Ambiguous Impulse

Thanks for the responses! I won't be able to put too much time into this until my semester finishes up, but I'll be sure to respond with my progress and questions after I start fiddling around. Also, thanks for the link @Hay, I will likely be using blender instead, but the information looks good, especially the textures portion. It also gave me a bit more info about .cfg files with the engine statistics.

Hi! I've been playing ksp for a while and I am looking to start modding the game. That being said, I have little to no idea where to begin. The most I've done to change the game myself is make a custom flag. The end goal would be to create something similar to extra-planetary launch pads. That being said, I'm aware that I have nowhere near the proper amount of experience to attempt that (yet). Some things I'd like to know how to do: 1) How do I get into the game code and change it? 2) What programming languages do I need? I only know matlab and visual basic, but I can pick up a new one. 3) How do I go about creating parts? Is it possible to use CAD software, or do I need something less rigid? (e.g. blender) 4) How do I ensure that my part is incorporated in the game's physics engine? If I've missed something incredibly obvious in how this all works, please point it out. Thanks!

Greetings! I recently installed RoverDude's UKS mods so I could make bases on other planets with a little more depth and functionality. I spent about an hour in sandbox looking at all the parts and seeing how they interact as well as reading the wiki on github (UKS is insane!). During this fiddling period, I wanted to use a bunch of the resource drills to see which raw materials were required to manufacture things like chemicals/polymers, etc, and to see how much storage I'd need for each type. The plan of action was to take a bunch of the big (5.0m) rectangular freight containers, designate a bunch of different resource types and slap all the drills to the side of it. Not wanting to run out of power, I thought I'd take the chance to try out one of the nuclear reactors offered by the mod. I attached the largest one (coz bigger is better, right?) and then fired up all the drills. Much to my dismay, they ran for only a few seconds before draining all of the electric charge from my command pod. I checked to see if the reactor needed to be started by right clicking on it, but all it said was that it had 450 units of Enriched Uranium and space for 450 units of depleted fuel. I reverted to the VAB to see if I could activate the part through an action group, but no actions were available for the part. I then read the part's description which listed storage specs and thermo specs but had nothing about the reactor producing electric charge. Also worth noting is that the KSP loading screen will occasionally have a popup that says "incompatible mods detected," which is odd, because ckan (I'm lazy) registered them all as compatible. All mods installed: Community Resource Pack Extraplanetary Launchpads Firespitter Core Kerbal Attachment System Kerbal Inventory System Module Manager USI Core USI Kolonization Core USI Kolonization System (MKS/OKS) USI Tools Thanks!