[[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9]

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.

[[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9]

8 hours ago, Guest83 said:

As it should be. In the stock game it's about as easy to land on Duna and come back than to go to the Mun. I believe the weight of food is well balanced, it also encourages you to include the greenhouse module for longer trips.

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.

[[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9]

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.

[[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9]

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.