Where next?

[Deathninja]

Sooo...I've been playing since about...0.12 or thereabouts? (at least 3 years anyway), exams/hospitalisation/work/more hospitalisation/other stuff/ohgodevenmorehospitalisationhowamIstillalive means I never really got too far into it.

I love designing rockets and planning missions (ex-cyberneticist) but the actual control winds me up, so I'm stuck on sandbox as I need MechJeb to enjoy the game; I give MJ a rocket with enough dV, plot a few nodes and leave the flying/landing/exploding to him. Problem is I got bored quickly, until I found mods.

The issue I'm having is it's shifted the balance from too few toys to drowning in them. To keep things simple I've stuck with KAS/KIS, Scansat (on EZ-mode, my playtime is pretty limited) and finally went for the USI ecosystem as it's well supported and has an LS system (also sexy kontainers). Now I've mapped a few moons and planets I'm aiming to establish a Mun/Minmus mining op (manned) to support an orbital LFO base for a later base on Duna, I'm just not sure how to build up to that.

Anyone with a similar mod structure have any tips? The UKS wiki is painfully outdated because Roverdude codes like a cyborg on crack, and at the minute it feels like jumpung from toy soldiers to ASL.

[Streetwind]

I think I remember that Roverdude, or maybe someone else, has been writing a comprehensive PDF guide explaining the game mechanics much better than the outdated wiki does. I can't really find it right now, since all I saw of it was a WIP version of it linked directly from a forum post, but I'm sure that if you ask in the UKS thread, someone can point you to it. Roverdude himself is very active.

A good piece of advice that you will often receive there, by the way, is "don't try to do everything at once". It's a very complex mod that's meant to build up from a few introductory modules to a big, interconnected system. If you go into sandbox mode and try to build the high-end system from scratch without ever having gone through the process of incrementally upgrading an initially small base, you will indeed have trouble understanding what the heck is going on.

[Snark]

If you'd like to keep the exact same "gameplay" mods but have a new place to go, a nice way to extend your play is to tinker with the solar system.

Two mods in particular stand out to me as "best in breed":

• Outer Planets Mod (a.k.a. OPM).  Adds new planets to the outer solar system: analogs of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.  Leaves the stock solar system alone (except for moving Eeloo to be a moon of the Saturn-analog), so you can retro-fit it into one of your existing save games without disrupting anything.  The production value is just stunning, it's easily up to the quality of the stock game.
• New Horizons.  This completely rejiggers the entire solar system.  Adds a bunch of planets and moons, and completely rearranges all the existing ones.  (Kerbin, for example, ends up as a moon of a gas giant.)  It's like a whole new game.

Both of the above are just loads of fun.  They give you a lot of new places to explore, and you should be able to squeeze a lot of hours out of them. 

[Norcalplanner]

+1 for the ASL reference.

[Wemb]

One thing I really want to explore is some properly automated launches that don't rely on MJ.  I want, at some point, to fly a missions to dock at my orbiting station and do it entirely from within the IVA view with the games main GUI turned off via the F2 key. It should be possible to do this using MJ (for it's SmartASS) coupled to the RasterPropMonitor MFD displays.  The one element that's missing is a sensible way to launch this. I could wing it from the navball, but my goal will be to do the launch with kOS. 

kOS isn't something I've remotely looked into yet, but it sounds interesting and would add a whole new interface to the game, rather than extending the game outwards with more planets, it'd provide me with an entirely new mechanic, and set of challenges, for handing even the simple stuff.

Wemb