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Lord Aurelius

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  1. Lord Aurelius
    @5thHorseman, Yemo Thanks for the table tips for the signature, I've got it sorted out now. Also, FreeThinker posted some code for a basic microgravity kerbal health experiment for the hitchhiker on the stock science tweaks thread that looks like a nice addition.
  2. Lord Aurelius
    Added a new telemetry report for probes. It doesn't give much science, but it does allow you to complete "transmit science from X" contracts with just a probe core. Code is in OP.
  3. Lord Aurelius
    I got a probe core telemetry science experiment working. I've updated my science tweaks mod with the code, link is in my signature. Edit: And the more advanced features of this forum still elude me. How do I get my signature picture to float on the side instead of being stuck inline with text?
  4. Lord Aurelius
    @zilfondel The new situations give normal science payouts, i.e. the barometer has a base science value (12) and every situation has its own science multiplier so it scales exactly the same way the other experiments do. @FreeThinker Thanks for the tip, I'll mention it in the OP.
  5. Lord Aurelius
    I hacked together a config file that enables barometer experiments for InSpaceLow situations with appropriate messages for all bodies. Surprisingly, Squad actually wrote a bunch of science messages for the barometer for the airless bodies but never used them. They've been enabled now. This doesn't change any of the existing experiments, all it does is enable a few new situations so it shouldn't break anything. For anyone who is interested: Barometer Science Tweaks
  6. Lord Aurelius
    Note: This mod was formerly known as Barometer Science Tweaks, but now it covers a bit more than that so now I'm calling it Stock Science Tweaks. This mod consists of several independent experiments and tweaks, each in its own self-contained config file or folder. If you don't want to play with all of them, simply delete the components you don't want. Ever since playing Better than Starting Manned, I've been annoyed that barometers ceased to function entirely outside atmospheres, making them entirely useless for getting science from airless bodies. The thing is, reading 0 pressure is still a perfectly valid science point. How else would you know that a body is airless? Also, it seemed kind of silly that there is no equivalent to crew reports for probes, so I (likely along with many other players) ended up slapping a thermometer on a satellite just to be able to do the science from space contracts. Realistically, a lot of information can be gained simply from a spacecraft's telemetry, and I've seen a few other mods implement a telemetry style experiment, but they either had other dependencies or added other things I didn't really want so I figured I would create a very simple one that only requires module manager. The latest update also includes a modified Communotron 16 to represent a drill that can take surface samples so you don't have to always send kerbals, I always thought it was silly that kerbals couldn't build probes that could see what the surface of a planet is made of when we have several rovers on Mars that are perfectly capable of doing that. Again, this type of experiment is represented in other mods but not in a simple, stock-friendly way (at least that I've seen). I've also integrated Capt Robau's microgravity experiment as suggested by Free Thinker to make the hitchhiker more useful. As of 1.0, the barometer file is obsolete but it still works if you happen to like my implementation better than stock. Credits: FlowerChild for the initial concept for the barometer as seen in BTSM, CrowdSourcedScience for a MM template file that I completely rewrote, Squad for some of the science messages. Starwaster for his probe science configs that I've based mine on. Edit: Also Capt. Robau and zekew11 for the Science Revisited Revisited mod, which I've borrowed several tweaks and an experiment from. License: Creative Commons for the situation reports (at least the ones I wrote, there's a few from Squad I've repurposed, they're noted in the barometer experiment file). The other parts are either MM configs or Squad-style experiment definitions which you can shamelessly copy for your own experiments (i.e. I don't care what you do with them, I copied them myself from other examples). To use this mod, download the zip and copy the file into your Gamedata folder. If you don't want all the experiments, delete the files for the ones you don't want from the StockScienceTweaks folder. Current Version: 0.4 Changelog: 0.4 Enabled biomes for barometer when flying low, added some new situation reports for the telemetry experiment, added Crew and EVA report switch, added Capt Robau's microgravity experiment for the hitchhiker. 0.3 Rescaled drill and added a custom texture to differentiate it from the antenna. 0.2 Added a new drill part (copied from communotron 16) that can do the stock surface sample experiment so you don't have to always use kerbals. 0.1 Initial release with barometer tweaks and probe report experiment DOWNLOAD
  7. Lord Aurelius
    When your rocket casts a shadow over the water at noon, despite being centered on the launchpad. When you NEED scientific notation to make the dV numbers fit in the MechJeb window. When you confuse your rocket's part count with the payout for the contract you're trying to fulfill. When your rocket's escape pod has enough seats for all of Kerbalkind (just in case).
  8. Lord Aurelius
    @Yemo I wasn't trying to propose a new experiment type for the barometer, I was more thinking of simply defining the low space situation as a valid place for the barometer to do experiments (along with the surface of airless bodies) with appropriate science messages. Later today I'll take a look to see if I can quickly hack something together.
  9. Lord Aurelius
    @Yemo Sounds good, I like your extended plan for SETI and I'm glad to see that the core is almost done. The only other thing I can think of suggesting that might fit in the core is a mod that tweaks the stock science experiments, i.e. I always thought it was silly that the scientists at KSP seem to magically know that certain bodies are airless, and where the boundaries of their atmospheres are with space and so disable the barometer in those settings (note: this isn't necessarily my idea, BTSM does this and after playing it I've been annoyed with the stock science experiments ever since). Some kind of radiation experiment would be nice as well, I think FASA has a Geiger counter part with an appropriate experiment definition that would work well. Also, were you still considering adding a basic telemetry experiment to the probes?
  10. Lord Aurelius
    @Yemo As always, thanks again for making this amazing mod and for all the attention to detail (like with those decoupler parts) to make everything work together nicely. I'm sure you've got plenty to keep you busy, but I found a few more mods that looked interesting: Mk2 Essentials Adds a few new parts (like decouplers and a jet engine) that fit the Mk2 stack TurboNisuReloaded Adds a few interesting structural parts that can't be duplicated with procedural parts, like a triangular plate and some new girder segments Hangar Unloads a vessel and stores it in a hangar part and loads it again when taken out, i.e. doesn't count towards part limit, improves performance since parts are unloaded. Size/weight are taken into account so you can only store what would actually fit inside and still have the appropriate weight. Hangar Extender For building those excessively large rockets that don't fit in the VAB
  11. Lord Aurelius
    I got around the RAM limit by using -force-opengl, I don't like how blurry the textures look after ATM so I avoid using it if I can. It freed up enough RAM to be able to also use a few graphics mods like EVE and texture replacer while still being stable.
  12. Lord Aurelius
    Nice, didn't realize Karbonite was scheduled for this update (on top of the whole EC rebalance and everything else), I'll have to play around with those parts, I especially like the propfan engine (on a side note, Karbonite is still listed in the development section). Edit: The Probodyne Rovemate looks like it got missed in the EC rebalance, it still only holds 25EC. As an aside, there's a mod here that has a bunch of variants of this part with some interesting configs. It also makes it a probe core, which I actually like the idea of, especially since it's already listed in the game as a Probodyne.
  13. Lord Aurelius
    Another thing I just remembered that I forgot to ask earlier: The recent updates for Nightingale's contract configurator and contract packs now allow for dynamic contracts based on the game variables (like planet size) instead of having to hardcode values so they can be used with rescales without breaking, would it be possible at some point to do the same with the SETI contracts? Right now the only contracts that I can think of that might have an issue are the initial altitude contracts.
  14. Lord Aurelius
    I do like the idea of a system that uses fuel cells/elektrons as a kind of extended battery arrangement, the energy density would be much higher than batteries alone. I might have to give kOS a try again, although I seem to remember that it was a pretty demanding mod (i.e. tended to slow the game down) the last time I used it (which was quite awhile ago), has it improved in recent versions?
  15. Lord Aurelius
    That particular setting wouldn't be buried in a SETI config file though, it would be changed via overwriting the remotetech config with Yemo's file which has simply made that change already, nothing is stopping anyone from changing it back, or choosing not to download the optional file. Part of balancing is providing sensible defaults, and many of the players who are interested in SETI appreciate the gameplay centric approach that also takes realism into account. The last few pages have been talking about how to rebalance the EC system and remotetech because they weren't particularly well balanced, especially compared to the rest of SETI. As far as deciding how KSP is should be played vs rebalance, balancing is a difficult task and is very much intertwined with how the game is played. In fact, the way you play the game is heavily dependent on balance (unless you're simply building things for aesthetics) so we have to talk about how we want to play the game to make sure that the balance reflects that and doesn't create chokepoints where a player can easily get stuck without the parts they need, or give the player useless/overpowered parts. If you're main issue is with the proposed EC rebalance, the stock EC system is not consistent at all and we're trying to bring a sensible balance to the system, and remotetech is kind of a tangent off that since it's a popular mod that is heavily tied to the whole EC system and also happens to need its own rebalance.
  16. Lord Aurelius
    @Revenant503 What is SETI doing that's limiting choices? Core SETI only has a few required mods, and it has a ton of completely optional (but fully supported and balanced) mods that add a tremendous amount of new choices when building a craft. If you're worried about remotetech limiting choices, it's not a required mod, you don't have to install it if you don't like it. I've played BTSM and I agree that it's quite limiting (which is why I stopped playing it), SETI is basically the opposite and due to procedural parts gives a lot more choices than stock, especially with the supported parts mods that add a lot more variety for things like engines that were pretty limited in stock. As far as adding a config file download, Yemo had to do a similar thing with TAC life support because of the way the mod is structured where he can't edit the config file directly with module manager. Also, all the files in SETI are easily edited text files, there aren't any hardcoded plugins (like BTSM), so if something isn't quite what you want it's relatively easy to simply change the config. I've done that a couple of times on my SETI install with things like adding SAS to the early probe core before SETI did it, and also with my own remotetech config.
  17. Lord Aurelius
    @SVM420 I hadn't seen that appendix before, I just saw that root mode took the ranges of both antennas into account when calculating the effective range (which is much more realistic) and enabled it. A 0.5 range multiplier would help balance it, it looks like it changes things so that to achieve the stated max range you have to use two identical antennas, while still providing a nice boost to ranges when you use a long range antenna with a short range one, so when you update your comsats so you can send your existing probes farther out. The MultipleAntennaRangeMultiplier will probably need some tweaking, if you set it to 1 it looks like it basically adds the omni ranges, I just randomly picked 0.5 since it was in the middle so I would get some boost by using multiple antennas without being ridiculous. It seems to work pretty well on my comsats with 4 Communotron 16's since it doubles the omni range.
  18. Lord Aurelius
    @Svm420 Here's the contents of my config file. If you want more information, check out the remotetech online documentation (there's a link on the remotetech thread). Note that this is with remotetech XF, which adds the ControlAntennaWithoutConnection flag. Disclaimer: As Yemo said, these settings are probably a bit OP for the current antenna ranges, with the mulitpleAntennaRangeMultiplier you can spam the Communotron 16's to get pretty good omni range and with root mode you'll probably only need dishes on the comsats, not on the probes themselves until you get quite a ways out from Kerbin. I don't mind too much, I always liked the idea of remotetech but found the default settings to be a bit too punishing and these settings make it much less annoying while still adding the realism of building a comm network. (Not sure how to do the spoiler thing, so here's a code section) RemoteTechSettings { ConsumptionMultiplier = 0.5 RangeMultiplier = 1 ActiveVesselGuid = 35b89a0d664c43c6bec8d0840afc97b2 SpeedOfLight = 3E+08 MapFilter = Omni, Dish, Path EnableSignalDelay = False RangeModelType = Root MultipleAntennaMultiplier = 0.5 ThrottleTimeWarp = True HideGroundStationsBehindBody = False DishConnectionColor = 0.9960784,0.7019608,0.03137255,1 OmniConnectionColor = 0.5529412,0.5176471,0.4078431,1 ActiveConnectionColor = 0.6588235,1,0.01568628,1 ControlAntennaWithoutConnection = True GroundStations { STATION { Guid = 5105f5a9-d628-41c6-ad4b-21154e8fc488 Name = Mission Control Latitude = -0.131331503391266 Longitude = -74.594841003418 Height = 75 Body = 1 MarkColor = 0.996078,0,0,1 Antennas { ANTENNA { Omni = 7.5E+07 } } } } } Edit: You can also add more ground stations easily by just adding more entries to the ground stations section, I did that with an old realism overhaul install that also added a bunch of new launch sites and just added ground stations at the new coordinates.
  19. Lord Aurelius
    I second (third?) the 400Gm tracking station antenna, those are some good sized dishes there, much bigger than anything available to put in space at this point. If you're going to distribute a RemoteTech config file, would you also consider enabling root mode by default (i.e. a dish pointed at an omni will have an effective range somewhere in between the omni and the dish, not just limited to the omni range) and also the multiple antenna multiplier so we can use antenna arrays to increase range? I've done those on my RemoteTech config and I've been liking the results.
  20. Lord Aurelius
    @Yemo Ok, I see your logic, and yes the remotetech folding antenna is enormous (although I still like my giant satellite dishes). What might that dual use be, some kind of radio telescope experiment? For a smaller antenna to fill in the Joolian system gap, maybe you could consider reincorporating the old stock Communotron 88-88, if I remember correctly it's about half the size of the new model when unfolded. The KHI mod has all the old stock parts. And while searching for that previous link, stumbled across this again: KSPX. Might have a few useful parts that haven't been addressed by the stockalike mods we already have in SETI.
  21. Lord Aurelius
    @Yemo I like the proposed antenna changes, the ridiculous weight of the remotetech dishes has been bugging me for awhile. The reason I suggested a rescale for some of the dishes is that the giant remotetech folding antenna doesn't really have a fixed dish counterpart (at least not one that looks the part), stat wise the CommTech-1 is the closest but it is much smaller, around the same size as the KR-14. Rather than having two dishes that are more or less the same size, having one be a very large fixed dish (doesn't matter if it doesn't fit in a cargo bay, we have procedural fairings) would give a little diversity and could provide a dish for a 2.5m stack for very large comsats. The range could also be increased even more, so that players using something like the Outer Planets mod would have an appropriately large dish to put on comsats/interplanetary vessels. Also, large ground satellite arrays.
  22. Lord Aurelius
    I'll start a new sandbox game and build a bunch of random test craft to check out all the new parts and systems. Then I'll check out the tutorials, and then start a new career to test out that portion of the game.
  23. Lord Aurelius
    Nice, glad to see that the EC system is getting properly rebalanced. Also, while you're adjusting the configs for the remotetech antennas, could you consider a quick and dirty rebalance for the antennas? Right now there isn't really any consistency, especially with the weights, the stock antennas weigh basically nothing (DTS-M1 only weighs .03 tons with a range of 50Mm), but the remotetech antennas are quite heavy (.5 tons for the KR-7, with a range of 90Mm) and is unlocked later in the tech tree. The remotetech antennas aren't really balanced against each other either, the KR-8 is the heaviest antenna but only has mediocre range, and two dishes (Reflectron KR-14 and CommTech-1) have the same weight but the KR-14 is worse in every way. It would seem to me that the fixed dish antennas should be much lighter than they are currently (but still heavier than the folding antennas) and much cheaper, available sooner, and possibly also more efficient and with better range. Some of the fixed antennas could also be rescaled to different sizes, so for example we can have a 2.5m fixed antenna (current largest is for a 1.25m stack, and we have about 4 fixed dishes for that size at the moment). Edit: Found this little bit of information on the weight of dishes, might be useful when it comes time for a full rebalance [link] According to that link, a 5m dish should only weigh around 50Kg. Edit: My quick and dirty proposal: (parenthesis indicate intended use for antennas) CommTech EXP-VR-2T (for probes with mini landers, think Cassini/Huygens) Looks decent enough for now, no changes CommTech-1 (for large comsats in Kerbin orbit, for endgame missions to Jool/Eeloo) Rescale to fit on a 2.5m stack, reduce weight to 0.3 (the extra weight from above can be due to heavier gauge aluminum, radio equipment, etc), increase range to 500Gm, at some point maybe add a radio telescope science experiment Communotron 16 (early comsats, Kerbin orbit) No changes for now Communotron 32 (later comsats) No changes for now Communotron 88-88 (for probes out to Moho/Dres when paired with a KR-14 comsat around Kerbin, range out to Eve/Duna before then) Increase cost significantly DTS-M1 (for probes out to Minmus, or for within the Jool system when used with a relay) Move later in the tech tree (should be around the same time as folding solar panels), increase cost Reflectron DP-10 (LKO/landers/upper stages) No changes for now Reflectron GX-128 (for Jool/Eeloo probes/relays) Reduce weight to 0.15 Reflectron KR-14 (for Moho/Dres comsats) Reduce weight to 0.15, increase cost, rescale to 1.875m Reflectron KR-7 (for Minmus comsats) Reduce weight to 0.05 Reflectron KR-8 (for Eve/Duna comsats) Reduce weight to 0.1, dramatically increase efficiency
  24. Lord Aurelius
    Since when has KSP supported Steam cloud? Is a new feature for 1.0 (which would be awesome)?
  25. Lord Aurelius
    More reason to use the adapters is always good, I enjoy building a good engine cluster. I've resorted to building excessively large rockets (1,000 tons to LKO) to have an excuse to use a cluster.
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