[Min KSP 1.12.2] Buffalo: NASA Inspired Modular Space Exploration Vehicle

[Gordon Dry]

On 7.6.2017 at 3:30 AM, Angel-125 said:

NASA concept rover

That vehicle looks neat enough to use it as camper on earth vacation and fulfill the need of coolness when parking it on a supermarket parking lot.

[panarchist]

On 6/7/2017 at 8:10 AM, Angel-125 said:

Right now I'm thinking big, but honestly, I already have both the Buffalo and the Bison. But hm, what about something much smaller? That body design might work to hold a single kerbal in the cockpit, and fit the half-sized chassis with the Bear Cub wheels...

Sounds awesome to me, I need a flight deck tractor to respot aircraft on my Heisenberg-class airship.  :-D

I think I'm doing something wrong with the V-22 from Buffalo - I can't get it to hover properly with *anyone's* autopilot. Maybe I have too many mods, or I am missing something obvious.

[Angelo Kerman]

4 minutes ago, panarchist said:

Sounds awesome to me, I need a flight deck tractor to respot aircraft on my Heisenberg-class airship.  :-D

I think I'm doing something wrong with the V-22 from Buffalo - I can't get it to hover properly with *anyone's* autopilot. Maybe I have too many mods, or I am missing something obvious.

Have you tried the reference craft with Hover Manager? It definitely works.

[panarchist]

10 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Have you tried the reference craft with Hover Manager? It definitely works.

Yep.  I'm going to grab the logs and look through - with Hover Manager and both GTGs running, the reference craft runs out of EC after about 30 seconds. (in sandbox, which should be fully upgraded. If I move off vertical at all, I can't return to vertical - I've used Hover Manager before with the Kestral and one of the other reference craft from Heisenberg with no issues. This is in an install with only WBI items + Aircraft Carrier Essentials (I stripped out all the other mods plus the MM cache).  I'm sure I must be doing something incorrectly, because I know this is working fine for you and numerous others.

Edit: Ok, I think I have this figured out, user error - the GTG output is tied to the throttle setting, and since I was using Hover Manager, I didn't throttle up.  "Handling" issues are due to CoM not aligning with CoL and me not flying with a joystick, or other means of keeping the aircraft stable horizontally. If I plug in the joystick and keep it stable manually, I'm fine - I think I had it in my head that the Hover Manager provided both vertical and horizontal stability, probably because I've been messing with that, and Kramax, and Diazo's  utilities, and TCA to try and find autopilot/flight aids which work well for me.  I think I'm going to stick with Diazo's horizontal mod and Hover Manager.

Edited June 15, 2017 by panarchist
additional info

[adsii1970]

For those of you who do not know, I love abusing using @Angel-125's mods. And as such, they appear a lot in my craft in various forms. Sometimes, however, I abuse use a mod in a manner that does not exactly work as I intended it to do... and that's what happened today.  So, here's what I've done with one of the smaller buckboards:

Spoiler

To tell you the truth, I need to do some tweaking on the unit. I wanted something that could haul cargo to the station, and once emptied, could simply be jettisoned and sent to a fiery death. This is the demonstrator/proof of concept model and only contains beer, tacos, and wrenches (needed a cargo that could actually be used! ). Unfortunately, it is not easy to control, but believe I can make it more user-friendly with v1.1

Edited July 6, 2017 by adsii1970

[vossiewulf]

Questions, and thanks for a great mod family.

The buckboard 6000 and the wagon deflated are about the same size in the SPH. However, the Buckboard carries 1915.something ResearchKits while the Wagon holds 12,600, even deflated. Is this intended? I attached the Wagon to my rover in the SPH, inflated it, set it to ResearchKits, and deflated it back down. It still says it contains 12,600.

And once I send either a buckboard or a wagon full of supplies like ResearchKits to my base on the Mun, how do I transfer them to the base resources proper so the Doc Science can make use of them? And actually I guess that applies across the board because the main purpose of this rover will be mining, including a drill and an ISRU and storage initially for ore, LFO, and mono. So I mine, convert with ISRU and store within the rover, how do I transfer the end products to the base storage?

Said Mun base, all incuding rover came on that one lander. At this point I still hadn't hooked up the antenna or attached the S.A.F.E.R. reactor.

Edited August 12, 2017 by vossiewulf

[Angelo Kerman]

33 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

Questions, and thanks for a great mod family.

The buckboard 6000 and the wagon deflated are about the same size in the SPH. However, the Buckboard carries 1915.something ResearchKits while the Wagon holds 12,600, even deflated. Is this intended? I attached the Wagon to my rover in the SPH, inflated it, set it to ResearchKits, and deflated it back down. It still says it contains 12,600.

And once I send either a buckboard or a wagon full of supplies like ResearchKits to my base on the Mun, how do I transfer them to the base resources proper so the Doc Science can make use of them? And actually I guess that applies across the board because the main purpose of this rover will be mining, including a drill and an ISRU and storage initially for ore, LFO, and mono. So I mine, convert with ISRU and store within the rover, how do I transfer the end products to the base storage?

Said Mun base, all incuding rover came on that one lander. At this point I still hadn't hooked up the antenna or attached the S.A.F.E.R. reactor.

There's probably a bug somewhere, when the Wagon is compacted it shouldn't be holding resources. The Buckboard 6000 is supposed be equal to two Buckboard 3000s, while the Wagon is about 6 Buckboard 3000s.

To transfer the resources, you can do several things including:

Dock your rover to your base.

Use KIS (Pathfinder is built around KIS).

Use Pathfinder's resource distribution system. To do that, each part needs to have its resource distribution set up. You can do this through the Manage Operations button or the Setup Distribution button on each storage part. For each resource, you can Share, Consume, or Ignore the resource. Share will evenly distribute the resource to all parts in physics range that are sharing the resource. Consume will fill the part's resource to capacity. Ignore will ignore the resource for distribution.

[vossiewulf]

Thanks for the quick answer

Ok, so I can just use your Manage Operations UI- I hadn't noticed the consume function so I didn't realize you could transfer, not just share.

I was guessing that was a bug/oversight on the Wagon, I'll resist abusing that

 

[Angelo Kerman]

Buffalo 2.2 is now available:

2.2 BARIS: Building A Rocket Isn't Simple
This update introduces BARIS, a replacement for the stock heat mechanic used on the mod's drills and converters. You can think of BARIS (the name is a nod to Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space) as a highly customizable Dangit-lite. Don't want your drills or converters to break? Don't want the hassle of parts wearing out? Do you prefer not to send Equipment up to repair your parts, or to requrire specific skills to repair them? No problem! All that and more are options. As always, It's Your Game, Your Choice.

BARIS IS OFF BY DEFAULT! You'll have to opt-in via the Settings->Difficulty->BARIS tab.

With BARIS, converters and drills now have wear and tear, which is indicated by the part's Quality rating. They're unlikely to break during their normal design life, but they can start to break down after you exceed their design life. If you perform maintenance on them, you can reduce the chance that they'll break. A broken drill or base part won't function, which can be either annoying or life threatening depending upon the mods you have installed. Once you fix the part, it will continue to function, but its design life will be reduced- unless you disable that option.

[LordOfMinecraft99]

I love it, but one suggestion-  Buffalo-form heathshield. It may (sadly) cover up the bottom window of the cab, but it would be worth it. I am attempting to make a reusable lunar lander in this form function, and in RO you can't just enter the atmosphere with no heatshield.

[vossiewulf]

Another question - this is the first time I'm mining, I built a Buffalo for that purpose and landed it on the Mun at my base via monoprop engines. It has the drill, the ISRU, Tundra 200 and 400, Wagon, plus some saddle tanks for more ore storage.

Last night I left it mining with the ISRU converter set to LF/Ox and happily converting mined ore. This morning I checked on him, and the drill was still going as was the ISRU but the LF/Ox numbers were low and not changing. The Wagon was set for LF/Ox storage and had less than 100 LF and about 120 Ox and was stuck there. Does the wagon get confused about whether it's inflated or not? It was acting like it had been left mining and converting when it had no storage left, so it was just dumping LF/Ox over the side for most of the night.

 

Also, while I'm at it, another question although this one is more Pathfindery  . I landed two cargo deliveries consisting of 2.5m 32s + K&K units filled with rocketparts right next to the LFO Chuckwagon. I have connected one to the Chuckwagon via KAS connectors and it all seemed to go correctly and the buttons on the right click connector UIs seem to work, but no fuel is transferred. I know I can just set them to share but I'd like a little more control of what is where

 

Edited August 16, 2017 by vossiewulf

[Angelo Kerman]

21 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

Another question - this is the first time I'm mining, I built a Buffalo for that purpose and landed it on the Mun at my base via monoprop engines. It has the drill, the ISRU, Tundra 200 and 400, Wagon, plus some saddle tanks for more ore storage.

Last night I left it mining with the ISRU converter set to LF/Ox and happily converting mined ore. This morning I checked on him, and the drill was still going as was the ISRU but the LF/Ox numbers were low and not changing. The Wagon was set for LF/Ox storage and had less than 100 LF and about 120 Ox and was stuck there. Does the wagon get confused about whether it's inflated or not? It was acting like it had been left mining and converting when it had no storage left, so it was just dumping LF/Ox over the side for most of the night.

Also, while I'm at it, another question although this one is more Pathfindery  . I landed two cargo deliveries consisting of 2.5m 32s + K&K units filled with rocketparts right next to the LFO Chuckwagon. I have connected one to the Chuckwagon via KAS connectors and it all seemed to go correctly and the buttons on the right click connector UIs seem to work, but no fuel is transferred. I know I can just set them to share but I'd like a little more control of what is where

 

Dang, out of likes! For your first question, I don't see anything out of the ordinary going on with the Wagon, so it's confusing as to why it's not storing resources. I'll have to do more investigation on that.

For your second question, not sure what you're asking. Once you hook up the KAS connectors, you can manually transfer fuel between the base and the vessel fuel tanks. Pathfinder's resource distribution only works on Wild Blue fuel tanks that have distribution turned on, and it isn't clear if you have Wild Blue tanks on your rockets.

[vossiewulf]

3 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Dang, out of likes! For your first question, I don't see anything out of the ordinary going on with the Wagon, so it's confusing as to why it's not storing resources. I'll have to do more investigation on that.

For your second question, not sure what you're asking. Once you hook up the KAS connectors, you can manually transfer fuel between the base and the vessel fuel tanks. Pathfinder's resource distribution only works on Wild Blue fuel tanks that have distribution turned on, and it isn't clear if you have Wild Blue tanks on your rockets.

If you don't know something on the first question off the top of your head (which is what I was checking for), I will do more investigating, you don't need to worry about it. Once I figure out what is/was going on I will let you know.

Second question, tanks are standard rockomax or whatever they are 2.5m x 32s, These guys.

I brought them to the Mun on a single launcher and detached them in turn to land. Both fell over on landing, the second one BECAUSE I FORGOT TO PUT THE GEAR DOWN *facepalm* but in both cases nothing was broken so I just drove them the 100m or so from where they landed to here on their sides. The one closest to the base already has had his probe core and batteries removed, rest of equipment on both will be removed. Top K&K units have the rocketparts.

You can see I've connected one to my LFO Chuckwagon. When I right click on either connector, I get the unlink and Pump Here options. I have no idea what "Pump Here" means as in does it mean pump TO here, or place pump here to pump the other direction? Regardless, when I click on either of them, buttons depress but no LFO is transferred from the tanks to the Chuckwagon. This is probably more of a KAS question than a Pathfinder question, I'll go ask them if that's what I need to do.

Edited August 16, 2017 by vossiewulf

[Angelo Kerman]

32 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

If you don't know something on the first question off the top of your head (which is what I was checking for), I will do more investigating, you don't need to worry about it. Once I figure out what is/was going on I will let you know.

Second question, tanks are standard rockomax or whatever they are 2.5m x 32s, These guys.

I brought them to the Mun on a single launcher and detached them in turn to land. Both fell over on landing, the second one BECAUSE I FORGOT TO PUT THE GEAR DOWN *facepalm* but in both cases nothing was broken so I just drove them the 100m or so from where they landed to here on their sides. The one closest to the base already has had his probe core and batteries removed, rest of equipment on both will be removed. Top K&K units have the rocketparts.

You can see I've connected one to my LFO Chuckwagon. When I right click on either connector, I get the unlink and Pump Here options. I have no idea what "Pump Here" means as in does it mean pump TO here, or place pump here to pump the other direction? Regardless, when I click on either of them, buttons depress but no LFO is transferred from the tanks to the Chuckwagon. This is probably more of a KAS question than a Pathfinder question, I'll go ask them if that's what I need to do.

That sounds like a KAS issue thing. For standard fuel transfers between tanks, you right-click on a part, then hold alt and right-click the other part. Then you can transfer resources between them. Those tanks don't have any Pathfinder support for automated resource distribution. You'd need something like GPO Fuel Pump for that.

[vossiewulf]

3 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

That sounds like a KAS issue thing. For standard fuel transfers between tanks, you right-click on a part, then hold alt and right-click the other part. Then you can transfer resources between them. Those tanks don't have any Pathfinder support for automated resource distribution. You'd need something like GPO Fuel Pump for that.

I finally got it to work, thanks. It's another issue as with most of KSP where it's easy if you know the exact sequence to follow and how to avoid that pitfall and that one and oh yeah definitely don't do that one. In this case, after you have linked your base to the tanks you must be in base focus or the right click/alt right click doesn't work. I had tried it in EVA and it doesn't work there, so I then tried using that pump function when you right click the connectors and that didn't work either.

Biggest other problem I have isn't even KAS, it's KSP in general. Like anything put down on the Mun has a reasonable chance of exploding for no reason, especially if you find the right sequence, 100% of those OX-10 solar panels exploded if placed on the ground and then moved to a different ground location.

What has killed me though and I've lost two patio slabs, at least four Gaslights, and five of 16 solar panels I just took off of those cargo drones - whenever I switch between Kerbals at the base, there is a chance something sitting on the ground, even attached to the ground (as the Gaslights and the patio slabs were) will just disappear. It didn't take me long to figure out where they are, they move z + 1600m and hover there silently. The next time I'm cycling through control options, it will then switch me to one of the hovering pieces of equipment. And once I'm there, it won't let me leave because they wake up and start falling, and hey, we can't let you leave something that is moving over the surface?? That's the worst part, that it won't let me leave and forces me to watch these pieces of equipment accelerate in and bomb my base.

I haven't figured out why- one patio slab has stayed there since I put it down, the other two went spaceward very shortly after I put them down. Any idea what causes this?

Cargo cleared out and drones all sorted out. Except I also lost one of the lander bases and its main engine to the Z +1600m bug.

 

[Angelo Kerman]

2 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

I finally got it to work, thanks. It's another issue as with most of KSP where it's easy if you know the exact sequence to follow and how to avoid that pitfall and that one and oh yeah definitely don't do that one. In this case, after you have linked your base to the tanks you must be in base focus or the right click/alt right click doesn't work. I had tried it in EVA and it doesn't work there, so I then tried using that pump function when you right click the connectors and that didn't work either.

Biggest other problem I have isn't even KAS, it's KSP in general. Like anything put down on the Mun has a reasonable chance of exploding for no reason, especially if you find the right sequence, 100% of those OX-10 solar panels exploded if placed on the ground and then moved to a different ground location.

What has killed me though and I've lost two patio slabs, at least four Gaslights, and five of 16 solar panels I just took off of those cargo drones - whenever I switch between Kerbals at the base, there is a chance something sitting on the ground, even attached to the ground (as the Gaslights and the patio slabs were) will just disappear. It didn't take me long to figure out where they are, they move z + 1600m and hover there silently. The next time I'm cycling through control options, it will then switch me to one of the hovering pieces of equipment. And once I'm there, it won't let me leave because they wake up and start falling, and hey, we can't let you leave something that is moving over the surface?? That's the worst part, that it won't let me leave and forces me to watch these pieces of equipment accelerate in and bomb my base.

I haven't figured out why- one patio slab has stayed there since I put it down, the other two went spaceward very shortly after I put them down. Any idea what causes this?

Cargo cleared out and drones all sorted out. Except I also lost one of the lander bases and its main engine to the Z +1600m bug.

 

Sadly there isn't much I can do about the random explosions. That is a KSP thing; I've found that the game doesn't like large bases. That's one reason for the resource distribution system that I made for Pathfinder. Best advice I can give is to save often.

[vossiewulf]

16 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

Sadly there isn't much I can do about the random explosions. That is a KSP thing; I've found that the game doesn't like large bases. That's one reason for the resource distribution system that I made for Pathfinder. Best advice I can give is to save often.

I figured that was the case, but didn't know if there was something about how or when you place things that make them more prone to teleporting straight up.

One thing I like about the Buffalo is that it's heavy and stable. The Packrat on the other hand, if a Kerbal even touches or thinks about the wheels or fenders, the thing shoots off pure vertical at 10m a second or so, my Kerbals now approach said wheels as if they were nuclear attack snakes. It's really crazy that some of these basic issues continue, it's not like we're talking edge cases, anyone who tries to build a base on the Mun will run into these over and over. I manage developers and we'd be all kinds of fired if anything we did had bugs this serious happening this frequently and you don't even need the five years part, a month would do it.

Ok that will be my one and only rant on the matter, anyone who's built a Mun base deserves one for free.

Thanks again for the Buffalo and Pathfinder, they have in fact made all of the problems easier to deal with. And I really had fun flying the Buffalo in with four of the really heavy SpaceY Dibamus RCS/OMS thrusters- four of those in a close square pattern around the CG make an excellent Mun lander. Brake most of the way with a standard engine, detach the Buffalo at 10k or so, rotate it 90 degrees to put its wheels downward and turn on the Diabamii, they are staged like other engines. Worked beautifully and was quite easy to land safely even though he was 28t when he detached.

Edited August 17, 2017 by vossiewulf
typo

[TaterRaider]

BARIS is off by default, but if I had wanted it I would have downloaded it.  Since I don't it's a deal-breaker. Please consider packaging separately.

I did the same with another mod that took over my Kerbalnaut Komplex so don't feel it's just you.

[Angelo Kerman]

3 hours ago, TaterRaider said:

BARIS is off by default, but if I had wanted it I would have downloaded it.  Since I don't it's a deal-breaker. Please consider packaging separately.

I did the same with another mod that took over my Kerbalnaut Komplex so don't feel it's just you.

SImply revert your mod to the previous version.

[Angelo Kerman]

Buffalo 2.2.5 is now available:

- BARIS is now an optional download as originally intended- just took awhile for me to figure out how to make that work. DO NOT DELETE the 000ABARISBridgeDoNotDelete FOLDER! That plugin is the bridge between this mod and BARIS.

[Merkov]

2 hours ago, Angel-125 said:

...the 000ABARISBridgeDoNotDelete FOLDER...

That folder name alone is worth rep.

[vossiewulf]

Well... this is new.

Yep, restarted and reloaded and entire back back of my second mining Buffalo is just gone. They're not floating in the air, just gone, the game somehow decided to saw a 25t vehicle and half and take one half home with it. I like how it inexplicably left the flex fuel power pack that was on top - the ISRU below disappeared and it fell to the surface. 

I guess the lesson here is don't leave your mining vehicles KIS attached to the base? Now to dig through saves to see where it happened...

[Jacke]

3 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

I guess the lesson here is don't leave your mining vehicles KIS attached to the base? Now to dig through saves to see where it happened...

I thought the proper response in such a case is a blood sacrifice to the Eldar Gods and beg they intervene with the Kraken.

[Angelo Kerman]

3 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

Well... this is new.

Yep, restarted and reloaded and entire back back of my second mining Buffalo is just gone. They're not floating in the air, just gone, the game somehow decided to saw a 25t vehicle and half and take one half home with it. I like how it inexplicably left the flex fuel power pack that was on top - the ISRU below disappeared and it fell to the surface. 

I guess the lesson here is don't leave your mining vehicles KIS attached to the base? Now to dig through saves to see where it happened...

Did you get any loading errors? I haven't seen that problem. Does it happen with Buffalo 2.1.3 or 2.2?

[vossiewulf]

It was 2.13 with 1.30. When I went back a couple saves, it was still intact and moving forward from there was able to once again bring down the cargo lander (the one with a black/red tank) and land him with the Buffalo unmaimed.

I'll check the logs but had no visible errors loading the game. Also will download latest and see if that stabilizes things any.

And if you found that surprising, you would have found what I just saw amazing- I had reloaded a save when the cargo lander had just landed near the base this morning, and the Buffalo was still intact, so I just hit escape to freeze it and left it there.

I came home for lunch and say down and hit unpause on the game, and watched in fascination as the ENTIRE base, including both Buffalo and the first 30t lander and all of the Pathfinder buildings, started thrashing around and then the entire thing along with the vehicles went ballistic, tumbling, so fast and so far that I'm not sure if they wouldn't have gone into orbit had I not reloaded.

Before:

One brief screenshot of the base flying overhead, too bad it was night. Closest thing is one of the Buffalos 574m up, and you can see other parts of the base >1km and still going upward.

And the aftermath- exactly like an F5 tornado had gone through. Note the ONLY things that could be called part of the base that didn't fly away are the Telegraph (knocked over) and the Packrat, which seems to have been completely unaffected. And that's odd because otherwise that rover loves to zoom off into space for no reason.

 

Edited August 22, 2017 by vossiewulf