably give an update as to why I have been MIA so long and what has happened with SSS. I ended up deciding to take a break from continuing to develop SSS (and playinf KSP as a whole) due to a mixture of real life commitments (being an engineering student keeps you busy!) and the fact I was getting pretty burnt out and stressed from development of the mod in general, particularly when it came to dealing with either fine-tuning science balance or trying to stamp out all the minor issues coming from either kerbalism or the general heft and disorganization of the mod as a whole. (That and KSP modding gets quite time-consuming when the size of SSS + BDB means 10-20 minutes reload times ). This killed most of the satisfaction I got from mod development and frankly also starting turning me off from KSP as a whole (cause I naturally wanted to play using SSS, but would just get frustrated when it wasn't working as intended), so I decided to just move on from both for my own sake. As of late though, I have been having a bit of a craving for KSP again, and when I popped back on the forums for the first time in a while I was surprised to still see so much activity on the thread so long after the last release. I'm planning to get back into the game again, probably via a classic stock playthrough - I got into modding so fast I've never even sent a crewed mission past Duna in stock KSP, so I figure I should finally start working on getting myself around the stock system some more. I have considered maybe working on SSS again, but after some thought, I'm thinking I'd prefer to just leave it as is for the time being and just focus on enjoying KSP without the stress of modding for a change - even just skimming the files and things quickly to take stock of how it all is has overwhelmed me . There is a possibility I might look into updating SSS, or at least officially incorporating the various fixes people have made for issues the mod had in my absence, at some point in the future but for now I'm not making any promises one way or the other as my priority for now is just trying to get back into enjoying the game. Regardless, I do want to say thanks to all the various contributors who all worked together to help figure out how to fix or patch things in my absence - I know my code and file system isn't exactly the most intuitive or well-written, so I've got to give y'all props for figuring out how it all works and making sure people can keep enjoying the mod how I hoped they would! Also, just thank you to everyone who has enjoyed SSS over the past year or two - I'm glad that so many people enjoyed this little project of mine that even now people still actively are interested in trying it out.

I'm excited for it being a new stable platform which hopefully has less spaghetti code than KSP 1, and thus less random crashes/lag/glitches

Has anyone else been experiencing very high lag in low orbit of Jupiter's moons? For whatever reason I get a huge amount of lag when I'm close in to them even though the game runs fine everywhere else.

According to my code it should just be any Scientist. As for the latter, that's intentional - irl scrubbers tended to wear out over time hence the limited amount of LiOH - I haven't really tested, but it might be possible to add on some additional LiOH scrubbers in the external ECLSS for more time. As for the basic regen, not sure why the dump co2 method is missing, but the catch with the basic regen is that iirc it can only support half of the requirements for a given crew, so you'd need double the amount of basic regen scrubbers to get the same scrubbing capacity as the LiOH scrubbers - it's more meant to make early stations viable before the advanced one is unlocked, without making LiOH scrubbers useless.

If I'm remembering correctly, it means you have to bring a kerbal out and interact with the part to "prepare it" for its run, and then you'll be good to activate it.

Are there crew in the habitats? IIRC sometimes the VAB automatically slots kerbals into habitats, and then naturally it won't let you deflate them if they're occupied

Not exactly - it still uses the kerbalism system, but I tried to make it a tad more reasonable. I've got some ideas for modifying it in that regards (eg give capsules set amounts of resources based on their usage length) but I wasn't sure if it was better to do that or leave it up to players. I could see about throwing something together for the next update, but no guarantees

Yeah that seems pretty high to me as well - that originally came from a PR, so I assume the contributor had a reason for making it so lategame but regardless, I moved them back to the first aviation tier so they are actually useful.

Yeah - Engine Ignitor should be feasible, most early rockets have either solid ullage motors or rcs for ullage, both of which should be available at the same time as the respective engines. As for the balance concerns and glitches with regards to sounding rockets, I'm planning on investigating them soon. Frankly, I've never actually done a playthrough of KSP with SSS and SK as I've been too burnt out from the game to try it once I finished the mods up. I'm finally looking at setting a playthrough up (once I've decided on a planet pack - leaning towards KSRSS reborn but am worried about its stability) so I can finally get an idea what works and what doesn't.

Have people been having success running the KSRSS reborn beta? I'm trying to decide on a planet pack to finally do a run through of my tech tree and check balance and all that good stuff, and have almsot settled on KSRSS. I just want to make sure other people have had success with it so I don't start and than find out midway thru that something is completely borked

Are you using SkyhawkKerbalism or just stock Kerbalism?

Wow! They look amazing! How does one install them? I was just trying to install the latest gitlab version (after the configs were added), but it seems that when Parallax was put it, in would just lead to an infinite loading screen. Is there any specific things I need to install/not install different from the default parallax to get it to work?

That's probably the best bet then. Lower science rewards should make it harder to progress and thus encourage you to do more BDB-style missions

Ah - therein lies the other issue. SSS is incompatible with CTT, so naturally, having both installed at once is gonna lead to them fighting over stuff. Try deleting CTT and see how it works. That was the thing that I had a lot of difficulty while balancing - i wanted to make it harder to encourage people to do more realistic missions, but not so hard that it limits flexibility and railroads people in to one specific way of playing. That and depending on what your solar system is, stuff may be thrown off as well - I have custom science multipliers set for most popular planet packs, but the issue is that they require kopernicus to function properly, so if you're playing in stock then they might not be applying correctly (that, and also if you're at 1x scale, the rockets are just more powerful which makes it much easier to progress to higher tech levels)

Alright - thanks for the info, looks like it was a singular small typo - suprised it actually never came up before. I'll release the fixed version in a moment That is intentional - Skyhawk Kerbalism completely reworks the BDB-Kerbalism compatibility in a way that is different from the old Kerbalism support, so naturally the support files are going to look vastly different. SK/SSS's Kerbalism integration is a whole different animal from stock Kerbalism

Thanks for catching this - I must of forgot that the new engine would have be hypergolic. I'll add this in next time I do a release Yes that is the section that handles engine reliablity, so you're own the right track. Unfortunately, I'm not planning on doing anything with it at this time - I don't feel comfortable releasing work unless its up to my (pretty dang high) standards, and unfortunately, Kerbalism's engine reliability stuff is a tad too wonky for me to get it to that level without sinking a decent amount of time into it, which I'm not really interested in doing right now, and honestly, I'm pretty much burnt out with modding and don't expect to be doing anymore major updates for a good long while, if ever again. I'm always open to pull requests, but I wouldn't expect any support outside of those.

You could probably copy paste the portion of the default kerbalism's reliabilty config which handles engines into a seperate config file and it would apply it. No clue how it would handle hypergolic engines though, as it tends to assume stock resources.

That is intentional - I found that Kerbalism's engine failure modules were a bit clunky and had a lot of weird cases where they didn't work how I wanted them too (like giving late game engines way to short burn times, or certain engine types having really strange numbers of ignitions), and thus opted to just completely disable that portion of the mod. I'd recommend other mods such as Engine Ignitor or Less Real Test Flight if you want engine ignition limits or failure functionalities respectively. That's a strange config error - I'll investigate when I get a chance. Ah - I forgot about that. When CRE is installed the hypergol tankage node moves forward to sounding rockets because CRE's early rockets are hypergolic, so that they can actually be used.

For fuel tank types, first of all, make sure part upgrades are enabled and B9 Part switch is installed. So long as that's the case, you'll begin unlocking new fuel tank types as you unlock engines that use said fuels (eg, hypergol should unlock when you research "Early Hypergolic Engines") As for the tier 0 cores, I think that may be due to some edge cases in the system I used to assign data values, as I (incorrectly, it seems) assumed most people would only really be using the "eaglet" parts for their first sounding rockets. I'll have to remember to change that in the next update, but for now I'd say the best bet is to just add a patch like the following somewhere in your GameData folder:

I hate to be that guy (cause I've definetly been on the other side of this with SSS, and ik how it can get pretty annoying), but I was just wondering if y'all have a ballpark estimate for the full download being avalible again (eg is it a more short-term days to weeks type of update, or is it gonna be a longer term month or more type thing) cause I'm trying to decide if I'm gonna wait for the release to start my next playthrough, or just pick a different planet pack and start that instead.

New Releases for Skyhawk Kerbalism and Skyhawk Science System up on github - should fix most, if not all of the issues people have been experiencing as of late. Let me know if there's any issues!

alright - I was planning on using a custom space center for my next playthrough, so i guess I'll use the beta to get my kerbal konstructs stuff all taken care of and then just wait for the full release to start playing

alrighty. you think its stable enough for save game use yet, or is it better to just wait for the full release?

Just making sure I'm not just being an idiot, but I can't find the download link anymore? Is it still somewhere on the first page or is it in a different spot now?

Yo I'm currently trying to decide what planet pack to use for my first real playthrough since wrapping up Skyhawk Science System, but can't really decide which planet pack to go with. I enjoy relatively realistic planet packs that are still challenging/fun to explore. I had originally been planning to wait for the Galaxies Unbound home system but it seems like that's still a bit far out from release. Currently I'm mostly torn between JNSQ, GPP, or KSRSS. JNSQ is one I've always wanted to try for a while, either on its own, or mashed together with OPM, but there's a few small issues that keep pushing me off from it - I've heard people say its boring, theres a weird visual bug with Kerbin's shorelines that I don't like, and the big visual mod for it (Ad Astra) seems to have some funky glitches. GPP seems really awesome, and challenging too, but it also definetly seems to be a bit dated (especially I remember some of the planet textures being kinda low res last time I tried), and I'm thinking I should probably just wait cause I remember hearing some rumors about how there might be a revamp at some point. KSRSS is really cool, especially the new Reborn version, but I'm not sure if I should start a playthrough there either because reborn still is in development and I'm not sure if it'd be better to wait for it to be fully released so that all the visuals are as good as they can be (especially cuz it seems like a lot of the outer planet moons still look a tad fuzzy). What do y'all think - which one do you think I should try (of the three, or a completely different one entirely), and do y'all think I'm being a little too harsh with worrying about the visuals as well? Ik its not ever gonna get to real life levels of quality, but sometimes the textures just seem very off-putting to me if they are slightly lower res)