Terwin

You do a search with a pioneer module and one will populate within a couple km of your base. Yes they look like large rocks. I get the impression that they are akin to landed Asteroids, but with more limited usage.

I found some resource nodes with my pioneer modules, so I thought I would send up a Karibou Rover to collect them for processing at my base. Apparently putting a Klaw on the back of a < 10 ton rover is not an effective means of transporting a 125 ton nodule(but it does make a very effective parking brake). I am getting the impression that I either need a rover with 9 resource tanks(to cover all harvestable resources other than dirt) and a sifter so that I can process it in place, or I need to send up something large and folding with the PAL parts if I am to actually move these things... Has anyone successfully collected/harvested these nodules yet? Note: it seems like you find one every time you search with your pioneer module, so I expect the planned cost to use these nodules is either lots of round-trips with a rover, or some sort of very large collection rover that can actually lift the things(and presumably, once you can manage that, the boost from the nodules are not that big of a deal any more) Thoughts?

@WisemanYou need a logistics module, not a pioneer module. I find that if I have a pilot on board and a full warehousing module, I often lose 50% to planetary storage before I can lift off. This mostly happens with collapsed inflatable storage modules where I let the collapsed storage module start full(for the collapsed state) when I am taking a logistics module somewhere else. To test logistics I suggest this: Duna logistics module, Mk1 capsule(with pilot), inflatable storage, inflated and filled with some resource. Send it to the pad and see if your storage is still full.(if it is, double check if it has warehousing enabled)

I had something similar to that, When I klawed an old Med-bay in orbit(left over from a rescue), my supplies suddenly wen to 0 like the kerbals consumed supplies for the entire period it was abandoned. I think the issue was supposed to be fixed, but I never verified it myself. Machinery will slowly be used up. If an engineer does the 'perform maintenance' action on a part and has access to a warehouse with machinery in it, he will re-fill the machinery on the part he is doing 'maintenance' on from the warehouse. You an have this happen automatically if you have an engineer in a workshop or assembly plant as well. TL;DR version: 'Maintenance' is refilling machinery from a warehouse. I updated the Manufacturing page of the wiki to reflect 0.50.9, I also updated all the rates to include the hourly and per-second costs in energy and raw materials. The USI-LS Converters page has also been updated to have per-second costs for raw materials along with the existing per-day costs. (and this time I did not skip the Organics and Nuclear processing tables)

As far as having supplies going, I find that a Nom-o-matic 2500 or two is adequate for handling my local needs.(assuming I use the 3-kerb 79% recycling part and don't use more than 3 kerbals) For making surplus supplies, I generally just make more fertilizer and put a nom-o-matic on all of my ships. Both the Ranger crush-o-matic and the Tundra Agricultural support module can convert Gypsum into fertilizer(or Minerals at a reduced rate). The 1.25m ISRU unit is what I use for Fertilizer on my interplanetary ships, but that is pretty slow.(only needing one set of drills on an up-right ship and low mass for high d-v are the reasons I use this low-efficiency method for a back-up system on long trips. If I actually need it, it will be because I got stuck somewhere or was forced to make additional stops because with 79% recycling, 4500 fertilizer will last 4 kerbals more than 11 years, or more than twice my hab-time. They may turn grumpy, but at least they will be fed...) After I had everything else set up and processing, I did add some of those ranger green-houses to my bases(Using Cultivate to turn substrate+water into supplies), but those are more for putting supplies in the planetary warehouse against a future emergency than they are for life support.

@Wiseman you can right-click on a drill and see how much it is currently producing per second.(this depends both on concentration and on engineers/multipliers so can't really go in the Wiki) For everything else, you can look at your % for that production step(also given in the right-click menu) and multiply it by the numbers in the config files (the config files provide per-second numbers, and I'll try to add those to the Wiki like I did for EC on supplies parts, next time I update it, probably this weekend).

The only place I am aware of that you can get full details on what parts will do would be the Wiki.(probably not yet updated to 0.50.9 numbers) In-game you can see everything currently stored in the planetary resources to get an Idea what you are producing a lot of. Or you can open up your resources tab for the current base and look at what you are producing vs consuming(if there is a - in front of he number on the right, you are a net producer, if there is no - in front of the consumption and it is not (0.0) then you are a net consumer.

After upgrading last night, I noticed that some of my drill modules reverted to dirt and/or stopped drilling. I suspect it was just an upgrade artifact and not worth bothering with at this point, but if I see it happening again, I'll see about creating an issue. Also, it seems that local resource management did not want me to off-load my machinery delivery. The material kits off-loaded just fine, but I had to hook-up a pipe to off-load the machinery. I'll try to take some screen-shots if it happens again. Aside from that it seems to be working quite well(Love the refinery boost, it should make my deliveries much less important for kick-starting a base)

Don't forget that machines exist in meat-space and no amount of software security will prevent: * blunt force interacting with delicate instruments * power surges * wear and tear on precise instruments(like hard drives) * cascading hardware failures(such as whole array failures on a RAID that starts thrashing after a disk goes down and ends up losing more disks than it can handle) High-end systems(usually government funded as few others are willing to spend that kind of money), can minimize these, but you cannot eliminate these or many other issues. Most are willing to just have an off-site backup and work from there.

I think you can actually make material kits with just 5 parts(3 of them are inflatable, and one is a surface attachable drill): 1 mid-sized drill(set to Metal ore/Substrate/Minerals), one Tundra Industrial Refinery(3.75M set to refine Metals/Polymers/Chemicals), and one Ranger inflatable workshop. After that you just need a place to put the raw and refined materials(one inflatable storage unit for raw and one for refined). The workshop can hold the kits, so that is all you need. Add some solar panels and a radiator for the drill and you can make material kits. More drills/high level engineer combined with more refineries will speed things up, but are not needed. Note: you will slowly chew through your machinery so will occasionally need re-supply unless you make it yourself(I think you only need 5 MKS parts other than storage, but 3 of them would be Tundra 3.5M parts[two refineries and an assembly plant], the other two are drills).

Considering that a Mk1 cockpit is based of the Mercury/Gemini mission cockpits and those are described as 'worn not flown' by the astronauts that flew them, multiplying the crew space by 3 probably only gives enough space to have both a bed-roll and a toilet if you use the toilet for a pillow. After all, in a Mk1 cockpit, you neither have room for a second diaper, nor enough mobility to take off the one you put on before launch. I don't know about you, but the Mk1 Cabin looks like barely enough space for one Kerbal to stretch and exercise for a 3 week mission(when not strapped in to the cockpit at least)

Mk1 crew cabin is in a 45 science node and will let you extend habitation by 2 kerbal-weeks per ton. If your science returns are so low that after farming Kerbin and LKO you cannot afford a 45 science node, then you can always stack Mk1 pods to get more living space for .8t/kerbal-week

There are 3 mulch recyclers in base USI-LS: Nom-o-Matic 5000 (small surface-mount Greenhouse) Nom-o-Matic 2500 (Large surface-mount Greenhouse processes 5x the 5000) Nom-o-Matic 2500-I (2.5M in-line greenhouse processes 2x the 25000) https://github.com/BobPalmer/USI-LS/wiki/Parts:-Converters#agroponics I believe the others are in USI-MKS.

There is a cap on how much can be transmitted for most experiments, so for those you will need to take one or more additional readings to take back to Kerbin to get the full science value. Note: several experiments need multiple readings to get the full value, even if you bring the results back to Kerbin: surface sample, science jr, goo, gravioli, atmospheric analyzer thingy

With rescues you only need to get within 2.1km, then you can swap vessels and EVA the kerbal over to your ship(you may want to switch your nav-ball to target mode and retro-thrust to get your relative speed below ~40m/s so the rescuee can catch your ship). And while I do not generally bother with satellite missions, it is more due to not needing the funds and not launching many unmanned ships that could fill the contracts as part of a larger mission. Achieving a specified orbit is a pretty fundamental skill when it comes to space flight, and if you have patched conics, you have a helpful graphical representation of the resulting orbit that makes it much easier to know the outcome of a given burn.

Generally most of my 'Station in orbit of Kerbol' missions are completed by training missions that only spend a few minutes outside of the Kerbin SOI.(The rest are taken care of by interplanetary missions) Without a gravity-assist to help with matching the orbit of the station, you would either need the station to produce/maintain some very perishable resource that could not be produced/stored on a normal vessel, or you would need it to be harvesting something worth all the extra effort(like a low Kerbol orbit station collecting anti-matter for the warp-drive mod)

Generally I go with the 'increase available contracts to 30' and 'tweak vessel and flight plan to accomplish several missions' strategies. There will usually be several training/rescue missions visiting mun, minmus, and popping out to Kerbol that also include two or more base/station contracts and excess space is fulled with tourists.(although I take a lot less tourists than I did before I started using USI-LS, due to habitation and recycling limits). The vessels have ISRU and will often visit a new biome for each moon(assuming any have science remaining).

All those rescue missions. Early on, I'll take all of the ones that do not require recovering landed debris, but after I get around 30 in the astronaut complex, I'll make a choice to stop taking them. Then I feel bad for not taking all those other rescue contracts that come up...

I won't let Kerbals die. I also will generally not strand them due to pilot error. Design error, sure, but if the cat stepped on the keyboard, or I was not paying attention and did not fire the braking thrusters when I needed to, I will load or revert however far back I need to go. Of course deign errors that lead to a stranding are few and far between when you have ISRU on virtually all of your manned missions... I also do not send gender un-blanced crews more than a few minutes outside the Kerbin SOI. (usually 4: pilot, engineer, 2x scientist in lab) Also, as I am using USI-LS, I don't send anyone past the Mun out without plenty of elbow-room.

Had an odd bug last night. I had a cargo vessel making a delivery to my Mun base and I figured that as I was heading that way, I would grab and deliver an old med-bay in kerbin orbit that I had rescued a kerbal from a few weeks prior. When I finished my ejection burn(about 2.5 hours into the flight and about 20 minutes after I grabbed the med bay) I noticed that I only had a handfull of supplies and a full load of mulch. As I had a 25000 nom-o-matic that had launched with full fertilizer and supplies, a 79% recycling part(for 3) and only 2 kerbals on board, I had not expected supplies to ever drop below full. Estimating backwards, I figure that when I klawed the med-bay that because the med-bay was considered the parent vessel(the name was changed from cargo ship to med-bay), all kerbals on-board consumed resources for the entire time the med-bay was floating abandoned in orbit. If I get a chance, I'll set up a USI-only game and try to create a save just a few meters away from grabbing a derilict med-bay(assuming I can reproduce the suspected scenario reliably when and old bay is klawed), but I'm leaving for a week and a half on Sat morning, so I wanted to mention this should I forget or otherwise not have time. Fortunately, it did not have a negative impact on my game, but I could see it causing problems for others.

On the PC version, they have been careful to avoid breaking save games when upgrading, so I expect the same will be the case on the console version. Any new features that could negatively affect an existing game(comm network for example) are off by default in older saves for example.

perhaps, but it seems like exactly the right thread to post it on, so better to keep everything together. Addendum: What if the advice Kerbal also popped up on the launch-pad/air-strip with a 'Are you sure you want to launch with <list of critical warnings from engineer's report>' message and disappears when you hit space to launch? Seems like a reasonable thing for a training-wheels type setting...

Career Mode addendum suggestion: Goal/Walkthrough/Tutorial mode This would add a select-able goal for a new game such as 'Landing on the Mun' or 'Duna Colony' all the way up to 'Grand Tour' (which would include round trips to every solid body in the system). The primary effect would be a Kerbal in the KSC who provides advice on what you can do next to work towards your specified goal. If you are low on funds, they may suggest you look for some easy contracts in the admin building If you have not made it to space, they may make rocket building suggestions(multiple stages with solid fuel boosters only in the first stage) If you are ready to go interplanetary but have a low level tracking station, they could recommend upgrading that. If you have gotten suborbital but not yet orbital, they may suggest researching a vacuum engine like the terrier, or recommending a multi-stage approach(possibly with advice on a gravity turn) After achieving the goal you selected at game creation, you would get a message akin to 'Congratulations, you have successfully completed <goal>. now the next objective is up to you'. At that point the advice kerbal would go away and you would continue in normal career mode. This could help players who don't know how to proceed or want a specified goal in their career. I would expect that most of the advice would be fairly basic/straight-forward and only really act as a reminder for experienced players, but could provide some much needed help for new players who do not know the game very well.

Surface TWR does not necessarily include atmospheric impacts to engine thrust, just the current acceleration/surface gravity(by my understanding). I have had a number of LV-N vessels getting ready for reentry on Kerbin with a Surface TWR near or above 1, and I can assure you that even with empty tanks and infini-fuel, they could never take off from KSC on those engines. In the VAB you need to click on the 'Atmospheric' button so you can see your atmospheric TWR for the selected body.

It's not that bad to be without RCS if you are using 'klaw docking', just get close to the target vessel and basically stationary, then point your klaw at a mostly clear portion of the target vessel(as in nothing easily broken if you miss) and thrust forward at no more than about 0.8m/s. Make sure your claw is perpendicular to the target so the correct part engages, and that should be all you need to do. That is how I do all of my 'and vessel' rescues, as I do not generally bother with RCS. (I also don't use docking much outside of rescues and, some times, refueling)