New challenge- New career-Gameplay mod recommendations

[Noel32]

I'm playing the newest ksp 1.2.2 and I've only ever played the stock vanilla game.

 

I'm about to start a new career play through and I'm pretty much set on using TAC Life support and Kerbal Planetary Base systems.

 

Are there any other gameplay mods you recommend to go with a playthrough like this and are there any particular settings I should keep in mind and tips you could offer?

 

Many thanks

Edited January 4, 2017 by Noel32

[Sharpy]

If you go with Planetary Bases, KIS is strongly recommended. While you *can* assemble everything through docking ports, being able to attach/detach parts at random is really welcome.

And if you go with KIS and want your bases to be worth more than just pretty parts sitting on the surface, and a place to grow your greens, seriously consider OSE Workshop. Building your satellites, return vehicles, rovers etc from scratch at the destination is waaay fun.

Additionally, Pathfinder plays really well with the above two, both expanding the "planetary bases" theme on its own and providing parts and extensions that utilize and expand them. At the very least, for OSE Workshop you'll want a container bigger than what "stock KIS" provides to be able to manufacture larger parts, and Pathfinder's Hacienda fits the bill quite well. Alternatively, get USI's Kontainers, for its 5m KIS container.

(right at this moment I have two craft launched, one to Dres, one to Moho, both with less than 20 parts total, both carrying crew of >6 kerbals, both with not enough delta-V for return, both with large containers filled with bare essentials to start self-sustainable bases - which will, subsequently lead to constructing return vehicles.

[Kombat engineer]

I would suggest USI mods.

[CSE]

You may already know USI life support, but if not then it's worth checking out as an alternative to TAC; it has a less detailed chemistry but more on the 'soft' factors for long-term habitation. I think it's easier to get started with than TAC, making your first ships' life support simpler and then growing gradually more complex as you try to make planetary bases less dependent on receiving supplies from home.

Roverdude's Konstruction gives you parts for assembly vehicles such as cranes and forklifts. It also has the fantastically simple self-welding docking ports that let you turn a docked base into a single structure as if you'd built it in one piece.

Necrobones' Lithobrake parts pack provides large landing gear and long ladders that can be very useful for getting large bases safely onto the surface.

...

For my own preferences, I also use Landing Height and MechJeb / Kerbal Engineer to give me better instrumentation for the approach - having the height to terrain, separate horizontal and vertical speeds, and the vertical acceleration is just so useful, I'm nearly as efficient as MechJeb's landing autopilot when I have good instruments (and pretty awful without them).

[CSE]

As to tips for playing - choose a site on the equator of your favourite planet/moon for your base, to give yourself less time fiddling with launch/landing windows and orbital plane corrections, and more time landing and building your base. And then land small explorer probes at several potential equatorial sites. Pick the one where the terrain looks the coolest to build your base: you'll spend a lot of game time here, and the most important resource for a planetary base is fun.

[Noel32]

I've done as Sharpy suggested with the following mods:

KIS

KAS

Pathfinder

plus the ones I've already committed to:

TAC life support 

Planetary Base systems

Engineer Redux

Alarm Clock

 

Its brilliant and amazing and overwhelming the amount of new pieces of equipment. Actually I'm a bit lost. :-D

 

 

[DStaal]

I'd add in ScanSat, for a slightly better scanning/mapping experience.  And if you're doing Pathfinder, you should take a look at MOLE for your orbital operations.  (And maybe DSEV for your deep space operations.)  DSEV has some welding docking ports that will make building things is space a bit more sturdy as well.  (They work very similarly to the ones in the Konstruction pack.)

Worth looking at/thinking about is Extraplanetary Launchpads, for building out in-situ.  Or Alista's new Ground Construction mod - which lets you ship up kits from Kerbin and build them out on site.  (Vs. EL's where you can do the whole refinery chain in-place.)  Keridian Dynamics makes some very good replacement parts for EL if you don't like the parts that ship with it.  (Which are notoriously... Odd.  I'll go with odd.)

And all of the Near Future stuff is worth looking at - but the Construction, Solar, and Heat packs especially so, as they directly fill in some places where stock has gaps, without anything else going on.  (Some of the others have some mechanics changes on how things operate.)

And since you sound like you're going for a semi-realistic playthrough, may I suggest Connected Living Spaces?  It'll enforce that you can't do things like transfer a Kerbal through a truss or fuel tank, so you have to pay a bit more attention to your designs.

[StupidAndy]

if your using life support, I recommend Kerbalism, it has all of the stuff of other life support, and some, magnetospheres! radiation! malfunctions! quality of life (cramped spaces+long time= bad)! to me, its better then most other life support mods

and also, not really something that adds parts or mechanics, but final frontier is an AWESOME mod! it helps you with choosing astronauts by keeping the records of all of the astronauts, like first astronaut in space, first to orbit, first EVA, landed on mun, ETC

[Sharpy]

My recommendation for the start planet of the first base? Kerbin

That way any mistakes are easily undone or corrected. You learn the ropes and when you know most caveats, you're ready to go

 

[JadeOfMaar]

I'd like to recommend not all of USI, but Karbonite for use with TAC LS. It is an incredibly versatile alternative to Ore for fuel processing; its parts even let you grab Water from oceans, and refine Water, Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen from Karbonite on the fly. 

Edited January 13, 2017 by JadeOfMaar

[Streetwind]

Something that's not been mentioned yet:

Have you considered an expanded tech tree? As you keep adding mods, the stock KSP tech tree gets kind of full kind of quickly. Not to mention the fact that it's fully unlocked without the need to go interplanetary, which for a lot of people is kind of a bummer in terms of progression. Custom tech trees offer more nodes to hold the part flood, and/or a different progression path, and usually give you more endgame goals.

Your main choice lies between Community Tech Tree, which merely adds additional nodes onto the stock tree but is broadly compatible due to preserving the stock nodes, and a fully custom tree that completely replaces stock but might only support the mods that the tech tree author manually implemented.