Sir Mortimer

Is this in a sandbox or science mode game, perhaps?

That looks very much like the radiation level that you would be receiving *in* Jool. In as in *below the surface, near the center of the planet*. Or within the sun, maybe. Is it just that one vessel that's affected?

New Release: Kerbalism 3.1 (KSP 1.5 - 1.8.x) Download links and instructions -> see kerbalism.github.io Yet another major overhaul of Kerbalism: Kopernicus support, radiation overhaul, more science, new user interface, improved reliability and more! Solar panels and Kopernicus The simulation of the solar panels finally got the overhaul it deserved. Gone are the days of unpredictable electricity blackouts during **time warp** that killed half your crew. While unloaded, all solar panels will now assumed to be oriented at a constant angle to the sun, which means that you finally can time warp probes with fixed solar panels - without suddenly running out of electricity half a year later. With this new implementation, Kerbalism now can support Kopernicus star systems with multiple suns, as well as a wide variety of different solar panels - including the ones provided by SSTU (Version 0.11.49.161 and above). The new system even supports features that are crucial to RealismOverhaul (RO), like decaying panel efficiency over time! Science The science implementation got a good shake down that should improve the overall performance (read: frame rate) a bit. Also, some of the most often reported quirks should be fixed with this - and the UI now looks really great! The new science archive helps in planning and running all those experiments. Additionally, many little issues and oddities have been fixed. Radiation The radiation model in Kerbalism was improved by a lot: radiation belts now can be tilted and no longer are fixed to be aligned with the planetary axis. There are solar cycles of activity that will affect frequency and intensity of coronal mass ejections, and celestial bodies can emit gamma radiation. In the case of the sun, the radiation levels will also be affected by the current solar activity. Shape and location of the radiation belts around Kerbin changed considerably. The model is now a lot closer to the Van Allen Belts around earth. This means that the inner belt was moved closer to the surface, and the outer belt extends a lot farther out than it used to. So check the orbits of your crewed vessels after update, they now might be in a radiation field! Radiation now also plays into reliability: some components are very sensitive and can fail sooner than expected if they're exposed to high radiation for too long. In combination with the now extended outer radiation belt this means that you really should invest in high quality parts for stationary satellites, because the geostationary orbit now skims along the border of the outer radiation belt! Kerbalism now looks closely at your vessel and where you place radioactive parts. If you build vessels with nuclear engines or reactors, make sure to put those components at the maximum possible distance from your habitats to minimize the amount of radiation to your crew. Also watch out on EVA missions: getting too close to a NERV engine will inflict considerable radiation on your kerbal! There is more: during a coronal mass ejection (CME) event, you now can try to hide the crew from the sun by putting the bulk of your vessel between the sun and the habitat. Kerbalism uses raytracing to determine which parts are between your habitats and the sun, and you can use these as a passive shield against the ionized radiation from the sun. The bigger the parts, the greater the effect - but there is a caveat: because of the bremsstrahlung effect, the parts that absorb ionized radiation will emit gamma radiation. The only way to protect your crew from gamma radiation is by keeping your distance from it. Keep that in mind when building your interplanetary ships! Speaking of radiation shielding: Kerbalism now uses a high tech and light layered alloy composite as shielding material. It provides the same shielding effect while being three times lighter. Reliability There now is a window dedicated to part failures. It gives a nice overview over busted parts, parts that still can be repaired and which parts need inspection and maintenance... yes, maintenance: you can do maintenance on EVA. Go to any part, inspect it for damages, and if something seems odd you can repair the part before it breaks down. Finally something useful to do on your EVA missions! Engine failures are new, and no longer depend on MTBF. Many rocket motors cannot run for too long, some can be ignited only a limited number of times, and there is no guarantee that an igintion works every time. Planning for redundancy is highly recommended. The time will come when your main engine explodes 5 seconds after liftoff, so dust off your launch escape towers - you'll need them! Various other things Humidity is gone. There are no more humidity controllers, and there won't be any condense water that can cause issues. Tooltips in the monitor will now show which components / process use up or produce resources Kerbalism will now check for mods that are known to cause problems and give out a warning if one is detected. A the same time, it will display a warning if CommunityResourcePack (CRP) could not be found, or if there are multiple Kerbalism configurations installed at the same time. When transmitting data, the file with the highest scientific value is transmitted first Science summary UI in telemetry will tell you when your probe transmitted the last bit of science, and how much it did in total Show experiment result description in finished message and file manager tooltip #488 General UI face lifting. You'll see for yourself. Tweakable hard drive capacity Bugfixes Just the ones that stand out the most: Breaking ground sample return contracts are fixed Breaking ground rover arm experiments are doable Asteroid surface samples work again #458 Gravity ring no longer disappears with Community Category Kit The list of fixes is very long, check out the issues page on GitHub if you want to know it all. RemoteTech We dropped support for RemoteTech. There are a few issues with it and unfortunately noone willing to look into them. Until that changes, we no longer recommend using it, and Kerbalism will display a warning message to tell the user about it. Other mods Some effort went into supporting the following mods, by configuration or code changes: Sounding Rockets Universal Storage 2 fuel cells Unkerballed start tech tree ReStock+ (new probe core, now it has storage) Kerbal Atomics engines now emit radiation SSTU solar panels (requires Version 0.11.49.161 and above) Tarsier Space Technology #486 CommNet Constellation #439 Credits Thanks to all the contributors who made this version possible, especially to Got who gave Kerbalism a brand new science UI!

You've got ResearchBodies installed, right? https://github.com/Kerbalism/Kerbalism/wiki/FAQ#q-my-probes-use-12-ecs-for-comms-and-die-within-seconds

Putting this here as a heads up for Kerbalism users: If you experience a massive EC usage on all probe cores (like 12 EC/s or more), please delete the file ResearchBodiesMMRemoteTech.cfg (see this issue on GitHub for details).

Works for me on 1.8.1. Are you absolutely positively sure that you have the latest version in your 1.8.1 installation?

Glad you like it I just had to abort a Mun landing because the main engine exploded during circularization in Kerbin orbit No. I think it's ScrapYard or OhScrap! that does that, but Kerbalism doesn't keep track of part usage at all. The only thing affecting failure rates is the high quality setting in the editor. Upside is: EVAs can repair and inspect stuff. You might need a specialist to do it, but most things can be maintained by any Kerbal in a space suit. First time I hear about that, will pay some attention next time. I got used to ignoring the solar panel planner and just slap on a couple of extra units. Solar panels are prone to failures, so a bit of redundancy doesn't hurt

Sounds like a problem that doesn't exist any more in the dev builds. Easiest fix: in GameData, delete your Kerbalism folders (both of them, this is important to avoid duplicate configurations) and get the latest dev build, which at this point is very close to a release anyway.

There is not a single line of text in that screenshot that relates to Kerbalism.

Thanks for bringing this up, turns out that the radiation was wrong for all moons. The latest dev build includes a fix for it. The thing is, there are short of a dozen different variables in Kerbalism that determine the resulting radiation in any situation, and it is just that one radiation level. Real world data deals with alpha, beta and gamma radiation, Kerbalism doesn't. And depending on what source you're looking at there have wildly different numbers on the different types of radiation, that affect living tissue and delicate instruments differently. What's more, Kerbalism assumes some Numbers for radiation that, while in the ballpark of the real thing, can't be accurate because their real world counterparts are still very much unknown. F.i. we don't know the radiation outside the heliosphere because we haven't sent a dosimeter there yet. Plus, the Kerbalism radiation model, while being (in my biased personal opinion ) the best that's available for KSP at this time, still is just a model that tries to map a real scale solar system to the tiny star system that Kerbin exists in. In other words: it's not perfect, it won't match what you find on the subject, but it will be in the same ballpark and it works for the game. And that last one is the most important, and ultimately the only relevant consideration.

OK, to wrap up the pressurization thing: removing the Mk1 pressurization bonus was done to stop people from going for very long term missions (>30 days) with just a Mk-1, there weren't many additional considerations done or possible at the time. Kerbals are a very forgiving and hard core bunch, they would endure such torture without much of a fuss if the cabin was pressurized, that's the entire reason. The Kerbalism Habitat code is quite rigid in its implementation, it is impossible to simulate different kinds of atmosphere in different environments and pressures (pure O2 in low pressure EVA suits vs. an earth like air mixture in a cabin). What we do now is the equivalent of feeding a tube from the O2 tanks into the lungs of the Kerbals with just enough flow to convert all of it it into poisonous CO2. Without that tube the Kerbals would probably suffocate, because the cabin air consists of nothing but Nitrogen and CO2 (which is why you loose only nitrogen, but no O2 to cabin leaks). Plans are to change that, along with fixing some bugs with Habitat (sudden and unexplained pressure losses etc) - but not for the coming version.

comfort is about the ability to move about a vessel without having to wear a space suit. As far as I know, they never put those suits off in mercury

This didn't age very well - @aluc24 try the latest dev build.

Good point! Will be removed when science is off.

For now, life time radiation isn't displayed anywhere. Ah, I see. I just looked into it and I think Kerbalism breaks contract configurator contracts that query the stock science archive via AllScienceSubjects* - which FieldResearch is doing a lot. I'm afraid there's not much that can be done about this now. I'll add it to the list of known incompatibilities.

You need the config zip that comes with the core zip. A couple of things changed in regards to experiment definitions. For this reason please make sure to delete any existing Kerbalism folders before copying the dev version into your GameData, otherwise you might end up with duplicate/redundant/conflicting configurations. Edit: There's a New And Noteworthy page on the wiki if you're interested.

Kerbalism removes / doesn't support the KSC biomes, so you won't be able to fulfill those contracts. Others should work fine.

If you want to use engine failures, you need the latest dev version. At this point I'd recommend using that version over the latest release anyway, since there is so much fixed in it and not many known issues, none of which are serious. You can get the latest stable release version from GitHub or CKAN, dev builds can be found here.

The latest dev build (#7229) has full compatibility with KSP 1.8 - download here: https://github.com/Kerbalism/DevBuilds/releases/tag/DevBuild-7229 Warning: this is a dev build. No guarantees. Delete the old Kerbalism folders before installing this version. Backup your save game before using.

Such is life.

The stock comms. They actually are quite good.

Most of it, yes. And most is already fixed in the current dev builds (use at your own risks, they're largely untested and can be buggy). That said, any problem related to RemoteTech won't be fixed for the foreseeable future, so at this point I have to recommend not to RT with Kerbalism. ^ That one's fixed I have no idea what JSI.RPMVesselComputer is or what it does. Do you know which mod that is from? That's a good one - I'll look into it

The current configuration for engine ignition failures was at about 1.7% - or 1/4th of that for high quality - engine failures *per ignition*. It has since been reduced to less (0.7% I think, but don't quote me on that). That said, I just added a slider that lets you adjust the ignition failure probability in the Kerbalism preferences, that way you can either decrease or increase the probability without having to go through the config files. No. The engine either fails or it doesn't, reducing max thrust on failure sounds interesting, but adds quite a bit of complexity.

No worries - I was just using this opportunity to steer people towards that page BTW, for all the [X] Science fans out there...

Quoting the New and Noteworthy page on the wiki: