Cant transmit science from MPL - Out of power

[Biggen]

So i guess you live and learn. I jam packed my MPL full of data (maxed it out), put a scientist in there, hit research, and time warped to fill up the science buffer. Im thinking, "Man, thats a crap ton of science i just earned. Just gotta transmit". I go to hit the transmit button and I see my power steadily decreasing until its at zero but the science is only 50% transmitted. I try it again after the batteries are recharged, and the tranmission starts over at 0%.

WTH? It wont partially transmit and just pick up where it left off once the batteries are recharged!?

So now Im stuck. I cant research because the science buffer is full and I cant transmit since it needs a nuclear reactor worth of power to push it to Kerbin. Ideas?

Edited February 24, 2017 by Biggen

[mikegarrison]

Change the setting on the antenna. You can have it set so that it will transmit the science in chunks.

[Tyko]

adding to what @mikegarrison said...right click on your antenna and look for Require Complete and switch it to Allow Partial. if you have multiple antennas you may want to switch them all. It's a strange process because your power will rise just above zero, the antenna will squirt some data and drain the battery again..so it takes a while, but it works.

 

[Biggen]

Hmmm. I tried this and it didnt work. Said something like "Out of power, reverting transmission" or something like that. Im not at my computer now to check but Ill try it again this evening. Perhaps I didnt click it.

Thanks guys.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Biggen

[bewing]

I'm not sure it does. That works for science experiments, but the last time I checked it didn't work for the MPL. There's a bug report about it with the devs. I'd love to be proven wrong on this one! So @Biggen -- please try doing what they say and tell us whether the science really does transmit in chunks -- or whether the transmission simply fails and returns all your science to you every time.

And please save a savegame for me, if you have an unmodded game.

It should work with partial transmission, I say. Because if you can't get the science out of the MPL, then the MPL becomes a brick. You can fix it, of course, by turning on "infinite electricity" in the cheat menu temporarily.

 

 

Edited February 24, 2017 by bewing

[Biggen]

3 minutes ago, bewing said:

I'm not sure it does. That works for science experiments, but the last time I checked it didn't work for the MPL. There's a bug report about it with the devs. I'd love to be proven wrong on this one! So @Biggen -- please try doing what they say and tell us whether the science really does transmit in chunks -- or whether the transmission simply fails and returns all your science to you every time.

 

Im fairly confident it doesnt work as i tried it. But ill try it again in case i misclicked the button.

This sucks if this is the case. Its basically worthless now if i cant transmit. I guess ill turn on infinite electricity to transmit it back.

[bewing]

To not cheat, you can fly up a rescue mission with a klaw and some extra batteries.

 

[Biggen]

21 minutes ago, bewing said:

To not cheat, you can fly up a rescue mission with a klaw and some extra batteries.

 

The Kraken summoner? 

I dont have the Klaw unlocked. Although i dont consider this cheating. If you can partially transmit science then the same should hold true for the MPL.

[bewing]

The Klaw has been 100% perfectly stable since 1.1.0, I think. It's all I use for docking, and I haven't had a single kraken attack (except in beta testing when the devs make a booboo) after 5 million dockings.

[Tyko]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

I'm not sure it does. That works for science experiments, but the last time I checked it didn't work for the MPL. There's a bug report about it with the devs. I'd love to be proven wrong on this one! So @Biggen -- please try doing what they say and tell us whether the science really does transmit in chunks -- or whether the transmission simply fails and returns all your science to you every time.

And please save a savegame for me, if you have an unmodded game.

It should work with partial transmission, I say. Because if you can't get the science out of the MPL, then the MPL becomes a brick. You can fix it, of course, by turning on "infinite electricity" in the cheat menu temporarily.

 

 

I've used Allow Partial with MPLs in 1.2.2.  It just acts a bit odd because every time you get a unit of power the antenna squirts some data and drops power back to zero. So it's a LOT of stops and starts, but it does work.

To prevent that in the future I just reduced the max science my labs could hold to 250. The MPL will stop generating science until I clean it out, but at least I'm not running out of power.

Edited February 24, 2017 by Tyko

[Loren Pechtel]

3 hours ago, bewing said:

To not cheat, you can fly up a rescue mission with a klaw and some extra batteries.

 

Or KIS/KAS and bolt them on.

I really wish the MPL would simply transmit the science when it has a connection rather than make us worry about it.

[mikegarrison]

46 minutes ago, Loren Pechtel said:

I really wish the MPL would simply transmit the science when it has a connection rather than make us worry about it.

The MPL is one of the most controversial things in the game. As such, I think the annoyingly long and power-hungry transmission lag is intended as "balance". The root cause is, IMO, actually that the whole science/career mode of the game is a bunch of kludges stuck on top of each other, but it's never going to be fixed because that's just the way KSP is.

[Snark]

6 hours ago, Tyko said:

To prevent that in the future I just reduced the max science my labs could hold to 250.

If I ever used the science lab, which I don't, I'd prevent it by building it with a fair amount of battery storage and a couple of Gigantor solar panels, to ensure adequate electrical power.  It doesn't take all that much, it's just something that one has to plan for.

2 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The root cause is, IMO, actually that the whole science/career mode of the game is a bunch of kludges stuck on top of each other, but it's never going to be fixed because that's just the way KSP is.

Disagreement with the above statement relegated to spoiler section, as it's getting off-topic.

Spoiler

I would contend that the root cause is that different people want different things, and it's never going to be fixed because different people will always want different things.

Ask 10 people about KSP's career mode, and you'll get 10 different answers.  One person loves it, thinks it's great.  Another thinks it's terrible.  Find several "it's terrible" people and ask them how it should be fixed-- every one will give different answers, because it turns out that the thing-they-don't-like is different in every case.

There have been tons of "Stupid career is broken, fix the design!" threads in the forum, and the one thing they all have in common is that nobody agrees.  Whatever model you have in your head, that you think "Squad should do this and then career would be good" ... I can guarantee you that if you post it in the forums, there will be people who vehemently disagree with you and would say that your suggestion makes things worse instead of better.

It's a fundamentally unsolvable problem.

That's not to say that it's necessarily as good as it could be, or there's nothing they could do to make it unambiguously better... but I think the people who criticize career game design in KSP are being a bit unrealistic, in most cases.  They tend to equate "the game isn't how I would like it to be" with "the game is stupid".  Those aren't the same thing.

 

[Hotaru]

One way to get around insufficient power for transmission is to start the transmission and then go into high time warp (at least 100x, maybe more--if in low orbit you may need a mod that allows it). Sometimes this has allowed me to fully transmit data that couldn't normally be transmitted in real time without running out of power.

I think of it as throttling the transmission rate, which the antennas should be able to do anyway. (Something a bit like this happened to the Galileo mission after its high-gain antenna failed to deploy properly.)

[Tyko]

4 hours ago, Snark said:

If I ever used the science lab, which I don't, I'd prevent it by building it with a fair amount of battery storage and a couple of Gigantor solar panels, to ensure adequate electrical power.  It doesn't take all that much, it's just something that one has to plan for.

it seems to depend which antenna you put on first. On the station in question I'd added my relay antenna first which sucked a lot of power despite having lower power alternatives. Sending about 500 hundred science cost over 10000EC to send. That was higher than my entire power budget for a darkside transit of the moon. When my lander docked - which had a simple direct antenna - the station could suddenly transmit science for a much lower EC cost

As far as using Labs...I adjusted them to put out significantly less science and then dropped my game-wide science rate down to 50%. As a game rule I only process science on a lab that's in orbit around the body where the science was collected - a Minmus station researches Minmus science. I can move the station to another place later, but I never bring science from one planet / moon to a station somewhere else. This balanced out science points. I wish the game had a better balanced solution, but my solution is fun for my style of play and isn't OP because it's a lot of (fun) work to build and maintain stations with life support mods running.

Here's my MM cfg if you're interested:

Spoiler

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleScienceConverter]]:FINAL
{
    @MODULE[ModuleScienceConverter]
    {
        @scientistBonus = 0.15
        @researchTime = 6
        @scienceMultiplier = 1
        @scienceCap = 250
    }
}

The other trick is to lower the data capacity of the lab. Because of the whacky math the game uses your data -> science conversation rate rises exponentially as you have more data. If you lower the data cap you can keep the lab from churning out 50 science a day - which is a bit annoying. My lab is set to a data capacity of 500  and it churns out about 6 science per day when filled. This is a very manageable production level.

Edited February 25, 2017 by Tyko

[Biggen]

This was the 1st time ive used the MPL but I didnt have Gigantors unlocked so I was limited to the smaller retractable panels and the smaller batteries. No fuel cells either...

Allowing partial does work, but takes a loooong time. If I did it again Id load up on more batteries/panels. Also, there appears no way to choose what antenna the MPL uses to transmit if you have multiple ships docked to it with different antennas. One tranmission would use a Communitron on a docked ship while another would use the relay attached to the MPL itself.

The MPL is definitely OP. I biome hopped Minmus and had a ton of science. I then stuffed all of that into the Minmus orbiting MPL and it unlocked the entire tree after a couple years of warping.

But, I find biome hopping teadious so Im glad I dont have to mess with this again in my career. Id rather be building stuff and doing contracts for funds.

Edited February 25, 2017 by Biggen

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Biggen said:

The MPL is definitely OP. I biome hopped Minmus and had a ton of science. I then stuffed all of that into the Minmus orbiting MPL and it unlocked the entire tree after a couple years of warping.

Well, by that definition, Minmus and Mun are OP, since you can unlock the entire tech tree (even without using the MPL) just by hopping around them and never once even leaving Kerbin's SoI.

2 hours ago, Biggen said:

But, I find biome hopping teadious so Im glad I dont have to mess with this again in my career. Id rather be building stuff and doing contracts for funds.

Which is exactly why the MPL exists:  to give that playstyle option to people like you, who share your likes and dislikes. 

 

One of the big challenges of designing a "free-play" game like KSP, where there's no set "win" condition and you can pretty much do whatever you want, is that when you make a game where people can play however they want, it turns out that people want to play however they want.  Crazy, huh?

That may sound like a pretty obvious statement-- I mean, "duh", right?-- except that you'd be astonished just how very different other people's play styles can be from your own.  For example, I would highly recommend reading through this thread-- not just the OP, but the comments that follow.

It was a real eye-opener for me, and I consider it a must-read for any KSP player with thoughts about game balance.

When I first saw this thread, I was flabbergasted at the idea that anyone would play KSP for any length of time and not have any interest in visiting the other planets, ever.  I mean, there's a whole solar system there, right?  Going and exploring the planets is the whole point of KSP, right?   Except that it turns out that an awful lot of players choose never to leave Kerbin's SoI.  Lots.  Maybe even most.  And when you read through this thread, there are plenty of folks just like that who share thoughtful, cogent reasons why they like it that way.  It's a play style so different from my own that it hadn't even occurred to me.  And the important thing to realize is that these people's way of playing is just as valid as anyone's-- it's not because they're "dumb", or have short attention spans, or anything else negative.  They've got great reasons.  They simply like doing different things than I do.

So... that's why I tend to cast a skeptical eye on any forum complaint that a particular feature is "overpowered" or "underpowered" or "stupidly balanced".  The population of KSP players is so diverse that it's a fairly safe bet that you can pick practically any feature of the game and you'll be able to find a large group of players who think it's overpowered, another large group who think it's underpowered, and perhaps even a third, tiny group who think it's just right.

So, I find it's easier to read such complaints if I just mentally translate every single instance of the complainer saying "stupid", "overpowered", "underpowered", "broken", or just about anything else into "not how I like to play" instead.  Then the complaints make a lot more sense.

Unless I agree with the complaint, of course, in which case it's obvious that they're just speaking simple, unvarnished, universal truth.  I mean, duh. 

[bewing]

It's not the MPL that's overpowered. It's timewarping. You wouldn't get any of these big returns if you didn't timewarp.

[Tyko]

25 minutes ago, bewing said:

It's not the MPL that's overpowered. It's timewarping. You wouldn't get any of these big returns if you didn't timewarp.

agreed...I don't timewarp for science. Instead I set up my MPL and then play normally - using time warp to move to the next step of various missions. I run missions in parallel with various ships flying around so my usual maximum time warp is about 10-12 days. There's always something to do. Occasionally I check back at my MPL, transmit science and load it back up with data. Using this method I get a couple hundred science every 50 days or so and it's quite manageable. It feels more like long term science research is happening.

[Biggen]

If you didnt time warp then why even use the MPL? Might as well recover the science on Kerbin and skip using the MPL so you can get instant science gains with new unlocks. You HAVE to time warp to play the game. No one here is playing realtime missions I assume, right?

We could argue all day what is OP or not I guess. What I find tedious is something someone else may find fun. Snark does a good job explaining the phenomenon of balancing fun vs challenging gameplay for a sandbox game.

Edited February 25, 2017 by Biggen

[Snark]

29 minutes ago, Biggen said:

If you didnt time warp then why even use the MPL?

Simple.  It's for the same reason anybody does anything in KSP.  Because he likes it, that's why. 

30 minutes ago, Biggen said:

You HAVE to time warp to play the game. No one here is playing realtime missions I assume, right?

(waiting for a post from some guy in Hoboken or Memphis or London or somewhere, saying "I've been playing KSP for two years and my Jool mission has nearly arrived...")

^ That's a joke... but only barely.  As I say... you'd be astonished at the variety of play styles out there.

[GluttonyReaper]

1 hour ago, Biggen said:

No one here is playing realtime missions I assume, right?

There were some guys a while ago that were going to do a real-time mission to the Mun, which actually works out to be doable within a day. That were going pretty far with it too - literally having someone sit in a room for 6 hours or whatever, controlling the flight purely from IVA view, with other people relaying orbital data to them so they could fly the ship. No idea if they ever actually did it, though.

There's also been a few requests for background simulation of crafts even while not in the game, presumably for the same purpose. So yeah, it's not quite a safe assumption, I'm afraid.

[DerekL1963]

3 hours ago, GluttonyReaper said:

There were some guys a while ago that were going to do a real-time mission to the Mun, which actually works out to be doable within a day. That were going pretty far with it too - literally having someone sit in a room for 6 hours or whatever, controlling the flight purely from IVA view, with other people relaying orbital data to them so they could fly the ship. No idea if they ever actually did it, though.

My google-fu is weak, but I do recall them actually doing it.

[WanderingKid]

5 hours ago, Biggen said:

If you didnt time warp then why even use the MPL? Might as well recover the science on Kerbin and skip using the MPL so you can get instant science gains with new unlocks. 

In my case, I do both.  Getting extra copies of the experiments is a little time consuming but reasonably easy with a lander and a few Science Cases.  They're fun to build as bases, and having them actually DO something gives me a reason to get off my duff and build them.  Sure, the science gain is relatively minimal in the short term, but eventually they're just money generators when I get around to checking on them.

I guess it's similar to the 'Why don't I go interplanetary very often' thread.  Well, why would I?  What's the point?  I enjoy designing rockets about as much as I like flying them.

Anyways, to the OP's question, as mentioned, you need a huge battery bank.  I typically overkill it completely with a massive bank of 1,000 energy ones.