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

[Terwin]

3 hours ago, blakemw said:

Over the course of 30 days the Kolony Rewards were:

• 26 science (compared with 120 generated by Bob in MPL) (6 kerbs)
• 130k funds (8 kerbs)
• 52 rep (5 kerbs)

I am not so sure about rep, but funds are a small fraction of what you can make with 1 monthly supply vessel that repaints the crate and takes back commodities(rare metals/exotic minerals).

Looks sort of like 4 science/16K funds/10 rep per kerb-month for passive rewards.  As opposed to much higher active rewards(doing research, sending back resources, or doing missions).

As these benefits may require nothing beyond set-up costs, I am ok with the perpetual colonization rewards being relatively low.  (think of it as putting our money in the bank and accruing interest)

Makes me wonder if it would be worth while to send up a batch of colonists in a hab module to add-on to my mun-base.  (currently dumping lots of fertilizer into planetary stores, so hab-space and recyclers should be all I need(at least until I need to convert both ranger ag-modules to agroponics, but that would support a *lot* of colonists)

 

[sh1pman]

Can sombody please explain this to me? I can't deploy the Tundra Hab module for some reason. It says that I need 8k MaterialKits to do it, even though I have enough of those on my station.

[dboi88]

5 minutes ago, sh1pman said:

Can sombody please explain this to me? I can't deploy the Tundra Hab module for some reason. It says that I need 8k MaterialKits to do it, even though I have enough of those on my station.

Warehouse enabled?

[sh1pman]

Just now, dboi88 said:

Warehouse enabled?

They're on the same vessel. 

[dboi88]

Just now, sh1pman said:

They're on the same vessel. 

It doesn't matter. Your engineer needs access to them. It needs warehouse enabled.

Your engineer is technically scavenging them. Same with maintance for machinery and uranium.

[sh1pman]

1 minute ago, dboi88 said:

It doesn't matter. Your engineer needs access to them. It needs warehouse enabled.

Got it. I use OSE Workshop's container, it doesn't have the Warehouse module.

[DStaal]

2 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Got it. I use OSE Workshop's container, it doesn't have the Warehouse module.

Hmm.  I'd like to consider that a bug: If the Warehouse module doesn't exist, I think they should be able to get stuff.  I'd only block when it exists *and* is disabled - then you don't run into things that 'hold MaterialKits, but can't be used'.

Other's thoughts?  If people agree with me, I can open a GitHub issue.

[WuphonsReach]

@Terwin and @blakemw - My results are similar.  I was getting 340k per 28 days at my Minmus base.  I don't remember how much I spent setting that base up or exactly how many 3-star kerbals I had (maybe 15-18?).  But it was definitely enough that I wasn't all that excited about shipping refined exotics back to Kerbin.  The amount of rep I was getting every 28 days was very overpowered and should probably be the square root of the current values.

[voicey99]

Indeed, it is extremely overpowered. That's coming from me, making ~10M every couple of weeks with a CMD/REX cargo run and a base with 8-10 1-star kerbals (I'm not sure if its OPM or CBK that nukes XP modifiers and makes it pretty much 1-star only for the mun/minmus circuit). I added a decimal place to the modifiers in the cfg, because it seemed totally wrong to be able to dump a load of kerbals on some forsaken rock and come back later to find they have summoned a 5m-Konainerful of Kash from nowhere.

Maybe, instead of simply taking an axe to the rewards, generation rates could be repurposed as a means of driving progression. This means the rewards could tail off over time in accordance with the three Kolonisation ratings, so that planets that have been kolonised more extensively and for longer produce fewer 'free' rewards, instead requiring a planetary manufacturing etc. economy to be set up in order to maintain purpose. If the reward rate also varied per body (so more distant and challenging bodies would produce more rewards), this would also act as an incentive to 'get out there' and kolonise more planets to keep the rewards flowing, and thus produce more complex kolony networks as your reach expands.

[sh1pman]

33 minutes ago, DStaal said:

Hmm.  I'd like to consider that a bug: If the Warehouse module doesn't exist, I think they should be able to get stuff.  I'd only block when it exists *and* is disabled - then you don't run into things that 'hold MaterialKits, but can't be used'.

Other's thoughts?  If people agree with me, I can open a GitHub issue.

Sounds like a good idea. 

In my save I just added the Warehouse module to the container in question with a MM patch. 

[zabieru]

Maybe some different config presets for funds/science/rep would be a good option? Because I like the way the kolony rewards are tuned, presently.

As has been noted, the Science rewards are underwhelming, but I think that's a feature, not a bug: I like Science to be kind of a driving force in my games, the thing that pulls me out to new places. Having the ability to trivially unlock everything by setting up a moonbase and timewarping is, eh, not really desired.

Likewise, I'm not a huge fan of scraping up funds. I don't really expect a space colony at the MKS stage to be financially self-supporting, I expect the homeworld to be paying for things. The idea that kolony rewards generate enough funding to support the supply runs needed seems, well, about right to me.

[gamerscircle]

I have a basic scavenging noob question.. It would seem that it works, but supplies don't seem to scavenged.. is there something that I am missing when it comes supplies?

 

[jd284]

Make sure both vessels have supplies warehouses with the warehouse option enabled. The "normal" supplies storage in pods and such does not participate in logistics. In particular, the standard USI-LS containers are not warehouses (which is probably a bug, MKS should add this function to them I think).

[jd284]

On an unrelated note, I just noticed something terrible:

Whoever suspected that Kerbals are actually robots?!

[dboi88]

@jd284  You can do this with the EPL recycle bins too.

[Kaa253]

Regarding the colony rewards. I like them the way they are.

Yes it is science that drives my career and it should be. I take the funds from my Mun and Minmus kolonies and invest that in Mariner, Pioneer and Voyager probes to go out to the planets for more Science. I use the rep to pay for declining the bad missions offered in Mission Control to roll again until I get better missions offered that can be done by the probes in the course of collecting more science. It feels like I never have enough funds to pay for all the science missions I want to do. Nevertheless, I usually unlock the Alcubierre Warp Drive at the top of the CTT tree well before my year 1 launched Hohmann transfer orbit New Horizons probe reaches Eeloo.

So basically you can use both funds and rep to get more science. If you feel you are getting too much science you can always start a new career and move up to a harder level in the stock difficulty settings 

Edited January 31, 2017 by Kaa253

[blakemw]

The thing about science is that it's very easy to farm using MPLs, the science farming technique is to make a space station with a MPL and 2 scientists and put it in a polar orbit of Mun or Minmus, do high/low gravity scans (and other experiments but gravity scans can be done many more times) which should provide about 1500 data, the lab will produce about 500 science every 50 days with lvl3 scientists. If you still want more science you just replace the station with a new one and rinse and repeat, or if you want science at a faster rate you have 2 or 3 MPL's (on the same station) and run them in parallel, so you can make thousands of science every 50 days and only need to visit 1 station to claim it all. In terms of life support just use nom-o-matics and a big tub of fertilizer and a hitchiker can and viewing cupola - this'll easily support the scientists until the lab runs out of data.

Roughly speaking a science specialist in a mun base generates science at about 1/30th the rate of a scientist in the MPL lab, that means you need to provide him with life support and hab for 30x longer to get the same science yield, not only that but because it's on the surface rather than in orbit it makes everything much harder, I'd say that putting aside duration of stay it's *at least* 3x harder to put a kerbal on the surface of Mun than in orbit, so in total the science specialist is about 1/100th as effective as the scientist in the MPL, that's an *irrelevant* level of science. And here's the thing, even if the science rewards were 10x higher, it would still be 10x harder making science with a base than the "MPL cheese factory", it would still be a really bad way to make science, it just wouldn't be so abysmally bad as to be irrelevant.

And it's all very well and good to just say "well I abstain from using the MPL so I want the rewards to be lower" but a stock-a-like mod should be balanced around options in stock. I would say that being 10x worse is probably acceptable, being 100x worse is not. But there would be a good argument to be made for making a science specialist generate science at almost the same rate as a scientist in a MPL, since a MPL can be used in orbit while a base must be on the ground which is much more challenging in many ways.

There have also been some good ideas in this thread. One really good idea as suggest by voicey99 would be to make kolony rewards diminish over time, so let's say the science yield starts at say 2 science/day per lvl3 specialist (this is still much lower than MPL), then every 100 science generated by the kolony lowers the science yielded by 2% until it decays down to 4% yield which then remains constant. So then a new Kolony would initially be very rewarding and gratifying with new discoveries constantly being made and without requiring a massive investment in life support to get meaningful science but it doesn't become an (easy) infinite science mill. This would make it so you could get like 4000 easy science out of a kolony and unlock several techs before the yield diminishes so much that the kolony either needs to be massively expanded and made self-sufficient so you're not constantly baby-sitting it, or a new kolony needs to be founded elsewhere to make new discoveries. It would also make it so that the player has the choice between heavily populating the kolony to frontload all that science, or just lightly populating the kolony so it produces more stable science yield over time.

It would also make sense for rep and funds to suffer diminishing returns in this way altough perhaps not as steeply. I also like the idea that funds diminishes (presumably as interest in funding the kolony diminishes) but you can boost the funds back up by investing in workshops and such.

Edited January 31, 2017 by blakemw

[jd284]

2 hours ago, dboi88 said:

@jd284  You can do this with the EPL recycle bins too.

Huh. Well I made a PR to fix it for MKS. No idea if it's intentional for EL or not so I'll leave that alone.

Just so we don't get "rockets are made of people!!" campaigns, you know.

[BigJammy]

Hi guys! I'm trying to build a mining rig to support a MKS base using logistics, but a peculiar combination of functions is putting me in a really annoying situation.

This is the rig: 

As you can see it has a Duna Logistic Center to push mined resources into Planetary Storage, a Ranger Habitation Module to let a poor kerbal live confortably, and 4 Karibou Cargo Crates with 8000 Material Kits to deploy the Habitation Module.

The problem is: if I enable the Warehouse Module on the crates, part of their contents get pushed into Planetary Storage, and an EVA kerbal can't access it to deploy the Hab Module. If I don't enable the Warehouse the kerbal can't access the Material Kits to deploy the Hab Module. Anyway I do, I can't deploy the Hab.

Is there a way to disable the Logistic Center until I need it?

[jd284]

1 minute ago, BigJammy said:

Is there a way to disable the Logistic Center until I need it?

Put the pilot on EVA? Nope, that won't work anymore since pushes can be done without pilot.

Sorry I don't think there's a way at the moment, except by editing the cfg and remove the module temporarily.

[Kaa253]

18 minutes ago, BigJammy said:

Is there a way to disable the Logistic Center until I need it?

You make an excellent point. I had essentially the same problem in an earlier MKS version and at that time my solution was to take my pilot on a long Mun walk out of physics range and leave my Engineer behind to inflate the habitat. With the latest update even that will not work. I wonder if the Local Logistics tab in the Kolonization Dashboard could have planetary storage in the vessel selection?

[BigJammy]

31 minutes ago, jd284 said:

Put the pilot on EVA? Nope, that won't work anymore since pushes can be done without pilot.

Sorry I don't think there's a way at the moment, except by editing the cfg and remove the module temporarily.

I hoped there was a more conventional way, but probably that's what I'll have to do.

[Gilph]

ATM, I have to Hyperedit the resources back once I get into orbit.

[WuphonsReach]

Just now, BigJammy said:

I hoped there was a more conventional way, but probably that's what I'll have to do.

The crates will only empty down to 50%.  That gives you a few options.

• Pack twice the crates, but only fill them to 50%
• Eject the crates shortly before landing so that they are not connected to the 'Duna' Logistics
• Turn off warehousing on the crates, EVA and detach them from the lander (decouplers or KIS/KAS), then enable warehousing once they are detached (I think you can do that)

(My personal approach is to not put kerbals on automated miners at all.  Unless I need X resources by a particular date, putting down an uncrewed mining rig wins out over trying to keep a Kerbal happy.)

[jd284]

The obvious fix would be to also pull MaterialKits from planetary storage when inflating things. I've added a request to DStaal's ticket about this topic.