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Mod about routine maintenance?


cjones

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Hey guys, was doing some googling and couldn't find anything like this; has anyone created a mod about routine maintenance?  One of my favourite mods is the KAS/KIS pair of mods.  I love launching and then building things in space so any reason to do more things in EVA would be great.

I am thinking a sort of mod that subtly changes several elements of the game by introducing wear and its effects.  Wear would be calculated differently based on what part it was.  An obvious examples for me would be:

  • Batteries
    • Maximum charge decreases gradually over time
      • This would probably be a logarithmic reduction, eg: the first year would have the largest decrease is max charge, subsequent years would reduce less and less to maybe a minimum of 50% of original max charge (just spitballing here)
  • Problems:
    • Replacing radially attached battery packs is trivial with KIS, Replacing inline batteries could be problematic unless the implementation of this system just provided an 'in place repair' as long as the Kerbal had the right part in inventory, it would just consume the inventory item and reset wear of the part on the ship.
    • This could lead to a LOT of micromanagement the further into your game you get.  If you had 50 craft all over the place, having to remember to replace everything would be annoying.  This might then require an 'automatic' replacement that is handled in the background, as long as the craft has a replacement item in storage somewhere.  This level of background stuff would then need a whole UI similar to life support mods tracking individual ships and every part on them which would drastically increase time for development.  And of course, if the replacements are being done in the background automatically, then what is the point of the mod at all.
    • Nothing stopping people from just adding 2x the number of batteries (they are cheap, light and can be placed anywhere).  I suppose this would really just be for people like me who like to 'roleplay' only building sensible craft even if anything is technically possible and those not interested would just give this type of mod a pass.

I was thinking of maybe trying my hand at making a mod like this, so I was just wondering what people's opinion on something like that is...  Although, as I type this and think through some of the difficulties in implementing even a simple thing like battery wear, I wonder if I'm talking myself out of doing it.  O_o

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Thanks, that is close to what I was thinking, although not quite with the catastrophic failure, more just a general degradation of performance over time.  I'll have to give this one a try soon!

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Whelp... I tried Oh Scrap out, but it's just not for me.  This just turns the game into a grind where you just have to relaunch over and over to get to a point where there aren't critical failures all the time.  I suppose on a near stock game, that would be OK, but my game can take almost 2 minutes to get on the pad due to the number of mods I am using. Still, thanks for the suggestion.  I totally didn't see that mod.

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Take a look at MKS, actually - it has a fairly well developed (but fairly automatic) wear mechanic: Many parts need maintenance over time, but an Engineer (or a subclass) can perform that maintenance using Machinery instead of new parts.  Either it has to be done on EVA, or it can be done automatically if they're seated in a workshop.  (Of which there are a couple of types.)

This mostly doesn't extend to batteries and stock parts, though it could set to do so.

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I've been using BARIS and having fun with it.  Parts have a timer where they will want maintenance and if you leave it too long they will need full on repairs.  It also includes launch failures and rocket building/integration time, but you can turn them both off in the difficulty section.  I reduced failure check difficulty from normal to easy and have just the right number of launch failures for my play.  Normal was certainly a bit tedious.

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8 hours ago, DStaal said:

Take a look at MKS, actually - it has a fairly well developed (but fairly automatic) wear mechanic: Many parts need maintenance over time, but an Engineer (or a subclass) can perform that maintenance using Machinery instead of new parts.  Either it has to be done on EVA, or it can be done automatically if they're seated in a workshop.  (Of which there are a couple of types.)

This mostly doesn't extend to batteries and stock parts, though it could set to do so.

Thanks, I'm currently using MKS and it has been great so far, but I have yet to do some of the more heavy duty stuff that requires machinery and such (I do love how those expandable parts require equipment to deploy and x number of crew, very cool!)  It's a pretty complicated mod, so I'm taking it slow and deploying things a bit at a time (don't want anyone dying after all!)

10 minutes ago, overkill13 said:

I've been using BARIS and having fun with it.  Parts have a timer where they will want maintenance and if you leave it too long they will need full on repairs.  It also includes launch failures and rocket building/integration time, but you can turn them both off in the difficulty section.  I reduced failure check difficulty from normal to easy and have just the right number of launch failures for my play.  Normal was certainly a bit tedious.

Thanks, BARIS looks interesting.  I especially like the huge customization options!

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