[1.12.x] - Modular Kolonization System (MKS)

[Gilph]

1 minute ago, Grimmas said:

OK I get what you mean now. You're talking about all the infrastructure that you need to feed to the WOLF, Kerbals included, to produce TCs in orbit for the follow-on routes. 

BTW you can easily set up zero-TC routes if you want. I think the only thing taken into account is the total mass - so if your mass at the end is higher than at the start (because you refueled, at the end, for instance) then your TC cost will be zero. Whether this is 'gaming the system', 'cheating', or w/e, is another matter

I think the refueling is a bit cheaty, but the challenge of setting up a zero cost route by expending only .1 mass is interesting. I just got a free 30 cargo space route to Duna by sending 10 vessels that use xenon and ion engines, each able to increase cargo by 3 for zero cost because I lost only .093 mass. I have a similar vessel that goes from Kerbin orbit to Minmus orbit for about 8 cargo each way for about 5 round trips. When it's out of fuel, I just launch another one.

[Tacombel]

24 minutes ago, Grimmas said:

BTW you can easily set up zero-TC routes if you want. I think the only thing taken into account is the total mass - so if your mass at the end is higher than at the start (because you refueled, at the end, for instance) then your TC cost will be zero. Whether this is 'gaming the system', 'cheating', or w/e, is another matter

As in any other solo game, you define the rules. There are people that refuels the ship at a station in the final biome because they already set up the infrastructure to do so, so you can make any route 0 TC. Is just a matter of what its Ok with you.

[ElonsMusk]

Upon 'establish depot' the depot disappeared, is this a bug?  I apologize in advance for likely missing it, but is there explicit documentation on WOLF components? I think I bit off more than I can chew, lol.

[goldenpsp]

1 hour ago, ElonsMusk said:

Upon 'establish depot' the depot disappeared, is this a bug?  I apologize in advance for likely missing it, but is there explicit documentation on WOLF components? I think I bit off more than I can chew, lol.

that is intended.  The point of WOLF is it is kinda "virtualized" so that the part count doesn't kill your game

[zabieru]

15 hours ago, Tacombel said:

As in any other solo game, you define the rules. There are people that refuels the ship at a station in the final biome because they already set up the infrastructure to do so, so you can make any route 0 TC. Is just a matter of what its Ok with you.

A little more structure might be good, though. I think USI-LS is a good model here: you can turn everything off if you like, you can make everything reversible (tourist/grumpy instead of dead) or you can play it hardcore, and you can adjust the timers as well. Some kind of TC multiplier slider would be nice, at the least.

There is also some odd behavior that's a bit harder to justify. For instance, you can launch your rocket dry, start the route, fuel it from a tanker truck right there on the launchpad, launch to orbit, and get a zero-TC route without any orbital infrastructure. Perhaps the comparison should be final weight to the maximum weight during the route, instead of to the starting weight.

1 hour ago, ElonsMusk said:

Upon 'establish depot' the depot disappeared, is this a bug?  I apologize in advance for likely missing it, but is there explicit documentation on WOLF components? I think I bit off more than I can chew, lol.

That's correct behavior. This is basically how WOLF works: the parts (and crew) disappear into WOLF-land and keep working there.

[Grimmas]

1 hour ago, zabieru said:

There is also some odd behavior that's a bit harder to justify. For instance, you can launch your rocket dry, start the route, fuel it from a tanker truck right there on the launchpad, launch to orbit, and get a zero-TC route without any orbital infrastructure. Perhaps the comparison should be final weight to the maximum weight during the route, instead of to the starting weight.

I get what you mean, but that would require checking the mass of the vessel all the time during flight - potentially up to 60 times per second or so. Rather than just once at the start.

The point of WOLF, as I see it, is to make the late game less laggy, not more, and not to police the player's actions. So I'm fine with the current model that relies on the player to establish what he/she is and is not OK with. 

[zabieru]

Just now, Grimmas said:

I get what you mean, but that would require checking the mass of the vessel all the time during flight - potentially up to 60 times per second or so. Rather than just once at the start.

The point of WOLF, as I see it, is to make the late game less laggy, not more, and not to police the player's actions. So I'm fine with the current model that relies on the player to establish what he/she is and is not OK with. 

For sure, and it sounds like you've a better handle on the performance impact than I do. It's certainly not worth a major hit.

I do think a TC slider would be a good option, though: rather than seeking out weird cheaty edge cases to reduce the TC costs of your routes, just turn the slider down. Obviously Gliph is having a good ol' time with his ten xenon freighters and I would hate to take that away from him, but personally I'd be irritated that I couldn't send two big freighters instead without paying the TC cost.

[modus]

3 hours ago, ElonsMusk said:

Upon 'establish depot' the depot disappeared, is this a bug?  I apologize in advance for likely missing it, but is there explicit documentation on WOLF components? I think I bit off more than I can chew, lol.

for documentation I would recommend the MKS wiki https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/wiki, search for WOLF and check out the 'bleeding edge' page (BTW thanks @Tacombel!)

So yes, as the others said: when you establish or connect to a depot, everything vanishes. It is an offering to WOLF. You say a little WOLF prayer afterwards.

[Tacombel]

2 hours ago, zabieru said:

There is also some odd behavior that's a bit harder to justify. For instance, you can launch your rocket dry, start the route, fuel it from a tanker truck right there on the launchpad, launch to orbit, and get a zero-TC route without any orbital infrastructure. Perhaps the comparison should be final weight to the maximum weight during the route, instead of to the starting weight.

There will always be loopholes. You can even hyperedit a kontainer directly from KSC to Jool with all its mass intact. It is just up to you. I don't see the need to implement barriers to avoid people doing it.

I think the case for USI-LS is somewhat different, because those are effects that will occur automatically to my kerbals, so it is good that I can define them. But in the case of TC all those situations are things that the players explicitly do. No need to have a config for the player to limit himself. Just my humble opinion.

Edited April 20, 2021 by Tacombel

[RoverDude]

5 hours ago, zabieru said:

There is also some odd behavior that's a bit harder to justify. For instance, you can launch your rocket dry, start the route, fuel it from a tanker truck right there on the launchpad, launch to orbit, and get a zero-TC route without any orbital infrastructure. Perhaps the comparison should be final weight to the maximum weight during the route, instead of to the starting weight.

100% by design.  If you've gone through the hassle of setting up refueling stations, then a 0 TC route is acceptable.  No different than 0 TC routes with ion drives and electric rovers are fine.  

On 4/19/2021 at 5:45 AM, modus said:

Damn it, I invested a lot of my time to set up my production chains, I want my vessels to be built instantaneously!

Me and @DoktorKrogg agree 100%

21 hours ago, Gilph said:

The second part is that I'm questioning the need for having both cargo and TC. The transport computer metric is kinda fun and a generic way of measuring a cost from point A to point B, but the cost could have been just expressed as cargo capacity as a function of fuel, mass, and mass loss. I don't see the use for TC, as it now has been evolved from the older design as a consumable, to a newer one like cargo. Needing both seems like I'm paying twice for the same thing. I'm going to test changing the Transport module input to 1 Fuel for 10 TC and see how that looks.

TC's represent the infrastructure requires to continuously maintain that route, in terms of ship refueling and repair and managing the logistics chain.  Cargo bits are just there as a measuring stick as you simulate the first route.

[Plomie]

Do you have to estalbish a new mining operation every time in another wolf biome if the availability is 0 of a resource?  And i was told wolf was useful and its tottaly true.

 

[Tacombel]

2 hours ago, Plomie said:

Do you have to estalbish a new mining operation every time in another wolf biome if the availability is 0 of a resource?  And i was told wolf was useful and its tottaly true.

 

I don't quite understand what you mean. If the availability is 0 you can't extract anything from that biome, so if you need it you will have to bring it from somewhere else, yes. 

[modus]

And also, mining, as in with drills and converters (because that's maybe what you mean when you say 'mining operation'?) is good old MKS, not WOLF.
In WOLF you harvest stuff, but if the stuff you want isn't listed as a harvestable resource, it isn't there. If it is a harvestable resource but there is 0 available, you're all out.

 

 

Edited April 22, 2021 by modus

[Grimmas]

WOLF also has no concept of time, it's just a number that gets reduced once when you start mining. If you had 500 of a resource in a biome and you add a WOLF harvester for 20 units you now have 480 of that resource - forever.

[BasKing]

I was wondering if this is normal behavior:

I land a wolf depot (the nr 26 pioneer logistics) module on minmus,
press the 'establish depot' button,
it says 'your depot has been established on minmus',
and I can see a minmus-depot under the wolf button, so far so good.

But then the depot itself vanishes? That puzzles me.
What about the things I attached to it? Solar panels, cargo, fuel tanks, kerbals? Is it even normal to vanish? 
Would it not be more immersive if it stayed where it landed? Perhaps to scavenge parts etc off it?

[Grimmas]

2 minutes ago, BasKing said:

But then the depot itself vanishes? That puzzles me.
What about the things I attached to it? Solar panels, cargo, fuel tanks, kerbals? Is it even normal to vanish? 
Would it not be more immersive if it stayed where it landed? Perhaps to scavenge parts etc off it?

That's how WOLF works. The vessel, including all parts, all resources, and all kerbals on it, are destroyed. This way they no longer consume any valuable processing time and do not take up any space in your save. WOLF is an abstract representation of your industry development, it is basically just a small list of numbers per WOLF biome, which is much simpler to process.

If you want bases that stay around you can use the default MKS chains instead. But after you build enough of them, you will see noticeable performance drops and at that point you'll consider WOLF since it removes the vessels. No vessels = no performance issues. 

Basically, WOLF is an end-game solution for end-game lag in large MKS bases. 

[modus]

If you scroll up a bit and read some earlier posts you will see that

On 4/20/2021 at 7:52 AM, zabieru said:

That's correct behavior. This is basically how WOLF works: the parts (and crew) disappear into WOLF-land and keep working there.

because

On 4/20/2021 at 9:14 AM, Grimmas said:

The point of WOLF, as I see it, is to make the late game less laggy, not more, and not to police the player's actions.

so

On 4/20/2021 at 9:39 AM, modus said:

 yes, as the others said: when you establish or connect to a depot, everything vanishes. It is an offering to WOLF. You say a little WOLF prayer afterwards.

Edited April 22, 2021 by modus
Or you know, what Grimmas said :-)

[Tacombel]

7 hours ago, BasKing said:

But then the depot itself vanishes? That puzzles me.
What about the things I attached to it? Solar panels, cargo, fuel tanks, kerbals? Is it even normal to vanish? 
Would it not be more immersive if it stayed where it landed? Perhaps to scavenge parts etc off it?

I would suggest reading the wiki

[DiegoKeys]

On 9/12/2020 at 11:34 PM, Galthromir said:

I'm seeing an issue with Colony Rewards, specifically if you let Reputation accrue for a long time. I've got a Minmus colony with 20ish Kolonists, and when I check rewards, I often get more than a thousand Reputation...which seems to cause it to overflow/reset to 0. While this isn't a massive deal, since I don't do tons of contracts anymore, it'd still be nice to not drop to like 20% rep when I check on the colony :P.

Looking at the console, didn't seem to be any obvious references or errors when it happened. I was running 50% Rep -> Funds campaign though.

Happened to me also similar problem, reputation went negative. Continuing to check for other colonies rewards took reputation to -100%, and the next check bring it to grow vs positive values again. Has been addressed this issue?

[Xilis]

I have a question how do you remove a transportation rout in Wolf I don't see an option to? The colony its attached to doesn't need the resources and I've stopped shipments of everything but I want to recover the transport credits tied up in the rout.

Thanks

[Grimmas]

There is no way to do that. Well technically there is - you can edit all WOLF parameters directly in the save game file. 

But there is no way to do it from inside the game. You can change the resources being sent on a route, but you can't delete the route itself. You'll need to build out more TC infrastructure if you need more TC.

[lBoBl]

I like keeping the number of parts to a minimum to keep loading times reasonable and also because I like the challenge of being limited to mostly stock parts. 

The latest pre-release is only available as a full USI constellation package, and I was wondering how safe it would be to remove some of the folders? Basically I'd like to keep Konstruction, Kontainers, LifeSupport, MKS, ReactorPack, maybe the Submarine, Survival and Exploration Packs and of course WOLF.

How unsafe would it be to remove all the rest? (meaning deleting the Akita, ART, FTT,  Karbonite, Karbonite Plus, Karibou, Malemute, NuclearRockets, Orion, SoundingRockets and WarpDrive folders)

[Grimmas]

You need to keep USI Core and USI Tools, the rest should be safe to remove. 

Edit: You also should keep CCK and CRP of course. And I think that some of the other mods including MKS depend on Firespitter for the switch code so you need to keep Firespitter also, at least the dll (you can delete the Firespitter parts and assets and should have no problems). 

Edited April 24, 2021 by Grimmas

[modus]

I can confirm this, you can delete folders in the umbra folder.

[lBoBl]

Bit of a quirk here,

I have a WOLF depot on my homeworld's closest moon, mining and processing tons of stuff. In that biome I am making alloys, synthetics, and specialized parts, the plan is to ship them to low kerbin orbit to feed my future orbital shipyard.

Problem is, the alloys and synthetics don't show in the WOLF GUI when I check it (Specialized parts do). They're not at 0, they just don't appear at all.

Looking at the WOLF section of the savefile, it does look like I am making 2 Alloys and 2 Synthetics in that biome, just as intended. Same thing when I open the planner in the VAB and try to add more fabricators for alloys and synthetics, it goes from 2 to 3.

I am going to try and establish the route between that biome and low kerbin orbit but I don't know if I'm going to be able to ship my alloys and synthetics, and if I'll be able to retrieve them with a hopper in low orbit. I'll update this post when I find out. That'll tell us if it's just a visual bug in the GUI or a deeper problem with those resources.

Edited April 27, 2021 by lBoBl