[1.12.x] USI Life Support

[Tarheel1999]

@NermNermNerm my understanding is that it takes time to "heal" your kerbals. The amount of time is proportionate to how long they have been homesick.

[MadJock]

Hi guys, not sure if this is posted in the right place so forgive me if it's not.

My issue is I'm now getting an error and my SSTO won't load up in my SPH due to it saying I'm missing a part called the Life Support minipack. I wasn't aware I'd installed any life support mods however if I have what mods include this minipack or what do you think I'm missing?

Cheers.........MadJock

[Tarheel1999]

@MadJock  probably this one

 

Edited March 26, 2017 by Tarheel1999

[NermNermNerm]

13 hours ago, RoverDude said:

More of an MKS question but no worries

The Tourists were physically in the medbay correct?  If no resources were consumed, it tells me they probably were not.

RE having your entire crew go Tourist at the same time... that would be by design.  You'd have to send out a rescue vessel with a new scientitst to rescue your tourists.  To prevent them being tourists in the first place, use a Kolonization module.

 

Yes, I had the tourist in the medbay and the scientist in the medbay (also tried a medic, tried adding them to the medbay in different order).  The medbay was started (the screen shows "Medbay: 105% load" and "Workshop Efficiency: 7.9%").  If I time-accelerated for a while, I saw the Colony Supplies get consumed, but I don't think that is very telling because I can observe that even if the Medbay is not occupied.

As to the "go tourist at the same time" question - perhaps I'm just going about it wrong.  My goal is to create a ship that can stay out for a very long time.  Of course, I can just build a vast ship and place only a few Kerbals in it, but that seems un-fun.  I wanted a largish ship with a goodly population...  You know, the whole 5-year mission to go where no Kerbal has gone before kinda thing.  I would have thought that the Medical Bay was the way to achieve that sort of thing.

One clue - I continue to suffer with the "Coroutine couldn't be started because the game object ... is inactive" problem.  Could that be the cause?

Edited March 27, 2017 by NermNermNerm
grammar error

[RoverDude]

34 minutes ago, NermNermNerm said:

<SNIP>

Assuming you're using MKS - use a Kolonization Module for what you're trying to do.

[DStaal]

38 minutes ago, NermNermNerm said:

As to the "go tourist at the same time" question - perhaps I'm just going about it wrong.  My goal is to create a ship that can stay out for a very long time.  Of course, I can just build a vast ship and place only a few Kerbals in it, but that seems un-fun.  I wanted a largish ship with a goodly population...  You know, the whole 5-year mission to go where no Kerbal has gone before kinda thing.  I would have thought that the Medical Bay was the way to achieve that sort of thing.

Note that if you send some Kerbals on away missions and such, the ones back on the main ship will have their habitation/homesickness go up slightly - they had more space to play with.  So with care you can probably make sure that your chief medical officer is the last Kerbal to get homesick.

[NermNermNerm]

2 hours ago, RoverDude said:

Assuming you're using MKS - use a Kolonization Module for what you're trying to do.

Thanks!  I tried out the Tundra Kolonization unit.  The docs should probably be updated - based on the documentation, all they do is allow for procreation, but I see that it makes the Hab & Home time for Kerbals go up, in exchange for ColonySupplies.  That's cool.  Much better than rotating crew in and out of the Medical bay, and it allows for fun scenarios like having reasonably-sized space buses traversing the void, picking up Supplies at both ends.

Still, I think the Medical Bay is busted.

Edited March 27, 2017 by NermNermNerm
Overactive return key

[jd284]

9 hours ago, NermNermNerm said:

Still, I think the Medical Bay is busted.

I think the problem is that you're trying to revive crew in the same ship that made them go crazy in the first place, so if they revived they'd just go crazy again from lack of hab.

You probably need to improve the hab situation first before the Medbay can help. It works fine if you have people that went Tourist on an away mission, and can save them in a ship with better hab. Or if you dock a rescue vessel and improve the hab situation that way.

Though personally I never actually used it on a spaceship; the effort of bringing a rescue ship is generally much, much greater than remote-controlling the vessel and sending it back home, or to a nearby base that has a medbay and plenty of hab.

[kraden]

5 hours ago, jd284 said:

<snip>

the effort of bringing a rescue ship is generally much, much greater than remote-controlling the vessel and sending it back home, or to a nearby base that has a medbay and plenty of hab.

This is why all of my ships have a probe core and sufficient antennae for their missions. Just in case...

[RoverDude]

Sure, it's more a case where you have a nice base and bad things happen and there's no option to bring them back.

[Noobton]

do nom-o-matics benefit from being crewed by scientists? in the wiki it says Scientists "Gives an efficiency bonus to all Ag modules and Greenhouses", but I'm not sure if nom-o-matics qualify. 

Is there any crew that can improve their efficiency?

 

[jd284]

4 hours ago, Noobton said:

do nom-o-matics benefit from being crewed by scientists?

No, these bonuses apply only to the MKS greenhouse/agriculture parts.

The Nom-o-matics have a flat 100% load regardless of crew or kolonization bonuses.

[jofwu]

I've got a question about how the catch-up processing works with life support... I'm curious how it will play along with the capacitors from near future electrical.

Capacitors hold "Stored Charge", where 1 unit of stored charge = 1 EC. The trick is that to be used they have to be "discharged" which rapidly drains stored charge and fills any batteries with the corresponding amount of EC. They recharge just like batteries except there's a cap on how fast they can be filled. The discharging (as I understand it) is something that happens manually.

So let's say I have a base with 1 days supply of EC and 5 more days supply of stored charge. If I were manually monitoring the base, I could discharge capacitors as needed and the base could run for 6 days. But what happens if the ship is out of focus? If I go to another ship and come back 3 days later, will my Nom-O-Matic have carried on at the initial rate or am I going to be behind on Supply production because of a lack of readily available EC?

[TheRagingIrishman]

1 minute ago, jofwu said:

I've got a question about how the catch-up processing works with life support... I'm curious how it will play along with the capacitors from near future electrical.

Capacitors hold "Stored Charge", where 1 unit of stored charge = 1 EC. The trick is that to be used they have to be "discharged" which rapidly drains stored charge and fills any batteries with the corresponding amount of EC. They recharge just like batteries except there's a cap on how fast they can be filled. The discharging (as I understand it) is something that happens manually.

So let's say I have a base with 1 days supply of EC and 5 more days supply of stored charge. If I were manually monitoring the base, I could discharge capacitors as needed and the base could run for 6 days. But what happens if the ship is out of focus? If I go to another ship and come back 3 days later, will my Nom-O-Matic have carried on at the initial rate or am I going to be behind on Supply production because of a lack of readily available EC?

It won't work (due to how the capacitors work). If you had 6 days of EC, then everything would work fine.

[jofwu]

3 minutes ago, TheRagingIrishman said:

It won't work (due to how the capacitors work). If you had 6 days of EC, then everything would work fine.

Thanks! One more question, capacitors aside... What if I have 3 days of EC with means of producing a surplus? How does that work? Does it understand how to include what you can potentially produce?

[panarchist]

On 3/27/2017 at 1:57 PM, kraden said:

This is why all of my ships have a probe core and sufficient antennae for their missions. Just in case...

Yeah, but it's also cool to build the Kerbalized version of the Medical Rescue Vessel "Nightingale 229" - in my case, it's a nuclear-powered MKS Tundra module with extra components, some Nom-o-matics, and 18,000 m/s of ΔV.  I don't have James Spader and Angela Bassett on board, but thanks to the DeepFreeze mod I *do* have the Dimensional Stabilization Chambers (pods)

My long-range "Dimension Jump" is courtesy of a USI Orion - mainly because I always try to figure out an excuse to make that the first stage of nearly every ship.

[TDplay]

Now I have a firm grasp on KSP, I'm playing with this. It's quite good.

[Akira_R]

@RoverDude

I would like to request what I hope is a small quality of life improvement:

The ability to control in the settings.cfg what the GUI uses as the day length.

I currently am playing a 3.2x rescale game using Sigma Dimensions, I am mulitplying the day length by 1.8333333 to give me 11 hour days and keep the surface rotaional velocity roughly close to what it is in stock. There is a handy little feature in Kopernicus now that will change the actual in game clock to display the time with respect to whatever day length you are using which is excellent. It would be really fantastic if we could make a tweak in the settings.cfg to change what your GUI is using to calculate number of days so that mistakes of "Oh yeah I have 8 days of supplies left and with this maneuver we will be landing in 6, no problem.... oh wait that's actually only 48 hours of supplies soo 4 days and 4ish hours... crude" won't happen as much. Weather we have to specify # of seconds per day or # hours per day, or if there is just a multiplier doesn't really matter to me, just having the ability to change the day length would be fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to consider it!

[Sigma88]

8 hours ago, Akira_R said:

@RoverDude

I would like to request what I hope is a small quality of life improvement:

The ability to control in the settings.cfg what the GUI uses as the day length.

I currently am playing a 3.2x rescale game using Sigma Dimensions, I am mulitplying the day length by 1.8333333 to give me 11 hour days and keep the surface rotaional velocity roughly close to what it is in stock. There is a handy little feature in Kopernicus now that will change the actual in game clock to display the time with respect to whatever day length you are using which is excellent. It would be really fantastic if we could make a tweak in the settings.cfg to change what your GUI is using to calculate number of days so that mistakes of "Oh yeah I have 8 days of supplies left and with this maneuver we will be landing in 6, no problem.... oh wait that's actually only 48 hours of supplies soo 4 days and 4ish hours... crude" won't happen as much. Weather we have to specify # of seconds per day or # hours per day, or if there is just a multiplier doesn't really matter to me, just having the ability to change the day length would be fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to consider it!

to expand a bit on this

 

KSP stores the lenght of  Year/Day/Hour/Minute/Second in special variables

all those variables are expressed in real life seconds, so

hour = 3600
minute = 60
second = 1

generally speaking the time in ksp is always stored as a single number, in real time seconds.

so that:   time = 15300  will usually displayed as Year1, Day1, 4:15

KSP also can switch between 6 and 24 hrs per day (with 461 or 365 day per years respectively)

here's the bit of code that is responsible of the changes in kopernicus

I'm not sure if USI-LS can tap into those variables to "read" how to display time

 

if you need more info feel free to ask me

[Prezombie]

I think the default EC consumption needs to be dialed way down. Currently it's at 0.01/sec, which is nothing once you have solar panels, but can be crippling in the early game between part limits and batteries having small capacities. With the default rates, you're effectively limited to short orbital flights until you've unlocked solar panels, 

Alternatively, how about making it easier to frontload the grace time of having no EC? In effect, give each kerbal a personal resource container filled with a few days worth of noms and EC which they consume first before going after the ship supplies, so early missions aren't left with no power for the reaction wheel.

 

[RoverDude]

You already have a fifteen day grace period for supplies - for EC, send more batteries (though I would not be opposed to a low-efficiency LFO generator early on)

EDIT:  Actually, it would be something easy to add to the existing radial recycler thus discouraging it for being used as a fancy alternator

[Prezombie]

The problem is, the 15 day "grace period" for EC is massive compared to how much EC you can reasonably fit onto an early ship (at most a few hours). If you don't forcefully disable batteries, any manned mission more ambitious than suborbital becomes unreasonably difficult due to EC drain making reaction wheels and radiators unusable until you manage to research solar panels.

And it's thematically weird that you can't lock away supplies from them, but you can lock away EC from them. An easy fix would be to have kerbals start to drain that much after a few days in space. (First few days, being in space is awesome. After that they start to get bored and start watching reruns of Everybody Loves Kerman). This way, early Munar/Minmus missions don't have the huge "I have no power for reaction wheels" problem.

 

[goldenpsp]

1 hour ago, Prezombie said:

The problem is, the 15 day "grace period" for EC is massive compared to how much EC you can reasonably fit onto an early ship (at most a few hours). If you don't forcefully disable batteries, any manned mission more ambitious than suborbital becomes unreasonably difficult due to EC drain making reaction wheels and radiators unusable until you manage to research solar panels.

And it's thematically weird that you can't lock away supplies from them, but you can lock away EC from them. An easy fix would be to have kerbals start to drain that much after a few days in space. (First few days, being in space is awesome. After that they start to get bored and start watching reruns of Everybody Loves Kerman). This way, early Munar/Minmus missions don't have the huge "I have no power for reaction wheels" problem.

 

It takes 155 science to unlock the first solar panel.  There's ~700 science on and around Kerbin.  It's not that hard to get a solar panel before heading to the Mun or minmus.  IMO ec is fine where it is.

And it makes sense that you can't lock supplies but you can lock ec.  You only need supplies to feed kerbals, so it was easy for people to game the system by locking all of the supplies and unlock every 14 days.  But you need EC to actually fly your rocket so it is far more difficult to actually lock out all of your EC on a vessel and still have it remain useful to actually fly.

[PocketBrotector]

1 hour ago, Prezombie said:

The problem is, the 15 day "grace period" for EC is massive compared to how much EC you can reasonably fit onto an early ship (at most a few hours). If you don't forcefully disable batteries, any manned mission more ambitious than suborbital becomes unreasonably difficult due to EC drain making reaction wheels and radiators unusable until you manage to research solar panels.

And it's thematically weird that you can't lock away supplies from them, but you can lock away EC from them. An easy fix would be to have kerbals start to drain that much after a few days in space. (First few days, being in space is awesome. After that they start to get bored and start watching reruns of Everybody Loves Kerman). This way, early Munar/Minmus missions don't have the huge "I have no power for reaction wheels" problem.

The second problem sounds like a solution to the first problem. Or, if you prefer, fixing the second problem would exacerbate the first problem.

Admittedly I've never minded this much, because it's never occurred to me to go beyond LKO without some means of generating electricity. 

[herman]

I have a vessel with 2 kerbals, 2 PDD-12 Cupolas, and 3 PDD-10 Hitchhiker Storage containers. In the VAB the calculator says I have 10Y:184D of habitation time, but when I launch the vessel the time instantly goes down to 86D when the launchpad loads.

What am I doing wrong?