jd284

Alright, I played with the Warpdrive for a while now. I've learned some fun new maneuvers to do rendezvous using nothing but the Warpdrive (except for going below the safe altitude of course). To go Mars, I let the sun change my velocity until it matched that of Mars, the jumped there and visited Deimos and Phobos on the way in. So if there's any demand, I'd like to make some sort of tutorial on doing Warpdrive orbital maneuvers without expending any (conventional) fuel, basically how to move my orbit around so that the following gets accomplished for free: how to brake or get faster as needed how to change direction only changing inclination to match a target in general matching velocities with a target (planet or ship) how to achieve low orbit from interplanetary speeds Where would be a good place to put this information? In the forums it'd easily get overlooked. Maybe the official wiki? Or start a wiki on the Warpdrive github? Or would it be more fun for people to be forced to learn this on their own? Is that why there's no wiki yet?

It's continuous, frame by frame. Kerbals don't have set mealtimes, they sort of nibble on the supplies all day long (and night too). If you're calculating demand, make sure you don't forget the recyclers. They're the most important piece of the puzzle.

I don't think he has ever stated in detail, but I suspect it's this part of Kerbalism: - resources: consumption and production in background Probably breaks the USI converters and such in the background, since they're based on the stock mechanics. Also if it changes how EC works in the background many MKS things could break.

Out of my own experience with TAC-LS and MKS, and if you're starting a new game anyway, I'd suggest you might consider switching to USI-LS if you like a challenge. With MKS, TAC-LS is actually easier since its supplies are much lighter and it doesn't have the habitation mechanic which makes everything a lot more interesting. Like half the MKS parts have useless functions without USI-LS. Also TAC-LS isn't very well integrated into MKS. It works, so you can definitely play like that, but it's a bit klunky. Not trying to force you to switch or anything, but at least consider what would be right for you. Personally I'm glad I switched for my 1.2 game. Also I think Kerbalism is not supported and breaks some MKS functionality. Never played with it so I can't say for sure. To be somewhat credible the leak rate would have to be different for each resource. Like for example, Organics would probably spoil much faster than Metals would disappear. Unless you have some rogue kerbals doing some copper scavenging on the side, where would it even go?

It sets all attached leaf parts with ModuleWeightDistributableCargo to physicsless which causes their mass to be added to the parent part. By leaf parts I mean any such parts without further parts attached to them. Oh and if you enable it on a leaf part, it directly applies to that part instead.

"Indefinite" means your USI-LS has disabled hab effects so it doesn't matter what the timer is. Which I think is still the default setting if you only have USI-LS and not also MKS. So if you want to play with hab mechanics you'd need to enable them. Otherwise just ignore it. Note that you shouldn't change the settings while you have any ongoing long-term missions (beyond Minmus) because the settings will affect those too and those kerbals will suddenly realize that they're actually NOT HAPPY after all.

I added that function via MM patch since it doesn't make sense that there's no way to throw out stuff.

Not with the mod on its own. Though I'm sure a Tweakscale patch could be made...

It should look like this. Pretty sure the message comes from Firespitter, at least the version that's in the USI constellation.

If your FireSpitter is up to date, you should be getting an onscreen message saying which resource it was repainted for. Even easier than trying to remember ISM numbering or kontainer abbreviations.

You have my reply directly under your original post...

Thanks, that makes some sense. And if I have more than one commons the multipliers are added, I think. But basically that means the crew capacity rating of habs that just give months and no multiplier is irrelevant. Maybe it should be omitted in the info box to not cause confusion.

Actually I'm not sure either how it works. I thought it just meant that if you had more kerbals, they'd only get the base hab time. But considering it a bit more, I doubt that's how it works. The way the calculator shows it in the VAB it's just the total months divided by number of crew, regardless of supposed crew capacity of the hab. And I'm even less sure how the multiplier is factored in. There doesn't seem to be anything about efficiency in either case. Mostly my hab design is just trial and error until the numbers are right after I launch it... and bases running low on hab just get some extra parts as needed.

Good point. Although you could argue that inflatables only really make sense for manned bases which are relatively likely to have a pilot as well. No, it means 69 months for 1 crew or 11.5 months for 6 crew. But for comparison the 2.5m version has 18.5 months for 1 crew or 4.6 months for 4 crew, significantly less than the 24% difference in mass.

Forgot to mention in the above, most other habs and recyclers from MKS require machinery, but the Kerbitats don't. That's why they're heavy on their own, but other habs get just as heavy when filled up with machinery.

Actually stock legs and also the ones from MKS work fine and don't slide much until the slope is more than 10° or so. But the SpaceY legs are much better at folding aerodynamically so I prefer them for atmospheric rocket stages. Although for now I solve the problem with the MKS "ground tether" feature which has the advantage that it breaks automatically when you take off again. (I used an MM patch to add it to SpY legs...)

The 3.75m Kerbitat is actually much better than it looks. I made a ticket about it too but eventually realized it doesn't need fixing. It's only 24% heavier than the 2.75m version but its capabilities are scaled more than that, the habitation supports 6 crew instead of 4 and has much higher multiplier or base months. The recyclers have a much higher recycling percentage, giving about 40% more supply extension factor (e.g. for the non-water consuming ones 2.5m has 0.81 which is a factor of 5.3x, whereas 3.75m has 0.865 which is 7.4x, that's the best factor you can get without consuming lots of water). And that sets the cap for all other recyclers, so having a 3.75m Kerbitat is worth it for that alone if you have a big enough base. At least for the recyclers, splitting the capability into multiple bays would have to destroy that benefit or it would be OP (or would need to complicated in that the recycling percentage depends on number of bays using that recycler). As for hab, there's plenty of other ways to get that so I don't think it's a big issue.

The obvious fix would be to also pull MaterialKits from planetary storage when inflating things. I've added a request to DStaal's ticket about this topic.

Thanks for the update! And thanks for the mod in general! Just checking though, no luck with fixing the landing legs yet, right? At least mine are still sliding around like they're teflon-coated unless there's literally zero slope.

Put the pilot on EVA? Nope, that won't work anymore since pushes can be done without pilot. Sorry I don't think there's a way at the moment, except by editing the cfg and remove the module temporarily.

Huh. Well I made a PR to fix it for MKS. No idea if it's intentional for EL or not so I'll leave that alone. Just so we don't get "rockets are made of people!!" campaigns, you know.

On an unrelated note, I just noticed something terrible: Whoever suspected that Kerbals are actually robots?!

Make sure both vessels have supplies warehouses with the warehouse option enabled. The "normal" supplies storage in pods and such does not participate in logistics. In particular, the standard USI-LS containers are not warehouses (which is probably a bug, MKS should add this function to them I think).

Yes, KSP doesn't simulate EC generation while unfocused. But basically that means the EC timer is useless if you have any means of power generation on board... I regularly have vessels with the EC "expired" but when I switch to them all is normal, so it's no problem though.

OK, good to know thanks. I'll try to keep my changes compatible with yours then. But I probably won't have time until next weekend anyway.