Reiver

Ooh - thanks! I'll give it a go.

I've been recently toying with the idea of making a 'Colonist' class of Kerbal, which has an experience progression along the lines of: 0-star: Tourist 1-star: Not Tourist (For purposes of being able to crew greenhouses, etc) 2-star: EVA 3-star: Drive vehicles 4-star: Fix wheels (While they'll never be an engineer, fixing a wheel seems useful for frontiersmen ) You'd get more Kerbal Colonists by accepting contracts; they'd be their own mission reward much like a 'rescued' kerbal is. (They do still join you once rescued, right? It's been a while since I've played career.) Preferably with efficiency bonuses for working in greenhouses much as Engineers grant mining rigs. This would be a seperate mod from this one, but I've no idea if you actually can design individual classes. If anyone is keen to help out, I'll start a new thread so we don't distract from this one...

I only just tried this mod yesterday, and I love it! That said, what I was looking for was propellers. While I have full kudos to the wide range of nifty toys on hand, I'm finding the plethora of vintage aeroplane parts is clogging up my inventories a little. Is there a 'lightweight' version of this mod (or perhaps related mods entirely) that just comes with the propellers? My current goal is Eve-based aircraft to support a colony base, so the extras are a little superfluous (Though I suspect I'll be putting the thing wholesale into my separate spaceplane install, for when I'm flying with my joystick )

Hm, I will have to investigate whether I can rebuild my Dropship with the new VTOL engines. (I guess I should set up an imgur account so I can share screenshots of the poor thing... sigh. Wish my Steam copy of KSP would still let me do screenshots, that tool was so handy. ) Edit: That fighter cockpit made me realise what I'd been looking for for a while: a 1.25m to Mk2 inline air intake without the central 1.25 bit, which you could then insert your own parts into - be it more fuel, a Mk1 cockpit, or whatever else. The intakes would jut along the 'sides' of the central part, but allow for very short (Like, decoupler short!) transitions without ruining aerodynamics or the opportunity for air intakes. Is this madness? I can't tell.

What's this for? There's already a two-base-to-2.5m adapter; you can chain adapters from that to the 3.75 pretty easily. Though it does briefly make me wonder whether a triple adapter is possible... hm. Sides of a triangle inside a circle of diameter 3.75m = 3.247m Unless I got my math wrong (And I might've, let's be clear), that means a triple adapter could actually work Nice spacious room in the middle of the thing, too. If my math is correct, it'd fit a 1.25m sized stack there too! That would make for one heck of a colonisation payload.

Interesting. I suppose that's fair enough - thanks for the warning on that. I've never been able to make IR function right, so I'm not much of an expert in how that all works out. Disregard my suggestion!

Ahh, such genius If you throw this on KerbalStuff, it'll end up on CKAN for the lazy...

Instead of a built-in drill, how hard would it be to have a part that simply rotates up to vertical from the horizontal? You could mount a drill to it, sure... or a rocket or antenna or something. Come to think of it, is that actually possible? I know landing gear twirls around, but I don't know whether there's any stock stuff that moves and can be mounted on. Hm. Now I'm outright curious.

Then I'm glad! I'm OK with that, though I question why you'd want an intermediate resource that doesn't do much (Unless 'Organics' can also be turned into fuel or something). And I reiterate that the 'ore' you're harvesting is presumably oxygen and carbon-bearing substrates, rather than metals - if you can turn it to fuel, you can turn it to organics, aka mulch That said, I'd be OK with it turning to fertilizer too. This would increase the number of Kerbals a greenhouse could maintain, correct? But then, I'd also be happy with the exact opposite - fertilizer would be containing the essential extras and minerals that aren't in the local ore, thus supercharging your supplies. I guess the biggest advantage of mulch+ore -> Fertilizer is that it does mean there's a third step in the loop before the rocks become food, and that particular resource is already present in the system... so which way you go on that part is up to you, really.

This, pretty much. We're not talking iron ores here (Which admittedly, is the more common type we think of on our blue and green rock), but minerals that can be mined and processed into fuel. I don't see it as much of a stretch that one could turn it into something you could feed a greenhouse with. (Technically, we can already turn oil into organics right now; it's just a terribly inefficient process when the oil is more valuable than the food even before you broke out chemistry sets, see? )

I don't run UKS, and there are, as noted, multiple other mods that 'close the loop'. I note that if you can turn Ore to Mulch to help top off the mulch->noms->mulch wastage, you've still only closed the loop as long as you have ore handy - this means your space stations are either harvesting rocks, or sitting somewhere that isn't in space. Given how heavy Ore is, and it'd be 'topping off' your Mulch rather than supercharging your supplies production like Fertiliser does (at a fraction of the weight, aka much more efficiently), I don't see an issue with this. Eating rocks to power your life support sounds glorious anyway... I worry a little how much work you're piling on yourself, much as I admire the dedication, though. Have you considered simply making adapter parts so you can shoehorn other mods in? Not that I mind, really, the quarter-tanks are cute.

Perhaps the happy medium is to have the algae tanks turn Ore to Mulch? This way Fertiliser remains the valuable 'supercharger' resource, but you can render greenhouse-powered colonies self-sufficient if you're willing to use Ore to do it. As a bonus, Ore is heavy, so you don't just haul it round to supply your space stations - those want to run on Fertilizer instead. - - - Updated - - - No, no, your power consumption is entirely reasonable! It's just a headscratcher on how to power the thing overnight on batteries. Perhaps the secret is 'use Fertiliser to boost the output during the day to compensate for the night time production loss, and hurry up with those fuel cells if you want total self-sufficiency'... And your plans with the .zips is pretty solid. You could, I suppose, go so far as to release mini-mods on CKAN or something to split 'em out if you wish, but I wouldn't panic too much on that. I'm loving this stuff, dude! Do you plan to make a utility bay end-cap? So you can have pretty curved base ends.

I appreciate the texture re-use on those parts. A small question - if you're trying to do all the parts for all the life support mods, will these be in seperate sub-releases? Or do the TAC guys get LSI bits lying around and vice versa? A more general ponderance I'm trying to solve: Those massive battery banks store a whopping 3600 energy. This is fantastic until you realise it's enough to run a greenhouse asking for 1 energy per second for one hour. Are my bases meant to have huge long strings of battery banks lined up, or is life support not meant to be viable until you've got mining rig-supplied fuel cells and/or RTGs running? This is an honest question; it's just been a headscratcher.

There's already one in the Advanced menu options. It's pretty good. Re the radial pack: Ha! It hadn't loaded properly when I was fooling around with USI, but there it is. Excellent, all is well. I mean, a small massless lunchbox with 10 Noms in it or something wouldn't go amiss, but I'm happy otherwise.

... You know, I was going to scoff at that, but I've actually gone and tried it. It's not bad, but probably the biggest sin is that the cargo tail curves down - I much prefer the more stock Mk3 to Mk2 adapter, that lifts the tail up neatly and keeps the top roofline straight. So yeah, actually, a cargo door to go with that pretty nose actually would be pretty cool. If, y'know, you ever felt like it.

Which parts? They're pretty good about having mount points in the sensible places. I mean, I can't get the landing gear ones to work in Linux (The ALT button doesn't seem to be doing it, dunno why), but beyond that...

I dunno, I'm starting to really appreciate USI's very 'Kerbal' approach. I do wish there were a couple mid-tech 'supplies extenders' in there, so you could have a ship, a ship with supplies, a ship with supplies and Stuff (Presumably churning through extra electric power to do it), and /then/ the fullblown greenhouses-with-ore Ulitimate Solution, in which ore extractors end up giving you permanence and the ability to actively resupply everything else again. Well, that and a lunchbox to store supplies in quantities less than '1m roundel'. That'd be nice too. As it is, there's a bit of a tendency towards running on the two-week grace simply out of a shortage of there being much else... but these thoughts should probably be headed in the actual USI thread, eh?

Oh man I just saw that - I love it! Thank you! Any chance on the 'end cap' one? I'm mostly thinking of the habitats with a nice dome at one end, where it'd help the silhouette. And possibly save on an extra leg mount. - - - Updated - - - They're more spacious and comfy for your little green men on extended trips, of course! That said, a weight reduction to be only marginally heavier than the Mk1 wouldn't be entirely unjustified - one holds 3 kerbals always, the other holds 4 kerbals when extended. A nice pair of tradeoffs in itself, perhaps. Were there ever a mod that resulted in Kerbal Downtime, I'd suspect the Mk2 would be much better at 'resting' a Kerbal, but I'll probably have to design that one myself.

That's what Fuel Cells are for, surely?

This. This makes me happy. Itshouldbestock.jpg

This stuff is fun. A similar but related concept is the turborocket, for a lower-tech solution: It performs like a jet engine, but provides its own oxygen The way it works is by using a small rocket motor to drive the turbine and heat the air that gets sucked in the front; it still needs air for thrust, but you could easily enough design one that can skip the oxygen-in-the-atmosphere bit. Would such a device be a reasonable addition to a project like this? It's not nuclear, but it fills a similar niche.

Mk1: An airlock might be cute, sure. But I've no objection to leaving them hotbunking on the spare bed. If you want the luxury of staterooms, give 'em a MkII Speaking of the MkII: Could we get a picture or mirror or something on the bedroom wall? When you IVA to that Kerbal it's really confusing to stare at a blank wall in front of your nose until you turn his head... he must be so bored!

Okay, I've decided that the Edgar J Hoover VTOL engines are awesome, and so is the Multi-purpose cockpit. They make the coolest dropships.

Aw, you're moving the hatches? I was fond of their being on the roof - I figured that entrance and exit were what command cupolas and airlocks were for, right? The roof ones were emergency exits and roof access; not unreasonable on a mobile structure. It also made it easier to move dudes around inside the bases, because you didn't have to swing round to find the doors so often. I guess this is mostly to note that all those not complaining were... probably not complaining. A small aside: I love your new quarter-round cargo shape, but it'd be awesome if there were a few more adapters for it - perhaps another that's 2 modules wide, which sits perpendicular against the end of a base? I've been just connecting 2-wide ore or fuel containers onto the ends of my bases, and it works OK, but using the offset tool to center them means mirror symmetry works oddly Pretty sure it should be able to fit the landing pad connector plate thingies on the sides of it too... Are we ever likely to see an X-shaped base part? That'd be fun for big sprawling buildings... assembly optional. Gangways are cool too, of course, but I find they imply different design 'feels'. Other than that, loving this, dude! Oh, and that bicoupler is awesome. I'm going to be launching a Duna Stack very shortly with it

How much does it weigh? Because you can fit two of them in the same diameter as a normal ISRU, so that could be hilarious. edy3145: I've been clipping ISRUs through the utility bays to make them a flatter platform, and making glorious processing towers. (It'd be less risky if it didn't have that central beam, of course, but we do what we can. )