totm may 2024 [1.12.x] - Modular Kolonization System (MKS)

[rudemario]

On 8/16/2020 at 11:52 PM, Terwin said:

There is a time-span beyond which homesickness and habitation time stops counting.

I believe that it is 5 years.(not counting any extensions from using colony supplies)

So any base that can provide 5+ years of habitation will allow an indefinite stay without habitation or Home timers causing a problem.

For pilots(and explorers) that time-span is 1 year.

Hey Terwin, would you happen to know whether this "indefinite hab/home" feature is still present in MKS?

I have a ship that has 50+ years of hab/home for my 3 kerbals, but the scientist and engineer switch from "indefinite"  to "49y" after a few days in orbit, obviously after enough days have passed to fall below the 50 year mark.

Maybe there is something I am doing wrong or this feature has been removed.

I replied to your post since I saw you addressed the issue in August as quoted and might know more about it.

[Terwin]

2 hours ago, rudemario said:

Hey Terwin, would you happen to know whether this "indefinite hab/home" feature is still present in MKS?

I have a ship that has 50+ years of hab/home for my 3 kerbals, but the scientist and engineer switch from "indefinite"  to "49y" after a few days in orbit, obviously after enough days have passed to fall below the 50 year mark.

Maybe there is something I am doing wrong or this feature has been removed.

I replied to your post since I saw you addressed the issue in August as quoted and might know more about it.

I have not heard anything about it being removed.

Having a Home timer of 49 years and descending sounds like you have a big luxury space station and departed from it on a smaller vessel with less habitation, and now the home timer is counting down from max set by the 'best' vessel the kerbal has been on.

But in that case the Hab timer should be less than 50 years, as a hab time of > 50 years should stop the timer.

Is it possible that some of your habitation modules turned off or ran out of colony supplies perhaps?

I have the latest release version, and my GameData\UmbraSpaceIndustries\LifeSupport\setings.cfg file has the following to lines:

    ScoutHabTime = 9180000
    PermaHabTime = 459000000
where 9180000 = # seconds in 425 days of 6 hours each(sounds like about a kerbal year to me) and the higher number is that times 50.

So as far as I can tell, the default is 50 years and 1 year for scouts.

I think you can modify this in a given save, so you should check your in game USI-LS settings as ell as your settings file, just to make sure.

 

Is it possible that your vessel only has 49 years of hab time, but you only see this once it gets above the 'HomeWorldAltitude'?  (default is 25km above kerbin)

You may need to switch on one or more habitation parts after leaving the VAB.

[lBoBl]

On 4/29/2021 at 9:04 PM, modus said:

It spawns at a certain distance from your ship, so I wouldn't worry. 

Well apparently if your ship is too big they can still spawn inside of each other. I managed to work around it by timewarping as soon as the ship spawns to suspend the physics simulation and just wait for the ships to drift apart from each other.

However I'm currently trying to deal with another problem that is slightly more annoying. As I am trying to build a particular ship, the game gets stuck on the loading screen indefinitely. I have to terminate the process with task manager and restart the game. At this point the ship appears in the tracking station, however, if I try to control it, I get an infinite loading screen again. If I try to control the shipyard that is next to it, everything seems to explode for no apparent reason.

Obviously I know that this isn't enough to investigate the issue, especially since I have a ton of mods. I'm just wondering if others have had the same issue, but if not I'll try to pinpoint it. Apparently only specific ships cause the crash, maybe it's a part in particular or something. I've glanced at one of the logs but saw nothing suspicious, but that was after I restarted and unsuccessfully tried to control the ship from the tracking station. I'll try to reproduce the issue and I'll upload the log.

[rudemario]

1 hour ago, Terwin said:

I have not heard anything about it being removed.

Having a Home timer of 49 years and descending sounds like you have a big luxury space station and departed from it on a smaller vessel with less habitation, and now the home timer is counting down from max set by the 'best' vessel the kerbal has been on.

But in that case the Hab timer should be less than 50 years, as a hab time of > 50 years should stop the timer.

Is it possible that some of your habitation modules turned off or ran out of colony supplies perhaps?

I have the latest release version, and my GameData\UmbraSpaceIndustries\LifeSupport\setings.cfg file has the following to lines:

    ScoutHabTime = 9180000
    PermaHabTime = 459000000
where 9180000 = # seco[...]

This is what puzzles me.

I created a ship for testing purposes to illustrate the issue, and then I warped it up to Kerbin's orbit with the Set Orbit cheat default.

As seen here: my ship has all the normal requirements. I'm not below the home altitude. All of my habitation modules are turned on and I wouldn't need colony supplies because pilots who are indefinite don't need colony supplies. I have enough battery to last throughout the dark side of the planet, recycler for 3 Kerbals, supplies, enough Nom-O-Matics to meet demands, fertilizer, enough power generated via the solar panels to feed all of the habitation modules, as well as having all of the habitation modules turned on and deployed (I encountered an issue before with habitation modules functioning while uninflated but this was unintentional, causing unexplained bugs).

In another video here: you can see that with my ship starting at 50 years and a few days, that after going around Kerbin a few times you can actually see the timer tick down in blue: "hab for x:y ." After a few go-arounds, when the hab time reaches below about 49 years and 400 days, the indicator on the right switches from "indefinite" over to "49y".

Now, the Pilot is unaffected. If I time-warp all the way down below 1 year, he is fine and functions normal. Everyone else on the other hand doesn't get this treatment even though they're above 50 years and say "indefinite."

Here you can see my config settings and you can see everything is set to default as normal and the default time for regular Perma-Hab is set to 459000000 which is the default 50 years.

I'm not sure what's going on. Any ideas?

 

[Kerbex]

Hi, I'm a little confused about crew transfers with WOLF.  Is it possible to transfer by route the crew?  If so, how?  I'm using the pre-release versions of the whole constellation.  I do notice that there is another sort of flight recorder (posted image) that may be for crew transfers but the part does not seem to have any functionality.

Edited May 5, 2021 by Kerbex

[Caerfinon]

1 hour ago, rudemario said:

I'm not sure what's going on. Any ideas?

Regardless of the starting values, Hab time and Home time are always decaying over time for the crew. All kerbals are immune if these values are over 50 years. Under 50 years only pilots and scouts are immune. All other kerbals start counting down at less than 50 years until it zeros out and they need to return home.  Some people set Hab effect (vet) to none to give the original 4 kerbals immunity. 

[rudemario]

7 minutes ago, Caerfinon said:

All kerbals are immune if these values are over 50 years.

Am I misunderstanding something here? You said that all Kerbals are immune if these values are over 50 years.

In my post I showed the values of my ship in the video were at 50 years plus 5 days, and before I recorded the video the value was at 50 years plus 95 days. It wasn't until I got below 49 years and 400 days that the hab/home timer showed "49y" instead of "indefinite" which I showed in the video. My screenshots showed only the threshold point of before indefinite expired and just after.

9 minutes ago, Caerfinon said:

All other kerbals start counting down at less than 50 years until it zeros out and they need to return home.

But in my second video it shows that the timer still counts down even though all crew members show "indefinite", and then once below 49 years and 400 days FROM 50 years and 90 days they switch to "49y" If I fast forward all the way until their expiry, they do actually become tourists, and my pilot, Jebediah, doesn't, so he's functioning like normal.

What happened to me goes contrary to what you're saying. What could be the issue?

I might just be missing something here.

[Kerbex]

3 hours ago, rudemario said:

 

 

Hey, I do notice that the first one which says that it's indefinite for all three crew, it also says that the hab is 49 years and 379 days.  Where it says 119 supplies (6.8/day) hab for 49y:379d at the top.  It may be some sort of rounding problem.  If you bump that number up above 50 years it may work?

Edited May 5, 2021 by Kerbex

[Tacombel]

@Yuubari_  Other parts where you will want engineers are the ones that provide Konstruction Points for EVA konstruction. To activate the assist you need an engineer in it.

[Caerfinon]

4 hours ago, rudemario said:

I might just be missing something here.

HAB time and Homesick time are always two clocks counting down.

It is designed so Kerbals always want to come home after some period of time in space.  Individual kerbals show the effects of this countdown in different ways. Pilots and scouts have a longer immunity to the countdown. It represents how long a kerbal will put up with being on a long mission. At some point they all need to be brought back to Kerbin.

Home time can be altered by med labs and colony supplies, but not stopped entirely.  Hab time can be reset by moving Kerbal to more spacious craft, but then it still counts down  "Indefinite" is not an absolute. it only shows while the timers are over the perma-hab value.  

From the Wiki: Functions-(Habitation)
"Hab time is reset every time a kerbal enters a new vessel. It begins with the vessel's provided Habitation time, divided by the number of kerbals present, and counts down to zero"

"Home time never resets of its own accord and starts counting down from the moment of launch. However, it is increased by the highest amount of Habitation ever experienced by the kerbal."

[modus]

8 hours ago, lBoBl said:

Well apparently if your ship is too big they can still spawn inside of each other. I managed to work around it by timewarping as soon as the ship spawns to suspend the physics simulation and just wait for the ships to drift apart from each other.

Did not know this. @RoverDude(or someone else) is there a fixed distance at which constructed vessels spawn?

[Terwin]

10 hours ago, Kerbex said:

Hi, I'm a little confused about crew transfers with WOLF.  Is it possible to transfer by route the crew?  If so, how?  I'm using the pre-release versions of the whole constellation.  I do notice that there is another sort of flight recorder (posted image) that may be for crew transfers but the part does not seem to have any functionality.

The part you showed is for creating routes in the released version and I believe it has been replaced by the cargo crates and passenger berths in the pre-release version.

I have not used the pre-release, but I would recommend looking under utility if it does not show up under WOLF(and if not there, look in your research tree to see if it is still locked) 

[rudemario]

7 hours ago, Kerbex said:

Hey, I do notice that the first one which says that it's indefinite for all three crew, it also says that the hab is 49 years and 379 days.  Where it says 119 supplies (6.8/day) hab for 49y:379d at the top.  It may be some sort of rounding problem.  If you bump that number up above 50 years it may work?

In my video linked in the post, I start the timer off at 50 years and 6 days. When I launched the ship, I started with 50 years and 95 days before fast forwarding to 5 years and 6 days.

This is a screenshot from the video. While a little blurry, you can see the timer there. When I fast forward, the timer keeps counting until they no longer say indefinite. This isn't what is supposed to be happening I don't believe.

 

4 hours ago, Caerfinon said:

HAB time and Homesick time are always two clocks counting down.

It is designed so Kerbals always want to come home after some period of time in space.  Individual kerbals show the effects of this countdown in different ways. Pilots and scouts have a longer immunity to the countdown. It represents how long a kerbal will put up with being on a long mission. At some point they all need to be brought back to Kerbin.

Home time can be altered by med labs and colony supplies, but not stopped entirely.  Hab time can be reset by moving Kerbal to more spacious craft, but then it still counts down  "Indefinite" is not an absolute. it only shows while the timers are over the perma-hab value.  

From the Wiki: Functions-(Habitation)
"Hab time is reset every time a kerbal enters a new vessel. It begins with the vessel's provided Habitation time, divided by the number of kerbals present, and counts down to zero"

"Home time never resets of its own accord and starts counting down from the moment of launch. However, it is increased by the highest amount of Habitation ever experienced by the kerbal."

Also from the Wiki: Functions-(Habitation) under Habitation and Homesickness, right before the example.

"The hab/home timers can also be paused indefinitely if habtime per kerbal exceeds 50 years or 1 year if the kerbal is a pilot/scout, or is on a planet with a kolonisation rating of over 500%."

It looks as though either the Wiki is wrong or I'm encountering some bug? It says the only requirement for pausing the hab/home timers is if hab time exceeds 50 years for all kerbals aboard, or if they're on a planet with a kolonisation rating of over 500%. I have met one of the criteria but it's not working.

You can see in my photo above that my ship was at 50 years and 6 days of habitation time before I began fast forwarding in the video in my second post. Also, my ship started with 50 years and 95 days before I fast-forwarded to set things up for the video I took.

I really hate to be that guy, but, @RoverDude, am I missing some requirement not listed on the wiki or is this a bug? I'm sorry to invoke you, but the behaviour in my game goes directly against the Wiki and what some people have said in the forum.

[lBoBl]

Spoiler

13 hours ago, lBoBl said:

Well apparently if your ship is too big they can still spawn inside of each other. I managed to work around it by timewarping as soon as the ship spawns to suspend the physics simulation and just wait for the ships to drift apart from each other.

However I'm currently trying to deal with another problem that is slightly more annoying. As I am trying to build a particular ship, the game gets stuck on the loading screen indefinitely. I have to terminate the process with task manager and restart the game. At this point the ship appears in the tracking station, however, if I try to control it, I get an infinite loading screen again. If I try to control the shipyard that is next to it, everything seems to explode for no apparent reason.

Obviously I know that this isn't enough to investigate the issue, especially since I have a ton of mods. I'm just wondering if others have had the same issue, but if not I'll try to pinpoint it. Apparently only specific ships cause the crash, maybe it's a part in particular or something. I've glanced at one of the logs but saw nothing suspicious, but that was after I restarted and unsuccessfully tried to control the ship from the tracking station. I'll try to reproduce the issue and I'll upload the log.

 

A quick update about that :

I know suspect that when I got that infinite loading screen it might not have been infinite but very very long because things were happening in the background. According to the log file, things started exploding when I launched the craft which is confirmed by what I thought I had heard while stuck in the loading screen (very faint and muffled explosions sounds because I have a mod that muffles sound in space, so no it was not immediately obvious that they were indeed explosions). That is however a bit weird because last time a ship I built spawned inside of the shipyard I could see what was happening on screen, whereas there all I could see was the loading animation

But, as I was trying to reproduce the issue once more I finally managed to launch the craft without it exploding. There are a couple different reasons that might explain that

1 : the ship I used as a shipyard was only very big in one dimension, i.e., it was very long / tall but not that wide. So I tried reorienting it and also time-warping a bit, thinking that it might give clearance to the ship I was building an have it spawn outside of the shipyard.

2 : It might have been caused by the magnetometer boom. Just out of curiosity I tried spawning the ship on the runway using Vessel Mover. I saw that when the craft spawned, for a brief moment the magnetometer appeared deployed and stuck out of the ship by a lot. I tried to remove it, thinking that it might be what was spawning clipped inside of the shipyard, and then the build was successful. But I suspect 1 did the trick and that the magnetometer thing was unrelated, I should have changed one variable at a time to be sure.

3 : It could be neither of those, maybe the problem wasn't ships going through each other at all and it was just luck that I managed to launch it in the end...

[cinemagic]

Help! my orbital Logistic window doesn't display anything, and when I open the window every window of other mods also glitched (cannot be clicked on).

For orbital logistic tab on kolonization dashboard, I can just close the dashboard, but for the the one opened from logistic modules, it stuck in center of screen. I can only close it by loading save or switching vessel.

[rudemario]

1 hour ago, cinemagic said:

Help! my orbital Logistic window doesn't display anything, and when I open the window every window of other mods also glitched (cannot be clicked on).

For orbital logistic tab on kolonization dashboard, I can just close the dashboard, but for the the one opened from logistic modules, it stuck in center of screen. I can only close it by loading save or switching vessel.

I can't suggest anything useful specifically to you, but while you're waiting for a response, you can copy and paste your KSP installation into another folder, making a copy of it, and then remove the mod folder for each mod one by one in order of "most changes/most advanced" and start the game each time to rule out if it's a mod conflict.

You don't have to be careful or worry about anything, since you're not modifying your normal game, just this copied one. Make sure to launch from the copied KSP folder's KSP.64.exe launcher to be safe.

[Space_Coyote]

I'm having an isue with the "Konstruction" part of the mod and this involves weldable docking ports..

 

The Problem:

I'm buidling a space station and I get two arts docke now one of the joints is a primary joint where the booster to the station was in fact moved away and thus freed up the port , now I want to bring in a new part (Say an extention to expand the station), and in fact now I dock and want to compress weld and... 'Nothing" no weld no smoky poof or whatever.. Okay posible misalighnment maybe? So I try to undock the part to try again and surprise! It won't undock either..

 

So what now/ how can I unock the part and then redock it if th edocking port won't let go..(This seems to be an issue with every version I've played with ince this mod has come out..

 

Also now with the fack that we have "Some assemby required" Wouldn't be be easier for a kerbal with a welding tool go out and start welding in order to remove the locked welds (thus weling it into place..

 

Might be something to look into when it comes with the Konstruction Side of the mod..

 

Space_Coyote

[Grimmas]

3 hours ago, rudemario said:

It looks as though either the Wiki is wrong or I'm encountering some bug? It says the only requirement for pausing the hab/home timers is if hab time exceeds 50 years for all kerbals aboard, or if they're on a planet with a kolonisation rating of over 500%. I have met one of the criteria but it's not working.

You can see in my photo above that my ship was at 50 years and 6 days of habitation time before I began fast forwarding in the video in my second post. Also, my ship started with 50 years and 95 days before I fast-forwarded to set things up for the video I took.

 

Quick question - are you sure that absolutely all of your converters/habitats/recyclers/etc/etc are all enabled? Just having them on the vessel is not enough for them to affect the timers, you need to click on every such part and enable the life support module through the PAW. Although I suspect that this is not the issue you're seeing, it doesn't hurt to check.

[rudemario]

4 minutes ago, Grimmas said:

Quick question - are you sure that absolutely all of your converters/habitats/recyclers/etc/etc are all enabled? Just having them on the vessel is not enough for them to affect the timers, you need to click on every such part and enable the life support module through the PAW. Although I suspect that this is not the issue you're seeing, it doesn't hurt to check.

In order for me to reach the 50 years and 95 days my ship has I needed to turn on every single habitat. If I missed even one the highest I could have gotten was 44 years. I designed it this way intentionally. I also ensured my nom o matics were enabled and loaded the craft up with batteries.

If you watch the video linked in the post (here), you can see the ship being fast forwarded through 200 days or more and because everything is turned on none of my resources drop.

If I had even one habitat turned off I wouldn't have reached the 50 years and 95 days I had before I started the video (closer to 44), and I wouldn't have reached the 50 years and 6 days before I hit the record button and fast-forwarded.

[Grimmas]

Also check your config, because the perma hab time is exposed as a config variable. 

I do see the code for freezing the timers - it's in ModuleLifeSupportSystem.cs around line 256. Haven't looked at it in detail but if you want to investigate for a possible bug I'd start there.

Edit: and another thing to try - does it work correctly when you unload the vessel (ie go back to the space center) and then time warp and then load the vessel later on?

Edited May 5, 2021 by Grimmas

[protoz]

How is everyone connecting bases? Is it still through KAS + MKS-Flexotubes? or is there a better alternative?

[Tybot]

21 minutes ago, protoz said:

How is everyone connecting bases? Is it still through KAS + MKS-Flexotubes? or is there a better alternative?

The best way is to not connect them at all. With proper storage resources will transfer short distances to where they are needed automatically. Helps to prevent attracting the kraken.

[protoz]

24 minutes ago, Tybot said:

The best way is to not connect them at all. With proper storage resources will transfer short distances to where they are needed automatically. Helps to prevent attracting the kraken.

I'm aware of logistics pull & push resources to & from planetary storage. I'm not aware of WOLF yet as its the very last thing one could unlock in career mode. I just wanted to connect several 10 ton miner vessels to a single logistics with a pilot so the excess LFO can be stored in planetary storage, instead of having several pilots in each simple miner. I guess the vanilla way to do is is through docking ports.

[rudemario]

6 hours ago, Grimmas said:

Also check your config, because the perma hab time is exposed as a config variable. 

I do see the code for freezing the timers - it's in ModuleLifeSupportSystem.cs around line 256. Haven't looked at it in detail but if you want to investigate for a possible bug I'd start there.

Edit: and another thing to try - does it work correctly when you unload the vessel (ie go back to the space center) and then time warp and then load the vessel later on?

I tried taking a look at .cfg file since I already posted my config in my second post up above, but to no avail. Everything is set as it's supposed to be, but there's also a note that this does nothing for existing saves.

And here is the screenshot of the in game GUI settings menu from a few posts up:

As you can see, things are normal here.

I decided to try out setting everything up, heading to the tracking center and time-warping, and then coming back. When I time warped and displayed the Life Support Status window in the tracking center it didn't show the hab timer going down at all, so I thought it was a success. Then, upon loading up the game, after rejiggering itself and catching up to the current time value it gave me indefinite days and then dropped it for some reason. Then, for some reason, indefinite came back, but only for the home timer, not the hab one.

This definitely doesn't look like intended behaviour.

Thoughts?

[Grimmas]

14 hours ago, rudemario said:

Thoughts?

I have a few:

1) Make sure you can reliably reproduce it in a stock (vanilla) KSP install (latest version) with the pre-release constellation from Github. This is a pre-requisite for the below steps. I would also try adding way more hab time than needed, try 2x or something.

2) As it is an issue with USI-LS you could try asking in the USI-LS thread.

3) If you are technically inclined you could try to debug the issue yourself. This is the fastest way to fix your issue but also the most involved.

4) If you are not technically inclined, or simply can't be bothered, then I would suggest opening an issue on USI-LS github repo. Attach screenshots, log files, reproduction steps, etc. But I would not count on a quick turn-around time.