Duke Leto

Of your suggestions, I like 2) and 1) but not 3). Assembly of a single rigid craft via KIS sounds the least maddening, but sending a half dozen more engineers to Minmus makes the setup difficult to replicate on other bodies (Ike, Gilly, Moho, Dres, Eeeloo, and one of Jool's smaller moons). Just so we're clear talking about hauling launch clamps to Minmus to act as anchors for bases or landers.

Yeah, SimpleLogistics is a "no go". One of the requirements was that the level 3 engineer in the "control tower" applied their efficiency bonus to all of the ISRUs and drills in the entire facility. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. So, I either need to grit my teeth and put up with the wandering mining towers, go back to the drawing board and try and design a system which can accommodate docking assembly on the surface (and which will almost certainly be spontaneously ripped apart by the kraken on being loaded eventually), or admit that KSP hates what I'm trying to do and give up.

OK, thanks.

I was pointed in the direction of this Mod to stop me having physics engine glitches and KAS blow up the entirety of Minmus when I attempt to build a large scale fuel refinery there. It seems to be sharing produced resources well enough... but the individual craft containing ISRU units and drills that aren't connected to the craft with a level 3 engineer aren't getting the engineer's productivity bonus, and that kind of renders the whole thing pointless. Am I doing something wrong, or does SimpleLogistics not support this?

Hmmm. Then the only question that remains is if there's an efficiency loss from running all 3 resource conversion recipes at once on a single ISRU converter, because I currently have the hotkeys set up so that they can switch between the recipes on all the networked converters. That's something I can work out for myself, though... Thanks.

Well, my concerns would then be: 1.) What happens if components manage to clip into one another? 2.) Can Simple Logistics handle unified hotkey presses? For example, I want to shut down the ISRUs and retract all of the solar panels, radiators and drills when the hulking great freighter lands or takes off...

That doesn't solve the underlying problem of the component base parts wandering around relative to one another. 1. What do you mean "use struts"? Are you talking about attaching craft to the KAS ground bases or pylons using the autostrut part (which no longer seems to exist in KAS/KIS)? Because I tried assembling the base in orbit and holding it together with autostruts in a previous playthrough... And they caused the craft to rip itself apart. 2. If you're trying to convince me that the physics engine is NOT buggy garbage and the game does merit my spending any more time on it, you aren't doing a good job.

The problem that moving the drills higher solved wasn't asymmetric drill placement. When you switch craft to the base, all the component craft with deployed drills shot directly up into the air by several meters, although it seems towers on the edge were more violently affected. Since the height of the jumps was different but the towers were connected by fixed length KAS fuel lines, the component craft would get torque in the direction of the static fuel line, and thus fall over. Every single one of the towers is on landing struts rather than gear. There might be an issue with them not settling evenly because of the length of the poodle engines. I think that part of the problem is that the individual craft, although connected by fuel lines instead of docking ports, are considered by the physics engine to be separate craft with separate "orbits", and the calculation of where they are relative to the surface of Minmus is accurate to within "a few meters". So they tend to wander around. Kerbal Alarm Clock might be exacerbating the problem. This could be interpreted to mean that I need to use docking ports instead of KAS... But I'm honestly thinking my whole enterprise is insane. The Unity physics engine is just not going to allow large connected craft to exist while landed. It's fundamentally buggy. These bugs can not or will not ever be fixed. Continuing to try to work around them is foolishness on my part.

Honestly, this is my fault for expecting better from KSP.... So, I'm having problems with my over ambitious surface mining base on Minmus. The premise is that to eliminate the tedium of having to connect components in orbit and try to land a large and complicated base, or of going through the rigmarole of assembling component parts on the ground on Minmus, I use the Kerbal Attachment System mod to connect the component drilling/ISRU "towers" with a central "command tower" with an engineer. (There's also another tower with a Sci lab.) I use flags and MechJeb to guide the component parts (and eventually the fuel freighters) in for a precision landing. The first problem, which resulted in all of the mining towers being blasted intentionally into a nearby hill as defective, was that the large mining drills, when placed too close to the ground and deployed on a landed craft, cause that craft to playfully shoot up into the air when you switch to it. Consequently the mining towers had a marked tendency to fall over, breaking their solar panels and radiators. I addressed that by redesigning the mining towers with the drills moved higher on the chassis. So what's my problem now? Well, the goddamned base keeps trying to walk away when I transfer to it or use warp while focused on it. The individual components move relative to each other and unconnected bits like flags when either happens. I've illustrated with a red and blue dot where the latest mining tower and the flag where I intended to land the next one were relative to the rest of the base when I left it last. It's honestly not clear whether the latest tower and flag are moving or the rest of the base is. The local slope is about 2-3% by the way. So... what the hell am I supposed to do here? I've got one tower in orbit and three more en route, but I don't want to continue the process of setup if the base components are going to randomly slide around and clip into one another during its operational lifetime. Is there any way to mitigate this, or do I just need to admit that I'm in an abusive relationship with a fundamentally broken game engine and get on with the rest of my life?

Dumb Question. Back in 2018, I used KAS to construct what I referred to as a "modular Minmus mining base". Basically I got fed up with trying to assemble a complicated mining setup in orbit and land it on Minmus, or with trying to dock base components on the surface, so I took inspiration from oil drilling operations and landed a "Control Tower" and several individual rocket landers that each contained a big ISRU, drills and all the accouterments needed to turn out a fuel at a fast clip. Each tower was connected to one of the others or to the control tower using W-50 winches and JS-1 sockets (or whatever the equivalent parts were called then), so that all individual craft consolidated into one base and the Level 3 Engineer in the control tower applied his bonus to all of them. Then I landed my nice 10m SpaceY fuel freighters next to the setup in order to, as I said at the time, "make the rocket equation my poodle" in preparation for a huge interplanetary exploration effort. Then Squad and Steam conspired to ruin my plans by spamming save breaking updates, all of my favorite mods stopped updating, and I generally lost patience with the whole goddamned enterprise. So then I find myself staring at the wall during quarantine and I decide I might as well make another try in version 1.9. Fortunately, things have been going faster because I learned a lot last time. (And I moved my installation away from where Steam could harm it...) So I mostly reused my old designs, landed the towers at a nice flat equatorial plateau with a nearly 13% ore concentration and lashed them together. Didn't work as expected. The craft are still separate. So my question is: does KAS still do craft consolidation via fuel lines? I'm hoping the RTS-1 will do the job, because linking with solid pipes was (in my experience), the equivalent of chanting "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Space Kraken R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn..."

Well... that is really pretty dumb. Squad really phoned it in with Breaking Ground, didn't they?

So, I have Science generating experiments deployed on the ground at KSC, on the Mun and Minmus, and excepting the seismometer at KSC (just need to send a few more rockets screaming into the ground a few km west of KSC...), all of them have been at 100% complete for a while. About 60 in game days in fact. But none of them have transmitted 100% other than the seismometers on the Mun and Minmus (disposing of heavy ascent stages during Munar/Minmur(?) descent is FUN!). I noticed this and sent Bob in a rover to poke at the things at KSC, and found that the Go-ob ED Monitor and the PD-3 Weather Analyzer were disabled although both had completed their experiments 100%. I assumed that this must have happened when I had Bill replace the solar panels with Mini-Nuk-PD units to get continuous power coverage... but no. When Bob turned the experiments back on by hand, they had turned themselves off again the next time I checked the things. So is there any way to get the last couple drips of science to transmit, or do I have to pick the things up and haul them home? EDIT: Recovering the modules near KSC through the space center map doesn't give you the missing science either.

Did y'all ever figure out if ROC was a place or a programming error?

Then I shall take your example and make indolence my watchword! Thank you, sir.

I guess someone, by which of course I mean me, should go and correct the wiki guide I linked...

This ain't really explained really well in the tutorials on CommNet on the wiki. It says you need 3 gigantor solar relays near Kerbin, presumably because 3 x 23 charge per s per gigantor is > 6 charge per Mits x 11.43 Mits per s. But the relays only draw power when transmitting. You presumably need 12 gigantors at 25 Gm and 48 at 50 Gm, and 48 isn't practical. Getting enough PB-NUKs to generate 69 charge per s is equally impractical and absurdly expensive. Can I just get around the requirement by spamming the relay sat with batteries?

Good to see my lunacy is helping others on their "doomed voyage of the obsessivo-compulsivo"...

I think most people are going to find driving a weighted jet rover downhill from the runway into the ocean and on down into the vasty deep LESS of a pain in the ass than flying to the poles and poking around looking for water on top of them, but whatever floats your boat, metaphorically speaking. If someone finds such a location and wants to post the coordinates, good on 'em.

If you're like me, obsessive and detail oriented, and you have the [x] Science! mod, you might be wondering if it's actually possible to collect science results while landed in Kerbin's water or splashed down in the deserts. The answer is yes for Vanilla KSP as of 1.4.5. You can "land" in the water by getting a craft to the ocean floor out beyond the limit of the shore biomes, and there are lakes or rivers for each of the major biomes that you can splash down in, and I'm going to list the coordinates for the latter below. For an added challenge, in addition to getting the raw science by running and recovering the standard experiments, you can run the experiments, transport them back to KSP by any means of transport you like, and instead of recovering the experiments, launch them into orbit where they can be processed in a mobile sci lab for more sweet science. (Or converted to reputation or funds via strategy, since science from the Mun or Minmus yields more science points for the same effort.) Getting landed in water is just a matter of getting a craft to the ocean floor by making a submarine or a craft that's too heavy to float. Ore tanks full of ore do the job nicely, and you can adjust the amount of ore a craft has at launch to greater than zero the same way you can adjust the fuel, oxidizer or mp in a tank. You can also map the "jettison tank contents" action to an action group to dump the ore and regain buoyancy and return your sub to the surface. Note air breathing jet engines can get oxygen from underwater... somehow... I used a modified version of kantokris' Mini Submarine Mk 3. I replaced the claw at the front of the craft with a materials bay studded with experiments, and added some detachable landing gear as a launching frame. I'm not sure kantokris knew you could just start with full tanks of of ore, so you can possibly dispense with the drills and ISRU as well. https://kerbalx.com/kandokris/Mini-Submarine-Mk-3 For added Kerbalness, if you can find a way to make your submarine a yellow one... As noted above, splashing down in land biomes is just a matter of finding a lake or river that isn't a water or shore biome. I find a supersonic science "dive bomber" works well here. Create a custom waypoint with the Waypoint Manager mod using the coordinates below and fly towards your target. Decelerate down to subsonic speeds and drop into the lower atmosphere once you get near your target, then kill the engines and go into a dive straight towards your target body of water. Once you're under the 1000 m limit (ALL lakes and rivers are at a 0m altitude), deploy a buttload of chutes and fall gently down for a nice splash down. Stall to get to a safe velocity before doing so if you need to. (Doing the same with landing gear is handy for soft landings with planes is rough terrain as well, FYI.) In two cases, there are several biomes available in the same body of water a short distance away from each other. You can also deploy landing gear in the water and use some low power jet thrust to get your plane up safely onto the shoreline, but make sure you aim for a gentle slope before trying this. If your plane has a probe for flight control and only one seat, you'll have to choose whether you want to send a scientist (cleans experiments for more than one result), or an engineer (repacks chutes for multiple landings). Below are the coordinates for each biome's splash down location, thanks to the chaps in this thread for helping me find them. Note that you can customize MechJeb's surface info window to add the surface biome your craft is in or over. If you have the ScanSat mod and want to try and find some locations yourself, look for locations with the target biome that have an altitude of less than 0m. Shores: You really should be able to work this out for yourself... Grasslands: 3°56'45" S 83°40'53" W Easily reached by going S/SE along the coast from KSC. Deserts: 2°25'7" S 87°34'5" W Near the west coast of the KSC continent opposite KSC, over the southern edge of the mountain range. Highlands: 47°21'13" N 140°3'52" W This and the nearby mountains are probably the only splash down locations for their respective biomes. This is in the river system on the large area of grasslands and highlands north of Baikanur and the great desert. Splash down in the river near the target coordinates and cozy up to the cliffside on the western edge. Mountains: 47°28'17" N 140°4'24" W Just north of the above highlands splash down point in the same river. Cozy up the west edge of the cliff again. Badlands: 17°50'27" S 30°19'23" E This is probably the nearest Badlands lake to KSC, but it's a bit of a pain to taxi back out of owing to the steep banks, if that's what you want to do. Tundra: 70°39'59" N 100°56'43" W Mostly a straight flight north from KSC, this is a very big lake that's easily visible from orbit. Ice Caps: 70°59'32" N 99°5'21" W In the exact same lake as the Tundra biome above, easily reached by splashed down taxiing. Northern Ice Shelf: 70°59'33" N 99°2'14" W As you get close enough to the near vertical ice cap wall on the eastern edge of the lake, you transition from splashed down in the ice caps to splashed down in the northern ice shelf. This is arguably buggy, and you can get this splashed down biome "fairly" by splashing down in the ocean just south of the edge of the ice shelf and then taxiing up to the vertical shelf. Southern Ice Shelf: 74°39'43" S 57°31'9" W Pretty much head south from KSC over the sea, and splash down near this point in front of the southern ice shelf. There are other places in a more direct line from KSC where the ice shelf biome juts out into the sea, but this one is conveniently located near a beach if you want to get your craft back up onto land. Have fun exploring, FOR SCIENCE!

FYI, the Online Manual button in the MechJeb interface now leads not to an online manual but to something called "SecuryBrowse", which wants you to install its extension to Chrome and let it turn into your default browser, which then gives garbage results. I suspect that the domain registration has lapsed and been scooped up by some shady company.

Heh, you're correct, of course. And the save itself isn't broken, per se. Hard to say what might be causing the experienced behavior, and it isn't affecting my current game any more, so perhaps the log and save data will enable someone to determine if there's a mod conflict that's generating the strange behavior, and fix the mod. Otherwise, best just to move on from my tantrum.

So, Squad also has absolutely no knowledge of how their primary vendor does business and what effect Squad's issuance of updates is liable to have on people who have purchased their game through Steam? That's an interesting perspective. I'd derive amusement from seeing a web development company whose page doesn't render in Firefox because they only tested it in Chrome trying to flog that line of argumentation to their end users. Does this sidebar discussion help either of us? If not, why don't you find amusement elsewhere.

Have I mentioned that the behavior you're describing on biome determination is not what is happening in my game? It isn't. That describes what my experience used to be. Not any more. Touching a building sometimes places you in a building specific biome, sometimes it places you in a general biome for the area, which is NOT the same biome as the one you get for simply parking on the area around the buildings in each KSC section. If there's a pattern to how it decides which, I can't discern it. I was implicitly volunteering to edit the wiki, FYI. (Deep breath... there's no reason to be angry at this poster's bemusement...) Yes. Yes, I am. You're seriously laying the blame on Steam for a policy that is wholly beneficial for 99.9% of its titles and me for not knowing that treating KSP as a normal Steam game was wantonly courting disaster? I am blaming Squad because they have made a game with the following features: An enormous game world with a huge amount to see and do. An ongoing development cycle with updates that break pre-existing saves. Insufficient time between these updates to make a meaningful dent in exploring that game world within the constraints of Career mode. (At least in the past year.) Why should a player have to choose between a space program robust enough to send dozens of tourists to Duna and Jool and using the "Making History" features? Why should a player need to worry about the default features of an installation periodically breaking their saves? Why should a player have known in advance not to start an ambitious career campaign without re-configuring Steam to disable automatic updates? None of these things are normal industry practices. Granted, the very things that make KSP special are causing the problems I'm having. At least I can't complain about the value for money that I paid for the game relative to the content, since Paradox would have charged 10-20 times for the same set of feature upgrades over time.