[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9

[APlayer]

14 hours ago, ShotgunNinja said:

[...] The reliability has no concept of a module being in use or not. [...]

Is it possible, or hard to implement a possibility to edit the reliability module of a part mid-flight?

If so, you could make engines decrease their MTBF upon ignition. A bit of the decrease would be permanent.

Example: Engine ignition - MTBF decreases to 0.05% of initial value (About 10h if it was 8Y initially). Upon shutting down the engine, MTBF restores to, say, 80% of initial value.

This would require cfg tweaking to have low thrust, high ISP engines (Ions, for example) have much higher MTBFs than other engines, but I am willing to take this over, if necessary.

[MaxZhao]

12 hours ago, ValynEritai said:

I had this thought too, then had another thought that it could just be to get the ship into the atmosphere, then antennas can be deployed afterwards so they don't snap under dynamic pressure.

 

I actually completely agree with this, I've made changes to my install of Kerbalism to allow this. Thanks a lot again for making Kerbalism support Bluedog!

[ragusila]

9 hours ago, Yaar Podshipnik said:

@ragusila  you can't edit profiles via MM patches. See https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/pull/56#issuecomment-271663949, with relevant bit here for your convenience.

Easiest way to achieve what you want seems to be making a copy of default profile, adjusting the values you want using a text editor, and simply using that profile instead of the Default one.

I see, thank you. I did make a new profile, and it works, but I thought an MM patch would be a more elegant solution. Will finish the profile then by changing everything manually. 

[alaxandir]

Is there a way to get the same type of data transferring utilizing some of the DMagic Orbital Science pack? It has some ridiculous OP antennae and I want to either nerf them or make them work with this mod.

[ockidj]

Where does the waste water and waste go before researching any waste recycling?

 

Edited January 13, 2017 by ockidj

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, ockidj said:

Where does the waste water and waste go before researching any waste recycling?

 

Overboard. It vanishes, like all other excess resources.

[Yaar Podshipnik]

15 hours ago, alaxandir said:

Is there a way to get the same type of data transferring utilizing some of the DMagic Orbital Science pack? It has some ridiculous OP antennae and I want to either nerf them or make them work with this mod.

I started working on support for OS antennas, don't know when will submit a patch. I don't really like the stats on those antennas in base mod, as they are very, very light compared to the advertised range. What I'm doing is making them have high range but low bandwidth to compensate for low weight.

You can always write your own MM patches to add support of course. 

If you want a nice long range antenna, that's balanced ok on mass/range/bandwidth see JX2Antenna 

Kerbalism already has full support for it.

[alaxandir]

56 minutes ago, Yaar Podshipnik said:

 

Kerbalism already has full support for it.

1

Thank you this is perfect.

How difficult is it to write Module Manager patches? I've never tried.

[APlayer]

3 hours ago, alaxandir said:

How difficult is it to write Module Manager patches? I've never tried.

Consider this: I was able to do some easy ones. So, not difficult at all. 

[SiCaRiO31]

Squad really should add some of the stuff from kerbalism :p.

Now, I was thinking about how probes are build for specific pruporses and missions and it occured to me: why not add a way to customise the science instruments for specific uses (like for instance, have the magnetometer be more sensible in certain ranges more suitable for Jool than Kerbol, for instance). I trought of this when reading about Juno, and how their science instruments would not be capable of gathering the same science they were specting because its in an orbit it wasnt designed to be.  If your probe is not within the parameters of the instrument, then you bet less science than you should otherwise.

[Yaar Podshipnik]

@alaxandir not difficult at all. Let's dissect the JX2Antenna patch as example. All explaining comments are after // (which indicates a comment) and in green (as it's simply the best). You can actually copy-paste the whole stuff below to a cfg and it should work. All 3rd party support patches for Kerbalism go into Support directory, with one .cfg per mod. https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/wiki/Module-Manager-Syntax are docs for MM, and have some pointers below.

 

Quote

 

@PART[jx2LDA]:NEEDS[FeatureSignal]:FOR[Kerbalism]:AFTER[JX2Antenna]

//@PART[jx2LDA] means edit part named jx2LDA. You find the name of the thing you want to edit by looking at the config files in the mod directory, OS 'antennas' seem to be in DMagicOrbitalScience\OversizeScience, find the top-level 'PART{}' block and then find the 'name' attribute. So if you want to edit 'Oversize Signals Intelligence Satellite' you would look into SIGINT.cfg and use 'dmSIGINT' here

//NEEDS[FeatureSignal] is a mechanism to 'read' kerbalism config. What this bit is saying is 'only apply this patch if FeatureSignal is enabled'.

//FOR[Kerbalism] is technically unnecessary - it marks the patch as part of the Kerbalism mod, but in our case it is redundant as it lives in a subdir of Kerbalism. If you have your own folder with tweaks you can use FOR in combination with BEFORE and AFTER to patch things at various stages.

//AFTER[JX2Antenna] means 'execute this patch after all the patches for mod JX2Antenna have been applied'. It also means that if that mod is not installed it won't try to do anything.
{
  !MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter] {}
  !MODULE[ModuleDeployableAntenna] {}

// Every part in KSP composes its behaviour out of modules. What !MODULE does is remove a given module from part config. Here in particular we remove the stock KSP antenna code (ModuleDataTransmitter) and stock KSP antenna deployment code (ModuledeployableAntenna). We'll replace that functionality with Kerbalism-specific stuff. For OS antennas you don't need to delete ModuleDeployableAntenna - they don't have it. That animation is handled differently.

  MODULE
  {
    name = Antenna
    type = high_gain
    cost = 1.98
    dist = 1.0e12
    rate = 0.256
  }

// This MODULE bit means 'add this module to the part I'm editing'. 'Antenna' is the Kerbalism module that you need to have on your part in order for it to be considered an antenna for Kerbalism Signal purposes. See https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/wiki/Modules#antenna for detailed explanation. Also check existing patches to get a feel about balance.

  MODULE:NEEDS[FeatureReliability]
  {
    name = Reliability
    type = Antenna
    title = Antenna
    redundancy = Communication
    repair = Engineer
    mtbf = 108864000  // 12y
    extra_cost = 3.0
    extra_mass = 0.5
  }

// This is actually a really cool bit - the whole patch will only be applied if FeatureSignal is turned on, but this additional module will only be applied if FeatureReliability is on as well. That means that if somebody plays with profile without Reliability, they can still use your antenna and won't see any stuff that doesn't make sense in their game. In recent MM versions you can have :NEEDS pretty much everywhere.

  MODULE
  {
    name = ModuleAnimationGroup
    deployAnimationName = deployHexes
    moduleType = Antenna
  }

// This re-adds a generic way to deploy an antenna - it's just an animation player. It uses the same animation name as the original mod. So for our SIGINT you would use 'dishDeploy'. I'm not entirely sure if you need that bit in case of OS, @ShotgunNinja could probably explain how Kerbalism detects whether antenna is deployed or not.

  @description = An enormous High-Gain antenna, powerful enough to maintain contact with DSN even from the farthest outskirts of the system. It has been built from the highest quality components available, thus ensuring a long and reliable service.

// Here I just edit the description of the part to better reflect its new role
}

 

When you look at most antennas, you'll see that pretty much everything but the part name and actual stats is boilerplate config - you can get away with copy-pasting one of the patches and just pointing it at the right mod/part ;). 

Once you're happy with the results of your work share it with the community! Best way to do that is to make a pull request on github, as it allows easy code review and a conversation between ShotgunNinja and you if something is not entirely right. I think some patches were posted here as well, but it's more work to integrate them if you have to copy paste from a forum post.

One thing you should keep in mind - Kerbalism is 'free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.' see https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/blob/master/LICENSE. If you're submitting any work to that mod it will be released under that licence. So if you don't like your work to be in public domain, don't submit it. 

 

Edited January 13, 2017 by Yaar Podshipnik

[alaxandir]

1 hour ago, Yaar Podshipnik said:

@alaxandir not difficult at all. Let's dissect the JX2Antenna patch as example. All explaining comments are after // (which indicates a comment) and in green (as it's simply the best). You can actually copy-paste the whole stuff below to a cfg and it should work. All 3rd party support patches for Kerbalism go into Support directory, with one .cfg per mod. https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/wiki/Module-Manager-Syntax are docs for MM, and have some pointers below.

 

When you look at most antennas, you'll see that pretty much everything but the part name and actual stats is boilerplate config - you can get away with copy-pasting one of the patches and just pointing it at the right mod/part ;). 

Once you're happy with the results of your work share it with the community! Best way to do that is to make a pull request on github, as it allows easy code review and a conversation between ShotgunNinja and you if something is not entirely right. I think some patches were posted here as well, but it's more work to integrate them if you have to copy paste from a forum post.

One thing you should keep in mind - Kerbalism is 'free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.' see https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/blob/master/LICENSE. If you're submitting any work to that mod it will be released under that licence. So if you don't like your work to be in public domain, don't submit it. 

 

8

Thank you very much for taking the time to teach me how to do this. Amazing!

[ockidj]

I can't find any documentation on co2 poisoning? Am I missing something? All I could find is this https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/wiki/Habitat#atmosphere-control

[podbaydoor]

On 1/11/2017 at 2:58 PM, ShotgunNinja said:

@podbaydoor

2) I'll take a look, but can you try to see if that's the case in 1.1.8?

 

Just confirmed tweakable sliders still are not remembered when saving crafts in 1.1.8.

[alaxandir]

3 hours ago, Yaar Podshipnik said:

@alaxandir not difficult at all. Let's dissect the JX2Antenna patch as example. All explaining comments are after // (which indicates a comment) and in green (as it's simply the best). You can actually copy-paste the whole stuff below to a cfg and it should work. All 3rd party support patches for Kerbalism go into Support directory, with one .cfg per mod. https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/wiki/Module-Manager-Syntax are docs for MM, and have some pointers below.

 

When you look at most antennas, you'll see that pretty much everything but the part name and actual stats is boilerplate config - you can get away with copy-pasting one of the patches and just pointing it at the right mod/part ;). 

Once you're happy with the results of your work share it with the community! Best way to do that is to make a pull request on github, as it allows easy code review and a conversation between ShotgunNinja and you if something is not entirely right. I think some patches were posted here as well, but it's more work to integrate them if you have to copy paste from a forum post.

One thing you should keep in mind - Kerbalism is 'free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.' see https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/blob/master/LICENSE. If you're submitting any work to that mod it will be released under that licence. So if you don't like your work to be in public domain, don't submit it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EUREKA! I did it!

https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/pull/62

^ My proposed changes to DMagic Orbital Science antenna, thanks again for your help I never would have figured this out without you.

 

This changes the DMagic antennae from the ridiculous 10 T to 280 Gm, and I changed the data Tx rate to 0.032 to bring it more in line with other antenna you'll have around this tech level. These give the player a real choice if they want to go really far away but only have limited Data throughput; they can now make that choice. They don't work in Atmosphere and can't relay since they are high-gain so they should be pretty balanced and provide a meaningful experience for people who want to send early probes to very distant bodies with the understanding they won't be able to transmit a lot of data quickly.

 

Though now that I'm looking at it in game it appears my changes haven't worked.

 

Anyone who knows more able to take a look at my patch and see why it's not working?

Fixed it.

 

 

What do you guys think?

I also just realized the soil moisture sensor is also an antenna in DMagic but I think I'll remove it as an antenna, doesn't make sense to me.

Edited January 13, 2017 by alaxandir

[APlayer]

16 hours ago, Yaar Podshipnik said:

[...]

Sir, you should teach this kind of stuff.

[Yaar Podshipnik]

@APlayer thank you! I'm a noob to KSP modding, mostly learn stuff by looking at cool patches in big mods like Kerbalism, USI, NFT, and Ven's Stock Revamp. IRL though, teaching other people to code (MM is not coding though) is a large part of my job, so hopefully I do something right

[Jade_Falcon]

23 hours ago, ockidj said:

I can't find any documentation on co2 poisoning? Am I missing something? All I could find is this https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/wiki/Habitat#atmosphere-control

There is a bit of info about it here:

https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/wiki/Default-Profile#biological-needs

Basically, keep the levels below 2%.  As long as the scrubbers are working, it should stay at 0. Above that, the kerbals on board start to suffer the effects of CO2 poisoning.  If you have an issue like I did where one of the scrubbers was accidentally turned off before performing maneuvers under warp , you may not have enough time for the scrubbers to reduce the levels back below 2% before everyone dies. It occurred to me later that I might have been able to have some of the kerbals go on EVA then vent the pod by turning off the Habitat; from reading the info on how the Habitat works, that may have dumped the atmosphere inside reducing all levels back to 0.  Ill have to test this out later to see if it works.

Edit: That would have been totally cool if it worked. It kinda works in that the kerbals on EVA take some of the Waste Atmosphere with them, but turning off the Habitat only dumps the Atmosphere overboard. Once the kerbals come back inside, they bring the Waste Atmosphere back inside with them. On the upside, the EVA suit scrubs some of the Waste off as well.

Edited January 14, 2017 by Jade_Falcon
Additional info

[mikegarrison]

I think I have found an unfortunate interaction between several mods.

The relevant ones seem to be Near Future Electrical (the nuclear reactors), MechJeb, and Kerbalism.

I think (not 100% confirmed) that what is happening is that when the nuclear power is the only source of power, and MechJeb is warping the time, then a Kerbalism warning message stops the timewarp temporarily. At this point sometimes Kerbalism thinks there is no power, or no CO2 scrubbing, or occasionally other similar things. And before Kerbalism can figure out that everything is OK, Mechjeb restarts the timewarp.

Before I can stop it again, the Kerbals die because Kerbalism thinks they are poisoned by CO2 or whatever. They never should have been in danger, because the reactor was working normally, the scrubbers were on, etc. But time warp does strange things sometimes, and MechJeb will immediately turn it back on again if something else interrupts it (be it Kerbalism or even just hitting the "x" key).

[Edit: apparently it's not tied to the Kerbalism warnings after all. I watched carefully as it happened on a ship to Minmus. Under high timewarp, suddenly the CO2 count started shooting up. I paused the timewarp and everything was fine. The CO2 started to come down (from 4%). But the scrubbers weren't working fast enough and the crew's poisoning percentage kept climbing. So I saved, then edited the save file to bring the CO2 in the cabin back down to 0%. Then I timewarped again and the crew recovered.

I'm not sure if Kerbalism just decided that there was no power and so stopped scrubbing, or whether the problem was directly with the scrubber module turning itself off. But I have seen other cases where the EC drops to zero either in or just coming out of high timewarp, even though I have a nuclear reactor constantly providing massively excessive power.]

Edited January 15, 2017 by mikegarrison

[alaxandir]

4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

I think I have found an unfortunate interaction between several mods.

The relevant ones seem to be Near Future Electrical (the nuclear reactors), MechJeb, and Kerbalism.

I think (not 100% confirmed) that what is happening is that when the nuclear power is the only source of power, and MechJeb is warping the time, then a Kerbalism warning message stops the timewarp temporarily. At this point sometimes Kerbalism thinks there is no power, or no CO2 scrubbing, or occasionally other similar things. And before Kerbalism can figure out that everything is OK, Mechjeb restarts the timewarp.

Before I can stop it again, the Kerbals die because Kerbalism thinks they are poisoned by CO2 or whatever. They never should have been in danger, because the reactor was working normally, the scrubbers were on, etc. But time warp does strange things sometimes, and MechJeb will immediately turn it back on again if something else interrupts it (be it Kerbalism or even just hitting the "x" key).

[Edit: apparently it's not tied to the Kerbalism warnings after all. I watched carefully as it happened on a ship to Minmus. Under high timewarp, suddenly the CO2 count started shooting up. I paused the timewarp and everything was fine. The CO2 started to come down (from 4%). But the scrubbers weren't working fast enough and the crew's poisoning percentage kept climbing. So I saved, then edited the save file to bring the CO2 in the cabin back down to 0%. Then I timewarped again and the crew recovered.

I'm not sure if Kerbalism just decided that there was no power and so stopped scrubbing, or whether the problem was directly with the scrubber module turning itself off. But I have seen other cases where the EC drops to zero either in or just coming out of high timewarp, even though I have a nuclear reactor constantly providing massively excessive power.]

 

This might have something to do with the time-delta calculations. Maybe tweaking the values would help? I'm not 100% certain where you'd find those files but increasing the amount of time the game gets to do calculations might help. I'm sure it's a variable in there somewhere.

[DMagic]

On 1/13/2017 at 5:03 PM, alaxandir said:

I also just realized the soil moisture sensor is also an antenna in DMagic but I think I'll remove it as an antenna, doesn't make sense to me.

The soil moisture sensor is nothing but an array of L-band (1-2GHz) microwave antennas, a lot of space communications use the nearby S-band (2-4GHz), so it isn't unreasonable to think that it could also be used for deep space comms.

Concrete information about SIGINT satellites is pretty hard to come by, but I believe at least some were used to catch the spill-over signals from line-of-sight microwave communications, which operate at similar frequencies. So really it's all just down to different antenna design. There is actually a different soil moisture satellite design that uses a large umbrella-type antenna, similar to what some of the newer SIGINT satellites supposedly use.

[alaxandir]

9 minutes ago, DMagic said:

The soil moisture sensor is nothing but an array of L-band (1-2GHz) microwave antennas, a lot of space communications use the nearby S-band (2-4GHz), so it isn't unreasonable to think that it could also be used for deep space comms.

Concrete information about SIGINT satellites is pretty hard to come by, but I believe at least some were used to catch the spill-over signals from line-of-sight microwave communications, which operate at similar frequencies. So really it's all just down to different antenna design. There is actually a different soil moisture satellite design that uses a large umbrella-type antenna, similar to what some of the newer SIGINT satellites supposedly use.

 

Makes sense, I'm pretty ignorant of the antenna technology myself so I just went with what I thought was right. I'm sure that the maintainer for Kerbalism will change it if he wants it to also be an antenna based on what you've shared here.

 

Not to say that I don't like your stuff DMagic, it's great! Thanks for what you do!

[White Owl]

What could be preventing Kerbalism from modifying the antennae in my very unreasonably heavily modded install? I know the signals feature is enabled, because unmanned probes aren't controllable with the default config; but if I change the Kerbalism signals config to "full" control, then the probes are controllable. So that much works. But none of my antennae — stock Squad or mod part — are changed to high gain or low gain. They all have the stock "direct" or "relay" labels.

Obviously, some other mod is interfering... but I'm not sure where to start looking.

[alaxandir]

7 hours ago, White Owl said:

What could be preventing Kerbalism from modifying the antennae in my very unreasonably heavily modded install? I know the signals feature is enabled, because unmanned probes aren't controllable with the default config; but if I change the Kerbalism signals config to "full" control, then the probes are controllable. So that much works. But none of my antennae — stock Squad or mod part — are changed to high gain or low gain. They all have the stock "direct" or "relay" labels.

Obviously, some other mod is interfering... but I'm not sure where to start looking.

 

The right way to figure it out is to remove your mods one at a time until it's working. Sorry to say thats very tedious though.

[nosscire]

Question regarding Habitats.

I was under the impression that the new version would be dealing with habitats in a similar way to CLS. This is also what the Changelog seems to be implying:

Quote

- new module Habitat: replace CLS internal spaces

However, there seems to be no way to have multiple different habitats on one vessel, like you could have multiple separate living spaces in CLS? It seems that all spaces with Habitat is counted together as one large habitat.

Is this the intended way for things to work?

For most things this shouldn't make a big difference, but Shielding is one of the areas where it does. In the old version of Kerbalism, I heavily shielded one CLS living space, where I put my Kerbals during storms and similar things, but kept other areas relatively unshielded. This allowed me to save lots of weight, with the drawback that I had to manually move my kerbals to that habitat (and the risk of "Ooops, too slow").

Am I missing something here?