Yski

You're welcome

Talking about different versions, I made one with lasers that scale down based on distance instead of flat out stopping at around 2km. I also extended their range all the way to the physics range and added a variable that controls how quickly the damage falls of the the part's config file. As a result, lasers behave more or less like they would in real life, and I can finally get my 50km+ laser action going And no, that does not mean every laser weapon can now wreck everything within a 50km radius, I just made it so they can easily be modified to do so. It's just as easy to make the damage fall off at around 2km mark. I sent Baha a pull request, so I guess that makes it my first official modding contribution! ..though I only really wanted some long range weapons for myself

It's only been a week, give it time. Real life sometimes happens

Here's the latest post on the subject. Basically, there's no official DMP support, so no guarantees on anything working.

Mobile Refineries from MKS can turn it into Metal and Rare Metals. Metal can in turn be used to create machinery and spare parts for your MKS modules. So basically, you need it when you want to make your colonies completely self sufficient. The life support modules will keep recycling most things for you, but you'll eventually need to bring in more supplies to keep them running unless you make them from ore EDIT: Ninja'd

More over, that's a treaty made by humans. That being said, kerbals are supposed to be a peaceful species with a single goverment, so they probably wouldn't even think of weapons to begin with, unless someone dares suggest not adding more boosters

There's an example unity package linked in the first post, you could try looking for pointers there. I wish I could help you more, but unfortunately my vast pile of knowledge is pretty much limited to taking a quick look at the source code and recompiling the dll with a handful of changes

Long range laser testing. I opted to make a larger version of the laser for long ranges, and have the current one remain a short range weapon. Both now scale down with distance squared, one just does it faster.

I must say, that first post improved dramatically since I first saw it. So much easier to read now It does sound like a gigantic task to implement something like that though, so I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. It could be interesting, but maybe not quite worth the effort.

Nice, not what I'd use in my heavily modded saves, but these are perfect for a mostly stock game.

So, I messed around with the code a bit, and my infinite range lasers seem to be working as intented. I might have to work on the damage scaling a bit as it turns out it falls of a bit too quickly, but it's just tweaking the numbers at this point

Most of the time part count matters more than part size, so if you have fewer parts that are larger your performance might even improve a little.

There are plenty of space worthy weapons out there, so why settle for just guns? If anything, unguided projectiles would be at a disadvantage, since hitting anything that's actively trying to dodge is going to be really difficult due to the long travel times for the bullets. Lasers are perfectly viable for space combat. For instance, if we pluck in an angle of 10^(-4) radians, we'd still do about 1/100th of the original damage at 50 000 meters, and seeing how quickly things break when hit by the laser cannons of doom that come with the mod, 1/100th wouldn't be all that terrible. The angle I gave you might sound small, but using the formulae I linked earlier the theoretical minimum angle for an infra red laser with a wave length of 3800nm (the kind of laser US military is experimenting with) and a mirror (~laser gun) size of 2m (a random number, more or less) would be 1.9*10^(-6), and that's a laser designed to be used in atmospheres. That being said, I'm not looking just for lasers, like I mentioned earlier missiles would be amazing as well, and cannons too, though improving their aim enough for those ranges could be trickier. As for physics instability, I'll take a few Kraken attacks for the joy of blowing up a tiny dot I might be able to see with the right mods installed

I probably should've made it clearer, but I'm looking for weapons suited for long range space battles. As such, all that's between my laser and the target is a few specks of dust and lots of distance. Here's some quick math for that scaling factor. The "a" is the angle between the center of the beam and one of its edges, "l" is the distance to the target, and "r" is the radius of the beam. Using some basic trigonometry we'll see that tan(a) = r/l -> r = tan(a)*l Using that, the area of the circle should be A = PI * r^(2) = PI * (tan(a)*l)^2 The angle "a" should be a constant for the cannon, and that's what you'd use to tweak the damage scaling to suit your needs. Or if you want to go really hard core, you could actually calculate that as well. I just did some lazy drawings to get a general idea If you want to dive deeper into the math, try this link: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php The part you are looking for starts after the fourth "Equation" on the page.

That's what I'm asking for. Currently the way the damage is calculated is like this: p.temperature += laserDamage*TimeWarp.fixedDeltaTime; LaserDamage is a constant of 10000 defined earlier, and unless I'm missing something obvious there it does not change depending on the distance. Similarly the range of the laser is defined by another constant - it's just a ray cast that goes a certain distance, and if it hits something it deals that constant amount of damage. What I'd like is a laser that scales its damage down based on range, preferedly powerful enough to work at reasonable distances. In other words, set the ray cast distance to the physics max range, and divide the damage formula by something that depends on size of the cone and distance to the target - it should be easy enough to figure out, but I'm about to miss my buss so I can't really do the math right now To be honest the laser part is just a simple tweak to the code that I could just as well do myself, but the missiles could use an actual model, and my artistic skills are non-existent, so making fancy 3d stuff is pretty much out of question.

I love you That being said, I don't think the way I did it is the right way to go. It would probably make more sense to make one very resource hungry life support module and do some cool things with the civilian population and in situ kerbal recruitment you mentioned instead.

Talking about physics range increases, I'd love to see some long range weaponry suited for space battles. I'm thinking along the lines of 50-100 km ranges here, and to put things in perspective our current weapons can't really hit anything further than 20km away. Missiles would probably be relatively easy - the HEKV missiles seem to get pretty close when fired from about 40 km away, and only really miss because they lack the fuel to do the final corrections. As such, I'd imagine a larger, higher delta-v variant that's smart enough to leave some fuel in reserve for those final adjustments would probably do the trick. I'm also drooling for a cluster missile that doesn't require me to boot up a kOS script before firing one, so I'd love a carrier stage that spawns several smaller missiles withing say.. 10km of the target as well Looking at the source code, I don't see anything immediately obvious to improve on the gun aiming formula, apart from makig a cannon (railgun?) with better accuracy value and a slightly higher projectile speed to help the bullets reach their target before it gets bored and leaves. I suppose it makes sense for unguided projectiles to be somewhat of a short range thing, but I'd still like them to work a few kilometer further, think 20-40 km ranges. Finally, there are the lasers. They can't do anything against anything further than 5km away, and once you breach that magical barrier they vaporize everything within seconds. Instead of flat out stopping the beam, how about scaling the damage down based on distance? That way it could be somewhat useable as more than just an anti missile system, but hopefully wouldn't instantly destroy everything from 100km away.

^Thanks for the good explanation

Out of curiosity, what is the one good space base mod you are thinking about? OKS is the first I can think of, but there are a few others like FusTek Station Parts that looks interesting, as well as some more special cases like the ginormous Stanford Torus mod. Of course, it's a bit tricky defining a space base mod to begin with, but I'd have hard time picking just one. That being said, I love my space stations, so I'm looking forward to see what you come up with

Kind of off topic, but how does limiting the game to 2 processors increase the performance? I know ksp isn't particularly good at multi threading, but giving it less resources and somehow having the game run better sounds very counter intuitive. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm very confused as to how that's supposed to work.

I'm running quite a few mods as well, and I believe me, I know you pain. KSP is wonky as it is, but add a dozen or so mods and sometimes things just break for no apparent reason. Good luck!

^Wait, what do you mean when you say you add a GameData from the vanilla setup? If you mean you are taking a GameData folder from an unmodded install, how does the unmodded version have anything the modded version doesn't? Are we talking about another GameData inside the GameData folder or what is going on here? Maybe I just misunderstood you, but to me it sounds like you are doing something very odd

So, I've been downloading all your mods and painfully slowly installing them all one by one, and I just realized I could've just downloaded them all in one neat package all this time. I love that USI_ALLMODS download <3 That being said, could you perhaps add it to the mod catalog? Let's face it, no-one is going to make it to the bottom of that page without downloading most of your mods, so that "Give me all the shinies!" button needs to be a thing

Hi, I made a little config file patch that adds Modular Kolonization System generators to the Torus parts. I named it Torus MKSifier, enjoy! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8zAlgvrk6rSU1Z3X0FSaGVPcDQ/edit?usp=sharing What it is: TorusMKSifier is a simple config file addition applied via ModuleManager to turn michealhester07's amazing Stanford Torus parts into large versions of RoverDude's Modular Kolonization System generators. The way it works is I've copied parts of existing MKS config files and tweaked the values to suit the larger parts. Required mods: RoverDude's Modular Kolonization System (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79588-0-24-2-USI-Kolonization-Systems) michaelhester07's Stanford Torus (See your current thread ) ialdabaoth's Module Manager, maintained by sarbian at the time of writing this (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55219-Module-Manager-1-5-6) Recommended: A way to generate lots and lots of power - Station Science Labs generate some power, but you'll probably find yourself needing quite a few of them to power your station. I wanted to encourage fancier generators/beamed power networks/solar arrays rather than giving enough free power to suit your needs. There are plenty of options to choose from, but if you're having trouble finding one, KSP Interstellar has fancy beamed power networks that should do the trick. Module multipliers: Torus == 4x Kerbitat, 10x of every inflateable storage module Habitation Module == Habitation Module Biodome == 4x Aeroponics, 1x Biolab Station Science Lab == 2x Colony Command Center, 10x Power Distribution Unit Forest == Agricultural Space Dock == 2x Refinery, 2x Fabrication, , 2x Factory, 2x Assembly, Station Docking Module == 2x Machinery Plant, 3x Repair Shop For instance, the test station with a krew of 456 had: 1x Torus 12x Habitation Module 8x Biodome 6x Station Science Lab (Not enough to power it!) 16x Forest 1x Space Dock 1x Station Docking Module Here's an old screenshot from before I fixed the final issues: (Pretend the description doesn't exist, I've solved those problems long ago )