Edminster

You could name it after one of the other major currencies of the Old West, the Peso. Kerbalize it and you get Keso, which works as a multi-layered pun (Chile con queso, the currency angle, moons made of cheese) and gives you the option of extending some of the simpler life support mods with an alternate foodsource.

Exactly! I've been noodling over a coda to the story at like a boardroom, where I was going to use the old line about the real money being in shovels, but I'm glad I don't have to take up more of this thread with my poorly-written story. I'm also super duper glad that it's obviously about the First Pioneer; originally I was going to write about an addle-pated old coot using these nifty branded gizmos but I couldn't get it to feel anything close to authentic. (in case you could not tell, I am looking forward to this mod to a ridiculous extent)

I'm really glad you like it! I had a blast writing it, and it feels great to know the person who inspired it got a kick out of it. I absolutely love the idea of a mega-valuable resource; when I finally unlocked the stock mining gear and ran the numbers I was supremely disappointed that I couldn't turn any meaningful profit from off-Kerbin mining. Sometimes you just want to ignore the contracts and remain financially solvent, you know? For balance reasons I understand why Squad implemented it the way they did (if you can mine and refine for beaucoup bucks right next to the launchpad, contract money is meaningless), but still. -------- "And I am quoting Gene here, 'Kestrel underwent RUD, Daphtris unhurt but requests ASAP support team' which by the way suuuuper messed up I hear it from CAPCOM and not, you know, from you." "Yeah Izzy I know but you were already over the horizon and besides, the service module isn't designed to land on the-" "Don't you tell me what I can or cannot land, Dee. I'm a Pilot, and I will land anything I damn well please." Daphtris has no response, but does pointedly stare at the crumpled service module resting on its side fifty meters from her own wrecked lander. "Okay, so maybe it would have gone better if it had some legs, but you have to admit apart from the cracked fuel tank and crushed bell I did a damn sight better than you," Isarigh concludes. Knowing there is no way she could win this argument, Daph shrugs and asks, "Everything I left behind still in there?" Thankfully her lucky wrench hadn't been jostled loose from the velcro pad, but the same could not be said of her power drill. Daphtris mumbles a few expletives as she attempts to navigate through a room designed without gravity in mind, but stops short as a foot catches in the handle to the snack drawer. A terrible question strikes her. Did they have enough for two people to continue on while the rescue ships were en route? She grabs a grease pencil and scribbles some figures on the wall. Even if they were to skip a meal each day, there wasn't quite enough to stretch it. Out of nowhere a second, darker thought hits. Do we have enough electricity to last the night? That carpet of solars she made would be utterly worthless come sundown. With a bit of struggle, she extricates herself from the service module. "Hey Izzy?" she calls, "Can you help me carry some stuff?" "Could you explain all of this, please?" Isarigh stands bewildered amid the piles of erstwhile engine parts, RCS gear, and what had been the twin to the Kestrel's antenna but was now... something else entirely. Her little sister had always been interested in how things work, routinely taking apart the toys she received on birthdays and holidays, but this was on a completely different level. "It's easy, Iz. You know how the alternator works, right? This," she gestures at one cobbled-together mass, "is the exact same thing, but instead of siphoning off exhaust from the rocket I've plugged it into the monopropellant system. It's not a lot of power, but it'll get us through the next few nights assuming it holds." Daphtris is smiling, the hours of grueling reconfiguration apparently paying off. "Yeah okay, but what's all that stuff?" Izzy inquires, slightly more confused than before. She gestures vaguely at the pipe attached to the exit port of the alternator, which leads to a squat box covered with what had been the cockpit window of the service module. It is nearly impossible to make out the contents as the interior is coated in condensation, but Isarigh puts her helmet to the glass and tries anyway. "Oh! Uh, remember how I lied about there being enough food to last until rescue?" "You WHAT??!" Iz bolts upright, almost toppling backwards in the low gravity. "No it's okay, this is how I fixed that!" Daph frantically backpedals. "The exhaust from the monoprop is basically just steam, and I'm using the excess to heat and water a miniature hydroponics setup like we had in our dorm room closet. Only major difference is this one's germinating those seeds you're always munching on." Suspicious of the explanation the older sister asks, "So how are you going to keep it growing at night? The docking guidance lamp got smashed when I landed." "That's what I needed your antenna for!" Daphtris beams. "I turned it into a light bulb on a stick." Isarigh nods slowly, inwardly convinced that her sister has gone completely off her rocker from the stress. "Soooo... where's the bulb?" "No imagination at all, I swear!" exclaims Dee. "The bulb isn't just there to stop you from poking your fingers into white-hot metal. It's there to keep the filament in vacuum, so it doesn't immediately burn out. This," she gesticulates wildly at nothing in particular, "is basically vacuum, so we don't need it. Just, you know, don't poke it and it'll be fine."

Have you given any further thought to the Tech Tree question? It seems to me this whole concept synergizes best with other mods if unlocked as early as possible, before resource-scanning proper is even in the equation. This way prospecting missions can start that much closer to edge of possibility and grasp-exceeding reach as befitting the pioneer spirit. ---- Half-mad, the intrepid explorer curses the spit-and-balingwire sensor suite cobbled together from the remains of her crew cabin. Eight meters a second sounded perfectly fine to her, after all those legs were rated for a thirty kilometer per hour collision. Sure, the manufacturer warned against exposing it to temperature extremes but it couldn't possibly be the problem; space has no temperature after all. *BDEEDLE-EEP* Finally! Some good news. That spiraling search pattern taught back in Skouts finally came in handy. She peers at the cracked LED screen, and sighs a slightly-overdramatic sigh. Maybe if she had applied herself a bit more in class she'd be a better Engineer, or maybe if she had switched to Pilot school the landing would have been smoother, or maybe, maybe, maybe... *BWOoop* Ugh. She carefully unplugs it from her suit and whaps the device against the ground a couple times. 'Percussive maintenance' the instructor called it. She thought of it as 'teaching misbehaving technology a lesson'. Either way the screen flickers back to life, but the numbers don't look how they used to. It's not like it really matters all that much; the screen's only good for the back half of the readout since her helmet slammed into it during the crash. Ah well, at least this place has numbers at all. She shuffles back to the wreckage, and pulls hard on the solar panels; one by one they pop off until she has the world's worst dinner service stacked in her arms. Reaching deep under the control panel she fishes out the last few wires that didn't make it into that junk heap of a sensor. Next is the telescoping antenna, which doesn't so much pop off as succumb to metal fatigue from furiously bending it to and fro. Should have packed better, she berates herself on the slow walk back to where she left the sensor. A few moments of finagling (and one totally busted panel) and she manages to get a cross between a solar array and a welcome mat operating nicely. The dead panel becomes the reflector for the increasingly bedraggled antenna. She reaches into her pack, thankful that it of all things survived unscathed, and withdraws the drill assembly. "Might as well see what we've got" she mutters, preparing herself for the long, awkward conversation with Mission Control about why the followup team will need to arrive sooner than anticipated.

Ah, I see where I was mistaken. I read 'when you install a more sophisticated mod like MKS, Pathfinder 's functionality is disabled in favor of the MKS way of doing things' as being an automatic process. Optional is totally cool and I apologize if I was too argumentative (I have been told that I can be a tad acerbic).

So where in the tech tree do you see Pathfinder as living? Centering it on explicitly known resource levels would imply mid-to-late game which seems directly at odds with the connotations of the placeholder names offered thus far. It would be neat to see early-game imprecise resource scanning! Like perhaps a sensor that only returns presence/absence of a resource on the body as a whole while in orbit, but can also be used while landed to confirm/deny for that particular location. Heck, for extra fun you can require a kerbal (or perhaps a tiny drill part for probes) to deposit a surface sample before it can work properly. You could even have multiple sensors that return only the Ones digit of the concentration for a given resource; this even ties nicely into the concept of settling in a place only to find a better spot upriver and moving camp and allows that to be a negative outcome! The X2% concentration you abandoned for your spiffy new X7% was in fact a better 52% to a surprisingly dismal 27%. All without needing to build an entire system to change resourcemaps! I must vehemently disagree on this point! Removing your parts does not in fact add more play options, in precisely the same manner that removing the Spark upon unlocking the Skipper doesn't. Instead, it forces gameplay upon a prescriptive path; Voyager analogues must now be built on a 2.5m scale. Yes there is quite a challenge in that but I am quite glad to have both engines available simultaneously! The argument you are making is frankly only valid if you are duplicating the work of another mod rather than supplementing it; removing your 2-meter long truss when another's 2-meter truss is available is copacetic, removing your 1-meter truss in the presence of someone else's 5-meter truss is not so much.

So will Pathfinder use the CRP / be compatible with the USI Suite? You mentioned a drill that brings up substrate and a miniature greenhouse, but there also seems to be an undercurrent that it be considered a wholly separate mod. Yeah! It's really great. I'm a big fan of the Stock ISRU so those patches allow me to use it for everything instead of needing a behemoth for fuel and a second behemoth to keep the first one running and make RocketParts. Cuts down on a bunch of launches/landings and simplifies the heck out of my launch systems :-D

They are really cool! ToxicFrog says they're up on CKAN now but I just downloaded directly from their Github thing here: https://gist.github.com/ToxicFrog/86c8fd788b91af92a019/ Here's ToxicFrog's explanation of them:

I'm curious as to why you feel bound by RoverDude's vision of O/MKS when making your own extension of it. After all, you solidly rejected part of it by granting the option to have a surface building uncaged. With the Skydock you rejected both Tanihwa's and RoverDude's vision of how an orbital launch platform should look. You can just as easily reject the notion that the O/MKS framework is only to be used deep into the tech tree for permanent bases. Where I am going with this is that you are free to make the mod that you find fun and interesting. If you think a first landing on Minmus should include pup tents and hand-cranked drills that can harvest any O/MKS resource, you are completely free to make that mod. You have your own eyes; you are not limited by someone else's blinders. You have your own hands; another's shackles do not bind you. For what it's worth, I would play the absolute pants off of a mod with the features you're describing. I can kind of do that now by installing O/MKS, EPL, and ToxicFrog's .dlls that allow the stock ISRU to convert Stock ore into Rocketparts, but that requires one to have almost completely filled out at least one line of the tech tree before even thinking about setting up shop.

You are correct! Fortunately, this is categorically NOT the direction Angel has expressed an interest in heading. In fact, Angel has explicitly stated they are interested in smaller things that are LESS efficient than 'stock' O/MKS. I am so glad we are all agreeing today that Angel's ideas are completely appropriate and explicitly not O/MKS but rather an extension for same :-) I am also very pleased that we have collectively acknowledged the fact that Angel is not at all bound by anything but the barest shroud of courtesy when making their expansion mod because RoverDude made the supremely community-positive decision to release O/MKS under an A-NC-SA CC license and Angel is thus perfectly within their rights to make their expansion (which again is clearly not O/MKS but rather a distinct yet non-standalone work) as gimped or hulked as they see fit.

I agree completely! This is why I am posting about my opinions and observations in a thread for a mod that extends MKS but is not MKS. I am glad we are on the same page :-) I admit I phrased myself poorly; in point of fact I do enjoy many of your models! Earlier this very afternoon I was gushing over the design for the OKS PDU to my boyfriend. You're quite the talented modeller, which is why I find it frustrating to no end when you decide to just slap a coat of paint on the exteriors of a few modules and call it a day. I am very excited indeed to hear that you are going for a full model refresh to add individuality to every part; I foresee O/MKS as being as staple to my KSP experience as KA/IS and KER. In the meantime I am pleased as punch that somebody else has already taken the time to make mesh variants as an extension, which again is why I am posting in this thread (which is dedicated to them) and not in yours (which is dedicated to your vision). All of this sounds absolutely perfect, and it fits a niche that RoverDude is on record a scarce few posts above as saying they do not wish to fill themselves. All the better if your camping gear can be lifted with 1-meter stuff to further accentuate the complementary nature of your mod!

My issue isn't so much the stockalike-ness (although I'm stoked it's now an option) but rather the fact that pretty much every landed base component is precisely the same model. Your mod allowed actual diversity in the greebling of buildings, where RoverDude just slaps a new coat of paint on the Pioneer and calls it the Aeroponics Module. There's no actual *architectural* variation which is almost completely at odds with the vanilla game. By way of a for instance, take a look at the 2.5 meter stock fuel tanks; every single one is a unique model that has a distinct silhouette. Same goes for the engines! There are 'families' to the parts to be sure, but you can tell without needing to rightclick on the part which one's the T-30 and which the T-45. Distinction matters, and your mod brought distinction to MKS.

I'm really sad to see the configurable greebling go, because I abhor the MKS/OKS palette-swapping with the same base underneath and the horrific 'cages' on all the surface colony stuff. Having the ability to give the various buildings unique-ish silhouettes was what I was looking forward to most with this mod, but i guess all things change :/ On the other hand, I'm super-excited to hear that the watchwords for the update are 'small, light, portable' because the current MKS stuff is obscenely huge and fairly well prevents one from actually playing with it until you unlock the 2.5 meter stuff and even then you have to have overbuilt launchers.

Bookmarking the hell out of this thread; it's everything I wanted out of MKS when I quit using it in frustration five months ago. Eagerly awaiting the updates of this and KAS!

Clearly there is only one acceptable name: Asteroid Resource Storage Expansion

Because god forbid this videogame get gamey For what it's worth I think you should definitely be able to convert Karbonite to Xenon or whatever but at the tradeoff of being incredibly inefficient with air scoops being incredibly efficient. I'm not sure how to represent that gameplay-wise though as how would the converter know whether Karbonite was scooped up through drills or through scoops? The only thing that leaps to mind immediately is have scoops produce straight Xenon in addition to Karbonite, but that feels inelegant.

So I take it not everything went well?

Pre-orders will still be a thing when the store is up, right? Because I\'ve been wanting to give you money for weeks now and it\'ll be annoying if I have to pay more because you guys didn\'t have the store ready before shutting down pre-orders.