ProgorMatic

Hi, I'm trying to enable TweakScale on SystemHeat and HeatControl radiators. A ModuleSystemHeatRadiator looks like this: @MODULE[ModuleActiveRadiator] { @name = ModuleSystemHeatRadiator // ..snip.. // option: use deterministic temperatures // Power radiated per temperature temperatureCurve { key = 0 0 key = 400 2.5 } // area for convection convectiveArea = 0.15 } The convective area, and the power radiation (second column under temperatureCurve) should be vary with the square of the scale, but the first column should remain constant. So, if the scale was doubled, the second key would go to key = 400 10 My understanding is if I just set the Exponent to "temperatureCurve = 2", it would set the key to 1600 10, meaning it would quadruple the temperature rating as well as the power radiation, which would not be helpful. Is there any way to specify different exponents for different elements of a list, or to address a single element in a list? Edit: Never mind. I just tried temperatureCurve = 2. I strapped a couple of Ion engines onto a reactor, so that the ion engines used every drop of power coming from the reactor. Then put a single radiator on it and scaled it up until the power radiation was just barely enough to cover the heat generated by the reactor (assuming that would make the temperature it was effective at about 8000K, but it kept the temperature at 983K like I would expect if the first field was not modified. So if anyone can explain why this works, that would be great, but it does seem to work.

Yeah, I'll be happy to help test. I think the trickiest part is going to be getting the System Heat module to scale correctly, especially on stock radiators. I tried and never could get them to work properly, but looking back, I think I was only adjusting their convection parameters and not the actual radiator surface area or whatever that drives the majority of the module. If you haven't played with it before, stock Titanium radiators are important to Far Future and System Heat because they are the only way to use the advanced engines in atmosphere. Even with the largest graphene radiators, which I think technically come from the HeatControl mod, heavy launch colony landers end up looking like this: So tweakscale is very much needed on all the radiators. These graphene radiators can't survive ascent, much less reentry, and the titanium ones that can would require more than 3x as many. Instead I'd rather build it like I did with these KSPIE Metallic Hydrogen engines (still working on aerodynamics): Right now I'm taking a bit of a break from my Far Future Interstellar Colonization game and playing with RSS/RO/RP-1. May end up combining the two and seeing how well my multi-million fund colony ship works with all the contstraints of an ROKerbalism game. Either way, I should have a couple of different mod sets to test TweakScale in over the next few weeks. Or I might be way underestimating how long it takes to even get an Easy start on RP-1 up to future time.

Sweet thanks! Any plans to include Far Future and System Heat radiators any time soon?

That screenshot is from a standard HD (1280p) monitor, but luckily the PAW will scroll if it overflows. The "Select Cargo" dialog doesn't look like it will though, so you'll probably have to use the left and right arrows under Cargo in the PAW to get to the bottom entries.

In MKS, sometimes you just need a container that holds a little bit of everything, like in your Factory base that makes whatever you need on demand. You can let Planetary Logistics handle the overflow, you just need a bit of storage in a Planetary Warehouse container to hold stuff until you can ship it to the big warehouse. I started by putting 25 Kontainers on my ship, but that's a bunch of parts to hold a little bit of everything. So I thought, why not create one segmented container that holds everything? I'm no artist, and SSPX parts already look like they are segmented, so I added the feature to SSPX containers: I also added TweakScale to all the stack and radial containers - because sometimes you need super tiny or super huge containers, and I can think of any reason why a container shouldn't be able to scale. In any case, here's config if you want to add this to your own mods - just create a MyPatch.cfg file in GameData and paste the contents of the spoiler into it.

That image looks cool, but I don't see anything resembling fuel tanks, engines, or radiators from this angle, and there doesn't seem to be enough room for them to cover a long interstellar voyage. I don't think I could make a functioning ship in KSP look like this without cheating. If I were going to try, I'd probably hide a full length Frisbee in the central truss, replace the back domes with LH2 spherical tanks, and build the Command center area out of Kontainers (to hold the fertilizer and supplies) and Antimatter tanks. I'd probably also have to scale the mission down to 20 kerbals or so, and use the 10m or 5m domes, or it would take 100s of years to get from one star to the next. The vision I have right now is basically several domes all facing prograde, so that the thrust from the engines behind them produces artificial gravity (hoping to engineer it so I can provide at least 0.5g for the entirety of a 10 light year voyage). I'm limiting myself to technologies that we've at least been able to detect the fundamental particles for, so antimatter is in but warp drives and gravity generators are out. The engines that have interstellar ISPs all seem to be super long, so it will probably end up looking like a 9-headed jellyfish. I'll call it the Hydra, because every time a "head is cut off" - dome undocks to land and start a colony - the colony will be advanced to self-sufficiency as quickly as possible so it can grow the mothership a new head and send it on its way.

I ended up switching back to KSPIE for my high end engines. I love the simplicity of far future, but for what I'm trying to build, embracing TweakScale is a necessity. The same build came out to 65 parts with 2 Metallic Hydrogen engines scaled to 8.5m.

I've found that most of the Far Future engines have a limitation when it comes to atmospheric flight (or would not be used in atmosphere if you care about realism, like the NSW rockets that spew radioactive material out of their nozzles). The atomic engines fit well here because the nuclear reactor is just used to super heat the propellant, and only the propellant leaves the nozzle. So I use atomic engines (especially the Deliverance aerospike) for landing and ascent, and far future engines for interplanetary and interstellar travel. Also, some of the atomic engines are fully cooled by their own exhaust, so one optimization strategy is to only use these engines at full or 0 throttle. This lets you save on radiators, but you should be good at suicide burns to land that way. For the most part, far future engines need a lot of radiators, so you can save on part count with atomic engines. With that said, if you don't care about realism (or want to keep part count down and still launch kilotons), the X-42 will get you anywhere in the Kerbol system, and the Frisbee will take you everywhere else. You can just pretend Kerbin doesn't have a magnetic field, so all life evolved with radiation immunity.

The X-42 needs some "torch" radiators to go with it. 8 radiators to cool one engine makes sense if you only have one engine, but once you start clustering them to lift kiloton plus payloads, it gets a bit crazy: What I'd like to do is scale a VF-1250 Delta (the biggest that can survive ascent through atmosphere) radiator up to 800%. This should make one radiator that covers 50k waste heat, assuming the heat disippated is proportional to the surface area. But when I scale it up, it doesn't change the System Heat values. Has anyone got TweakScale to work with System Heat? Alternatively, I'd love to see an active cooling module that could consume Liquid Hydrogen (in lieu of adding Liquid Nitrogen as another resource to manage) to produce Radiative Flux.

I think the domes are actually in USI MKS. There are 12 kerbal 10m domes and 96 kerbal 20m domes. Stockalike Station Parts Expansion also has some 5m domes that honestly look significantly better than these. They just don't have the Global Construction factory modules like the USI ones do. Update: the X-42 does indeed require more radiators than the engine replaces. Need to figure out how to get TweakScale to work with System Heat or make some bigger radiator parts.

Just wanted to show off something I made with Kerbal Atomic Engines: 40 Deliverance engines and 32 million units of Liquid Hydrogen gets a USI 20m Atlas Factory, Habitat, and Greenhouse, plus all 25 2.5m Kontainers (full), a reactor, all the necessary radiators (even to cool the engines when they are running at low throttle), and the Global Construction Ground Assembly Line to Minmus in a single stage. Vessel Mass fully fueled is 5,330 tons, Kerbin TWR is 1.49, total delta-V is 6646, and it has 176 parts. There's enough delta-V left over that I'm sure I can bring along some Convert-O-Trons and drills to refuel and go just about anywhere else, so this seems to be a great craft for single-stage-to-anywhere-and-build-whatever-else-you-want-when-you-get-there that will end up being the main colony bootstrap lander for my far future generational colony ship. With that said, 176 parts slows the game down pretty considerably. I'm going to try to build a smaller version based on the 10m USI Atlas domes. Also, now that I've proven I can do it with a "safe" engine, I don't mind replacing the Deliverance with some Far Future X-42 Nuclear Salt Water Rockets just to keep the part count down (assuming I don't end up just replacing the extra engines with more radiators).

Ok, I tested the Orbital Shipyard landed, and as expected, it told me it had to be in orbit. So I'll go back to my original setup with stable versions and Global Construction, and keep an eye out for updates. Thanks for all your hard work!

Hi, I'm starting to play with the new Konstruction features. I noticed this page https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/wiki/Bleeding-Edge:-new-and-modified-things. mentions a "Ground shipyard". Is that still in the plans (or will the orbital shipyard work landed?) I'm wanting to build entire bases from a seed lander, and the Konfabricator doesn't seem to let me do that.

Hey, is there a Constellation download somewhere with all the latest bleeding edge stuff, or do I need to pull all the individual repo releases? I looked here: https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/UmbraSpaceIndustries/releases but only saw an unstable release 28 days ago, and it looks like several of the repos have bleeding edge releases from 3 days ago (with some Jenkins stuff in it - is there a build server somewhere with nightly builds on it?)

I am totally on board with using danfarnsey's patch as the default. Then I'll look at releasing mine as a separate, optional compatibility patch. I knew it was a big change when I made it. Can CKAN be told to overwrite an existing file, or would I need to add some lines to delete the existing modules and make sure mine gets loaded last?

Look up 8 posts. Feel free to playtest that file and give me your feedback.

Yeah,the omission of the Tholos was intentional since its basically a cargo bay with nothing in it. Mass changes are also intentional, as the alternatives were to either have parts with completely irrelevant habitation values or have SSPX parts be massively overpowered against comparable MKS parts. In MKS, habitation modules are quite heavy (another alternative would be to greatly reduce crew capacity, but I thought the high capacity, heavy parts would give SSPX a stronger niche in the life support mini-game). Removal of localizations also follow MKS, so that I can differentiate between Hab-Common and Hab-Quarters modules, and the HV, HE, and Purifier variants of recyclers. I could reintroduce localizations, but could only provide en-US translations. If anyone wants to provide other languages, let me know. @danfarnsy your pull request comments were "I roughly made up some numbers that could be consistent with the inconsistent numbers for USILS parts. This update has the advantage of existing, whereas better updates do not." Can I take that to mean you intended your patch to be a stopgap until mine was available, or did you have some concepts that I need to take a look at?

Ok, I've completed the patch, and playtested it a bit. Turned out my original method for calculating the multipliers made them a little overboard when you started combining them, so I had to scale them back a bit, but now it seems like I can find an MKS analog (usually 2 to 3 parts to 1) that has similar habitation at roughly the same mass as the SSPX parts now, so I'm calling that balanced. I haven't tested every part, so if something seems out of wack to you, let me know and I'll adjust it. I've created the pull request to @Nerteas github (dev branch, hope that was right). If you want to playtest it yourself while waiting for Nertea to update, you can replace your GameData\StationPartsExpansionRedux\Patches\SSPXR-USILS.cfg file with the one found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/post-kerbin-mining-corporation/StationPartsExpansionRedux/dev/GameData/StationPartsExpansionRedux/Patches/SSPXR-USILS.cfg I also moved the Cronus to Advanced Colonization. If you want to see that, add this to the bottom of SSPXR-CTT.cfg in the same folder: // 5m Centrifuge @PART[sspx-expandable-centrifuge-5-1]:NEEDS[CommunityTechTree]:FOR[StationPartsExpansionRedux] { @TechRequired = advColonization } Let me know what you think.

The X-2 was already my favorite engine in this mod. Now I'm going to have to hurry up and finish the USI patch for SSPXR so I can play with this engine. I had to throw something together to check it out... 90k delta-V on a 1,000 ton payload with only 9 of the largest extending graphene radiators (8 for the engine + 1 more for the reactor)? Sign me up. Can't wait to get this bad boy into space... should be able to take this cargo anywhere in the system. This ship will take 1000 years to get to Nova Kirbani (Galaxies Unbound mod), but if I trade enough cargo for fuel... it will be interesting to see if there's a place for these on the colony ship, or if the frisbee is still the only option for interstellar travel. For scale, this thing is a little taller than the VAB. All parts are 5m, except the central liquid methane tank at the bottom which is 7.5m (to provide enough room for the 8 5m tanks surrounding it). It takes 17 tyrannosaur engines to get this thing into orbit, but then it can cruise the system with the single X-42 with a decent TWR of 0.34. Almost feels like you missed a decimal place somewhere... did you mean for this to use 1/15 of the fuel and provide double the thrust of the X-2? If so, it almost seems like it needs its own fuel type - concentrated nuclear salt water or something.

Hi folks, The day job has been crazy the last few weeks, but I've found some time to work on the USI patch, and have most of the balance changes planned out now. For the smaller parts I couldn't justify the multiple bay system, so they are getting rather low static values. They are a good start for making quick trips in the Kerbin SOI, but true "Habitation" doesn't really begin until 2.5m parts. @Nertea one of the things I noticed is that SDV-X Cronus seems to be put in the wrong spot in the community tech tree (maybe it's right for the base game, but it's in the wrong path and too early for CTT). I don't see it mentioned in the CTT patch at all so it looks like an oversight. As by far the largest habitation part, I think it makes sense in Advanced Colonization. Just looking at it in comparison to the other parts, it looks like it has 18 bays around the centrifuge ring (actually 12 of those are the size of shanties - 2 bays, but let's not get ridiculous here). plus 3 hostels (3 bays each) worth of living space in the core. 27 bays weigh in at 60 tons by MKS math (with the centrifuge mass penalty) and provide 10 years of habitation to its 16 kerbals all by itself, making it a great part for low part count, long-term expedition ships, and looks a heck of a lot better than strapping atlas kerbitat domes to the ship to reach the same effect. I'll probably make these 9 6-ton bays just so you don't have to click as much to get it set up, but still have enough versatility to balance it with the other parts on your ship. Other notable parts are the PPF-A Dirigible. This 18 kerbal economy module will support its larger crew for almost 2 years at 18 tons. The SDV-2 Atlas also weighs the same amount, but due to its smaller size and rigid construction, can support its 14 kerbals for roughly the same amount of time. Inflatables get a 25% mass discount, but lose the ability to pack in recyclers (they don't have the structure to support heavy machinery). Centrifuges have a 10% mass penalty to cover the motor used to spin them up, and the portion of their volume that seems to be taken by the motor is not included when determining the number of bays they should have. The rigid central core of the Pilgrim, Mercury, and Cronus regains the ability to hold recyclers though. On the Agriculture side, I wanted to avoid modding the mass in case you are not playing with MKS. So, the PXL-F15H gets a boost due to its huge mass. Sporting 4 bays (technically it has the mass for 5, but water is heavy), it can produce up to 211 Supplies per day (enough to feed over 100 kerbals with a good recycler setup) and uniquely can be equipped with Hab-Common with a bonus to the multiplier to represent the morale and health benefits of a more varied diet. Even though the Demeter weighs less than the PXL-F15H, it gets the full 5 bays, to represent its efficiency and size - quantity over quality loses the hab-common - and to give it a benefit for its deeper place in the tech tree. It can produce 264 supplies per day. All agriculture modules can be equipped with volume or effeciency recyclers (but not purifiers - you don't purify next to your poop and fertilizer processing) to represent the ability to grow inedible plants that are excellent CO2->Oxygen producers (e.g. algae), except the G4RD3N, which can only support High Volume Recycling at a lower capacity. It can still replace 5 RT-500s if you choose that bay. Right now this is all in a spreadsheet. I'll get them entered into the patch files hopefully this weekend, create a pull request for @Nertea and post the raw files if anyone wants to test with me. I'll need the most help from anyone who usually plays USI-LS without MKS, and with testing at various stages of career mode to make sure the SSPX parts are balanced at all stages.

I agree. If you are adding life support mid-game, you'd have to bring all your kerbals home and rebuild all your ships, bases, and stations to add Supplies tanks at least, and fertilizer, agroponics, and recyclers for longer term missions. With that said... I've always played with MKS and USI-LS both, so was having trouble differentiating which came from which. I agree with you. Habitation comes from MKS, and Supplies consumption comes from USI-LS. Habitation is where I was seeing the most discrepancy between part mass in USI vs SSPR. Essentially, stock kerbal containers are all "passenger compartments" - seats and that's about it. MKS doesn't assign any additional habitation to these items, so they get the default 1 kerbal month per seat, and stock balances these at about .5 tons per kerbal. On the other hand, true habitation modules get additional habitation bonuses, but are balanced at 1-2 tons per kerbal depending on how big the bonuses are. So I'll only mod the mass in the presence of MKS, to bring the parts roughly in line with the right mass for the amount of habitation they currently enjoy. This will make SSPR the way to use heavy parts to reduce part count on MKS stations. I also agree that providing some variance between the different parts makes sense. So aquaculture/hydroponics/cultivation will get agroponics and recyclers, habitation modules will get habitation and recyclers, science labs will get recyclers, and the Panorama will only get hab-common (similar to how USI mods other cupola-like parts). So the 2 ton bays will look like this: Habitation (based on 1/2 of a Atlas Kerbitat 10m bay): Hab-Common: 6 kerbal-months, 6 crew affected, 1.45 multiplier, 0.44 EC/sec Hab-Quarters: 24 kerbal-months, 0.22 EC/sec MedBay: 24 EC/sec, 24 ColonySupplies/day, rated for 4 kerbals, affects only tourists (including these so you can take care of your homesick kerbals in orbit, just send up colony supplies from surface, won't be available on early parts) Living Module: 6 EC/sec, 6 ColonySupplies/day, rated for 2 kerbals Recyclers (based on 1/4 of a Tundra Kerbitat 3.75 - will scale the percentages lower on smaller parts to keep them from giving you early access to end game recyclers in career): High Efficiency Recycler: 35 EC/sec, 86.5%, affects 1 kerbal Purifier: 138 EC/sec, 201.42 Water/day, 93.25%, affects 4 kerbal (kept at full value because you'll only ever have one of these anywhere) High Volume Recycler: 10 EC/sec, 60%, affects 20 kerbal ( = 20 RT-500 crammed into a single bay) Agroponics: 48 mulch/day, 4.8 fertilizer, 5 EC/sec -> 52.8 supplies (based on scaling Tundra agriculture module to 2 tons) Let me know what you think.

I had another thought along the complete rebalance lines - in order for SSPR to be relevant in the life support minigame it needs to have its own identity. What if we used the multi-bay system like MKS Atlas domes to make SSPR focus on huge configurability? In other words, I can come up with a standard set of bay options that all parts will share, balanced around the concept that 1 bay = 2 tons. Then I'll give all the parts 1 to 10 bays depending on their size, and mod their mass (and price too) to match the number of bays (with extra cost/mass for things like the motor that spins up a centrifuge or a discount for inflatables). Then every part capable of any type of life support could do any of it at your choice - want to devote a floor of the Hostel to agroponics, or put a sleeping bag in the closet of the aquaponics module? Go for it. Then you can go for whatever aesthetic design you like, and use the configurable bays to make sure it meets the mission goals as well. I'll aim for keeping habitation in line with where it already is, but increasing the mass to bring it back in line with MKS balance. This would make the Hostel a 14 ton part with 7 bays, for instance, and the Atlas and Demeter would be 10 bays for 20 tons... I'll start with half of an MKS Atlas 10m dome bay as the target for each bay (since its bays are about 4 tons each). I'd release it in 2 files - one for the new stuff and one to retrofit the old stuff, so you can choose whether to get it for everything or keep your existing ships like they are. @Nertea did you have a specific balance target in mind for the mass and price of the parts? And would you mind if these were modded in the presence of USI-LS?

I'm working on USI-LS definitions for the new parts, but I wanted to get some opinions on balance. The existing patch is not well balanced compared to current MKS numbers. For instance, the Hostel is about 60% the size and 80% the mass of the Tundra Kerbitat (3.75), but it holds 3 times as many kerbals. You would think cramming more kerbals into less space would reduce the habitation bonuses, but where the Tundra Kerbitat has *either* 69 kerbal months *or* 5.42 multiplier for 6 kerbals, the Hostel provides 107 kerbal months to 12 kerbals *AND* a 1.9 multiplier to boot. Another way of looking at it is: it takes 3 kerbitats to suport 12 kerbals for 5 years (1 common and 2 quarters) for a total of about 28 tons. 2 Hostels can support 12 kerbals for 5.5 years for 15 tons. Agriculture is underpowered - the PXL-R4NCH-3R processes 60% of the mulch into supplies that the Tundra Agriculture module does, and has 60% more mass despite its smaller size. Recyclers are a mixed bag. The PXL-F15H provides 5.5% less (a big deal at these efficiency rates, that's 40% more supplies consumption) than the 3.75m Kerbitat, and has 15% more mass. It also doesn't have the Purifier option to use water to increase its recycling rate. As a recycler, the PX-R4NCH-3R provides 9% less recycling than the RT-5000 but is nearly twice the mass. At least their EC consumption is in line. So, there's a few options here: I could keep the new parts in line with the existing SSPR parts, which would make habitation awesome (the habitation dome could support its 6 kerbals for 5 years all by itself, for instance), but the 5m recyclers and agricultural components wouldn't be any better than the Atlas Kerbitat (3.75m). I could rebalance all parts in line with current MKS parts. This could break saves pretty bad, with all your kerbals suddenly turning into homesick tourists. I could rebalance existing SSPR agriculture and recyclers so they are a similar level of overpowered as habitation, then make all the new parts in line with these metrics. SSPR basically becomes USI-LS-lite. I could do #3 just for new parts. I'm leaning towards #3. In particular I don't like the recycler mechanic that encourages you to have one big recycler and spam 1000 RT-500s. I'll probably make the habitation dome and other parts that would take recyclers something like 90% for 25 kerbals, 93.5% with water, similar to the atlas domes, with the mass in line with a third of a 10m dome plus 25 RT-500s baked in. I'll probably also put 2 bays in the 5m parts to make them more configurable. Any other ideas?

Yeah, I'm beginning to see that. I was thinking about some of the realism mod-packs. It looks like I could get something like Kerbalism + KSPI-E + the Planetary Base Systems one, along with Community Tech Tree to give a more realistic progression, but I'd really like the USI MKS stuff too, and it's incompatible with Kerbalism, so I'll probably just pretend days are years as far as the science progress goes. I'm also finding trying different mod sets that the first 10 hours of the game are always basically the same, so I'm probably going to start my game off with a few thousand science and a million bucks (is the currency ever named?), so I can focus on expanding through the Kerbal System and learning future technologies, and not re-enacting the Apollo program and and an odd rover tour of the space center that somehow teaches me how to build rockets and spaceplanes. Right now I found Galaxies Unbound gets me part of the way there (if I try really hard not to look at the published map in detail, and use ResearchBodies to hide it in game), so this isn't a front-burner project at the moment. But I've been interested in procedural landscape generation since college (don't ask how long ago that was), so I will work on this project even if it isn't ready until KSP 2

Ok, so it looks like no one is just watching this thread waiting for an update, and I'm leaning more towards the web-based Galaxy Generator app, so be on the lookout for an app likely called "Galaxy Generator" (never was good with naming things) that is "inspired by" this and redblobgames. (I'll likely use a good bit of the research seanth has put into things like magnitude and visibility from Kerbin, but will not directly port the source code from bas to js). I'll be targetting 2 groups with this app: players that want to generate a fully random galaxy with compelling worlds to explore, without revealing any of its secrets until they are able to see, probe, and explore it in game. Kopernicus mod developers that want to procedurally generate a galaxy, system, or planet, then drill down to each body, re-roll it until they generate one they like, then edit it to their liking before exporting the GameData zip. Obviously the first will be easier to implement, so expect to see it first, followed by a galaxy editor, system editor, and eventually a planet editor. I'll post a new thread as soon as I have something worth showing, but I'll keep an eye on this thread to see if anyone is interested in me publishing the work to make this mod mostly compatible with 1.11 (it loads but there's still some errors in the logs). In any case, I'll build something that's at a minimum compatible with KSPI-E, TAC-LS, the USI mods, and at least the Nuclear Pulse drive and other sub-light interstellar engines. I'll have to see how easy it is to support the various warp drive mods, but the game I want to play involves building colony ships that there is no feasible way to fit a warp bubble around without consuming all the energy in the universe, so I'm not very invested in that topic. You can always cheat yourself into orbit if you want to fake a warp drive.