Long term experiments impossible because power stops during time warp.

[Dunbaratu]

Am I doing something wrong - this seems broken but I might just not understand what's going on:

Here's the stuff that works:

I'm trying out the career stuff in Breaking Ground - I just got my first ground science going.  It consists of these 3 parts:

Go-Ob Ed Monitor,

Probodyne Experiment Control Station

Ox-Stat PD Photovoltaic Panel

They were placed close enough to each other to work together (all 3 say "connected").  The Experiment Control Station and the Photovoltaic Panel were both installed by Bill, (near the start of the game, Engineer level 0).  The Go-Ob Ed monitor was installed by Bob (Scientist, level 0).

Everything says it works.  The power is satisfied.  The Go-Ob machine claims it is doing science at 0.28215p/hour.  A very small trickle of science starts accumulating as expected.

Here's what doesn't seem to be working:

Now for the part that seems broken:  It only works in 1x time warp.  If I do any time warp, be it Physics or "Rails" warp, the power calculations fail and become zero, thus starving the machine and stopping it from producing any more science.  The rate goes to 0p/hour, and its "Power State" says "unpowered".  As soon as I drop back down to 1x warp, the power starts working again, and it jumps back to 0.28125p/hour.  This makes the contract (to get 50% of the science from the device) seem impossible unless I sit with my computer turned on for a few hundred hours at 1x warp speed.

This may or may not be relevant: Bob died shortly after he placed the Go-Ob ED Monitor device, due to an EVA flying error on m part.  I have no idea if the game somehow retains any memory of "This device is owned by Bob" and that makes it stop working when he dies, or if this is just totally unrelated to the problem.

[Dunbaratu]

Further information - it Does work but only when not looking at it:

So the problem only manifests while I have the ground station as the current "active vessel" and I'm looking at it.  If I leave the vessel and make it "unload" from memory into the background while I go do other things, then time warp, then come back to 1x and re-load the "vessel" in the tracking station, THEN the science collected gets back-calculated for the missing time and the number DOES jump up for the warped time.  It just doesn't do so *while looking* at it as a loaded vessel, making it very confusing.

Also the photovoltaic solar panel part keeps jumping up off the ground when I come out of time warp and about half the time when it does that get the screenmessage saying "Cannot deploy" the part because it's not on the ground (note, I am not attempting to deploy anything - it's *already* planted on the ground, but the time warping seems to confuse it and make it jump a few inches up when it comes off time warp.  I don't know if that's related to the problem.

[JPLRepo]

 As you are at the central station it acts as a regular vessel. So when you use time warp it goes on rails and unloads all its modules. When you leave it and go somewhere else in the game a seperate process takes over the management. I can understand how this could be seen as a bug. Raising it on the bug tracker - we can investigate a solution. 

 

[MechBFP]

The penultimate example of a watched pot never boils. 

[Dunbaratu]

15 hours ago, JPLRepo said:

 As you are at the central station it acts as a regular vessel. So when you use time warp it goes on rails and unloads all its modules. When you leave it and go somewhere else in the game a seperate process takes over the management. I can understand how this could be seen as a bug. Raising it on the bug tracker - we can investigate a solution. 

 

The problem is one of player information being misleading.  The player cannot monitor what is happening because the only place to watch it from is with the "vessel" being active, which is showing the zero'ed information.

Maybe it's a secret attempt to explain a bit quantum physics - By observing the experiment you change it.

The Science Lab is a similar long-term science part from Stock: But it has both the code that works on downtime, and the code that works while looking at it.  It's implemented in both places.

[Dunbaratu]

I should make it clear, the thing I consider broken about this isn't that the thing only works when you're not looking.  I would be fine with that gameplay in fact.

The problem is the fact that the game is lying to the player.  The game is *telling* the player something isn't working when it is.  It's *telling* the player, "your experiment will not work unless you stay here and stare at it in 1x speed."  Because when the player time warps to *test* what happens, they see the power zero out and go, "oh Noes!  I can't use this under time warp".  The player can't tell it will work fine, because it appears to be broken while you are looking at it, with zero indication that it will be different once you stop looking at it.