Senzipo

Excellent suggestions, thanks guys! Jeb rides again

Say, I'm coming back to GPP after a long hiatus. My usual MO is to strip mine the moons for science while I send large probe clusters to set up sat networks around planets on their first launch window (playing with Remote Tech and Near Future), then start docking together manned mega exploration ships waiting for the next launch window. It's very efficient and min/maxy, I climb the tech tree in leaps and bounds, but I find it repetitive and usually end up starting again after the first exploration ship returns. Any advice for mods or config tweaks that makes it easier and faster to explore the awesome GPP system, or self challenges that keep the early setup phase of the game interesting? I'm thinking of just taking my game one objective at a time and timeskipping a lot rather than mounting several concurrent missions waiting for their launch windows. My only problem with that is that it feels unrealistic and a bit cheesy

Be careful- Gael's moons don't see sun for like, a month at a time. Absolutely obliterated my first base's plans when I put one down there, it required solar power to run. Grab some nuclear power mods.

Oh man, of course, thanks. Based off my bad reading of the Nero config files, I guess I was under the impression that the lower atmosphere would be a denser hydrogen gas, compressed by the upper atmosphere. I don't know IRL gas giant atmospheres work, and didn't suspect both GPP and HLA airships would model densities off the real density of hydrogen. I expected it either to drop like a stone or stay buoyant, not to act like an air-filled balloon in a normal air environment.

Quick question concerning the gas giants atmo curves here- I warped a rigid airship quite capable of flying at Tellumo to Nero. I wasn't surprised to find no visible atmosphere changes aside from rentry heating as I descended with massive heat shields to it's core- I'm guessing it was made to be more deadly than stock Jool, and not ultimately intended to be survivable. However, I was quite confused to find the airship wasn't buoyant at any altitude, eventually crashing quite slowly into the 'ground'. Given the planet's lighter gravity and larger ASL pressure, this is confusing. Even if you weren't anticipating space zeppelins, the atmo and gravity should have been more than sufficient to keep the sucker afloat. Are you sure Nero's lower atmosphere curve is working correctly? Or am I misinterpreting something fundamental about the atmosphere model here? Or maybe it's bad buoyancy modelling on the airship mod's part?

Considering GPP has tiny bodies up to 6 times further out than Eeloo, this works surprisingly well. A simple 'body discovered' popup would fix people overlooking the nice flavortext you've provided in the UI window, cause most people using this mod are going to be mashing the button at first. I personally like how distant bodies were harder to find- I was considering launching a telescope into deep space for a while there, which seems like a realistic and natural gradation of difficulty. As far as keeping the bodies completely invisible until discovered, I like the idea a lot. Maybe bodies within a certain distance of your home planet should appear in the tracking station, but for further out bodies, you should have to put a telescope in a low solar orbit and run a different type of scan to make them appear? Getting close to the sun, and looking for moving reflections further out, since being in a low solar orbit guarantees distant bodies are illuminated, is the idea. Another change I'd recommend, if you're so inclined- researching bodies at the space station seems too easy, just throwing funds at each stage of the research program. Depending on your mod set and where you are in career, you could have orders of magnitude more money than required. Perhaps make each phase of research take a week or a month or something, so if feels more rewarding, and like some research program is actually going on behind the covers. Anyways, I absolutely love this mod. It made being in a strange solar system much more exciting, learning about the bodies in degrees feels much more thrilling than being able to immediately see them all and plan out your mission parameters decades before you have the tech to get there. If you got it up to full working order, I'd say Research Bodies is essential to playing in any Kopernicus modded system. Amazing how simple gameplay mods like this can change the experience so much.

I've got mod setup as close as I can get to Scott's Galileo career, but running 1.2.2, and Research Bodies is working just fine for me; just 'unlocked' the whole solar system. You really have to be pointing quite directly at the more distant bodies and moons in particular it seems; until I had probe with target tracking nodes I couldn't get a few of them. Before I had target maneuver node tracking, I had to wiggle around the node mashing the button wildly. Because no dialog box pops up when you successfully unlock the planet for research at the KSC, this method overwrites the successful discovery text with the stock failure text, making it seem like nothing happened. I often 'discovered' planets without realizing it, making it seem like more of the planets were undiscoverable at first. This impression is increased by the fact you gain no new information for simply discovering the body, so if you're in Map View it still looks undiscovered. I'd wager some of these complaints are from people who are successfully discovering planets, but this apparent lack of feedback makes them not realize they must go to the observatory to progress. If successfully unlocking a planet for research prompted a dialog box, and perhaps displayed the name of the unlocked body in map view instead of continuing to call it undiscovered, there'd be no chance of confusion.