OmniscientQ

How is the player supposed to know that the Agriculture Support Module uses Crusher efficiency parts without looking it up on the Github wiki? That's exactly my point. I'm reasonably sure it used to be displayed on the part in the VAB. In other news, I tested a fresh download of MKS with a fresh install of KSP and no other mods. The various parts still do not display a module that declares which type of efficiency they "consume" nor how much. They do still work, though. An inflatable hab part successfully enhanced the output of an agroponics module on the launchpad.

This used to be a much longer post, but most of it was irrelevant. Here's the important bit: I think I remember, once upon a time, that for MKS parts that could be enhanced by productivity boosters, their specific type and weighted booster consumption were listed as a module on the part in-game. Today, however, I find that while the inflatable habitation parts and the Ranger agriculture part all say they boost "Greenhouse" converters, none of the Tundra modules explicitly state that they are boosted by greenhouses. The same goes for Crushers, Smelters, and Workshops. Am I simply misremembering the way such data used to be displayed, or do I perhaps need to re-download MKS, or is it because some part of MKS was broken by KSP going up a version?

I tried building an all-inclusive monolith that I called the "Omnifactorium". The idea was to have one of everything on it that I could then expand by dropping a standardized colony pod nearby. Each colony pod had a Colonization module, and enough MPU, Agriculture, and Workshop space to boost the output of the Omnifactorium by enough to accomodate another six Kerbals. It... didn't go so well. Honestly, I should learn to use the konstruction ports more.

Hm. I guess I haven't honestly paid much attention to the trigger conditions for planetary and local logistics. For example, I usually have one vessel as a dedicated supply depot, with a Pioneer/Logistics module and enough storage units for at least every raw resource, then use local logistics to transfer to other factory vessels. (No need to put a logistics module on every single vessel in a colony.) Is the 10% capacity transferred per LL cycle determined by the source, the target, the larger vessel, or the smaller vessel?

How feasible would it be to add governor sliders for each bay in a MKS converter? I can add a github issue, but I'd feel embarrassed to ask for it if there were some technical limitation in the way. EDIT: I just remembered that I had another MKS-related question. Are catch-up conversions still done in 6-hour chunks, meaning any facility should have at least 6 hours of input/output storage in order to maintain full efficiency? I saw a page or so back that someone was recommending 60 hours of storage to allow for local logistics. And do those guidelines apply for electrical storage and distribution? Six hours of battery storage to run a workshop that's sucking down 100 EC/s is not trivial.

I agree with most of the rest here. I hate it, but it can be disabled, so I don't care. And it's obvious enough that it CAN be disabled. It's not like the games primary options menu is hidden or anything. It's not a console command.

I actually enjoy reinventing the wheel every time I start a new game. Most of my early vessels wind up being identical to the ones I used last game, but sometimes the mission parameters change. Contracts are different, and I'll decide it's worth the 20,000 fund bonus to include a part or use a different engine than I had planned. I tend not to build standardized, reusable vessels until I've finished up the tech tree. Once I start building those, however, I'll always forget some little detail, or wonder how I managed to cram all the science parts into my tiny little spaceplane last time, and I wind up doing things differently anyway. I learn new techniques that way, and it keeps the game from getting old.

[quote name='dziki0022']Another anoyng thing is share of crew specially at start where you just got 2 pilots so max 2 person can fly at once. I hope devs will give us nice multi with separate launchpads and ability to coop[/QUOTE] Unless they changed something in the "silent" patch the other day, you don't need a pilot-class Kerbal to launch anything. I'd be okay with them adding a second or third launchpad to the KSC, but there's absolutely no reason for a second space center. I'm not sure how anyone could have played this game and imagined a competitive Player-vs-Player mode of any kind, whether it's a race to the stars or shooting rockets at each others space center. Kerbal Space Program has always been about the Player vs Gravity. If and when multiplayer is added to the game, it'll wind up being purely cooperative (outside of mods, of course). I welcome the idea. For one thing, there's all kinds of missions I've dreamed up but been unable to carry out due to engine limitations (mostly regarding atmospheric flight and the on-rails destruction radius). Having a second player to run the other craft would be perfect. And when the mission inevitably goes wrong, then my buddy and I get to watch Jebediah die in a huge fireball together. I'm on the fence about how much interaction needs to be programmed into the game for the planning stages. The VAB, SPH, and administrative buildings can all be operated independently be each player. I imagine that for most people, the details of a mission will be planned out via Skype or IRC or whatever before KSP is even launched. The only thing that is needed is to transmit the .craft files to each player, and a means of deciding who controls what if you're launching a single vessel together. As an added bonus, multiplayer would necessarily bring with it a server/client model that would let me put more than one computer to use, even if I'm playing alone. I'd love to be able to hand off to a dedicated server some of the extreme amounts of math that currently make my computer cry if I try to launch a vessel with more than 100 parts in it.

I'd be happy with a maneuver node that doesn't change its orientation as you plan maneuvers. I wouldn't be at all happy with one that changed the orientation of the node handles, and changed their behaviors as you go. The maneuver nodes as they function now gave me a much better understanding of the orbital mechanics involved precisely because I could watch as the new orbit failed to change in the way I expected it to. Orbital mechanics are (to most people) completely non-intuitive, and the current nodes allowed me to understand WHY I was wrong. And understanding why I was wrong made it trivial to use the nodes as-is.

People who run life support mods certainly are. I can see a kind of sticking point, in which you establish your "routine" resupply mission when Kerbin and Duna are at a minimum-delta-v position, and then somehow continue that supply run without modification when they're on opposite sides of Kerbol. I would definitely be willing to concede that "routine" missions can only occur in Kerbin's SOI. But since all missions originate from Kerbin (barring even more mods that let you build and launch from other bodies), it'd still be a useful feature. If you have a non-self-sustaining base on Duna, then you should build it to go a year without resupply, regardless of convenient automation features.

That is possibly the most hilarious sentence I've read on these forums.

I agree with both camps here, somehow. I acknowledge that having a Revert button and self-imposed challenge of declaring a launch to be "simulated" or "real" before I press the button achieves one part of the goal... But I would really, REALLY like to be able to just warp my lander straight to a simulation of Duna so I can test its performance before I even start worrying about how I'll get the lander off of Kerbin. I could sit back and do all the math involved in calculating the drag myself to try and guess what the performance will be like, and I've done it before. I'll even admit that it's how NASA had to do things once. But honestly... Sometimes I just wanna watch the pretty colors as my lander explodes with Jeb inside it without having to go through twenty minutes of launch and rendezvous corrections first. Being able to pick a body and drop a craft in as a simulation shouldn't be something I have to hack in with third-party programs or a text editor.

You, sir, win all of the Kerbals.

Oh, yes, yes. A thousand times, yes. I frequently build rockets in which I need to swap control at launch from the rear-facing command module to a probe core buried underneath a fairing at the bottom of the stack... And trying to maneuver the camera is a huge pain.

My Top 5 wants for a future version? Hm... 1) Better automation of "routine" flights. Exactly how one would determine what is "routine" can be up for debate, but there are plenty of times I wish I could reduce the tedious parts of running a space agency. When I build an air-to-space launch vehicle (a rocket piggybacking on a conventional aircraft), I want the aircraft to return to KSC on its own while I fly the rocket. When I set up a mining and refueling depot on Minmus and prove to myself that the fuel hauler and orbital refinery and mining operation all work by doing a few fuel runs myself, I want to be able to turn that over to the crew. If I have a life support mod enabled (or if it gets added as a stock option later), I want to be able to automate the resupply missions, after I do it myself a few times. 2) Reworked science. Experiments, science labs, and all. I have a thread here about how I'd like to see the science system redone, but almost any change would be a welcome one. A science system that's friendlier to mods and more sciencey. The one we have was a nice, basic proof-of-concept for career mode, but it's time to put together the real deal. 3) Multiplayer. Yeah, I know. This is a seriously divisive issue. There's all kinds of arguments for and against, and competitive gameplay, and multiplayer balance, and all of that. I don't think KSP needs a competitive game mode in which players race each other to the Mun, or launch nuclear-tipped rockets at each others space centers. You don't need to worry about getting paired up with a troll by the match-making system. KSP has never been that kind of game. You can't just meet up with some random person from the internet and start playing in the VAB. If the person you play with tries to ruin your fun... why are you playing with them at all? In any kind of multiplayer experience, the mission specifics will probably have been hashed out in advance on IRC, parameters defined, and only after it's been decided does anyone actually launch KSP. Cooperative play. KSP has always been about the player vs the unforgiving laws of physics. I just want my buddy to come along for the ride. 4) Scale-able parts. I know it's been said before, but sometimes the girders are just a hair too big, or too small, or too round. Sometimes I want to cram a part inside of another part (The 2.5m utility bay is a godsend for me. I hated trying to fit the materials science bay into an otherwise large rocket because the damn thing can only be stack-mounted). Even better, it'd make it easier to balance the center of gravity on asymmetrical ship designs. I hate having exceedingly long rockets. I want big, fat ones. But since the science lab and ISRU and the Near-Future nuclear reactors aren't all the same weight, I can't radially mount one of each without throwing the CoG off-center. A scalable part would let me adjust the distance from center of each one based on its weight. 5) Kerbin monkeys. What kind of frikkin' space program doesn't shoot monkeys into outer-frikkin'-space? Don't give me any of that "Kerbals are kind of like monkeys" stuff. I want my space monkeys!

I really doubt it, but would it be possible to mod something like this with 1.0? Making a mod of it would mean it'd be yet another tech tree, and so it wouldn't resolve the incompatibility inherent with all the other mods out there. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks, and I'm getting more eager to try it. It wouldn't be pretty, though. The best model I can come up with to make this work in 1.0 would be to have empty science nodes in a line to represent progress within the disciplines, costing a few dozen science each, with "free" tech nodes branching off of them. Which just means more empty science nodes. And representing the tech nodes in 2D would get ugly fast. I've been trying to imagine what the science system would have to look like if this were implemented officially. It's easy to imagine the disciplines as color-coded progress bars, but you can't have the tech rewarded by each discipline laid out in a row for easy perusal the way the tech nodes are now, especially with ones that have multiple disciplines as requirements. A 3D science model with the disciplines arrayed in a circle, with the tech rewards hanging in the center from lines leading to each discipline at the height required could work, but... That could get confusing for a user to navigate and understand what they're seeing, especially as mods with hundreds of parts get added. With the new in-game encyclopedia, it'd be possible to just have a browsable wiki-style list of the tech parts that you can look up by discipline. It wouldn't be easy to come up with a user-friendly format, but I imagine that it would feel more... sciencey. The current tech nodes have mod difficulties as noted above, but they also feel like a business transaction in which I buy packages of parts, and not like discovery... Maybe that could be part of a difficulty slider: hiding the potential rewards of each discipline so you have to navigate them blind, or only showing the next potential reward. It wouldn't pose an actual problem with out-of-game wikis and personal experience to go on, but could be a form of self-imposed challenge.

There seems to be an assumption by everyone else that multiplayer in Kerbal Space Program would involve some form of competition, either racing the other players to the stars or trying to throw rockets at one anothers space centers. I'm honestly not sure how you can have played KSP and thought that would ever happen. I want multiplayer support because of the mission types that I can't carry out by myself. I want to launch a craft that splits in two and lands in two different areas simultaneously. I want to fly a spaceplane over the surface of Laythe, dropping a manned science capsule without slowing down. Even if the missions aren't actually efficient, I want the option to blow up with my buddy flying right alongside me. There's no need for you to worry about them ruining single-player KSP because they altered certain parts to make them "balanced" in multiplayer. This isn't that kind of game. You aren't going to be logging into some match-making service where you get paired up with some random troll from the ass-end of New Eden. The other players are not your competition. They're your wingmen. You probably won't be playing KSP multiplayer with anyone who you don't already consider a friend, having planned the mission well before you even fire up the VAB.

It hasn't been announced anywhere, so far as I know.

I know, I know. "Alternate Tech Tree Configurations" is listed as a thing-not-to-be-posted-here. And there's plenty of mods out there that alter the current tech tree configuration. I've given a few of them a try. There's the Community Tech Tree and Yonge Tech Tree Plugin. Both address what is a fairly important problem with modding new parts into KSPs career mode, which is how to fit the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of new parts into the basic tech tree. The Community Tech Tree adds enough new nodes all over the place that you can certainly find somewhere to put your new Space Widget at whatever science point cost you think is appropriate. The downside is that if you don't have enough mods, you wind up with some pretty sad and lonely tech nodes. When I tried it, I wound up buying those empty tech nodes because I honestly felt sorry for them. The Yonge "Great Big Sky" tree tries for a more granular approach, making dozens of new part nodes, and redistributing the stock parts among the new nodes in a way that almost lets you buy just the ones you want. Not a bad idea, but has some flavor problems of its own, especially when installing modded parts like Near Future. And here's where the problem really becomes apparent. The Near Future parts are distributed among the stock tech tree (sort of) and don't really fit in at all. You wind up with very part-heavy final nodes in each category. Near Future is also compatible with the Community Tech Tree, which gives a much more reasonable part distribution. No such compatibility exists with the Yonge tree, however, because the folks responsible for Near Future didn't explicitly create it, which leads to the Whirligig nuclear fuel reprocessor sitting in the Advanced Instrumentation node next to the... gravimax detector? Every pack of modded parts is like this. If you want to add a tech node of your own for your parts, it might overlap with someone elses tech node where, honestly, the two sets of parts should go together. Which is why I'd like to discuss (as in, please come argue the details and pros and cons) a whole new science system, and not just another tech tree mod. It'd solve quite a few problems if, instead of having a tree with various branches and nodes on it, we had science disciplines that we could devote our science points to. In fact, if you take a look at the stock tech tree or the Community Tech Tree, this is pretty much what we have now. There's a path for rocket science, a path for life science, a path for materials science and engineering, a path for aerodynamics... What if we simply formalized that system? Instead of belonging to the "Aviation" tech node, the tail fin and elevon parts simply required a science rating of 45 in the "Aerodynamics" field? The basic jet engine requires a 35 in aerodynamics, but also a 35 in Engineering. Advanced command capsules? High Engineering scores, with a moderate Biology score. Long term habitats? High life sciences and moderate engineering. Nuclear engines and nuclear power plants? You can start off with a basic RTG with a few points in Nuclear Physics but a high Engineering score. You have to have an already high score in other fields before Nuclear Physics starts to be useful. Or something like that. The requirements for each part are debatable. The most awesome part is that modded parts could be dropped right in by setting the science requirements without having to worry about which tech tree systems you'll support. So long as we have a decent spread of science disciplines to choose from, we won't need anything more. I'm thinking that six would be a nice, round number. Aerodynamics, Materials Science, Life Science, Rocket Science, Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Physics. This opens up possibilities for acquiring science as well. Each part can provide science points for just a single discipline if you wanted. The Materials Bay produces materials science points. Gravioli detector provides nuclear science points. Atmosphere fluid sensor gives life science. The Mystery Goo... provides a little bit of everything, a fact which the eggheads back at the KSC don't like to think too hard about. Each body in the Kerbol system might provide a higher bonus to one discipline than the others. I'll admit that such a science system might lose us a bit of flavor since the text on the various tech nodes are hilarious and well-written, but it can be made up in other areas. Would it be worth the trade? Is the entire system bland and unimaginative? Is it almost right, with just a few small tweaks required? I doubt such a thing is moddable under the current 1.0 game, but let's leave that aside for now. EDIT: Removed my poor attempt at formatting links to the mods named, added planetary possiblities.

Fuel dumping should be a simple enough option, right alongside fuel transfer. Having UI elements that make such transfers (or dumps) more precise would be appreciated, too.