[1.5.0 <-> 1.8.1] Kerbalism v3.2

[The-Doctor]

I'd like to hear others stories using Kerbalism, I see a lot of people saying how hard it is and the official wiki even has documentation regarding how hard it is to go the mun, this confuses me since I've had no issues with the mod or going there. I did missions to the mun and minmus without putting any thought regarding water recycling or any of those processes and just put enough supplies on, I also did them without radiation shielding, but who knows maybe that's just me.

 

I think a compromise would be the rdu only curing radiation poisoning from 25% to below and anything higher is permanent unless a setting is toggled.

[The-Doctor]

Does the hitchhiker upgrades apply to other part mods or are those specific upgrades such as the rdu exclusive to the hitchhiker?

[Gurki]

@The-Doctor Apparently, Kerbalism by itself only support the Hitchhiker (https://github.com/Kerbalism/Kerbalism/blob/a0df2935c57fe139b58e9e40314254df1b98719e/GameData/KerbalismConfig/System/Sickbay.cfg#L1-L33).
That being said other mods can support it by themselves.

Reposting my question as its now on the previous page

Quote

I tried to do an mining contract on the Mun (Acquire 600 fresh Ore/Have 600 Ore onboard). The Ore is correctly harvested in background (even from space center).
Actually, the "Have 600 Ore onboard" is fulfilled but not the "Acquire 600 fresh Ore". Does Kerbalism break these contracts ?

 

Edited August 9, 2019 by Gurki

[subyng]

I have the entire tech tree unlocked but I don't seem to have the ECLSS part. What am I missing? What is it called?

[Gurki]

@subyng The ECLSS functionality is on almost every crewable part, search for "Configure Pod" in PAW menu to open dedicated ECLSS configuration panel.
By default, part pop in VAB/SPH with "scrubber" a "humidity controller" until reconfigured, so you should also see "Scrubber: running" and "Humidity controller: running"

The dedicated part is named "External ECLSS Module" and should be found in the new category "Life Support". Look for a flower in the bottom of the left panel in VAB/SPH.

[The-Doctor]

Hi guys, so I noticed that you need 1 greenhouse to can support 1 kerbal with perpetual food. Even mods like SSPRX with giant greenhouses leads to the same amount of production. Can this be changed? Even with having scientists in the greenhouse nothing changes, it's a bit of a bummer that the output doesn't increase. Hope this is taken under consideration

[mikegarrison]

I hadn't played Kerbalism since (I think) version 1. All in all, it's definitely more playable. Used to be you had to totally spam your spacecraft with nitrogen, for instance, just to keep it pressurized. Now it seems you just need to keep a little around to account for losses during EVAs.

In many ways, this is the best life support mod. I like the life support modules, the way you can configure them, the way they interact with the resources, etc. And it's interesting to have to rely on fuel cells in the early game.

I both like and dislike the science mods -- making science take time is interesting, but it still seems a bit unbalanced toward too little science. And why do the in-flight science experiments take SO MUCH power? Does it really take that much power to just float around in the cabin?

However, my very favorite mods are still Near Future, and when I finally got to where I could install a nuclear reactor, it just failed. As best I can tell, Kerbalism has completely prevented the reactor from doing the one thing it is supposed to do, which is to create power. And Kerbalism seems to have overridden the Near Future reactor control panel. Also, I'm not sure the reactor is generating heat.

And I've never liked Kerbalism's determination that the science labs should not generate science. I mean, isn't that really the point of a science lab? Science isn't great in KSP in general, and a few of the Kerbalism changes are better. But I like to build bases or orbital stations with a science lab and actually get some science from it.

Unfortunately, the problems with the reactors are going to mean I'm going to end this playthrough now at about the point where I start leaving the Kerbin system, because I really want to reactors.

Anyway, thanks for your work.

[CoriW]

On 7/5/2019 at 5:00 PM, physicsnerd said:

Update: Kerbalism also seems to cause the centrifuges from SSPX to vanish (also a Near Future mod)

Noticed this as well.. Any known fix? If not I'll perhaps do some digging tomorrow.

[Cheesecake]

On 8/6/2019 at 9:27 PM, Cheesecake said:

That`s my config:

CoatlAerospace.cfg

The only experiments who don`t work are: ca_rpws, ca_mag, ca_orbitalScope.
The others work but have no animation anymore like the Gamma-Ray-Boom. It works but can`t extend.
I looked into the DMagic-config but it confused me.

Does no one know an answer? Sorry, I know you make all a great work and spend your time for this mods and the community. It`s frustrating to wait and no one of the devs is answering.
It would be helpful to have a clearly documentation (the shown config doesn´t work at all mods though the work like all other mods) how to make own configs for other science-mods.

[glennog]

I took a look at Kerbalism after watching Raiz Space on YouTube and I have to say I'm loving it...  well, almost.  It's the science.  For example, I really do not like the time it takes to read a temperature gauge or check the geiger counter.  Real life just doesn't work like that.  The changes, IMHO, make it unrealistic, counter-productive, overly restrictive and makes the early game soooooooooo much harder than it needs to be.  I also read a previous post that mentioned the Science Lab not producing science - is this accurate and still the case?  Really?  That is the entire raison d'etre of the Science Lab...  to produce Science.  It's right there in the name!

I noticed that the old science configuration file is still there but disabled - how can I go back to that config and ditch this whole new science thing?  I don't want to have to abandon the entire mod just for this one component as I'm really loving everything else that Kerbalism brings.

[Gurki]

Experiments are split in two categories. Some produce only data (instruments reading like thermometer, geiger, pressure ...) that can be transferred via ComNet for science and others (Goo, ScienceJunior, ...) produce sample that need to return to Kerbin ground for catching them and get science.

Or if it's too long/hard to bring them back on Kerbin, you can bring them to a Science Lab where they will be studied by a Scientist. These sample will then be converted to data and transferred via ComNet to Kerbin.

So they still produce science, but the not in the stock way and not for everything.

[mindstalker]

Having issues with things like BEEP experiment. It's biome specific but it's not possible to stay in one biome in space low for a year. It keeps resetting every time I cross biomes instead of continuing where it left off. Am I missing something??

[mikegarrison]

46 minutes ago, mindstalker said:

Having issues with things like BEEP experiment. It's biome specific but it's not possible to stay in one biome in space low for a year. It keeps resetting every time I cross biomes instead of continuing where it left off. Am I missing something??

I think that it doesn't actually "reset". You get credit for the small fraction of the total time that you spend in each biome. Eventually, if you wait long enough or have enough satellites, you would finally piece together all the available science. I think the idea is to avoid the situation that occurs in the unmodded game when all the science available in a given body is just tapped out.

Of course, in the unmodded game that's when you can send a science lab there and get more science that way. In Kerbalism, science labs don't work that way, so these really long term experiments are the alternate reason to keep a probe or a base or a station running for a long time.

2 hours ago, Gurki said:

Experiments are split in two categories. Some produce only data (instruments reading like thermometer, geiger, pressure ...) that can be transferred via ComNet for science and others (Goo, ScienceJunior, ...) produce sample that need to return to Kerbin ground for catching them and get science.

Or if it's too long/hard to bring them back on Kerbin, you can bring them to a Science Lab where they will be studied by a Scientist. These sample will then be converted to data and transferred via ComNet to Kerbin.

So they still produce science, but the not in the stock way and not for everything.

No, they don't "produce science" (except I guess there is an experiment if you have both a greenhouse and the lab). They only convert samples to data. It's far easier (in the Kerbin system anyway) to just return the samples.

[Gurki]

Well ... They don't produce science like stock in the sense that you can't rerun finished experiments then feed the lab for extra science points if that what you have in mind.

[glennog]

4 hours ago, Gurki said:

Experiments are split in two categories. Some produce only data (instruments reading like thermometer, geiger, pressure ...) that can be transferred via ComNet for science and others (Goo, ScienceJunior, ...) produce sample that need to return to Kerbin ground for catching them and get science.

Or if it's too long/hard to bring them back on Kerbin, you can bring them to a Science Lab where they will be studied by a Scientist. These sample will then be converted to data and transferred via ComNet to Kerbin.

So they still produce science, but the not in the stock way and not for everything.

Thanks for clarifying the role of the science lab.  I still cannot understand, though, why reading a geiger counter, a temperature gauge or a barometer, for example, would take several minutes to complete and generate several kilobytes of data.  If Kerbalism is intended to bring some realism to KSP then, on this point, it is failing.  This is particularly relevant in the early game  by the very limited 'hard disk' on board the stock capsule which can only store the results of one of the two available data experiments (geiger counter and temperature gauge) and one slot for a physical experiment (the goo).  The result is that you have to repeat launches just to get basic data.  It doesn't help that the additional capacity isn't available in the tech tree until you have, I think, 45 science - that can seem like a completely unattainable goal.  As science is so critical to progression in career mode, the changes to science in 3.0 are too limiting.

I'm guessing that there isn't a way to go back to the old science as it was in 2.2 (as nobody seems to have responded to that part of my post).  That being the case I'm going to drop Kerbalism.

[Gurki]

You can put an antenna on the vessel to transfer data to KSC as the experiment is running. The data space available isn't really an issue in overall.
Running out of data space will just slow down your experiments for the time needed for your antenna to send them to KSC.

Note that the science storage box doesn't provide HDD space, only sample slots. As far as I know, only pods and probe core give HDD space (imho a HDD part would be handy for only a few long running experiments)

I agree that timing and data size of some experiments need tweaks to be more realistic

Regarding upgrades, the stayputnick doesn't receive them and I'm not sure that the MK1 pod get them too. That's an intended behavior.
But higher probe core and pods in the tech tree get them.

[CoriW]

 

On 7/5/2019 at 5:00 PM, physicsnerd said:

Update: Kerbalism also seems to cause the centrifuges from SSPX to vanish (also a Near Future mod)

 

On 7/27/2019 at 8:24 AM, Sharp12 said:

Thank you for sharing this! I have been waiting for over a month for a fix on this. 

@physicsnerd @DR_RDR @Sharp12 @SilverState @Sir Mortimer

Okay so regarding the issue with the Kerbalism and SSPX gravity rings not appearing in the VAB, I've done some digging and found the culprit to the problem and have come up with a solution. The first thing I did was look at the config files for all of the missing parts and ensure that all of them had researchable tech nodes and categories set in the VAB, which all checked out. After that I opened up the Module Manager cache file and searched for the configs for the parts in there.. Suspiciously it said that all of their categories were set to "none". Upon seeing this I figured some patch somewhere was doing this and I opened up the Module Manager log and searched for any patches applied to those parts (I have 178 mods so this took awhile). After looking through each and every patch that touched those parts I found only a single patch even mentioned the category.. And set it to "none"..

The cultprit patch is one which comes with Kerbalism itself, located in the file "GameData\Kerbalism\Support\CCK.cfg". Within that file, there is the following..

// @PART:HAS[@MODULE[GravityRing]]:NEEDS[CommunityCategoryKit]:AFTER[zzzKerbalism]
// {
	// %tags = #$tags$ cck-lifesupport
// }

@PART:HAS[@MODULE[GravityRing]]:NEEDS[CommunityCategoryKit,!FilterExtensions]:AFTER[zzzKerbalism]
{
	%category = none
}

As you can clearly see, if you have Community Category Kit installed, which is a dependency for several other mods, but don't have Filter Extensions installed (which is why some people found the fix was to install Filter Extensions mentioned earlier in this thread) the patch will then proceed to set the category of all parts containing the module "GravityRing" to "none", but not set the tags required to put those parts in a CCK category which results in the parts vanishing from all VAB tabs.

There are two ways to then fix this problem, the first option is to simply uncomment the commented out patch which will result in the parts using the CCK category, or the second option is to comment out the second patch which will result in the category of the parts remaining unedited, leaving the parts in their original categories. For those who want a quick copy paste, here you go.

// @PART:HAS[@MODULE[GravityRing]]:NEEDS[CommunityCategoryKit]:AFTER[zzzKerbalism]
// {
// 	%tags = #$tags$ cck-lifesupport
// }

// @PART:HAS[@MODULE[GravityRing]]:NEEDS[CommunityCategoryKit,!FilterExtensions]:AFTER[zzzKerbalism]
// {
// 	%category = none
// }

I'd submit a request of some sort on Github but I have no idea how any of that works as I've only ever downloaded stuff off there.

Edited August 11, 2019 by CoriW

[traisjames]

I am early mid game (everything up to and including 160 science items unlocked) and I am finding while Squad related command systems (probes and command capsules) have increasing amounts of storage, those added in by mods still only have 512kb of storage.  Will Kerbalism eventually support other command systems as far as reasonable data storage?

[baldamundo]

8 minutes ago, traisjames said:

I am early mid game (everything up to and including 160 science items unlocked) and I am finding while Squad related command systems (probes and command capsules) have increasing amounts of storage, those added in by mods still only have 512kb of storage.  Will Kerbalism eventually support other command systems as far as reasonable data storage?

Have just been looking into this myself and gradually decoding the module manager patches that run this. It seems as if the way this works is as follows:

Kerbal Space Program\GameData\KerbalismConfig\System\ScienceRework\Tweakables\StockHardDrives.cfg - this defines the general values for the hard drive upgrades and the specific hard drive sizes of the stock pods.

Kerbal Space Program\GameData\KerbalismConfig\System\ScienceRework\HardDriveConfigs.cfg - this applies those values to the pods ingame.

The hard drive upgrades apply a multiplier to the pods' hard drive sizes, but it seems to be gated by the pod's initial hard drive size. This means that the earliest pods can't have any upgrades, and the mid-game pods only benefit from the first two or three upgrades.

The reason that mod added pods aren't affected by upgrades is that the HardDriveConfigs.cfg file also gives a default hard drive size of 0.5MB to all command pods that don't have a specific value defined, but the upgrades only apply to pods with a starting hard drive size of at least 2MB.

 

I think the simplest and quickest way to fix this is just to increase the default data capacity added to all pods by HardDriveConfigs.cfg in the below section (I assume this automatically gets overriden for the stock pods by the values defined for them later on in the file).

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleCommand]]:NEEDS[FeatureScience]
{
	MODULE
	{
		name = HardDrive
		title = Command Module Storage
		dataCapacity = 0.5      // data size in Mb
		sampleCapacity = 1      // sample size in slots
	}
}

My instinct would be to change it to 65 (slightly lower than the QBE probe). This allows it to benefit from all except the final upgrade whilst imo not being wildly unbalancing. 

 

(can someone who understands module manager confirm whether or not I've understood this correctly?

[Sir Mortimer]

14 hours ago, CoriW said:

 

// @PART:HAS[@MODULE[GravityRing]]:NEEDS[CommunityCategoryKit]:AFTER[zzzKerbalism]
// {
// 	%tags = #$tags$ cck-lifesupport
// }

// @PART:HAS[@MODULE[GravityRing]]:NEEDS[CommunityCategoryKit,!FilterExtensions]:AFTER[zzzKerbalism]
// {
// 	%category = none
// }

I'd submit a request of some sort on Github but I have no idea how any of that works as I've only ever downloaded stuff off there.

Great find, thank you!
I'll add it for the next release.

6 hours ago, traisjames said:

I am early mid game (everything up to and including 160 science items unlocked) and I am finding while Squad related command systems (probes and command capsules) have increasing amounts of storage, those added in by mods still only have 512kb of storage.  Will Kerbalism eventually support other command systems as far as reasonable data storage?

Yes, actually that's currently worked on. Right now, hard drives are added to probe cores and pods explicitely by individual parts, which is why only supported mods get them. There's a other system being cooked up, which will add storage globally to all cores and pods.

[Sir Mortimer]

16 hours ago, glennog said:

I'm guessing that there isn't a way to go back to the old science as it was in 2.2 (as nobody seems to have responded to that part of my post).  That being the case I'm going to drop Kerbalism.

There is, but it's not tested, so no promises:
* Delete the GameData/KerbalismConfig/System/ScienceRework folder
* Rename OldScience.cfg.disabled to OldScience.cfg

Regarding duration of temperature readings etc: you're not looking at the temperature at one moment. To get any value out of a temperature reading, you need to look at it for a while, see how it develops, does it increase, decrease, when does it increase, when does it stay the same, ideally you would be doing that for days and weeks, record the results, draw charts, feed it into a hypothesis that helps you understand why the temperature is what it is at this moment. So, yes, you're right. Using a few minutes for a temperature reading is unrealistic. It should take weeks.

19 hours ago, mindstalker said:

Having issues with things like BEEP experiment. It's biome specific but it's not possible to stay in one biome in space low for a year. It keeps resetting every time I cross biomes instead of continuing where it left off. Am I missing something??

It's an issue with the UI. It will say it starts at 0% because it doesn't look at how much of the experiment was done and sent back to KSC last time you were there. Over time, you'll be getting all the science.

[Sir Mortimer]

23 hours ago, Cheesecake said:

Does no one know an answer? Sorry, I know you make all a great work and spend your time for this mods and the community. It`s frustrating to wait and no one of the devs is answering.
It would be helpful to have a clearly documentation (the shown config doesn´t work at all mods though the work like all other mods) how to make own configs for other science-mods.

Sorry, it's a bit hard to keep up with github, discord and the forum at the same time. Generally speaking, issues and bug reports that are not on github are easily overlooked, forgotten and/or lost.
There is some "documentation" about how science is configured in the wiki (it recently moved, here https://github.com/Kerbalism/Kerbalism/wiki/TechGuide-~-Supporting-Science-Mods), that text is based on an earlier post here in the forum. I don't know if you've seen that.

[Cheesecake]

4 minutes ago, Sir Mortimer said:

Sorry, it's a bit hard to keep up with github, discord and the forum at the same time. Generally speaking, issues and bug reports that are not on github are easily overlooked, forgotten and/or lost.
There is some "documentation" about how science is configured in the wiki (it recently moved, here https://github.com/Kerbalism/Kerbalism/wiki/TechGuide-~-Supporting-Science-Mods), that text is based on an earlier post here in the forum. I don't know if you've seen that.

Thank you. But I have done all these steps and it don`t work for some experiments. You can see my config in my post.

[Sir Mortimer]

On 8/11/2019 at 3:52 AM, mikegarrison said:

However, my very favorite mods are still Near Future, and when I finally got to where I could install a nuclear reactor, it just failed. As best I can tell, Kerbalism has completely prevented the reactor from doing the one thing it is supposed to do, which is to create power. And Kerbalism seems to have overridden the Near Future reactor control panel. Also, I'm not sure the reactor is generating heat.

The general issue with reactors (and other mods that straddle into resource generation terretory) is that it is basically an under-estimated and often overlooked problem of generating resources in KSP, especially in combination with time warp and background simulation. Near Future specifically is mentioned here https://github.com/Kerbalism/Kerbalism/issues/461 but the problem is bigger and older than that - see this very old issue on the original Kerbalism github project: https://github.com/ShotgunNinja/Kerbalism/issues/85

As a rule of thumb: if a part generates resources, Kerbalism needs to work on supporting it.

[infinite_monkey]

6 hours ago, Sir Mortimer said:

As a rule of thumb: if a part generates resources, Kerbalism needs to work on supporting it.

Does that include mining etc.? Will Rational Resources be supported?

My 2 cents about the science discussion:

I understand the point that realistically you would want long term measurements for temperature etc. But then again, that would be a series of measurements, not one long measurement. I think the stock approach makes sense for this kind of experiments: reading a sensor value doesn't take any time at all, and gives you a good amount of science, as it gives you a general idea of the circumstances on that planet/biome. Subsequent measurements give you further details on how much variation there is, giving you additional science. So maybe split the experiment in a short and a long term part?

As for science labs: I think the Kerbalism approach is correct in the way that a lab can't produce science out of nothing. But in realitiy, the samples on the ISS don't com from the moon, but from Earth. So there should be some samples we could bring to a space station in order to examine their behavior in 0g - which is basically what DMagic Orbital Science does. Is that compatible with Kerbalism?

The bigger problem with science in KSP is this: gathering science in a realistic way is only half of the story. Applying it is the other one. In real life, your knowledge on temperatures or seismic activity on Mars doesn't affect your ability to build a bigger rocket, but it will affect your ability to build a base there. I think the general approach of science points is flawed. Instead, tech nodes should depend on specific experiments. E.g. heat shields should depend on completed pressure measurements in different altitudes, advanced heat shields should depend on reentry data.

Building bigger rockets, robotics or electronics is merely a question of time, money and testing (i.e. engineering), not of science done on other planets. Instead of the stupid stock testing missions, I would like this approach:

1. Invest money in a new technology
2. Wait for some time to complete development
3. Parts are not unlocked yet - you need to test them in useful and realistic conditions (no, I will not test a "Flea" solid rocket booster on an escape trajectory out of Kerbin)
4. After testing a relevant number of parts, the tech node is unlocked

Plus, as mentioned before, certain technology nodes should only be researchable after the completion of a secific set of experiments.

Not sure if this can be done within the limits of KSP, but that is how I would design it

Edited August 12, 2019 by infinite_monkey