Gotmachine

@ShotgunNinja Me again, with more complaints . It's about the EC and reaction wheels "tweaks". I'm hugely against them. My griefs : First, I think that it's a lot better to balance your mod against stock values than altering them. Stock balance may be imperfect (Personally, if I wanted to tweak values, I would perhaps increase EC producers weight by 50 % and batteries weight by 500 %) but it's a base to work on and as someone already pointed out, other mods are usually balanced against stock values. If you want scrubbers and greenhouses to be high EC consuming, just increase their consumption rate. They are only needed once you decide to get out of Kerbin SOI. In my early/mid career, I disabled scrubbers nearly every time, it was much easier to add more oxygen than packing dozen of solar panels and batteries. Scrubbers aren't really worth the trouble until you get to third tier efficiency. The way you made it, all panels before the Gigantor XL are nearly useless in comparison. If you don't have the Gigantor you need to pack literaly dozens of panels. Mid game, I launched a manned mission to Duna that required 42 OX panels for the scrubber and two greenhouses, it was barely enough. The main visible effect of the tweaks is that you need between 3 and 10 times the amount of EC producing parts for the same use. Really bad for the part count. You made ISRU impossible to use with solar panels, no matter the amount. Some may agree, other won't. I think that it should be let stock. If people want to tweak stock behaviour, let them do it by themselves. Same for reaction wheels. Yup, they are totally unrealistic and IRL spacecraft control is only done trough RCS. If you don't like them, just don't use them. But the only effect of reducing their efficiency is that I use three time the amount and again, here goes the part count... At least, if you want to make them more balanced with RCS, just scale up their weight. On a general note about balancing. Please remember that weight is the only "currency", the only resource the game is fundamentally based on and the main one that you should think about when choosing part characteristics. Unfortunately, another think to keep in mind as an important game resource is the part count. I'm more inclined to accept your science changes, since science is really ultra easy to get in stock. But by principle, I still disagree with altering stock things. Not related : we really need larger and inline oxygen containers (my previously mentioned Duna mission had about 30 big radial tanks). If you don't have the models, just use the stock monopropelant ones as a placeholder. To be positive in the end, know that it's the first time I really want to play the game with a mod. Nearly all other mods that add/alter gameplay are either simplistic or too complex, most of them are obsessed with realism and they usually are boring to play with, at least for the non-hardcore gamer that I am. I really like Kerbalism because it add a second fundamental resource : time, something I find really lacking in stock. And in a well integrated, not too complex, gameplay oriented way. Congrats to you.

Great ! Looking forward to this, these values seems much more in line with the stock game balance. About the unmanned/antenna problem, another suggestion : increase EC consumption instead of reducing range would be more coherent with the "non-blocking" malfunction guideline. Seems you discarded the "parts malfunction one after another" idea, still think it would be great to include some proactive way to do redundancy and get ride of the "timewarp completed, I have now 30 parts to repair in EVA" gameplay. But I will hold my tongue until I see how the rebalance affect things. A quick suggestion about part categories : I would prefer all oxygen and food tanks to be in the "fuel tanks" section, even if the title is somewhat wrong, this were I naturally go when I think about containers and consumables.

@ShotgunNinja I know what you mean, balancing things is hard. About the malfunction idea, an afterthought : perhaps you need to limit how many malfunctions can happen on a single part, so another one is chosen next. What use do we have for this 0.00001 EC/sec solar panel anyway ?

I made an error in the previous estimation, dry mass for modules was 37 tons, not 24. I accounted only one greenhouse and gravity ring. Those greenhouses are really too heavy. @ShotgunNinjaHard to do without the real thing in hands. Is the water recycled somehow ? Does the greenhouses/scrubber have the same relative efficiency ? Assuming no and yes, this is a rough estimate : Modules mass : 34 tons + 18 tons of radiation shielding Food : 3 tons Water : 6 tons Oxygen : 1 ton This gives a 62 tons payload, nearly half the previous one. Adding about 10 tons of extra payload (same as before), you need a 180 tons ship to get the 5000 dV with Nervs at 800 ISP. But this setup is silly, because food storage for 4 years would weight 16 tons, so you wouldn't want those 20 tons of greenhouses. Not using greenhouses, the payload get down to 55 tons, and the whole ship to 150 tons. But remember that the situation is specific to Jool as greenhouse efficiency is divided nearly by half, being so far from the sun. Having 5 tons greenhouses would restore their superiority, the payload would be 52 tons. About reliability/malfunction, still think that you won't be able to find a "sweet spot"... With the current way you do this, either this is annoying and tedious because it happens too much, with no way of recovery for unmanned mission, either it almost never happen and it is an useless game element. When I first read the mod description, the key gameplay element I saw was the need to plan for redundancy in case of failure and the increased need for engineers. It is very interesting because the two cases of unmanned and manned can be covered while adding some depth to the ship design and mission planning. You plan for redundancy on unmanned missions and you plan for additional life support and redundancy on manned missions. But as for now, you can't really plan for redundancy, because there is no way to add a redundant system, every part will fall apart at the same time. After some more testing, both on a mid-career tech level and on sandbox (I'm sick of timewarping for today ) this is what I think, as a better alternative than my "inactive parts" idea : I don't know how you affect malfunctions, but perhaps this could be done "per ship". The idea is that when a malfunction is triggered on the ship, it has a high probability to "choose" an already damaged part. This way, redundancy is effective because parts will fall apart one after another. It also limit the amount of different parts malfunctioning, thus limiting the tedious EVA repair work. And it feels somewhat realistic : a part begins to fail, then things get worse if nothing is done. @astroadrian99 Seems that your antenna is malfunctioning and/or is out of range.

I agree with the intent. But I'm talking about the balance against stock engine ISP range. For a round trip to Jool, you can go down to a 4 years trip if you use about 20% more dV than the optimal transfer window (and using aerocapture). Accounting for some maneuvers at destination, let's be optimistic and say we can do the round trip on a 5000 dV budget. To last 4 years with a crew of 3 kerbals, you need about 110 tons of life support : 37 tons : dry mass for modules (1 command pod, 1 cuppola, 1 hitchiker, 2 gravity rings, 2 greenhouses, 2 big food containers, 6 oxygen tanks) 18 tons : radiation shielding 50 tons : food (to last between each greenhouse harvest) 7 tons : oxygen Because of greenhouses, the food mass stays more or less constant for the whole trip, so you can perhaps plan for a 80 tons payload when calculating your ship dV. Not to say that this ship require a constant 1,34 EC/sec, accounting for malfunctions, you will need about 30 PB-NUK generators to keep that. Let just say that summing up everything (aerocapture equipment, some structural things, reaction wheels, docking ports, science parts...), this is a 120 tons ship. At Nervs 800 ISP and with MK3 liquid fuel tanks dry mass ratio, this makes for a 300 tons ship, without any lander and on a tight dV budget. In the stock game, the same mission would require a 30 tons ship, this is what I meant by "harder by several orders of magnitude". While this said, going to Duna can actually be harder than going to Jool because the round trip window is a lot tighter, you actually need a lot more dV for a no time-warp round trip to Duna than for Jool. And for Duna, you still need two greenhouses and 35 tons of food. Instead of 50 kg/unit of food, something like 20 kg/unit would be more balanced (on a realism note, this is still completely absurd but I don't care for realism, only for gameplay balance). And reducing the greenhouse from 10 tons to 5 tons would be more in line with stock part weight and balanced with the proposed food weight. @ShotgunNinja Noted that you intend to reduce malfunction rates in next version, but this does not fundamentally resolve the problem. What do you think of the idea of not applying malfunction "decay" on shutdown/retracted/deactivated parts ? Apart from that, thanks for staying true to the "Is it good for gameplay ?" rule, this is how mods should be done, and certainly the first and only one around to do things that way. Don't let the realism or overcomplicated systems maniacs rip that away.

I'm now half trough a new career using only Kerbalism and the overall experience is great. Sanity, food and oxygen give a real value to time, and force the player to plan for travel times, to find good transfer windows and encourage using not dV optimal transfers. As for the difficulty, I find that food is too heavy, the difficulty of going anywhere past Kerbin SOI is increased by several orders of magnitude. I get it, pre-supply missions and ISRU are now a necessity but when you sum up weight requirement for food + oxygen + living space + shielding + redundant parts in case of malfunctions, a manned mission to Jool is barely possible with stock engines ISP. There is one aspect that I find poorly implemented : malfunctions. I suspect two underlying intents : make engineers useful/needed and/or require redundancy. On manned missions, the gameplay is tedious. Having to fix on EVA 20 parts every 50 days is boring and do not add anything interesting. Why not just reduce malfunction rate when an engineer is on board, with a level influence ? And reduce it further when multiple engineers are on board ? It would encourage larger crews. But the totally game-breaking part is antennas : you simply cannot make a long unmanned mission because no matter how many antennas you put on the ship, they will more or less all break at the same time. I can compensate malfunctions on engines, power sources or torque providers by oversizing and it is an interesting gameplay element but antenna effect isn't cumulative so I'm stuck with a fixed lifetime. From my experience, this lifetime is insufficient to go past Kerbin SOI. And it also defeat the point of relays because they are already dead by the time I'm in a position to use them. As it is now the whole thing looks more like a "fixed part lifetime" system. To fix the problem, I think that malfunctions should only occur on "active" parts : engines should fail while running, reaction wheels when active, solar panels and antennas when deployed (and require antennas to be deployed to work) and so on. It would make real redundancy possible, give us a way to adapt a vessel/probe/satellite lifetime, would resolve partially the part failure spam when on time warp (this is really annoying) and fix the unmanned mission problem.

Before anything else, this mod is great ! Now to the serious matter : I think I found a bug while doing a rescue mission in career mode. The rescue mission was about a landed Kerbal on Minmus. After my landing, I switched to the Kerbal (he was on EVA) using the "[" key and activated RCS. I noticed that when right clicking on this Kerbal, he only had a monopropellant ressource (no oxygen nor EC). When trying to board my ship, the "Board" key did not have any visible effect, and when switching back focus to my ship, everything went south : "Ressources" panel in the HUD is empty, the Kerbalism HUD show nothing but a grey bar. I tried to switch back focus and now the focus seems to be blocked on the EVA Kerbal, although controls are still affected to my ship.