I stop playing when Kerbalism becomes outdated...

[Marshall Hopp]

ive played online games since ultima online and back to mario when nes came out and the thing i loved about them were consequences.   Life support adds that little extra challenge that motivates players like me to put in 1000s of hours into a game.   Life support is such an obvious step that it seems to be purely stubbornness preventing its implementation.    I have tried all the LS mods and kerbalism was what made me really fall in love with this game beyond just visiting planets.   the Radiation, comfort boredom all add such dimension to this game it NEEDS to be in the base game, so it doesn't vanish with each update,  the people working on it do a really good job keeping it working but cant be expected to keep up all the time.

this is a plea from a guy who had been looking for years for a good space simulator and stumbled onto kerbal watching a youtube video.    PLEASE PLEASE add life support  and more specifically the features from kerbalism.  it wont ruin the game, people could easily turn LS off... and yes i realize there are many threads about this but it needs to be said as many times as necessary 

[Pthigrivi]

I think Kerbalism (though great) is probably too much for stock. I've been using USI and I think it does a great job making things as simple and straight-forward as possible while still offering enough complexity to make things interesting. It boils life support down to one main resource with a couple others (mulch and fertilizer) to make greenhouses and long-term bases and stations work and recyclers filling in the middle. Whats nice is you barely have to think about it very early on and players have time to adjust and take on more as their missions become more complex and ambitious. I also really like having a simple habitation mechanic--though I think if anything a stock implementation could boil that down to one value rather than having both hab and home timers. Slap on a few cool habitation modules and centrifuges late in the tech tree, some near-future engines and reactors and I think they'd have a solid DLC.

[Guest]

I vote no on life support as in my view it goes against the light-hearted and somewhat whimsical spirit of KSP: Kerbals are supposed to die in spectacular explosions, not slowly starved or asphyxiated to death. That's a hardcore feature and as such perfect for mods. 

[KerikBalm]

I use TAC-LS... Must we 3 fight to the death of TAC-LS vs USI vs Kerbalism?

I don't use kerbalism, but I provide my kerbals generous space in hitchhiker cans, and I give them rotating sections for interplanetary vessels and the main station above kerbin (oh god will these new stock rotors make things better)

I vote yes on some form of life support, optional just like the comm relay. I think its a little absurd that sending kerbals is simpler than sending probes.

Like TAC-LS, pods themselves should contain enough resources that you don't need to worry about it for a reasonably efficient transfer to Mun (3 kerbin days of supplies in a pod, a reasonable Mun transfer takes 1 day each way, so with no additional supplies, you can stay at Mun for 1 kerbin day).

Like TAC-LS, it should be really easy to just add a few weeks of supplies (packing on the supplies to go to minmus consists of basically adding 1 part, and is only a small mass penalty).

Thus the complexity really only comes in when you want to go interplanetary... by which point it doesn't need to be "n00b friendly", since interplanetary missions are more advanced missions anyway.

It would mesh well with Breaking ground if you could mine surfaces for life support supplies: Now you can use robotics to set up surface bases. Perhaps in those storage containers, you could have mini piece of life support equipment.

A kerbal gets out on Duna, sets up the solar panels and controller, then the next thing he pulls out is an atmosphere processor: cracks Dunian CO2 into O2, filters humidity out of the air, produces Oxygen and water.

Then he unpacks a few little gardens to produce food, and there's enough life support production to sustain 1 kerbal.

For space voyages/ stations, you could have 99% efficient recyclers. After 3 days, only 0.03 days worth of supplies are gone. A 3 day supply turns into a 300 day supply. Pack on the same amount of supplies that allowed one to get to Minmus, throw on the recycler, and you're set for a Duna mission.

I would simplify it from TAC a little: I wouldn't have separate oxygen and water recyclers: I'd combine them just to reduce part count. I'd still have a food resource, because with TAC-LS I often have carbon extractors adn water purifiers, but no way to regenerate food, I carry minimal water and oxygen reserves, but large food reserves (still not that massive). TAC-LS by itself doesn't have a food recycler, so I modded that in (as other mods do too, such as KPBS, with its greenhouse.) Then I'd throw in another recycler, that does everything:

A greenhouse with integrated water filter: plants grow and produce O2 and food from the CO2 and waste of kerbals...

So we'd be looking at just a few parts for ships:

1) Combined O2&water supplies (lets say multiple sizes, the smallest is a 30 day ration for 1 kerbal)

2) Food supplies (lets say multiple sizes, the smallest is a 30 day ration for 1 kerbal)

3) Combined O2&Water&Food supplies (lets say multiple sizes, the smallest is a 30 day ration for 1 kerbal)

4) Air and water recycler

5) Air, water, and food recycler (can produce excesses with an ore input)

6) An atmosphere processor(produces excess O2 and water, no food needed)

 

And a few kerbal deployable parts, integrating with ground stations

1) Mini Greenhouse

2) Air and water recycler

3) Atmosphere processor

4) Supply cache - something your kerbal can drop off somewhere, lets say its a 3 day supply. Or your kerbal by virtue of having it in its inventory can operate for 3 days on EVA instead of a couple hours.

 

I don't think that's too complicated.

Edited May 29, 2019 by KerikBalm

[Pthigrivi]

7 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

I use TAC-LS... Must we 3 fight to the death of TAC-LS vs USI vs Kerbalism?

No I don't think so. Hopefully a stock implementation would be a bit sleeker than any of them. I think the one thing USI gets right is it combines air, water, and food into a single resource so players can work around one timer. After all, if you run out of any of the three you're dead (or on strike or frozen or whatever), so "supplies" are just an aggregate value meant to represent the amount of those three things a kerbal consumes in a given time. (In USI its 1.8 supplies per hour, which I might rather be calibrated to exactly 1/hour for stock to make the math easier). The byproduct is Mulch, which one could assume is a combination of waste-water, CO2 and compost. I think Roverdude is right that making a 100% closed loop life support system is not realistic, so the addition of Fertilizer mass as a catalyst for greenhouse recovery both to extend long missions and to allow for permanent bases is a pretty solid solution.

The other thing to keep in mind is all the work that goes into balancing this system as a gameplay mechanic. Its important both for greenhouses and recyclers that their mass and form-factor create sensible break-even points for players to consider. For instance there's no real need to use a greenhouse going to Minmus and back--you'd have less mass just using supplies--but using recyclers might make sense depending on how many kerbals you're bringing. (Again I think USI could use some tweaks in this department. I'd love it if the big recycler covered more kerbals and we got a 1.25 inline recycler to fill in the middle, etc.)

Same goes for Habitation. Its great because it creates an actual gameplay incentive to bring habitation parts so they aren't just heavy role-playing decoration. I also like the way it works with kerbal-month ratings and multipliers, but I think a stock implementation could just dispose of the home timer. Just like with supplies the important thing is to keep that end-of-the-day value to 1 per kerbal. It might also be nice if habitation was more of a perk mechanic than a penalty mechanic, like if happy, well-habbed kerbals gain experience faster. 

 

Edited May 29, 2019 by Pthigrivi

[Kerbart]

I don’t use Life Support, although it would be an exciting option.

 

But it’s discussions like these that I always have to think of when I’m being told that a DLC “adding functionality offered by mods” is worthless.

To be fair, life support, scantech and remotech offer extra realism I’d love to see in the stock game. And yes, I do consider DLC “stock,” as it will get continued support from Squad.

[Flibble]

You could always just delay updating until Kerbalism is updated...

[RocketSquid]

I think the problem is that everyone has their own idea, not just of how difficult life support should be, but how complex it should be. I, for example, think Snacks! is too simple, and Kerbalism and USI-LS are both too complex. TAC-LS plus Kerbal Health is about the right level, because I do want habitation mechanics, I just don’t want to deal with the supply chains that come with USI-LS. But at the same time, I have both TAC and Kerbal Health set to non-lethal, akin to the default settings for USI or Snacks, because I want to have second chances. However, if I had to pick one to base a hypothetical future stock LS on, it would be USI. Most of my problems with USI are there because it is a mod. The lack of compatibility with various other mods, the super-tight integration with MKS, and even the complexity, seeing as most of that comes from the MKS integration. 

[Pthigrivi]

26 minutes ago, RocketSquid said:

 I just don’t want to deal with the supply chains that come with USI-LS. 

This is a legit point. Its not much, really just fertilizer resupply to orbital stations, but maybe this could be solved with a hydroponics bay that converts mulch directly to supplies at 100% efficiency, but is large, heavy, expensive, and draws a lot of energy for balance. In fact maybe I should just mod that one from SSPXR...