[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9

[Nansuchao]

All those discussions about values are beautiful and really interesting. But luckily in KSP we already have a Community Resource Pack and a mod called Realism Overhaul that use realistic values for TAC-LF that is, yet, the most "realistic" Life Support in KSP.

Kerbalism is more about gameplay, ShotgunNinja did an incredible job creating such a complex mod that works flawlessly from the Day1.

Some tweakings are obviously necessary, but we already have standard values to use as a reference point.

[TransKerbolExpress]

Speaking of resource conflicts, Kerbalism has an interesting interaction with Interplanetary Launchpads: because Shielding is tracked as a resource, it can't be constructed with Rocket Parts. Instead, the newly made ship will take its design shielding off of existing station modules, if available, when it is first released.

Edited May 2, 2016 by TransKerbolExpress

[geb]

Does radiation have a cumulative effect on crew over multiple missions?

I don't know if I should be adding loads of shielding to avoid increasing the lifetime dose for my veterans, or if I just need enough to avoid death by radiation on individual missions.

[Guest83]

No, radiation poisoning gets reset when they are back at KSC.

[Kwarazi]

3 hours ago, Nansuchao said:

All those discussions about values are beautiful and really interesting. But luckily in KSP we already have a Community Resource Pack and a mod called Realism Overhaul that use realistic values for TAC-LF that is, yet, the most "realistic" Life Support in KSP.

Kerbalism is more about gameplay, ShotgunNinja did an incredible job creating such a complex mod that works flawlessly from the Day1.

Some tweakings are obviously necessary, but we already have standard values to use as a reference point.

The problem you have @Nansuchao is that TAC-LS is no longer being supported by its OP so unless somone takes it on it will die a slow death

[cicatrix]

16 hours ago, ShotgunNinja said:

@AlexTheNotSoGreat I seriously decrease the malfunction rates in next version, especially for the antennas. I also lowered radiation influence over malfunctions.

This is great! There's one aspect that I want to be addressed - autodeploy a spare antenna (if present) if the main one malfunctions.

[Squelch7]

6 hours ago, Peder said:

I have a small suggestion.

I started a new career game and I think the oxygen level of the black capsul mk1 need to be increased. It only have like 10-15 minutes  ( a guess ).

The capsules all come with a significant amount of oxygen and scrubbers. It sounds like you don't have ModuleManager installed. (Several of us have fallen for that.)

[lude]

So I noticed that you can avoid the radiation belt bei polar  rocket launches or reentries (in reality, with all kind of planets), will the mod reflect reality this way at some point or is it too hard to code such a non euclidian radiation belt?

[Nansuchao]

1 hour ago, Kwarazi said:

The problem you have @Nansuchao is that TAC-LS is no longer being supported by its OP so unless somone takes it on it will die a slow death

I know, but TAC-LS will not disappear, for sure someone of the marvelous RO guys will maintain it, we just need to have patience, a thing that the user base of this Community doesn't seems to have.

However, I was talking about reference values for a realistic LS, about Kerbalism, ShotgunNinja can choose the way he prefers, he surely showed that he knows what he's doing.

[ShotgunNinja]

@Nansuchao In 0.9.9.5 you could be able to reimplement TAC-LS as a set of rules.

 

@lude For now the belts are just a sphere around the celestial body. But in futures I'll make each belt shaped like reality (eg: two 'touching spheres' toward and opposite the sun direction), meaning you can exploit the poles like in reality.

 

@cicatrix Antennas doesn't need to be deployed in this mod. They are always considered deployed.

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited May 2, 2016 by ShotgunNinja

[Nansuchao]

@ShotgunNinja, telling the thruth, I'm a little bored of TAC-LS. I use it from the beginning and after 3 years has no more secrets or challenges to me. I'm more than happy to use Kerbalism instead and find new designs with new parts, different challenges and generally new things to learn.

[Artfact]

15 minutes ago, ShotgunNinja said:

 

@cicatrix Antennas doesn't need to be deployed in this mod. They are always considered deployed.

That's practical. Does this only concern operability or also for the sending and receiving/relaying of data?

Also, I do like the idea of having an 'on malfunction' trigger for actions or things like KOS. Could this be possible?

[PauloRazen]

How this antenna work? need i instal remote tech? because my sats away failure when im in muun and its inoperable on minnus.

Sry nb here.

 

 

I need to learn to read the whole topic before getting asking about everything.

Edited May 2, 2016 by PauloRazen

[ShotgunNinja]

@Artfact Even the relay system just consider all antennas deployed. I never used kOS but look like an interesting project for sure. But it looks like it doesn't have a generic system for other mods to add things like triggers... the ones that are there seem to be explicitly supported by kOS.

[FreeThinker]

2 hours ago, Nansuchao said:

@ShotgunNinja, telling the thruth, I'm a little bored of TAC-LS. I use it from the beginning and after 3 years has no more secrets or challenges to me. I'm more than happy to use Kerbalism instead and find new designs with new parts, different challenges and generally new things to learn.

The life support of Kerbalsim seems more intuitive to me, my only big Issue of Kerbalsim is communication. When RemoteTech is installed, is should disable it's own communication features, including breaking antana's which is deadly for any deep space equipment. Also it  should only break when entering the atmosphere or when anything crashes into it (like a Kerbal)

Edited May 2, 2016 by FreeThinker

[ShotgunNinja]

@FreeThinker 0.9.9.5 will disable the signal mechanic when RemoteTech/AntennaRange is installed. The Antenna module (the one that can break) is not even added to parts in that case, so that also disable malfunctions for antennas. To be released in a few days. 

[Nansuchao]

Damn, no more +rep for today. Kudos to you two @ShotgunNinja and @FreeThinker

[brusura]

Mmm ok, I like this mod because it add a bit of everything for every aspect without going to much deep and complicating things...now I see that tehre is no more only food and oxygen...but also water and snacks , with water being a mst have I think and snacks to increase morale maybe...

I really hope this mod is not going to get more and more complicated after each release

[ToukieToucan]

Nice stock looking mod, though I have some questions:

1. Do your relay sats need line of sight of the KSC

2. How do you know your relay system is working (so far I just launched my first probes but no solar panels yet = no relay system, but so far I haven't seen something like a line going from KSC to the probe like Antennarange and remotetech do) because if your working with a mod that uses LOS it'd be nice to see how your relay system is doing.

3. Jeb survived in space without electricity for a(n) (couple of) hour(s), why didn't he turn into a giant icicle?

[Kerbalstar]

14 hours ago, astroadrian99 said:

You have Remote Tech installed you can't have both.

[ShotgunNinja]

@brusura That screenshot was only to show the flexible system that's coming. The default behaviour hasn't changed.

 

@ToukieToucan 1. Yes, 2. Connection lines may be added in the futures, for now when a vessel is relayed its icon will turn yellow and the tooltip show the name of the vessels in the relay chain. 3. Surprisingly enough, if you stay out of albedo radiation (far from a body) and at the same distance from the sun that the home body is (in the home system for example) then the external temperature is not that far from the survival one and degeneration of climate per-kerbal slow down a lot. In shadow he should have frozen in 30 minutes , in LKO exposed to sunlight it would have burned in 15.

 

Edited May 2, 2016 by ShotgunNinja
more stuff

[JeffreyCor]

i can understand holding off on some of the communication systems until the new stock system comes out to see if it would be more feasible to work with that, but would very much to like to see connection line indicators included as RemoteTech and AntennaRange both have.

[GluttonyReaper]

Love the idea of this mod, it's nice to see so many features integrated so well into each other.

Just a question - is the lifetime for random failures permanently set at launch? i.e. can you just skirt around failures with quicksaves, or will the same part fail at the same time, regardless of how many times you quickload?

[ToukieToucan]

offtopic whoopies...

Edited May 2, 2016 by ToukieToucan

[seregheru]

@ShotgunNinja Regarding malfunctions - have you considered a "bathtub curve"? From what I can see in the source, every part is guaranteed to fail eventually, some time between min_lifetime and 10*min_lifetime... Under the current system, it looks like a part that *could* fail on a trip to Minmus would *always* fail on a trip to Duna, whereas a part that *could* survive on a trip to Duna would *never* fail on a trip to Minmus. [If I've understood this correctly] it will be very hard to set a malfunction rate that gives a total number of failures that isn't at one extreme or the other - which extreme depending on tech level and mission length.

A bathtub curve combines a falling "early failure" curve, an increasing "wear" curve and a constant random failure rate. The combination has a fairly flat middle portion with steeper sides at the beginning and end of the expected lifetime. From a gameplay perspective, a bathtub curve would let you set a very low baseline rate of failure per unit time, allowing longer continuous time-warps, while still ensuring that even short missions would have at least some chance of failure and that missions far beyond the design lifetime would still suffer multiple failures. Tech progression could both scale the curve and maybe add a "starting age" to the components. IRL, rigorous testing and selection means that space-going components are typically only used during the flat middle section of their lifetimes, so this wouldn't be an entirely realistic model for a space program - but I figure Kerbals aren't *that* rigorous in their testing anyway.

Currently, the uniformly distributed lifetime roughly approximates only the increasing "wear" curve - the linear cumulative distribution function implies a constant probability density function. But a component can only fail at time t provided it has already survived at least as long as time t. This implies an increasing instantaneous probability of failure (or hazard function) that will be extremely difficult to tune for balance. A flatter hazard function would be much easier to tune as well as being closer to reality.

From a coding perspective, implementing a bathtub curve wouldn't be all that different from your current code. You could still have a simple "(age>lifetime)" test at the per simulation step level, but you would initially set lifetime according to the inverse of a different cumulative distribution function (in other words the random number you generate, x, is given by x=cdf(lifetime), which you rearrange for lifetime.) As far as I can see, this is the only code change. As the aim is satisfying gameplay, rather than mathematical accuracy, an approximate CDF would be sufficient (as the "bathtub" shape describes only the hazard function, to do things properly you'd need to get from that to the PDF by multiplying by the survival function, integrate the result to get the CDF and then invert that to get the lifetime...).

I think the result should allow you to satisfyingly tune the failure rate over a much wider range of mission durations, keeping malfunctions relevant throughout career progression without completely crippling longer missions.