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RO/RP-0 Development Branch (RP-1) - Initial thoughts


Garlik

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Hi all,

Since a few months, I've finally joined the RSS/RO/RP-0 club. After years of playing "stock-ish" KSP this is a great change/challenge.
I quickly learned about RP-1, but was scared it was unstable. Other players (on the RO discord) have shared a great GameData folder, for easier RP-1 (RP-0 Dev branch) configuration. I started a few days ago with it, including KCT and TestFlight.

After a few months ingame, I feel I have problems with KCT's RP-1 build rates. Or that I just miss understand something.

Even worse than in RP-0, I feel build rates are really low. Starting at about 0.05 in the VAB, and IIRC about 4.2 for the R&D.
First sounding rockets take about 10/20 days to build, plus a few days to rollout. This seems ok to me. Lanched a few different versions, grinding some science allowing nodes unlocks, allowing a few more build points, allowing to raise VAB to about 0.2bp/s.
But first rockets with an A4 engine push me to about 140 days of build time, this seems huge. And it only has about 4/5k DeltaV, so still far from reaching orbit. I only have about 200k $ in hand, so I cant even spend it all on buying build points (30k each).
First sub-orbital capable manned rocket with X-1 cockpit was (IIRC) about 250days of build time.

This is without even mentioning that each early tech-nodes take about 150 days to unlock.


Seeing an old post from @Bornholio (bellow) I see he was able to get a total of about 65 points by September 1951 and still have about a half a million $ in hand.

I started with moderate difficulty with 400% cash rewards, that seem to be the recommended settings in RP1. If I continue the way I am doing now, I feel I'll reach 70's tech in 2000 or so... This seems wrong.

So my question is: what am I missing or doing wrong? How to unlock faster R&D research speed and faster VAB build rates to have reasonable progression?

Best to all!

 

Edited by Garlik
typo
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17 hours ago, Garlik said:

Hi all, 
Since a few months, I've finally joined the RSS/RO/RP-0 club. After years of playing "stock-ish" KSP this is a great change/challenge. ....

Seeing an old post from @Bornholio (bellow) I see he was able to get a total of about 65 points by September 1951 and still have about a half a million $ in hand.

I started with moderate difficulty with 400% cash rewards, that seem to be the recommended settings in RP1. If I continue the way I am doing now, I feel I'll reach 70's tech in 2000 or so... This seems wrong.

So my question is: what am I missing or doing wrong? How to unlock faster R&D research speed and faster VAB build rates to have reasonable progression?

Best to all!

I was abusing every trick i could including taking missions for the upfront cash to add more points.  Decrease the cost of your rockets to the minimum to get the mission done and rush build most of them.  Get a plane started building on day one, a simple prop plane with a pusher puller configuration to be re-used for a bunch of missions and also setup to do the low level science that is hard to get early.  Get a backup rocket building and edit to adjust payloads and add mission instruments. 

Until you make orbit the missions are grindy sounding rockets and high speed level flights. You need to move beyond this stage fast or it gets painfully slow. 

Get those points of science spent on nodes fast to get the points early, put them mostly into VAB until you can get missions up on a rapid pace.  Only then is it worth doing science points. 

Things i did early.  Get a pad upgrade going, make sure you buy extra pads and get a line of pads with bigger lift capabilities and keep lower tonnage ones ready to keep launch costs as low as possible.  VAB build rate is also your infrastructure build rate multiplier.  Everything you do is to bring in the money rapidly.  The first orbital missions will pay for tracking station, pad and mission control upgrades, lunar missions can be combo'd(impactor/orbiter/flyby) to dramaticly increase the pace. Plus lunar science brings points in rapidly.

One other cheaty thing was doing SO rocketry with X-1 cockpits, its possible to do orbital also but very risky.

Right now RP-1 dev is partly broken in training so you can hit a wall once you need people in orbit.

If you want to see the master watch @NathanKell's twitch sessions for dev.

 

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Great source of informations you bring in your post, thank you for all this, should clearly help me to get started easier in this new campaign.
Currently, besides your post and the few github wiki pages that have been updated, their is no real info on RP-1. If any of the devs come in, I'dd gladly help on writing down a new wiki/info pages for it


I tried looking at NathanKell's youtube, he has no "RP-1" videos in it. I quickly looked into twitch (Im not a usual twitch user), only live streams are available? no saved video in there?
 

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16 hours ago, Garlik said:

Great source of informations you bring in your post, thank you for all this, should clearly help me to get started easier in this new campaign.
Currently, besides your post and the few github wiki pages that have been updated, their is no real info on RP-1. If any of the devs come in, I'dd gladly help on writing down a new wiki/info pages for it


I tried looking at NathanKell's youtube, he has no "RP-1" videos in it. I quickly looked into twitch (Im not a usual twitch user), only live streams are available? no saved video in there?
 

Tech tree Testing videos used to be available.  maybe  twitch dropped them or just pushed them private? 

Hoping NK can feel the urge to do RO stuff.  Him and Pap were really roaring this summer.

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yeah me too. I'dd love to give them a help any way I can, at least in testing and providing feedback, or helping for wiki write down, but not really sure how to get to them

You still play KSP, RO/RSS/RP0? Join us on KSP-RO discord, would be nice to have you there too

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 04/12/2017 at 8:16 AM, Garlik said:

But first rockets with an A4 engine push me to about 140 days of build time, this seems huge.

Then don't build A4s until you've invested more money in VAB Upgrades in KCT?

On my RP-1 play through I had reached the 1960's techs by late 1954.  I did this by treating the start of the game like an economy game:

  1. complete sounding rocket contracts to gain cash
  2. invest in build points to build sounding rockets faster, completing sounding contacts faster
  3. get upgraded launch pad asap, for bigger sounding rockets, for harder more lucrative sounding rocket contracts

My first rockets were just Aerobee (WAC Corporal), and pretty much every penny I earned from Sounding Rocket Contracts was invested back in Build Points.  This enabled me to build two stage A4-Aerobee rockets, from which I made more money, etc, etc.

Quickly I was doing the difficult sounding rocket contracts and making a fortune.

EDIT:

Each time you complete a sounding rocket contract it gets harder for next time, but more lucrative.  The Difficult contract reaches something like 300k credits reward (upfront and completion combined) for 2000 units of payload to 3,740km.  Then it stops getting more difficult and the reward starts to decay (I'm currently on abut 180k credits per contract completion).  This means that funds are probably Too easy for me to gather at present.  I liked the scaling difficulty, it kept me on my toes for when I needed to unlock new tech or upgrade the launch pad.  Now, however, it's a grindy cash cow.  (So, now, I limit myself to building cash cow contract vessels only when I'm rolling out vessels for other contracts.)

Edited by MatBailie
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  • 1 month later...
Just now, FreeThinker said:

Well it would make parts that depend on them visible

The mod in question has to be explicitly supported by RP-0 (and RO) anyways. There is no reason to display parts in the tech tree if have not been correctly set up in the first place (placing & pricing). Besides, the RP-0 tech tree is fully customized: adding tech tree nodes for the sake of allowing incompatible parts to show up is not going to help anywhere.

If you are talking from a dev standpoint ("how to be sure where the parts should appear?") then you will have to consider:

  • the TRL of the part
  • the similarity with other parts that are already supported
  • the overall gameplay balance

With that information, finding out the proper tech tree node is an easy thing to do. Pricing is a completely different thing though, most of the times you have to fudge things...

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@Phineas Freak Thanks for your explanation but the problem I'm trying to solve is that some people would like to play KSPIE in combination with the RP-0 tech tree. The problem is that RP-0 tech tree is missing the futuristic tech nodes to create a balanced gameplay. Idealy RP-0 would give suppirt for KSPIE but I guess I have to add a little MM patch which will add the additional future tech nodes (fusion,  antimatter etc) at the end of the tech tree

Edited by FreeThinker
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In that case you can temporarily create custom tech nodes (as you correctly pointed out). In the long term, you can open a request in the RP-0 repository asking for the inclusion of more near future nodes (if you feel that the current ones are limiting progression - IIRC the last nodes span beyond year 2150 so there should be no problems expanding them even further).

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