OPM or GPP?

[Geschosskopf]

2 hours ago, WuphonsReach said:

I like to solve that issue with KCT turned up to eleven, which really cuts down on the number of launches that you can do per year.  Which in turn, means I spend a lot of time jumping forward 30-90 days at a time, which helps eat up the decades.  My first crew launch is in year 6-8, first station around year 12, and then another few years before I'm starting to consider a Mun station, and probably year 20-30 before I'm considering a permanent habitat on the Mun.

I don't think that would solve the problem, but compound it.  OK, so you slow your progress down with KCT.  That just means it will take more gametime until you have the gear to do anything meaningful at even the closer OPM planets.  It does nothing to shorten the travel time required to get there, let alone come back.  And until you've got the big relays and RTGs from near the end of the tech tree, there's not much point in sending even small fly-by probes early on because they won't be able to transmit much if anything from way out there.

Suppose you launch a mission to Sarnus on an 8-year trip (give or take).  After that, you muck around with the "inner" planets (which is everything stock except Eeloo, which is now at Sarnus).  Say you warp ahead 90 days, then spend all your play time for that evening messing with the ship you warped to or designing the next one. repeat.  In each such play session, the Sarnus mission only gets 90 days closer to Sarnus.  You'd have to play about 38 such sessions before your Sarnus mission arrives.  And then these big gas giant systems are so big that it takes a couple months just to get from the SOI boundary to the middle for a capture burn, then the best part of a year to visit all the moons, even with multiple ships operating simultaneously.

This is why I say that once you've got a mission en route to an Outer Planet, you pretty much have to abandon all operations from Jool inwards.  You have to warp ahead YEARS at a stretch if you ever want your OPM missions to get anywhere.  If you run life support that isn't a closed loop (and if it is, why bother?), your troops on the "inner" planets will starve during such long warps.  If you don't have life support and don't care about how long Kerbals are stuck in tincans, then this isn't an issue, but even so, you can't have them do anything with all the cool planes you sent to Laythe or whatever else you built prior to heading to OPM.  OTOH, if you do keep having to feed bases, rotate crews, and/or want to totally explore the "inner" planets, then your OPM missions won't get there before you lose interest in the game or an update breaks the save.

IMHO OPM is a thing unto itself.  I don't see much point in installing it unless it's going to be the total focus of your game.  Tech up as rapidly as possible with biome-hoppers to Minmus and Mun, maybe a few one-and-done probes to Duna and Eve, then nothing but OPM after that, whether you have KCT or not.

[OhioBob]

11 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

IMHO OPM is a thing unto itself.  I don't see much point in installing it unless it's going to be the total focus of your game.  Tech up as rapidly as possible with biome-hoppers to Minmus and Mun, maybe a few one-and-done probes to Duna and Eve, then nothing but OPM after that, whether you have KCT or not.

I'm currently using GPP, but I was previously using stock + OPM.  While I thought OPM was a nice mod and I liked having the outer planets as part of the solar system, I never got around to launching a single mission beyond Jool, mainly for the reasons you explain.  I still had stuff going on in the inner solar system that I didn't want to abandon just to time warp ahead the years needed to get to the outer planets.  I tend to agree with you... If a person wants to undertake a serious exploration of the OPM planets, they really need to forget about everything else and just focus on that.

The same thing is true of the outer planets in GPP.  Otho is GPP's Jool as far as distance and travel time is concerned.  Visiting the planets beyond Otho presents the same problem as the OPM planets.
 

Edited December 6, 2017 by OhioBob

[Geschosskopf]

2 hours ago, OhioBob said:

The same thing is true of the outer planets in GPP.  Otho is GPP's Jool as far as distance and travel time is concerned.  Visiting the planets beyond Otho presents the same problem as the OPM planets.

Well, well, well.  I didn't know that.  Now I'm seeing GPP as a more threatening trap for my next 3-5 careers, each focused on different aspects of it  

[cyberKerb]

For the people using GPP combined with OPM - do you leave the antenna modifications from OPM as default? (ie Antenna range x4, Lvl3 DSN x8)

Also, anyone using the JX2 antenna with OPM & GPP? I ask as JX2 removes the power boost by default unless you remove the cfg that changes it.