Merkov

Actually, now that I think about it, it might not be bad to have more people testing as we go. I don't get a ton of time to actually PLAY KSP that much anymore. My only concern would be that, if there are undesired bugs, their reports might bog down the main KPBS thread.

My vote would be only if we make it the WIP status very clear.

Both of these are fantastic. This will make it much easier (for me, anyway) to keep track of what we're proposing for which parts. Comments are already en route! Speaking of proposals, would you mind having a look at my post at the top of page 5 of this thread? I'm having some trouble making things fit within the spreadsheet's mass and volume constraints. With those two parts, it may also be worth looking at whether we want USI-LS to alter the mass of KPBS parts, though I'm still not sold on that idea.

Huh. You are 100% correct. The problem with using the wrench to attach a probe core is that most probe cores (all stock probe cores?) don't allow surface attaching, but the wrench doesn't allow node attaching. Thanks for correcting me, you probably saved my upcoming Eve mission a lot of grief.

As @jd284 suggested, this is really an RCS Sound Effects issue, not an MKS issue, so you should be asking in the RCS Sound thread. Somebody there actually posted a log in December which spams the same message you posted. Another helpful user then posted a possible reason: Also, it seems like RCS Sounds hasn't been updated since KSP 1.1.3, so some people have been discussing what they need to do to get it working nicely in KSP 1.2.X. Again, though, this is all from the RCS Sound thread.

Just remember that if you only have access to the wrench (and not the electric screwdriver) you'll only be able to nodeAttach parts, so you'll need to have a free attachment node to connect to your probe core. I only bring this up because I manage to forget every single time. -EDIT- I lied! See @Tarheel1999's post below for the truth.

Oops, I thought I had posted that in the Bases and Stations thread. My bad. I'll raise the issue in the morning when I get home so I can put exactly what the contract shows.

Hey, small question: I just got a contract to launch the Golly space station, but it says that it must be in a 6 km orbit or lower. As I recall, objects left on rails below 8 km over Golly get deleted by the game. Is there a simple-is way to increase this?

I actually really like that. It's different from anything else, and has one or two odd situations where it could really come in handy. I would suggest we then make it so that dumpExcess for the Mulch is true, Fertilizer is false. If it had the above ability plus the Ore+Mulch = Fertilizer, I think that would give the part a really unique fit.

Okay, looking at the Algae Container some more: the balancing spreadsheet shows conversion ratios for the conversions used in MKS/USI-LS. For the purpose of generating supplies, these are the two processes listed: INPUT OUTPUT Gypsum (10) Fertilizer (1) Minerals (25) Fertilizer (1) Not listed is the the USI-LS option of Ore to Fertilizer which of course is: Ore (1000) Fertilizer (1) That's pretty inefficient compared to the other options. If we add water as an input, we are not beyond the guidelines of the spreadsheet. What do people think the conversion rate should look like? Keep in mind that what we come up with doesn't necessarily have to be balanced with MKS as a whole at this point. On the other hand, the only guideline for balancing against just USI-LS is the 1000:1 ratio listed above. I'm kind of thinking that it should require a decent amount of water, but probably also be pretty Ore intensive? I'd also like to point out that the current Algae Farm's conversion rates look like this: INPUT OUTPUT Mulch (75) Ore (200) Fertilizer (80) Granted, this uses a lot of Mulch as a "stock" of sorts, but that is a much lower amount of resources required to get fertilizer than the Ore alone option at the top. Now, we could also just ignore the Ore to Fertilizer ratio provided by the stock mini ISRU, since it didn't even get a mention on the spreadsheet. Now, as for the option of making a sort of Ore-based cultivation option. I was thinking Ore+Water+Fertilizer=Supplies (which is pretty similar to MKS's Cultivation options, except you replace Ore with Substrate or Dirt. Those look like this: INPUT OUTPUT Substrate (10) Water(10) Fertilizer (0.1) Supplies (1) Dirt (25) Water (25) Fertilizer (0.1) Supplies (1) With that in mind, maybe something like 50 Ore, 50 Water, 0.1 Fertilizer to 1 Supply? I think it should be pretty low efficiency. Ore is pretty easy to acquire, after all. Another thought I had was that maybe getting rid of my first idea (Ore+Water=Fertilizer) and just keeping the current functionality (or adding water to it if we want) and this cultivation option as two swappable options is the way to go. That way, you only have small amounts of mulch, you can use Ore and Mulch (and water?) to make Fertilizer, then you can use those small amounts of Fertilizer along with Ore and Water to make Supplies. Thoughts?

Okay. I updated the chart on the GitHub LS issue with the numbers from option 4. As long as everyone's happy with it, then we can call that two parts ready. Sorry, when you say swappable between the two, you mean the two of my ideas (Ore+Water=Fertilizer and Ore+Water+Fertilizer=Supplies) or my first idea and the current function (Ore+Water=Fertilizer and Ore+Mulch=Fertilizer)? I think (but have not verified) that the swappable converters function is provided by USITools. When USI-LS 0.5 first arrived, RoverDude allowed players to swap the functionality of Nom-O-Matics, but dropped that for balance reasons. My guess is that all he did was remove the modules from the parts configs. I'll do some playing, but I think making it free to swap when only USI-LS is installed should be doable, though it will probably still need an engineer on EVA. I'll come up with some numbers for Algae Container conversions and see how we look. Fair enough. Well, as long as it's being used, it should stay. Just so everyone here knows, I've got a few more balancing ideas posted on the Life Support issue on GithHub (here). It's a little easier for me to keep all of my thoughts on that page and update the chart all in the same place. Basically, I just posted some ideas on possibly re-balancing the USI recycler container and introducing the Water Purifier Container, which currently is just used in TAC LS, I think.

Those have been deprecated, I'm afraid. They were replaced by the Kontainers found in USI Core.

No problem! I'm great at doing exactly what somebody says to do.

Since @DStaal did a good job of explaining where those pesky :FOR sections were, I took the liberty of tracking them down. Pull Request 16 should capture all three of them.

Warning, lots of rambling about parts below: MK2 Habitat Okay, looking at the MK2 Habitat now... Figuring out volume is tricky since it deploys. Just eyeballing it compared to other parts, it kind of looks like it would be 3.75 m across, 3 m long, and roughly 1.25 m tall, which gets me about 14 m3 of volume, which is NOT a lot... It's double my rough eyeballing of the MK1 Habitat (roughly 7 m3) and hardly any bigger than what KIS claims the MK1 Habitat is (10.7 m3). Even if I decide to be generous and say that the MK2 habitat has about 50% more volume than KIS's claim for the MK1, that still only puts us around 16 m3. So, the MK2 Habitat has a mass of 2.6 t. It holds 4 kerbals, 160 Supplies, 75 Mulch, and 150 EC. With all of those numbers except the mass, the hab time can vary depending on what we decide the volume is. According to the spreadsheet, 13 months would require 14.25 m3, 14 months = 15.25 m3, and 15 months = 16.25 m3. Now, those numbers aren't much bigger than the 10 months we decided on for the MK1, but the MK2 isn't really much bigger, and the MK2 does benefit from an extra quarter month from that 4th seat. Where things fall apart a bit is on the mass side of things. Higher hab times don't increase the suggested mass in the spreadsheet. RD's guidelines suggest a part like that should have a mass of only 2 t, not 2.6. Another thought I've had on these hab calculations: I placed a Ranger mini hab beside a MK2 Habitat just to compare the two. At first, I thought they both looked about the same size, but one thing occurred to me: the mini hab is a semi-sphere while the MK2 is a rectangular prism. The mini hab's centre is much taller than the MK2, but that space wouldn't be all that useful on the ground. It makes me wonder if I should be giving more weight to square footage than volume for the purpose of ground base parts. The mini hab's volume is about 10 m3, almost exactly the same as what we decided the MK1's was, and not much smaller than the MK2. However, the mini hab only has a floor area of 4.9 m2 compared to the roughly 7.5 m2 of the MK1 habitat, or the 11.25 m2 of the MK2. Although floor area isn't part of RD's spreadsheet, I think it has some significance when it comes to KPBS. Four beds fit a lot nicer into a rectangle of a certain area than a circle. The mini hab has 10 months of hab time, no seats. If we say the MK1 has 10 months of hab time plus 3 seats, that's basically 10.75 months of hab time. I can't help but think that the MK1 hab would make a much better living quarter than the mini hab. What do you guys think? Greenhouse In the GitHub LS issue, I mentioned that I thought the greenhouse's volume is about 25 m2. Looking at it more closely, I'm going to say it's probably closer to 21. Mass is 3 t. It currently holds 400 each of Fertilizer, Mulch, and Supplies. This one is also kind of tricky. If I reduce the number of LS resources to 200 each, then give it a simple agroponics ability (mulch+fertilizer=supplies) with a conversion rate of 0.0025 mulch, 0.00025 fertilizer, 0.00275 supplies (suggested EC/s cost of 5.5) then I reach our mass limit of 3 t but have only used 14 m3 of volume. Unfortunately, I can't even add hab time because hab time on its own without a hab multiplier costs mass which this part doesn't have. Now, another option I found was to reduce that conversion rate even further (0.002 mulch, 0.0002 fert, 0.0022 supplies, 4.4 EC/s), add a hab multiplier of 1.1 for 1 kerbal, then add 3 bonus months for 1.025 EC/s. This gives us a slow generation of supplies plus a bit of hab. Well, I say slow, but I'm pretty sure that's quicker than the inline Nom-O-Matic.

I also had a thought about the Algae Container: what if, instead of turning ore and mulch into fertilizer, it used ore and water instead? I know that fertilizer is supposed to be solid(ish) and base USI-LS doesn't use water, but KPBS adds water drills when USI-LS (or any LS mod, I think) is installed, and we're already talking about using it in the Central Hub's purifier. I would probably make the conversion rate a little more reasonable than the stock 1.25 m ISRU's Ore -> Fertilizer option. This would give USI-LS players something a little bit different, make use of the K&K water drill, and avoid turning mulch into fertilizer, which I'm still not a huge fan of. I know that 10 supplies turns into 10 mulch + 1 fertilizer = 11 supplies, so if you use 1 mulch to make 1 fertilizer you're technically okay, it still just seems like you could accidentally end up leaving it on while your base is empty, and come back to a base full of fertilizer but very low on supplies and mulch. As an alternative, maybe having a way of using ore, water, and fertilizer to make supplies (similar to MKS's cultivation options, but with Ore) would be a way to change things up. On the topic of water and KPBS, I know that when MKS is installed, the stock Narrow Band Scanner and Surface Scanner detect water. Does anyone know off the top of their heads if this happens without MKS? I know that water is a CRP resource. I'm trying to see if there is any need for the K&K water scanning parts to remain in a USI-LS install. If they are needed with USI-LS, it may be worth removing them via MM patch when the full MKS is installed when we reach stage 3.

For those of you watching the forum, but not GitHub, I've posted a modified copy of the LS parts table that DStaal posted on page 2 on this issue page: https://github.com/DanStaal/KPBStoMKS/issues/1 Basically, I plan on just editing that one comment of mine as I come up with values. @DStaal back to the Central Hub: for the straight stage 2, USI-LS-only balance pass, you had indicated that you wanted to see just a purifier and hab multiplier. RoverDude's spreadsheet doesn't really distinguish between purifiers and recyclers (basically, you put in what you want your recycler to be, and it tells you what a purifier would be ON TOP of that recycler). With all of that in mind, I wanted to run some numbers by you: 1) We still have one of the options I mentioned earlier: an 85% recycler for 1 kerbal is rated as a 92.5% purifier for 1 kerbal. The purifier uses 19.25 EC/s and 0.0085 Water/s. Add a 1.2 times hab multiplier for 5 kerbals plus 3 hab months (those are just used to justify extra volume when you add a hab multiplier). That hab stuff uses 2.25 EC/s. This works out almost perfectly to the 30 m3 volume and 7.5 t mass. 2) If we assume that a recycler would simply add mass, then we could try a 95% purifier (which would be a 90% recycler, but nevermind that) which uses 31.75 EC/s and 0.009 Water/s. Tack on a 1.2 hab multiplier for 5 kerbals, no kerbal months costing 1.5 EC/s and you get a volume just under the 30 m3 plus a mass of just under 10 t. That's a fair bit heavier than the 7.5 t that we're working with, but we have to decide how massive the recycler would be. 3) Another option would be to make the purifier less efficient (90%, which only costs 6.75 EC/s and 0.008 Water/s) and boost the hab multiplier to 2 for 6 kerbals, costing 3 EC/s. Volume is still good, this puts us just under 8 t, which is only half a tonne more than the Hub. Removing half a tonne for the recycler makes sense to me, but I guess it depends on how powerful we want that purifier to be. 4) If we want a bit more efficiency out of that purifier, we could bump it back up to the 92.5% I mentioned before (19.25 EC/s, 0.0085 Water/s) plus a 1.5 hab multiplier for 5 kerbals + 1.5 bonus months (2.25 EC/s). This works out to just under 30 m3 and 8.2 tonnes. If we assume a purifier without recycler saves us 700 kg, then we're on target. There are obviously more combinations I can play with. Do any of these stand out to you guys? Would you rather see a more powerful purifier or a larger hab multiplier?

Close the "here and now" window.

I've seen this a few times too, but it's worth pointing out that it seems to only be the LS window showing the wrong status, rather than the game actually treating them as if their life support timer had run out. I have never actually had my kerbals experience the negative effect when this little bug surfaces.

I would post a link but I am on mobile and this forum and my phone don't play nicely together.

I posted a basic one in the M2X thread a while back. There isn't a whole lot there, mostly because there aren't really aren't Mk2 parts that really seem dedicated to long term habitation. I think the only thing I added was a life support recycler to the M2X science lab. I also added some basic MKS support, too, but I can't actually remember what all I did anymore. I know I made the M2X reactor behave like a USI reactor (only if NFE isn't installed) but I forget what else. None of what I've done has been checked against RoverDude's new balancing spreadsheet.

Wait, I'm confused: I knew that CC-full and IFS-full didn't play nice with each other, but only having that core versions of both is also not a good idea?

Okay, I am focusing on USI-LS alone, but I wanted to sort out what I saw as problems calculating PL values, so I took my issues to RD, asking what it means for a part to have access to PL, and got this interesting answer: (The whole small conversation can be found in the MKS thread.) RoverDude also made the comment that a part that handles PL generally won't have room to handle anything else (which makes sense, if it's basically warehouse/big post office). Obviously we can't know what this overhaul of his will be or how to balance for it, but I'm wondering if maybe the KPBS rover garage should have access to PL? It's voluminous, and it would make sense as a hub where delivery rovers come to and depart from. Just something to think about. Okay, back to USI-LS numbers.

Oh, okay! That makes sense. Hmm... that actually makes me think that for KPBS' purposes, maybe the larger garage part should actually handle PL... (warehouses should be voluminous, after all). Thanks a lot, you've given me a bunch to think about!

Oh, okay. Out of curiosity, how do you envision PL "working"? That is, what is it supposed to represent on the ground? When a part has access to PL, what does that part actually do, and what happens in the background, abstracted?