[1.5 - 1.10] Kerbalism 3.11

[RedBaron117]

I'm having issues disabling habitats in flight. I can enable/disable them in the editor no problem. If the part starts disabled in the editor, I can enable it no problem while in flight. If it starts enabled, however, the option doesn't seem to be there. Before anyone asks, no, there are no crew in the module when I attempt.

Is this a bug? I play with tons of mods, so it could be one of those, but I thought I'd come here and ask before I do some real heavy testing.

Thanks in advance!

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, RedBaron117 said:

I'm having issues disabling habitats in flight. I can enable/disable them in the editor no problem. If the part starts disabled in the editor, I can enable it no problem while in flight. If it starts enabled, however, the option doesn't seem to be there. Before anyone asks, no, there are no crew in the module when I attempt.

Is this a bug?

as far as i know, it is. it's been there forever.

you can disable habitat by editing the save file, though. i don't remember the details, but there was somewhere in the data a line that was like "enable habitat" or something similar.

[Vl3d]

Does anyone else have issues with relays? I put three satellites with HG-5's in equilateral keostationary orbit and I still have probes without signal in the areas between DSN bases when orbiting ~80 km. Am I doing something wrong?

Also another person with relay problems:

 

Edited December 11, 2022 by Vl3d

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, Vl3d said:

Does anyone else have issues with relays? I put three satellites with HG-5's in equilateral keostationary orbit and I still have probes without signal in the areas between DSN bases when orbiting ~80 km. Am I doing something wrong?

Also another person with relay problems:

 

yes, i registered a bug there. sometimes you lose contact with a probe because it doesn't see a relay.

switching control to the relay that was not being seen, then back to the probe, was generally enough to restore control.

in my case, though, i couldn't do it because my probe was inside the atmosphere of titan, so i just had to disable commnet in the difficulty options.

 

[Vl3d]

I think I might be a Kerbalism noob without realizing it. How many antennas and of what type (relay/direct) do I need to (1) be a relay; (2) communicate through a relay? I can't find the answer on the official https://kerbalism.readthedocs.io

Edited December 14, 2022 by Vl3d

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

I think I might be a Kerbalism noob without realizing it. How many antennas and of what type (relay/direct) do I need to (1) be a relay; (2) communicate through a relay? I can't find the answer on the official https://kerbalism.readthedocs.io

same as in the normal game. antenna power and type are not changed at all.

[Vl3d]

Just now, king of nowhere said:

same as in the normal game. antenna power and type are not changed at all.

So for a relay I don't really need 2 antennas? Let's say 1 HG-5 that would be (let's pretend) pointed at a probe and another omni or HG-5 pointed at Kerbin? I can just use 1 HG-5 and it relays like in a normal game?

[king of nowhere]

yes, it relays just like in a normal game. it doesn't have to be pointed in any specific direction. though two hg-5 increase the range, just like in the normal game.

of course, since you're mentioning hg-5 which is the weakest antenna, perhaps (if it's not the bug i mentioned) it's just too weak for your purposes?

in case you're not aware, you can check in this page the antenna ranges: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/CommNet

in particular, if your probes have no antenna of their own (so they are limited to their own probe core at 5k), the second table shows that they can only communicate with an HG-5 antenna (rated 5M) when within 150 km, a very close range. if they have a regular basic antenna (rated 500 k), then they can communicate up to 1600 km; if your relay satellites are higher than that, then they are too far for the probes and it's normal that they have no signal

[Vl3d]

15 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

if they have a regular basic antenna (rated 500 k), then they can communicate up to 1600 km; if your relay satellites are higher than that, then they are too far for the probes and it's normal that they have no signal

There is no bug, I apologize for my mistake. I forgot that DSN increases range for sending and receiving (greater signal power AND sensibility). I was expecting a HG-5 and a Communotron 16 to be able to communicate with one another at 2.8 mil. meters (KEO and low orbit) just because they each work from the Mun with direct connection to DSN. I'll place my relays closer to LKO.

Kerbalism Companion Calculator does not help when thinking about bounce signals. Is there anything that can help with relay signal calculations in game except the CommNet table?

Edited December 14, 2022 by Vl3d

[king of nowhere]

32 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

Kerbalism Companion Calculator does not help when thinking about bounce signals. Is there anything that can help with relay signal calculations in game except the CommNet table?

nope, no idea. the commnet table has always been adequate for my purposes

[Vl3d]

Found this visualization tool - might be useful. Could be adapted to work with Kerbalism, to also display transfer speed.

 

[alexalex]

@Gotmachine,

I am trying to fix some of the issues and bugs with the KerbalismScienceOnly config file.  I've got it working decently but I'm running into an issue where there are game parts that have multiple different experiments on them via the configure property, but there doesn't seem to be a way to associate them all to the same HardDrive module, meaning I have to create a separate HardDrive for each experiment on the part which is very messy.

Is there a way to set them all to a single HardDrive or an easy change I can make in the Kerbalism.dll to allow it?

[alexalex]

I need a bit of help on some Kerbalism syntax that I hope someone more knowledgeable than I can help me on.

double availableDataCapacity = drive.FileCapacityAvailable();
int availableSlots = Lib.SampleSizeToSlots(drive.SampleCapacityAvailable());

if (Lib.IsFlight())
{
	// show TakeData eva action button, if there is something to take
	Events["TakeData"].active = !drive.Empty();

	// show StoreData eva action button, if active vessel is an eva kerbal and there is something to store from it and if there is capacity to store something.
	Vessel v = FlightGlobals.ActiveVessel;
	Events["StoreData"].active = !IsPrivate() && availableDataCapacity > 0 && v != null && v.isEVA && !EVA.IsDead(v);
}

Both the main vessel and the active EVA kerbal have drives on them.  I want to specificy that StoreData is active only when the drive on the active EVA kerbal is not empty.  However inserting !drive.Empty() like so -

Events["StoreData"].active = !IsPrivate() && availableDataCapacity > 0 && v != null && v.isEVA && !EVA.IsDead(v) && !drive.Empty();

specifies the drive on the main vessel rather than the one on the active EVA kerbal.  So what would I use so that it checks against the kerbal's drive rather than the one on main vessel?  The full set of code for the module is here if it helps.

[coper]

radition killed my entire crew when i was going to duna . although  the shielding was full at 9.7

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, coper said:

radition killed my entire crew when i was going to duna . although  the shielding was full at 9.7

there are solar storms. even full shielding will let 10% of radiation in (at normal level), and enough solar storms are enough to kill a crew over a year or two around solar maximum.

the simple way to protect from solar storms is to have some other part between your crew pods and the sun. generally a large fuel tank, but even something smaller like a thermal shield works.  Be wary that the ship is oriented so that the heavy part is actually shielding the crew compartments. the game will keep the last situation you had when you activate time warp.

if there are several compartments, the game will take an average of their shielding. putting the crew inside a specific compartment that's more shielded will not change anything.

finally, there is a bug where you still get radiations during time warp. the only way I found to deal with it was to set the config to stop time warp and warn me of solar storms, and time warp only at x1000 during the storms. it's quite annoying, but in a relatively short trip to duna you can manage it. in my own case, i needed 30 years trip and i just set shielding efficiency to 100% during trips. which is cheating, but it's done solely to avoid a bug

[kerbnub]

Is it possible to have a crew that doesn't break down periodically, say for a 20 year mission? Is it possible to be in a situation while assigned where their stress actually decreases? I've been testing in JNSQ (where years are 1.7x longer than stock) in a large ship with all the comforts, putting them in a hitchhiker with TV, and even my best kerbal so far can't make it 2 years before the first breakdown, with breakdowns less than every year after, which is not sustainable with multiple crew. It seems like an active shield solves radiation problems for the most part, but stress breakdowns seem to be a pretty hard limit in the default configs.

Also random question, but what does the RDU do?

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, kerbnub said:

Is it possible to have a crew that doesn't break down periodically, say for a 20 year mission? Is it possible to be in a situation while assigned where their stress actually decreases? I've been testing in JNSQ (where years are 1.7x longer than stock) in a large ship with all the comforts, putting them in a hitchhiker with TV, and even my best kerbal so far can't make it 2 years before the first breakdown, with breakdowns less than every year after, which is not sustainable with multiple crew. It seems like an active shield solves radiation problems for the most part, but stress breakdowns seem to be a pretty hard limit in the default configs.

Also random question, but what does the RDU do?

yes, it is totally possible.

Quoting from my own rss kerbalism grand tour, which lasted more than 1000 kerbal years equivalent without stress breakdowns
 

Quote

 

After some inquiries, I got told that it's a random factor linked to the kerbal's name. The name gets used as a key to generate a random number, which dictates stress level as between 66% and 133% of average level. This ensures that the same kerbal will always have the same resilience.

So instead of just hiring 9 hobos highly trained professionals and getting them on the ship, I hired a bunch and put them in orbit for a long time, and registered their stress levels. I picked the three pilots, engineers and scientists with the least stress after two years in orbit in a flying hotel, which I dubbed Hotel above California. More in the next subsection.

Jeb got to 22% stress in that time. He's got a good level, he's confirmed for the mission. Bill and Bob are also confirmed. The algorithm was made to make the core crew strong.

Val got to 26%, which is better than most - average was 30% - but still not good enough. Val was one of the five that got stressed in the previous mission. Getting pilots with low stress was hard, of the original batch of 24 (8 kerbals per type) only one pilot was better than Valentina. I had to hire a couple dozen other pilots to get another good one, monbrio - and at 24% he's still the least resilient crew member. I know from the previous mission that Jeb, with his 22%, didn't get any stress - the TV could reduce his stress more than it accumulated. While Val, with her 26%, did get stressed slowly over time. Not sure where 24% will fall - wait, what am I saying? By the time I write this, the crew is landed on Phobos and been in space for two years (I wouldn't take the time to write a full report if I wasn't sure the mission was working at first). And I can indeed confirm that even Monbrio is at 0% stress. I've got a great crew.

The champion in this ranking, though, is Adai Kerman. Adai remained at 20% stress - and with the most resilient getting stressed half as much as the least resilient, and some hapless participants reaching up to 39% stress, Adai's value is the lowest possible. Congratulations, Adai.

 

However, you say even your best kerbal only make it to two years before breakdowns. if you really have all the comforts, there is only one explanation: your ship is unpressurized. If you included a single unpressurized part, the whole ship will register as unpressurized. check habitat pressure, as shown in this picture. regular value is 101 kPa.

you may also have low pressure because you run out of nitrogen, but it's less likely.

 

anyway, even in a crew that was slowly getting stressed, i still managed to complete my opm kerbalism grand tour, which lasted some 330 kerbal years. the trick is having enough redundancies.

 

finally, as for rdu, it's the radiation decontamination unit. you use it to heal your kerbal, one at a time, of radiation. it heals roughly 1% every 24 hours

 

[kerbnub]

7 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

If you included a single unpressurized part, the whole ship will register as unpressurized.

Holy excrements, this must be it! I've always used an mk1 pod as a command pod because it had the lowest mass with max shielding... And I thought 30.3 kPa was the normal pressure (all other parts were pressurized). 

I have to say I love kerbalism, but there are many unintuitive things and so much important undocumented information like this. With this missing piece of information, the way the stress system works sounds perfect to me.
Does the TV effect only apply to kerbals in the pod with the TV, btw? Or the whole ship?

And the RDU looked like it can clean everyone in it. Does it, or if you have it active on multiple kerbals, what does it do?

Know of any other commonly misunderstood things in Kerbalism, lol?

 

Thank you so much!

[king of nowhere]

3 hours ago, kerbnub said:

Holy excrements, this must be it! I've always used an mk1 pod as a command pod because it had the lowest mass with max shielding... And I thought 30.3 kPa was the normal pressure (all other parts were pressurized). 

I have to say I love kerbalism, but there are many unintuitive things and so much important undocumented information like this. With this missing piece of information, the way the stress system works sounds perfect to me.
Does the TV effect only apply to kerbals in the pod with the TV, btw? Or the whole ship?

I have conflicting reports here. On one hand, it is supposed to only work for the kerbals in the pod.

On the other, I have forgotten kerbals outside the pod and sometimes they did not get stressed. Sometimes they did. To be safe, better to keep them all in the pods.

Quote

And the RDU looked like it can clean everyone in it. Does it, or if you have it active on multiple kerbals, what does it do?

You heal them one at a time. when you have crew inside, it will give the option "cure [name]", and you pick which one you are healing.

If you activate the rdu without selecting anyone to heal... well, I never tried. I'm not sure.

Quote

Know of any other commonly misunderstood things in Kerbalism, lol?

solar storms gave me a lot of grief - I went as far as carrying 120 active shields on my ship to protect from them - before I learned that I could nullify their effect just by turning the ship around and putting other parts between the crew and the sun.

what i misunderstood at the time is that it does not matter where the crew is. solar exposure is mediated between all the crew pods.

Also, at high time warp there is a bug where you still get irradiated. My first mission, I'd reduce time warp to x1000 at every solar storm. It took forever to get to Jool. In subsequent missions, I just turned up shielding efficiency to 100% during long trips.

this is the main thing coming to mind. I'm sure there's more, but can't think of it. I'd direct you to  my 4 kerbalism grand tours, linked in my signature, there's certainly more useful stuff in there. But my mission reports are overly long

Edited January 7, 2023 by king of nowhere

[kerbnub]

16 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

If you activate the rdu without selecting anyone to heal... well, I never tried. I'm not sure.

This is actually what I had been doing before, not realizing you had to select someone. It did nothing, which makes sense. Having used it properly now, I'm rather surprised. It seems OP enough to  remove the need for any shielding, kind of out of place in Kerbalism.

[king of nowhere]

5 hours ago, kerbnub said:

This is actually what I had been doing before, not realizing you had to select someone. It did nothing, which makes sense. Having used it properly now, I'm rather surprised. It seems OP enough to  remove the need for any shielding, kind of out of place in Kerbalism.

shielding is needed to navigate radiation belts. rdu is slow. if you want to land on laythe or vall, your crew can survive a few days in those conditions with shielding. without shielding, a few hours.

but yes, it is very strong.

[dodgethisduck]

I was wanting to try and change the inner Van Allen belt around Kerbin so that it's a little further out in space.

By default, it's somewhere around 150km(?) and I wanted to maybe push that back a little so that I have some more options for LKO operations. But, I'm a bit illiterate on how to change the .cfg file. I'm assuming I want to tweak the inner_dist value, which is set to 0.813, but what exactly am I wanting to change that to?

I'd like to maybe have it start at 250km and then I'd obviously have to rescale the outer belt to match my tweak.

[OnlyLightMatters]

Hi Mod Team! Happy new year!

I have one questions: are there plans to update small parts with the following capability so that it could be placed inside inventories and could be built during EVAs? I am thinking about the Geiger Counter, small canisters and containers.

    MODULE
    {
        name = ModuleCargoPart
        stackableQuantity = 3
        packedVolume = 1
    }

If not and if someone did the work, would you accept a pull request?

[kerbnub]

1 hour ago, OnlyLightMatters said:

Hi Mod Team! Happy new year!

I have one questions: are there plans to update small parts with the following capability so that it could be placed inside inventories and could be built during EVAs? I am thinking about the Geiger Counter, small canisters and containers.

    MODULE
    {
        name = ModuleCargoPart
        stackableQuantity = 3
        packedVolume = 1
    }

If not and if someone did the work, would you accept a pull request?

Until someone does, if Kerbalism is still being developed, this mod automatically adds inventory configs to anything that's missing them.

EDIT: I'm an idiot and was testing inside Kerbin's magnetosphere . Radiation works as the post describes and does update in real time based on orientation.
On a totally different note, does anyone know why I seem not to be getting any radiation from CME's? I've seen the post linked below on how to shield against them, but in trying to test myself, I'm not seeing any difference in habitat radiation based on ship orientation, and it seems like either I'm getting either an irrelevant amount of radiation or no radiation during the storm in the image, even on a lone unshielded kerbal. So:

1. Are storms broken or inconsistent?

2. Does the habitat radiation display update in real time based on your craft's orientation? For example, showing tons of radiaton if there's nothing shielding the crewed parts, and less radiation if you turn it such that it's shielded?

Spoiler

 

 

Edited January 9, 2023 by kerbnub
derp

[OnlyLightMatters]

I started to compare stock volumes to what is calculated by KIS which determines the smallest possible rectangle box in which this part can fit. It seems that KSP Part Volumes does exactly the same thing.
So my approach is to compare a part to a stock part which is close in shape and volume and make a proportional adjustement based on the KIS Volume.
At least I will do the work for me. I will propose a pull request in a few days.

Edited January 9, 2023 by OnlyLightMatters