PolecatEZ

I did figure out how to make Kerbin and Gael a binary system finally - got my answer reading sciency stuff actually, and it basically merges everything else into one nice system...oh well I tried GPP as secondary, but the contract system got stuck wanting my 3rd step in the space program to mine ore on Iota and explore Ciro...at my current tech level it was a 1000 year trip. So I got the idea to move things a little closer, and then realized without some heavy re-arrangement it would get too crowded.

I'll work on it tonight, I got a little side-tracked trying to turn Kerbin-Gael into a binary planetary system. It works, but it basically screws up Kerbin's reference points when you actually launch from there, so I think I'll need to dig into Kopernicus a little deeper for a fix. Shelfing it for now. Add-ons planned for the MKS patch: - Tethering added to cradles and command pods. Just one tether needs to be somewhere in the whole colony, so it doesn't need spammed on everything. - Pioneering function added to all command pods. (Kolony Rewards check) - Logistics control function added to larger command pods (Orbital Logistics). - Empty Machinery/Material Kit resources added where appropriate - Aquaculture will get advanced function for making organics/fertilizer. - Switch between Hab and Living Space function on Kerbitat pods. - I'm balancing based on ball-parking between mass and kerbal crew count. The above will get Kolonies "mid-level functional". If I can figure out how to tack on decal transforms, I can patch in variants for the parts that have appropriate external labeling and full functions for other pods - workshop, medical center, etc. It might require building an entire part file for each though, which is beyond the scope of patching. ------ Proceeding with the conversion. Slapped together 2 parts made from the 3.75 that should replicate the functions of the missing Assembler/Refinery combo. Was going to make the Eclair into an inflatable workshop using Ranger Inflatable values, and discovered the Ranger Workshop was completely OP compared to anything else...so no production for him! Mwahaha. Everything else is done, I'm just doing a balance pass right now and then I'll upload the final version to the Git. If Nertea wants to do some cool models (we discussed transform labels on existing ones also) instead of my hack jobs, that would be a bonus. Current Patch notes for MKS Compatibility (in testing): Aquaculture Unit has Advanced Agroponics Unit functionality - Everything in it requires Farmers (Fish Farmers!) 4 Configurable fish tanks allow it to produce food from Fertilizer and Dirt/Water or Substrate/Water Or produce Organics from Dirt or Substrate Or simply be nice to look at (adds to hab timer) Greenhouse Units have a Composter that increases Aquaculture's efficiency. Requires Biologists. Smaller inflatable rings have composting toilets. Everybody poops better in artificial gravity. The Asylum, Pilgrim, and Mercury have MedBay function - Eats colony supplies at a rapid rate to cure "Tourists", Medics very useful there. The Hostel and Mercury have long term colony functions - Eats ColonySupplies to push back hab timers over the whole colony. Airlocks now let your Engineers or Mechanics perform automatic maintenance if you assign them to it. Ground Tethers lock your base solidly in place on the ground. You only need to click it once for the whole colony. Command Modules can now check for Kolony Rewards and participate in Logistics. Quartermasters helpful. Modules contribute to Kolony rewards and efficiency percentages as appropriate. Two extra parts fill in the gaps for the production chain (Deluxe Refinery and Assembly Plant), you must use the smelters and refineries for other tasks. These are fused together hack jobs and hopefully we can get some better models in the far future. Smaller inflatables got a workshop efficiency module. Highly recommend bringing one because default converter values suck. * You will need to use the MKS processors, drills, and Ranger packs (the side mounts) for some things - fuel, fertilizer, and dirt sifting. * You should not have any need for Pioneer, Tundra, or Caribou basic parts. * Please use Near Future Atomic/Nuclear/Solar/Heat stuff for power distribution needs. From Previous version * Inflatables and Deployables use MaterialKits and (unlike MKS parts) can be deployed internally by anyone. * Station cores can distribute power and resources * Several parts have training academy functionality

I got a whole laundry list of MKS things I added to that patch. Varying degree of colony controls for the command pods and the tether system. Tomorrow I'm going to take a crack at giving the aquaculture pod some MKS function also...that one might be more complicated. I'm trying to figure out a way to eliminate using the Tundra and Pioneer modules entirely and just use the parts from this pack, at least for the station parts.

Did about 10 rescue contracts in the last few hours, so far nobody has popped in with an MKS pod of any kind.

Made a copy of my save to test. It simply won't load any planets you added on and any bases on any planet/moon at all will be poofed. I had a ship in orbit of Kerbin that was fine, but my Mun base was toast.

I found that if you delete everything in the entire UniversalStorage folder except for the science part (left nested), everything works just fine. The part files for the Dmagic parts are only calling on that one model.mu file. There may be a way to strip the casing, but I can't remember if that's a thing. It fits just fine in the US2 cores and covers. Leave only this folder intact, you can freely delete all else: GameData\UniversalStorage\Parts\US_1M110_Wedge_ScienceBay I'm curious if you make an MM script to delete the call for that file in each of the dmagic parts if it will work the same, but without the casing. It might be a better solution for backwards compatibility when they do update the build. I think the casing is what gives it collision though and the ability to be interacted - gonna test.

I'm having the exact same issue on my fresh start game. It continuously kidnaps the Bob, Bill, Jeb, and Valentina Gaelan kerbals and makes me take them on tourist runs or rescue them and add them again to my roster. They'll stay there for a few days, and then when a new string of contracts is generated, they get kidnapped again. I did notice something funny in that in the contracts it will say those 4 kerbals' full names (Jebediah Gaelan, for example) where for everyone else that's generated normally it just uses their first name. May have something to do with some kind of hard-wiring. I tried a workaround by messing with the renaming file and save file to switch those 4 to being "Kerman" (doing a full find and replace), but it simply then generates 4 new Bill/Bob/Jeb/Valentina Gaelans and throws them in the mix. Now all 8 of them are in the cycle of getting randomly kidnapped and turned into tourists or forcibly marooned in space to be rescued again. The game keeps getting more and more confused (having 2 kerbals with the same first name is bad, mmmkay?) when one of them is kidnapped. I think I just need to figure out who to kill to stop the madness. I actually like having the dev kerbals in the game, but I also like the original 4. ---- Ok, didn't take long, but killing off the doppelgangers seems to have worked. I got a few black marks from pushing tourists and rescuees out of airlocks and into the atmosphere naked, but so far so good. The contractors started generating other random kerbals to be rescued now.

Its an easy workaround, just set the home altitude in USI for 100km or so, and never use this mod to launch manned missions above that. Once the Kerbals change orbit above whatever you set, they're just fine.

If you want to get even more confused, if you bought your game on Steam you don't even have ownership rights. 90% of that EULA doesn't apply to you at all, but to the license holder...which is Steam/Valve. They allow you to use the software on a strictly subscription basis on their own terms. Any argument as to the fitness of the EULA is a moot point, as it doesn't apply to most people here and never will. Quite literally it is much ado about nothing. There are a few people that the EULA may apply to, ones especially that bought PS4 versions, for example, or bought license keys outside or before Steam purchase was a thing. The vast majority of players though straight up put it in their Steam cart and bought it there, meaning they have zero interest in this troll fest.

I did my first 2000 hours as a die-hard stock purist. After a while, you will break bad. I still don't like my mods too "cheaty" or far from the stock feel, but that doesn't seem to limit the variety overly much.

I'm about to hook this up again after being gone for many months, but from what I can remember you need to be in control of the same root vessel the entire time its recording. For "non-standard" launch profiles like you describe, you just need to creatively work around that limitation. So far I haven't seen anything else quite like this, and its a really fun challenge to see how cheap yet how big you can get something to a certain orbiting altitude. I'm really surprised this isn't more popular.

KSPedia has it, albeit it takes some reading. Another way is to just hop in the VAB and look at the labels on the part for each converter type.

Fair warning...the permanent tourist bug is back. I'll log a Github issue about it. Basically be careful on rescue missions where the stranded kerbal is in a Ranger part with no electric generation ability. What's new is that they don't act 100% like tourists...you can still EVA with them and even collect data and plant flags (and they collect FF ribbons and experience), but they have no other skills.

I killed Jeb right out of the gate due to EC wonkiness, though I think its TAC that killed him before I switched to USI. I just got a message "ship out of power" and then dead kerbal. Since I turned off death, this one did turn 6 of my kerbals into permanent tourists, but that was fixed a patch or two back. I didn't know that Thelma/Louising them would be such a big rep hit They hit the Mun going about 2600m/s...

Most parts in the MKS pack have it. Maybe it doesn't exist if you're using just pure Konstruction with nothing else. The thermal exchange pack is the smallest thing to have it that I can remember.

TBH I haven't found a use at all for "Colonization Modules", and only rare edge cases where medical modules are useful in any way. If you're moving in the extra parts needed for a Colony Supplies chain, you might as well just bring in more habs (inflatable or not) to bump the hab times to outrageous amounts...with or without the 50 year bonus...then its just a matter of waiting a few years for the 500% colony research where it all becomes irrelevant. 3 to 5 basic chains are all that are needed to max out the base - "Supplies" recycling (Agroponics), "Fertilizer/Supplies" fresh production, and Machinery, with some excess Material Kit, Uranium, and Specialized parts production for tweaking once in a while. All of that to support about 30 colonists can be easily landed in a single go. In most cases, you will need at least one other mining outpost on the planet that can support 2-3 colonists (Quartermaster and 1 or 2 Miners), but that part is easy as well. Given that, I haven't found a real use for Scouts and Medics as a profession. From a game design perspective, the "end game" is easily reached. ---- Your reply came in while I was typing this...and that was going to be the first suggestion - more/different functionality for those two things. The other is some kind of end-game challenge, such as eventual depletion of resources in an area that forces you to move on or found/move your miners around. Maybe a targeted asteroid strike would shake thing up a bit Then again, I play too much Rimworld also...

Something is up with the price calculations. A fully made MKS base, with reactors and full resources, is about 2 million credits in the VAB. If I drain out all the resources, then make a new ship and create a box with that same (empty) base...the price doubles to about 4 million credits.

Set the tether before you do anything crazy, it tends to help a bit keeping things from flying away. For the cradles, the legs do move in fits and jerks, just move them 2-3 points at a time and it avoids most issues. My problem with the cradles is they tend to pop off completely at random during even gentle landings...like 1 in 6 cradles will get knocked off mysteriously.

I think past 5m you're looking at some massive torque needed and reaction wheels become a little unrealistic. Vernor engines, placed in pairs fore and aft work great though and seem to be very efficient.

I remember vaguely it was mentioned by RD somewhere, but I didn't see it in the patch notes. I do know it works.

These are my second bases for each of these moons, so I basically had a massive checklist I ticked off to make sure nothing was forgotten. My first bases were...not efficient at all. As for massive hab rings, I like to leave these at "fire and forget" so I aim for the 50 year permanency bonus right out of the gate. If you also dedicate a few large tanks to supplies - and turn off planetary logistics for all but one - you can effectively ignore your base for a year or two at a time. This means I'm not spending long minutes loading into the lag fest(s) every time I timewarp an interplanetary mission. Check in, check the rewards, top off the supply tanks, check out. For the machinery issue, don't leave machinery on planetary logistics at all while your machinery chain is running. This means that all machinery deposits will fill in all the parts slowly without any intervention.

For my second Minmus base I just dropped everything in modules and hooked them up where they landed. The central tower went down first, and then I tried to flag LZ's surrounding it...which worked out more or less with a few minor mishaps. The problem is that this turns into a major lag fest that's nearly impossible to visit, even on my super beef machine. So for the Mun base I used a different approach with the help of SpaceY, just build the sucker entirely self-contained and drop it in one go. It uses about half the parts as a piecemeal base. Another pro-tip is to use a passenger compartment to keep most of your kerbals in one place. Very few functions require a kerbal to be in a specific part (training, medical). I would even go so far as to say drop the base, and then hook up a lander with just the kerbals later so you can rotate them out easily.

Geologists in the context of exploration or mineral exploitation would be "prospectors" or "surveyors". In digging around I also see reference to "geophysicists".

I only have that issue if symmetry settings are not zeroed out completely when I try to stack. Sometimes the symmetry gets stuck and you basically need to delete the part you're holding, then zero it out, then grab the part fresh from the catalog. If that still doesn't work, save the craft, exit the VAB/SPH, and then re-enter and reload the craft.

This happens to me as well, and can happen with "Supplies" calculations in the VAB. Adding it all up by hand, you'll see that it does calculate wrong in the VAB, sometimes not properly counting the amount of Kerbals you add to a craft. This has lead to quite a few scrapped missions for me as I see once my Jool mission gets to space, that I actually don't have the LS or supplies to get there. Your "post-launch" stats will be the accurate ones if you take the time to calculate it by hand.