[1.3] Contract Pack: Bases and Stations Continued 6.7.0.0 - 24/06/17

[LemonSkin]

Contract Pack: Bases and Stations Continued

This is an update to severedsolo's fantastic Bases and Stations contract pack since they have stopped supporting it. Original thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/102390-122-contract-pack-bases-and-stations-361-30042017-formerly-kerbin-space-station/&

I plan to add a few more features and try to fix some of the lingering bugs, please let me know if there's anything specific you want me to add!

 

Introduction

A complete overhaul of the stock Space Station and Base missions. Featuring no fewer than 15(!) extra missions for your stations/bases when they are in orbit. Also stops continuous "build a new space station" or "build a new base" missions. You'll only be asked to build one if there isn't one already on that celestial body.

 

The Pack

This pack will completely disable the stock space station (and build a base) missions, and replace them with my own flavour of missions:

 

The Missions

Spoiler

Orbital Stations

Building the Station:

Launch a new "Core" - This just has to have some kind of command module, and a docking port. You can then (either with your core, or modularly) attach:

• A Power Module
• A Science Module (supports the stock Mobile Lab as well as Station Science Lab).
• A Habitation Module
• A cupola

 

Maintenance missions

The meat and bones of the pack. This will give you a selection of missions to keep your station busy.

• Space Station Crew Rotation (common)
• Repair a faulty Power Module (uncommon)
• Replace a faulty Power Module (uncommon)
• Evacuate your station (rare)
• Life Support Resupply Missions (supports TAC LS, USI LS, IFI LS) - open to support others on request. (common)
• Do science on your station (uncommon)
• Do an Emergency Medical Evacuation (rare)
• Upgrade the Crew Capacity of the station (common - in specific circumstances).
• Collect a surface sample from a specific biome, and return it to your station for analysis.

 

Surface Bases

Building the Base

• Scan the planet for a suitable place to build (supports SCANsat and the stock M700 scanner)
• Scout for a new place to build the base. (The final location of this vehicle will be the place your base will be built).
• Build the base
• Expand it with extra crew capacity, life support (if installed) and a science lab

Maintenance Missions

• Crew Rotation
• Medical Emergency
• Resupply Life support (if applicable)
• Restore lost communications

 

Additional Mods that are required or supported by Bases and Stations. (that isn't to say other mods won't work, but these are the ones that B&S is specifically aware of).

Contract Configurator by nightingale - available here - REQUIRED DEPENDENCY

Module Manager by sarbian - available here - REQUIRED DEPENDENCY

StationScienceContinued by ethernet and tomf is highly recommended because it's one of my favourite mods and the pack is specifically written with it in mind. It is available here

NearFutureElectric  available here

TAC Life Support available here

USI Life Support available here

IFI Life Support available here

Kopernicus Support available here

Contract Pack: Tourism Plus by nightingale is also recommended

 

The Legal Bit

This pack is licensed under MIT License

It also contains elements of CosmoBro's Base Construction pack (with permission) which is licensed under MIT License (see below). I have sublicensed this under CC-BY-SA-NC 4.0.

Contract Configurator is licensed under MIT License.

Mini-AVC is licensed under GNU General Public License v3

 

Thanks/Credits

Massive thanks to Nightingale for all your help, and Contract Configurator - without which this would not be possible.

Thanks to metl for your time, patience and massive amounts of code contributed to this project.

Thanks to CosmoBro for allowing me to take over Base Construction

Agent Flag by Dale Humphries on www.flaticon.com and is licensed under CC-BY 3.0

Thanks to severedsolo for the original creation of this pack

 

Known Issues

Possible problem with vessel definitions. More Data needed. Please see this post if you can help.

ScienceExperimentModule may require a scene change before it will complete once you recover the science at KSC. This is a minor enough issue that I let it through the net. I think it's a CC bug and nightingale is investigating.

Life Support checking is... sloppy to say the least. Don't rely on the pack telling you to send up a crew only when you have LS on board. Check first (working on this)

 

Planned Features

Spoiler

Additional space stations modules

• Add large fuel tanks/mono-prop tanks for orbital refueling station
• Add additional solar arrays

Launch a next-generation space station

• This will only become active for users of UKS
• Optionally deorbit the old station for fun(ds)

I'm pretty happy with the base missions as they are (admittedly, I rarely get around to building bases on any of my saves), but I'm always happy to take suggestions and requests from people

 

Installation

CKAN

Download: https://github.com/LemonSkin/KerbinSpaceStation/releases

 

Edited June 24, 2017 by LemonSkin

[smotheredrun]

Sweet!  Gonna try this out when I eventually swing into 1.3.  Are you going to look at picking up another pack or two of severedsolo's?

[LemonSkin]

2 hours ago, smotheredrun said:

Sweet!  Gonna try this out when I eventually swing into 1.3.  Are you going to look at picking up another pack or two of severedsolo's?

Not really. I don't use them myself, but if people find any bugs in them, I can probably take a look at fixing them if they message me

[smotheredrun]

I haven't moved into 1.3 yet, except for some testing of one mod suite. But if I ever do get into 1.3 with my career save, I'll let you know!

[LemonSkin]

49 minutes ago, smotheredrun said:

I haven't moved into 1.3 yet, except for some testing of one mod suite. But if I ever do get into 1.3 with my career save, I'll let you know!

This mod should be backwards compatible, provided you're using the correct version of Contract Configurator. The Kopernicus compatibility that I added will just be ignored if it's not installed or you're running an older version of it.

[smotheredrun]

lol I actually eneded up permanently deleting that entire install a few days ago   That's what I get for not labelling my installs on my desktop very clearly.

[severedsolo]

I heartily endorse this product/service.

In all seriousness: I'm glad this is in safe hands good luck. One minor thing - I'm assuming you copy/pasted the OP from the old thread - I apparently never updated the license on that one. I changed it to MIT for the last release, not CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Would you like me to update the CKAN Metadata to point to your release rather than mine?

Edited June 16, 2017 by severedsolo

[LemonSkin]

7 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

I heartily endorse this product/service.

In all seriousness: I'm glad this is in safe hands good luck. One minor thing - I'm assuming you copy/pasted the OP from the old thread - I apparently never updated the license on that one. I changed it to MIT for the last release, not CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Would you like me to update the CKAN Metadata to point to your release rather than mine?

Oh, I didn't catch that, I'll change it now. And yes please!

[theonegalen]

Thank you so much for picking this up! It's definitely essential to my career mode games.

[Stratickus]

15 hours ago, LemonSkin said:

I plan to add a few more features and try to fix some of the lingering bugs, please let me know if there's anything specific you want me to add!

Since you asked.. I wouldn't mind seeing a Kerbin only First Space Station contract, slightly simpler than the currently offered first space station contract. Basically removing the requirement for having a Science Lab of some sort, while also adding a requirement to stay in space for some pre determined amount of time before contract completion. A week or something. This will bring added complexity for anyone playing with LS mods and should be more or less transparent to non-LS players. Similar to the first Tourist contract where you need to keep the tourist in orbit for 4 hours (I believe this is from the Tourism Plus contract pack).

The idea being to sort of bootstrap your way to a fully functioning space station. Lets see if we can survive in space for extended periods of time before we do a bunch of science there. I also imagined this to be an additional contract, not replacing the current First Space Station contract. Adding a science lab is important and should be a requirement for follow on contracts.

Additionally, and this may just be me, but it would allow me to start building space stations slightly earlier in my career. At least very simple ones, that effectively have just Kerbals, living space, life support in my case and what ever experiments I strap to the station, before lugging the science lab up. Again this just may be me and the mods I play with in addition to the way my Tech Tree unlocks.

Cheers,

[CrashTestDanny]

Thanks @severedsolo for the mod and @LemonSkin for taking over support!

I have a little problem I've been having with this pack for some time and was wondering if maybe you could help.  I will typically pick up as many contracts as I can and try to complete them with as few flights as possible, which means when I see contracts up to launch the Kerbin Space Station, the Mun Space Station, the Minmus Space Station, the Duna Space Station, and the Ike Space Station all offered at the same time, I grab them all and launch one station that satisfies all requirements.  I put it in orbit at Kerbin, complete that contract, refuel as needed and then send the same station to the Mun.  Wash, rinse, repeat until one station has fulfilled 5 contracts.  Smart, right?

Well anyhow, for a while now it seems like the mod has been outsmarting me.  After I get my station moved to its new home, I seldom see the mission to launch the Kerbin Space Station again, and when I do it becomes unavailable before I can move my mouse to the button to accept.  This seems to be the case with the medical emergency and mission specialist missions too.  Any ideas how I can correct this behavior?

 

Thanks

Danny

[TheRagingIrishman]

The whole point of this contract mod is to build permanent bases/stations. Once you complete the Build a Station Contract, it assumes there's still a station there. My suggestion, stop trying to hack the contract system and just build a station for each.

[LemonSkin]

@Stratickus I actually like the sound of this and will probably implement it. It never made a whole lot of sense to me to have a science lab before having a cupola and hitch-hiker module (or just basic life support and room for your kerbals). 

@CrashTestDanny pretty much what @TheRagingIrishman said. I won't be fixing this, you're not supposed to game the contract system like that. 

[DStaal]

As another thought for the basic station - I noticed that whatever other contract pack I was on before I added this wanted a station with *fuel* as it's first thing.

[vardicd]

@LemonSkin Glad to have this back in my mods list, thanks!, One thing though, the link you have to Near future electric seems to be broken? all the other links work for me, just not that one. anyone else having problems with that link? sometimes my IE does stupid things, so might just be me.

[LemonSkin]

26 minutes ago, DStaal said:

As another thought for the basic station - I noticed that whatever other contract pack I was on before I added this wanted a station with *fuel* as it's first thing.

I was going to add this as a later contract, I had a large orange fuel tank and large monoprop in mind. Usually useful amounts of fuel are too expensive to lug in to space in the early career.

6 minutes ago, vardicd said:

@LemonSkin Glad to have this back in my mods list, thanks!, One thing though, the link you have to Near future electric seems to be broken? all the other links work for me, just not that one. anyone else having problems with that link? sometimes my IE does stupid things, so might just be me.

Ah yeah, Nertea combined all his mods to one forum page a while ago, I'll update the link soon. 

[DStaal]

37 minutes ago, LemonSkin said:

I was going to add this as a later contract, I had a large orange fuel tank and large monoprop in mind. Usually useful amounts of fuel are too expensive to lug in to space in the early career.

Fair enough.  I'll admit it took me a while to get the 4,000 units of fuel it wanted into place.

[CrashTestDanny]

4 hours ago, TheRagingIrishman said:

The whole point of this contract mod is to build permanent bases/stations. Once you complete the Build a Station Contract, it assumes there's still a station there. My suggestion, stop trying to hack the contract system and just build a station for each.

 

3 hours ago, LemonSkin said:

@Stratickus I actually like the sound of this and will probably implement it. It never made a whole lot of sense to me to have a science lab before having a cupola and hitch-hiker module (or just basic life support and room for your kerbals). 

@CrashTestDanny pretty much what @TheRagingIrishman said. I won't be fixing this, you're not supposed to game the contract system like that. 

Ok, so just for arguments sake, say I de-orbit my Skylab station to make room for my new ISS?  Seems like the same situation would apply, right?

And what about the rapidly appearing/disappearing medical emergency, power module replacement, mission specialist, etc. missions?  surely it can't be by design that these contracts appear for less time than it takes to click on the accept button?

Danny

[CrashTestDanny]

Also, I would propose that if your intent is to make these contracts one-time, that you should add that condition, which exists in the contract system (see tourism plus, kick off mission for example) rather than relying on what is clearly a bug to enforce your idea of proper gameplay.

 

[LemonSkin]

41 minutes ago, CrashTestDanny said:

 

Ok, so just for arguments sake, say I de-orbit my Skylab station to make room for my new ISS?  Seems like the same situation would apply, right?

And what about the rapidly appearing/disappearing medical emergency, power module replacement, mission specialist, etc. missions?  surely it can't be by design that these contracts appear for less time than it takes to click on the accept button?

Danny

That's actually a plan of mine, adding a second-generation station into orbit and optionally deorbiting the old one. Specifically, I had UKS parts in mind for this. 

 

21 minutes ago, CrashTestDanny said:

Also, I would propose that if your intent is to make these contracts one-time, that you should add that condition, which exists in the contract system (see tourism plus, kick off mission for example) rather than relying on what is clearly a bug to enforce your idea of proper gameplay.

 

I'll look into it, but it sounds like it's something to do with the condition checking system. Sonetimes it takes a bit to catch up, especially if you have a lower-tier PC or are running a tonne of other mods. As for enforcing my play style, feel free to not use this mod if you don't like how things are implemented.

[CrashTestDanny]

5 minutes ago, LemonSkin said:

feel free to not use this mod

Very sorry to have troubled you.

[cyberKerb]

Thanks for continuing this! always like more contract packs!

Couple of small items, could I suggest you add an additional line to your StationAgent.cfg file? The log file throws up an ERR about a missing 'title' entry for Agent and is easily fixed with adding "title = Duna One" under the name in the above file. Not sure what the difference is between title and name in this context though.

Also is there any plan to update the .version file to point to the new github repo. (currently still pointing at severedsolo repo)

Edited June 17, 2017 by wile1411

[TheRagingIrishman]

6 minutes ago, wile1411 said:

Thanks for continuing this! always like more contract packs!

As a small item, could I suggest you add an additional line to your StationAgent.cfg file? The log file throws up an ERR about a missing 'title' entry for Agent and is easily fixed with adding "title = Duna One" under the name in the above file. Not sure what the difference is between title and name in this context though.

I'm not certain about this but my best guess is that title vs name is a change that comes from localization updates (for example, in resource definitions, there is now a name field (which always stays in english and is used by the game) and a displayname field (which changes based on what language you are using and is used in gui's)). 

Edited June 17, 2017 by TheRagingIrishman

[LemonSkin]

5 minutes ago, wile1411 said:

Thanks for continuing this! always like more contract packs!

As a small item, could I suggest you add an additional line to your StationAgent.cfg file? The log file throws up an ERR about a missing 'title' entry for Agent and is easily fixed with adding "title = Duna One" under the name in the above file. Not sure what the difference is between title and name in this context though.

Yeah, I'll put it on the list. Next update will be late this weekend or early next week. I foolishly took this over in the middle of my exams haha

[severedsolo]

2 hours ago, CrashTestDanny said:

And what about the rapidly appearing/disappearing medical emergency, power module replacement, mission specialist, etc. missions?  surely it can't be by design that these contracts appear for less time than it takes to click on the accept button?

That was a bug in Contract Configurator - it should be fixed with the latest version.

2 hours ago, CrashTestDanny said:

Also, I would propose that if your intent is to make these contracts one-time, that you should add that condition, which exists in the contract system (see tourism plus, kick off mission for example) rather than relying on what is clearly a bug to enforce your idea of proper gameplay.

Also, you are really taking your ire out on the wrong person. This was a design decision that I made very early in the life of this pack (back when it was called Kerbin Space Station, and used a stupid system to enforce labels).

Yes, you are not supposed to do what you did and move your stations around. The pack may misbehave if you do that, because it's not intended behaviour. It's not relying on a bug though, it just happens that I was nice enough to write a system in that allows you to  launch a new one if something happens to your old station (it was actually designed as a preventative for "oh nuts I just accidentally crashed into my station").

Lemonskin may decide to change this in the future, but it's ALWAYS been a core design point of the pack. The contracts randomly disappearing thing, as I said is a bug, and the latest CC should fix that.

Edited June 17, 2017 by severedsolo