rmaine

Also, I note you say that you *HAVE* to plant a flag. If you are talking about a mission requirement, those are satisfied in spite of the flag falling over. So you don't necessarily have to upgrade to 1.11.1 for that. If you mean that you "have" to plant one for aesthetic reasons, that's a different matter.

Um. Yes it does. From the bug fixes section of the announcement posted as the OP of this thread. Fix placed flags falling down. Also, I started a new 1.11.1 career and can verify that does indeed appear to be fixed.

If you happen to be looking at things like that, a similar issue is the mod suggesting crew reports when there is no crew aboard. This is pretty much zero priority as far as I'm concerned; it's easy enough for me to ignore. Just FYI. I was going to mention another low-priority feature that I'd be more interested in would be the ability to pretty much shut up the mod completely for after I've maxed out science and am not really interested in adding more... but then I noticed it already seems to happen to have that option. I'll have to check that out. :-)

Started a new 1.11.1 career a few days ago and I can verify that base contracts *CAN* still be completed by launching a small hub and expanding it using Extraplanetary Launchpads. Thankfully. :-) I just completed a mun base contract that required a cupola and the ability to support 6 kerbals, neither of which were met by my initial hub. So I'd say the new description is just plain wrong; no the base does not have to be launched complete. I can't testify as to exactly what the actual requirement might be, but it clearly is not "launched complete." To be at least a little fair, I admit that Extraplanetary Launchpads is a mod. It might be that the description is accurate for the unmodded game. I still think that the new description is more confusing than the original.

My interpretation (which I grant could be wrong) of intercept only is that it optimizes to intercept the target without taking into account the delta-v that would be needed to rendezvous. So you might get a smaller delta-v for the first burn at the cost of larger delta-v at the end. If you aren't going to do that end burn, then it saves a little. Probably not a lot of difference in most cases.

Maybe so, but that's not at all what the description says. The description specifically says it cannot be built in parts using EVA construction - nothing about the timing of assembled parts. If that is indeed what it meant, then I'd say the new string makes it more confusing rather than less so. Granted I haven't yet seen the actual string - just the above description of it. Granted further it does say that the change is just in the contract description, which implies that the actual contract working is unchanged. I sort of hope so because I pretty much always construct large bases by launching a small hub and expanding it using ExtraPlanetary LaunchPads (or something comparable like SimpleConstruction). That definitely works for those sorts of contracts now. I have to launch the hub after the contract is accepted, but then I can expand it later to meet all the other conditions.

Mostly just a matter of curiosity. Wondering about the rather drastic improvement in fuel cell productivity compared to stock. Searching for "fuel cell" in the manual got no hits. Searching for it in the forums gets impractically many. I didn't notice a way to restrict a forum search to this particular 240-page thread :-(. I recently started a new career - my first using EL. I had formerly used SimpleConstruction instead, but decided to try EL this time. Got to where I was ready to add some fuel cell power to one of my bases. Glanced at my old notes on what I had needed, but then when I started to build it... wow, that's a big change! A fuel cell array puts out 108 EC/sec from LF+LOX input of 15+18/hr. Compared to stock 18 EC/sec from .02/sec (=72/hr) of LF+LOX. That's somewhere around a factor of 25 or 30 better productivity. Fiddled around quite a bit before discovering it was from EL. Sure makes it a lot simpler to set up a self-sufficient base when farther out than Duna/Ike. And "recommends" is indeed exactly how CKAN shows it. I suppose that might have changed in the 2 weeks between when the above was posted and when I'm looking right now. I installed EL using CKAN and without KIS. Working fine for me (and I find launchpad 2 more convenient than survey stakes anyway... after using the disposable micropad to attach a launchpad 2 to my base).

Back from dinner. On the round trip thing. Yes, it works easily enough for Gilly, Ike and Dres. I've done all those in past careers. As you say, mostly just a matter of time. Duna was a bit harder, but still doable. Eve, however... taking off from Eve is hugely harder than landing there; I've never managed that round trip. I also haven't been farther out that Dres, but that's mostly because the self-destroying bases hit my tolerance limit before I got that far on my prior careers. I'm using EL instead of SimpleConstruction this career, partly because it seems more actively maintained. Discovered that in some ways EL with your tweaks is simpler than SimpleConstruction anyway. You simplify the resource chain so that it doesn't need a bazillion different sorts of resources; I hadn't really picked up on that before. I found I can use EL's launchpad 2 to avoid the hassle of dealing with survey stakes (and I haven't had problems with rovers bouncing into the air as soon as I build them).

I missed your reply til just now. Glad to see you are still around. I got a little farther in me recent playthrough in the last few days. Not far enough to be 100% sure yet, but it looks offhand like ksp 1.11 plus the USI ground tether hack is indeed helping a lot with things self-destructing on scene load. ANyway, none of my bases on mun, minmus, or gilly (that's as far as I have gotten) have done anything nasty yet. The tutorial bit I was talking about was the walkthrough on the wiki, which shows designing a base in the VAB and then says "So yeah, there are a lot of means of getting stuff like this to orbit - you can build it in orbit with Konstruction or Extraplanetary Launchpads. But when you're talking this kind of scale, you can do it the Kerbal way by offsetting a lack of aerodynamic efficiency with more boosters.". That seems to downplay the EL option. Heck, you never actually build the base as shown anywhere if you are using EL. You build a hub and then expand it. Yes, I tried your new transfer stuff and I'm reasonably happy with it. Enough so that I deleted SimpleLogistics (particularly since it looks like SImpleLogistics no longer has an active maintainer). Did notice one glitch where I didn't seem to be able to transfer fuel+lox in one case, but I didn't track that down as it wasn't a big deal. Minorly awkward that I can't do a partial transfer (wanted to transfer some but not all of my snacks from my tier 0/1 base to my tier 2 one). But I worked around that. Still learning Bon Voyage. My first few attempts were, um, spectacular failures, but I think I got it a little better figured out. Oh, and I discovered another thing that probably doesn't work quite like you intended in regards to the rover missions. I really only need to do one of them (thankfully). Transfer the stuff from my rover to the base. Then immediately transfer it back and do a second transfer from the rover. Works. Gotta run. Wife just called me for dinner. PS. Thanks again for the mod.

@NermNermNerm Not sure whether you are still fiddling with this mod or not, but I just started a new career in KSP 1.11 and PKS (the mod seems to work ok, btw). Thought it time for me to give a little feedback on various things I've noticed mostly from prior careers. I really haven't found any other mods that I feel I can reasonably make self-sufficient bases with; that's the biggest attraction of PKS to me. I've fiddled with a few others, most recently MKS, but I wasn't finding it very engaging to me (plus it's clearly in the middle of major changes). 1. The one thing that drove me to give up on my prior career with PKS wasn't directly the fault of PKS, but regardless of fault, it ruined the game for me. That was the problem of bases not staying stable on scene load. Sometimes they would slide around and bump into nearby things (even on perfectly flat lakebeds on Minmus). Worse, they would sometimes fly up into the air and then crash down; Gilly was particularly bad about that. I'd have a self-sufficient base set up, but come back in a few years just to check on it and see it annoyingly self-destruct (or if not the whole base, the automated stuff rover would go). I *THINK* the ground tether of USI tools (plus a tweak I read about elsewhere to apply that tether to all command modules) might have fixed that for me. The ground "stiction" of KSP 1.11 might also be helping, though it clearly was not enough by itself. Haven't yet gotten to Gilly on this career to test it there. 2. It's discussed in other posts above, but I think the tutorial walkthrough leads people down a miserable path in suggesting launching a fully-built base from Kerbin instead of pointing people to EL (or Simple Construction, which I use) to expand from a minimal starting hub. 3. I long ago gave up on the transfer stuff in PKS. Simple Logistics substitutes fine. I admit I haven't tried the transfer since your latest tweak to it, as I was already used to Simple Logistics. 4. Probably just a personal preference of mine, but I find driving rovers around incredibly painful and most definitely not fun. As rovers are all but mandatory for PKS, that pretty much killed it for me until I tried the rover autopilot of McJeb. That's still a pain, but the pain level is at least low enough for me to tolerate. I recently discovered the Bon Voyage mod; haven't actually tried it yet, but I intend to do so with this career. Relating to rover pain, I'd sure like to have a way to search for another source of stuff if the first one found is in a bad enough location. As is, you can search for another source, but only after depleting the first one, which doesn't address the problem of the first one being too difficult to access. I've taken to save scumming to avoid horrible stuff locations. 5. The requirement to do a round trip to a body before I can even start a base is awfully stringent. I could see requiring a one-way trip first, but to return? Considering that I'm mostly not planning on having the Kerbals that "man" (um Kerbal) the base ever return, that requirement doesn't seem to match. In my past careers, I never managed to get a base on Eve because of that requirement. Hmm. Maybe I could swing that with sufficient support craft rendezvousing in low Eve orbit. Might try that this career. 6. Oh. One thing that turns out to be a lot simpler than you probably intended. I happened onto it pretty much by accident. Since starving Kerbals has no long-term consequences, it is trivial to send them on long interplanetary journeys with even minimal snacks. Just turn off the usage of the snacks from every component where you have them stored on the vehicle. Ignore the resulting whining until you get to the destination. Then turn snack availability back on and everyone is soon happy, perhaps after a brief time or scene switch. Don't know whether you want to go so far as to kill Kerbals off when they starve, but reviving them probably ought to be harder than just giving them a snack.

Ah. I'd wondered about that. In my early missions to gather science from Mun and Minmus, I often bring along extra Kerbals just to get them XP (when I'm not carting paying tourists instead). I was wondering whether there was any reason to do this with MKS specialists as it wasn't immediately obvious to me that it made any difference. Thanks for the clarification.

Aha. That's what's going on! You just explained an annoyance I run into a lot when using McJeb's landing guidance. Common for me to select a target (such as the craft of a Kerbal I have a rescue contract for) and then try to offset a bit (because actually landing right on the other craft isn't good) by clicking several times on one of the buttons to move the aim point by 10m. Hadn't occurred to me that my multiple clicks were being interpreted as a double-click (which then takes me completely out of the targetting UI).

Ok. I can buy the "multitude of technical reasons"; don't even need more details to understand that there might be such. How about keeping the confirmation button, but removing the "=>" bit so that it just confirms the selection without trying to tell me about what the next recipe might be. After all, it doesn't tell me what the previous one was (which wouldn't be obvious when its the first recipe I'm looking at.)

Ok. I never would have guessed that. To me it would be a lot clearer without the confirmation step. The next and previous recipe buttons would just change the config without needing an extra button. The extra button and its => notation is what confused it for me. Just showing the current recipe and having buttons for next and previous would then have been obvious. Oh well. Now I understand how to do it anyway, even if I wonder why it's that way.

The interface for configuring WOLF modules in the VAB was confusing me so much that I gave up several times. Using the fabricator module as an example, I was working on configuring things to produce material kits as suggested by the WOLF intro I was reading. Looked to me like "machinery => material kits" was talking about converting machinery to material kits, so then I went looking for where to get machinery. I spent a long time fruitlessly trying to get a chain of conversions that was going to work. Gave up and played something else (CIV V) for a while. When I came back I eventually got closer by guessing that my interpretation of the => was backwards and that instead I should start with "material kits => specialized parts" and interpret that as converting specialized parts to material kits. I still couldn't put together anything workable from that interpretation of the =>. Gave up again. When I finally came back I ended up just ignoring the "=> specialized parts" part. Indeed cycling through the various recipes for material kits didn't actually seem to make any difference to what showed up in the WOLF planner. Relying only on the planner and ignoring the various recipes seemed to be the trick. Though that worked, it left me puzzled as to what the various recipes had to do with anything and what the => was supposed to mean.

I'm getting exactly nowhere in trying to experiment with WOLF. I have USI MKS 1.4.1 installed in a newish KSP 1.11 game. Used CKAN, so it ought to have all the dependencies. The intro tutorial linked above says you start by "rolling out" a "WOLF depot". I'm stuck already because I can't find this depot anywhere. This is a career game, so perhaps it requires some tech I haven't yet done, but I looked through all the parts and didn't see anything obvious. The tutorial mentioned starting with a probe core, so I tried starting to build a craft with a HECS core. Right-clicking on that showed nothing interesting. I have a feeling I'm missing something pretty basic. [edited] Ah. Eventually answered my own question. Pawing around, I found some mention of not supporting CKAN Installs. Well, ok. Went and grabbed the manual install files and used them instead, Aha. They have a whole WOLF directory that wasn't in my CKAN install. That makes me wonder why that wasn't there, but I accept that if you say you don't support CKAN installs, then you don't support CKAN installs. Oh, well.

A possibility occurs to me. If I read the dependency data correctly, it conflicts with the original gravity turn [edited - um, I meant the not continued version]. THat would make sense that you can't have both. SO if you have the original, it will probably show as incompatible until you delete that.

Already is. I just now checked. I suppose it is vaguely possible that it was added in the 2 hours between when you asked and when I checked, but I'd guess not. CKAN shows the release date as a month ago. Without more data, it's hard for me to say why you aren't seeing it.

Ah. Thanks for the suggestion about transferring crew when connected. For some reason that hadn't occurred to me. Just now tried it out. Works fine. Makes reentry and landing a lot easier than dragging the whole disabled pod back in.

Somewhat of a side comment. I've been cutting back on the number of mods I use in the hope that I might minimize random KSP crashes to desktop. This is one I've cut out (not implying that this one is necessarily relating to any crashes - just giving background). I've taken to an alternative approach to the problem of rescuing kerbals in pods without hatches. I just use a grabber to grab the whole pod. Combine with enough retrorocket power to avoid burning up on entry, and then a surplus of parachutes. Probably wouldn't work with the inflatables mentioned in the thread title, but it works for the cases I've run into.

Yes. The parts still exist, but that's just so that old craft that used the parts don't get invalidated. No need to put them on a new craft.

Well, I never use rendezvous autopilot myself (seems sort of redundant in that it just does a raise orbit, followed by a bi-impulsive transfer and a match velocities, all of which one can easily tell McJeb to do already). But I have recently noticed that autoland often fails to actually execute its burns. Quicksave and reload consistently fixes it. I haven't bothered to collect the data for a proper bug report (so, no I'm not asking for support). Just observing a probably related symptom.

@Tonka Crash Wow. Never occurred to me that the weird position of some of the arrows had anything to do with KAC. I've just been ignoring it for ages, as it's not a big deal to me - just a distraction. I use KAC a *LOT*, as I tend to have a dozen or two active missions going on simultaneously. Heck, I even use it for some things that aren't even really alarms. I find it handy as a menu of craft that I might want to do something with, even if they don't have a particular alarm time. I'll just set a manual "alarm" for 5 years or so in the future just so that a link to the craft is in the KAC window. That's handier than pawing through the much larger list of craft in the tracking station. So yes, I pretty much always have the KAC window up.

Orbital hydroponics are not per body; heck the same orbital farm might possibly be at multiple bodies at different times. Yes, shinies are mostly just to sell for funds, though I usually don't find it much worth the bother, at least for interplanetary stuff. Perhaps early on from Mun and MInmus. Elsewhere, the main use I find for shinies is just to contribute to the work needed to level up the production tier. I tend to throw away the shinies to make room for more. (There's not an explicit throw away that I know of, but temporarily changing the cargo type of the storage unit does the trick). And yes, using EL (I'm informed that the author prefers it to be referred to as EL instead of EPL)... or actually in my case SImple Construction as a simpler substitute for EL. Yes, there are other ways. Choose your poison.

@Deathninja I agree that the "orbital greenhouses" (hydroponic labs) are pretty useless; see my post a bit above on that. I do them, but just for completeness instead of necessity. The planetary ones, on the other hand, are crucial; once you get them to tier 4, your base can become self sufficient. For storing shinies and snacks (and other stuff), use the storage modules from the station parts expansion redux mod, which CKAN lists as a dependency, so you ought to have it. stuff and crush-in rates are constant, as far as I can tell. I don't worry about drilling ore until I want to feed some fuel cells for reliable power that doesn't run out at night time of when too far from Kerbol. (The fuel cells need fuel, which comes from processing ore in an ISRU). I pick sites with ore so that I can do that, but its not the first thing you need in a base. What you need first is stuff (for darn near everything). Next priority is fertilizer for the greenhouses to feed people... I mean Kerbals. P.S. And I find it hugely easier to land a minimal base as a hub and then build on expansions in place. Took me a while to get the hang of building the expansions. Mostly, you need docking ports to build from... and you need to orient the docking ports with the proper side out or the expansion builds in the middle of your base hub instead of outside of it, which results in... fireworks. I did initially just fly a prebuilt base up from Kerbin. That's tricky, but doable for bases on airless moons. For Duna, it is *REALLY* tricky to reenter with those greenhouses jutting out.