[1.5 - 1.10] Kerbalism 3.11

[JadeOfMaar]

On 9/17/2023 at 7:59 PM, king of nowhere said:

That could work; it could make it a real mass cost, unlike the very light repair kit. Actually, having a "spare parts" resource, and a "3d printer" module that can use spare parts to fix malfunctions, that would be the best option. Kerbalism uses the (ir)rational resources, and every planetary surface gives a complex composition that is never really used. Introducting some extra drills that would mine various metals - that the game already has in planetary surfaces - and machinery that turns those metals into spare parts. the idea is that there should be a cost - a real cost, not a symbolic one like 600 kg of mass on a space station - else there is no challenge. and you may as well just remove malfunctions entirely.

SandCastle (by mgb125) is a small mod all about 3D printing in-situ (well, it being the latest incarnation of the ideas behind OSE Workshop) but it introduces such ideas and gameplay loops as:

• Some parts can be consumed as ingredients for other parts
• Some parts can only be printed in some situations such as < 0.3 gee or only in vacuum
• Some parts can be universally blacklisted and must be shipped, namely the included "box of generic parts" or a "black box" part which is equivalent to USI SpecializedParts which are hard (or impossible, depending) to produce off-world.
• What a given printer can print can be affected by the current tech tree situation

About the (ir)rational resources, I recently settled on my own formulas for producing USI MaterialKits or WBI Equipment and avoiding Ore input as much as possible. The input resources are (refined) Metals and (mined) Minerals (representing the majority of common and semi-rare resources that aren't the bulk metals like Iron or Aluminium). The challenge is in dealing with this short (but not too short) resource chain and in acquiring MetallicOre which is most prominent in metal worlds and practically absent in ice worlds.

On 9/17/2023 at 7:59 PM, king of nowhere said:

However, it would still make sense for some malfunctions to not be fixable. You can't make a microchip with 3d printing. And while I'm not sure on the full capabilities of that tech, I'm pretty sure there are limits. I'd be extremely surprised if you could replace an exploded rocket engine just with printing; you probably can get something that works, but that's not terribly optimized. And I would not want malfunctions to become too cheap. Part of the charm of my motherships was all the redundancy, which actually gave me a good excuse to really go wild on ship design - and size. if I can avoid that by carrying 20 tons of machinery, where's the fun?

3D printing of microchips is called Photolithography. It's not unreasnable at all to dedicate an ISRU part (if it looks proper and exceeds a certain minimum size) to this. Any part that is a true EL workshop works, for example.

I guess you haven't heard of Relativity Space then. They're 3D-priinting as much as possible for their rockets, especially the engines.

I cannot argue the charm of designing a ship with redundancies. When they matter in your game it's indeed a pleasure to have them waiting and get to turn to them when the situation calls.

[king of nowhere]

7 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

I guess you haven't heard of Relativity Space then. They're 3D-priinting as much as possible for their rockets, especially the engines.

 

I heard, but I'd be extremely surprised if they could make this way a rocket that's as good as the real thing.

when we also factor in the assembly, I don't think it would be possible to assemble a large and optimized rocket engine in space from locally derived components. there's also the issue that some of the rarest metals required in some alloys would be very hard to find with isru.

ultimately, a spaceship capable of repairing itself perfectly is still outside of our capabilities. if it were possible, we could build one, and that one could mine resources from asteroids and build copies of itself one component at a time, and we could settle the universe like that. motherships acting like cells. but that's far future stuff. 

Edited September 19, 2023 by king of nowhere

[panarchist]

On 9/17/2023 at 4:59 PM, king of nowhere said:

I find that kerbalism is not compatible with a complex space program. Having a dozen ships around the place, and having to regularly service each one of them, would be too time-consuming. Kerbalism works best with a single mission, or a small number of missions. I had a lot of fun with kerbalism challenges, but it was always one single massive ship and I would always only control that one. what I love of kerbalism is exactly the challenge it gives in adding extra design constraints, at a time when the stock game had become too easy.

What I love about Kerbalism is radiation, and rendering it and the Van Allen belts beautifully in the UI. I have other mods for LS, science, and parts failures, but there isn't anything else out there doing radiation the same way.

[kerbnub]

10 hours ago, panarchist said:

What I love about Kerbalism is radiation, and rendering it and the Van Allen belts beautifully in the UI. I have other mods for LS, science, and parts failures, but there isn't anything else out there doing radiation the same way.

My favorite thing about Kerbalism is probably the science rework. Is there anything else that does science similarly?  I like pretty much everything about it really, not sure how I could play without it. Sure, there are other mods for LS and part failures, but none as in depth as Kerbalism, and they don't have persistent simulation for unloaded vessels as well afaik.

Ironically I probably have the most problem with radiation. I love the belts, but feel like there should be a better way to handle solar storms especially on planetary bases and rovers, where you would basically have to make a hugely impractical protective belt or abuse some part clipping to shield it properly.  Imo, crewed parts should have radiation exposure calculated individually, and only those parts occupied with kerbals should be calculated during a storm, so you can have them in a sheltered area while also having a greater living area otherwise that's less shielded. And I sometimes get weird spikes of radiation, even with properly oriented vessels.

Also the RDU feels kind of out of place. I don't think there are any actual real solutions to radiation yet, but it feels kind of like a magic wand just to make interstellar travel feasible without even more ridiculously large vessels.

[king of nowhere]

5 hours ago, kerbnub said:

Also the RDU feels kind of out of place. I don't think there are any actual real solutions to radiation yet, but it feels kind of like a magic wand just to make interstellar travel feasible without even more ridiculously large vessels.

on the other hand, radiations are a lot more dangerous in kerbalism than they are in real life. an unshielded ship in the main belt of kerbin would take a lethal dose in a fay or two. I checked values over the internet and made some conversions, and if my calculations are correct, it would take months of exposure to kill an astronaut in the van allen belts. same goes for everything else, radiation levels in space are dangerous but not that dangerous. and heavy shielding on a crew pod should block a lot more than 90% of incoming radiations.

so, the rdu is a magic wand that removes a problem that would not be there if the mod was more realistic.

 

what annoys me most, though, is servicing parts. taking an eva around your ship, checking every part, running maintenance on those showing signs of aging, that's cool. the first time you do it. maybe the second. In a multi-century mission like my grand tour, I am going to run a hundred maintenance run, manually checking hundreds of pieces, and it adds nothing to the experience. it would be a lot better if the whole "part aging" thing was completely reworked to remove the need to fly an engineer around. if something breaks, it breaks, and that's it. maybe make it so that an engineer on board gives a passive bonus against breaking, but don't force me to spend most of a mission flying around a ship.

it's pretty clear that the people who made kerbalism mostly tested it for the early stages of a career. given the extra difficulties involved, they didn't think people would actually try to send interplanetary manned missions - i was even straight out told by gotmachine that it was flat out impossible, lol!

and so it shows, the mod is not optimized for the experience of running long crewed missions.

[Gotmachine]

5 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

it's pretty clear that the people who made kerbalism mostly tested it for the early stages of a career. given the extra difficulties involved, they didn't think people would actually try to send interplanetary manned missions - i was even straight out told by gotmachine that it was flat out impossible

Interplanetary is possible, within reason. However, Kerbalism was indeed balanced around "past and current" technological levels and mission profiles, which is what I warned you against. We consider landing Kerbals on Duna and sending them back more or less the ultimate achievement, just like putting foots on Mars would be in the real world.

Stuff like the RDU or active radiation shields are mostly placeholder for people wanting to mess around, and everything is balanced around limiting the maximal mission time, crewed or uncrewed, to a dozen years or so (actually more like 5-6 years for manned). Servicing stuff with EVA Kerbals was never meant as a gameplay loop, just a stopgap measure in case of an unfortunate event. Yes, the way radiation is modeled has a bunch of shortcomings, and it could use a balance pass, but it mostly works for the intended scope.

Sure, you can throw nuclear reactors or various future tech mods, and tweak settings to try to get past what the mod intends to be and do things like a grand tour, but as you noted, it's mostly an exercise in frustration, which is exactly why I warned you in the first place.

Edited September 21, 2023 by Gotmachine

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Gotmachine said:

Sure, you can throw nuclear reactors or various future tech mods, and tweak settings to try to get past what the mod intends to be and do things like a grand tour, but as you noted, it's mostly an exercise in frustration, which is exactly why I warned you in the first place.

it's not. it's a wonderful exercice to push your shipbuilding and planning mission to the limit. I loved running grand tours with kerbalism. I've done 4 of them, and I may do more.

They are great, with some frustrating parts.

actually, the most frustrating part of the experience was the whole "lag" thing, and that's not the fault of the mod. even servicing parts would be a much smaller issue without lag. lag is caused by kiloparts ships, but that's a price to pay. in fact, what I love more about kerbalism is that it gave me the chance to really go wild on motherships, and make those huge things with each and every single part having a carefully considered purpose. Spending weeks designing and testing every part of a ship to fulfill the multitude of requirements introduced by this mode, then putting such a ship to the test, was immensely fulfilling. Sure, I can build a 5000-ton ship without kerbalism by stacking more crew pods, but they serve no real function, and where's the fun in that?

EDIT: while radiations are irrealistically strong, they work perfectly for the purpose of providing an additional challenge, I like them as they are /EDIT

 

Quote

Interplanetary is possible, within reason. However, Kerbalism was indeed balanced around "past and current" technological levels and mission profiles, which is what I warned you against. We consider landing Kerbals on Duna and sending them back more or less the ultimate achievement, just like putting foots on Mars would be in the real world.

I realize your consider my grand tours with kiloton ships to be outside the scope of the mod, but it may interest you that I also run a realistic jool 5, without any future parts mod, with a mass to orbit of 140 tons (the same of a saturn  5), 118 parts, no nuclear/ion engines and no nuclear power; I only used the equivalent of tried-and-true exhisting technologies, with the only exception of one active radiation shield for the interplanetary trip.

it is possible to significantly push the boundaries of what the mod was intended to do even without going crazy on ship design.

Edited September 21, 2023 by king of nowhere

[Comrad_501]

Hi, I'm having a load error that keeps persisting, I'm trying to load the science only config.
Anyone know what might be causing it?

(Error in question:)

Loading has failed due to an unhandled error

Failure in subsystem : Part compilation
Part: Greenhouse (KerbalismScienceOnly/Parts/Greenhouse/kerbalism-greenhouse/kerbalism-greenhouse)

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at PartResourceDefinitionList.Contains (System.String name) [0x00000] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at KERBALISM.Lib.GetDefinition (System.String name) [0x0000b] in <0f2cb93152734cf5bc1a865e44cdc55d>:0
  at KERBALISM.Lib.GetResourceDisplayName (System.String name) [0x00000] in <0f2cb93152734cf5bc1a865e44cdc55d>:0
  at KERBALISM.Greenhouse.Specs () [0x00006] in <0f2cb93152734cf5bc1a865e44cdc55d>:0
  at KERBALISM.Greenhouse.GetInfo () [0x00008] in <0f2cb93152734cf5bc1a865e44cdc55d>:0
  at PartLoader.CompilePartInfo (AvailablePart newPartInfo, Part part) [0x0017c] in <4b449f2841f84227adfaad3149c8fdba>:0
  at (wrapper dynamic-method) PartLoader+<CompileParts>d__56.PartLoader+<CompileParts>d__56.MoveNext_Patch0(PartLoader/<CompileParts>d__56)
  at KSPCommunityFixes.Performance.KSPCFFastLoader+<FrameUnlockedCoroutine>d__62.MoveNext () [0x0006c] in <84a4e11594ad4c4cb519f08a8e322246>:0

[shelshok]

2 hours ago, Comrad_501 said:

 

Hi, I'm having a load error that keeps persisting, I'm trying to load the science only config.
Anyone know what might be causing it?

 

https://github.com/Kerbalism/KerbalismScienceOnly/issues/4

[StupitVoltMain]

Now I can paly ONI in KSP

[october1337]

I have a problem with the fuel cell. It doesn't work because I have full energy. I need to idling for get water (to dump the energy) or turn off solar panels, but I don't see such a possibility. Plz, help me)

[theJesuit]

10 hours ago, october1337 said:

I have a problem with the fuel cell. It doesn't work because I have full energy. I need to idling for get water (to dump the energy) or turn off solar panels, but I don't see such a possibility. Plz, help me)

You can removed solar cells with an Engineer on EVA but you can't turn them off unless they are retractable.

From memory the fuel cell mechanic works on demand.  So if you need .1 EC/sec the you'll get that or .2 EC/sec and you'll get that.  The corresponding amount of fuel is consumed and water produced based on the amount of EC that is needed up till the max output.  It isn't an ISRU which is really what you want but I don't think exists.

[king of nowhere]

11 hours ago, october1337 said:

I have a problem with the fuel cell. It doesn't work because I have full energy. I need to idling for get water (to dump the energy) or turn off solar panels, but I don't see such a possibility. Plz, help me)

yes, it's a flaw of the mod that you can tell it to dump water, but you can't tell it to dump energy.

depending on how your solar panels are disposed, you can try to make them ineffective - retract them, turn the ship around to remove them from the sun, use an engineer to disassemble them, force the start of enery-intensive science experiments.

but if none of that is possible, the only thing you can do is use the cheats. I suggest launching an engineer from the ksc, alt-f12 it in rendez-vous with the ship, and have him disassemble the solar panels.

P.S. water containers are a lot more efficient than gas containers, so carrying oxygen and hydrogen and using them to make water is not the best idea. better to just carry water

[october1337]

45 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

yes, it's a flaw of the mod that you can tell it to dump water, but you can't tell it to dump energy.

depending on how your solar panels are disposed, you can try to make them ineffective - retract them, turn the ship around to remove them from the sun, use an engineer to disassemble them, force the start of enery-intensive science experiments.

but if none of that is possible, the only thing you can do is use the cheats. I suggest launching an engineer from the ksc, alt-f12 it in rendez-vous with the ship, and have him disassemble the solar panels.

P.S. water containers are a lot more efficient than gas containers, so carrying oxygen and hydrogen and using them to make water is not the best idea. better to just carry water

Friends, thanks for the answers.  "you can try to make them ineffective" - yea, that's exactly what I did, but the effect is insignificant. I'll try the idea with an engineer. I was just sure that this was provided by the mod.

"water containers are a lot more efficient than gas containers, so carrying oxygen and hydrogen and using them to make water is not the best idea. better to just carry water" - There was a water shortage for 7 days. Thought it would be a good idea to produce it rather than dump it (kerbonism's style). 

Edited October 7, 2023 by october1337

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, october1337 said:

Friends, thanks for the answers.  "you can try to make them ineffective" - yea, that's exactly what I did, but the effect is insignificant. I'll try the idea with an engineer. I was just sure that this was provided by the mod.
 

since apparently you have kerbals in there, but not an engineer among them, you may also launch one of your crew against some solar panels to smash them. a bit radical, but if you want less production from the solar panels... just make sure you stll have enough to get a net positive energy if you point them at the sun

Quote

"water containers are a lot more efficient than gas containers, so carrying oxygen and hydrogen and using them to make water is not the best idea. better to just carry water" - There was a water shortage for 7 days. Thought it would be a good idea to produce it rather than dump it (kerbonism's style). 

yes, but i'm saying that if you carry a big oxygen tank and a big hydrogen tank and make water from them, you end up carrying more mass. the gas containers look huge because they store hundreds of thousands of resources, but it's because it takes thousands of units of hydrogen and oxygen to make a single one of water. kerbalism uses one unit equal one liter, and gases have notoriously low density; so while one unit of water equals one liter, one kilogram, one liter of gas is a few grams or a fraction of gram depending on the gas. hydrogen is the worst, a tank of pressurized hydrogen only carries a fraction of the tank mass in hydrogen itself. so it is better to have big water tanks to last the crew a long time, and small gas tanks to last through the night with fuel cells.

which makes me think, how much gases do you actually have? because if you have a water shortage, you may feel fine seeing thousands of units of hydrogen and oxyge in storage, but those wll only make a few liters of water, they will only last a day or two. you may have to try and save the crew back to kerbin as fast as possible.

Edited October 7, 2023 by king of nowhere

[Markus08]

I'm having some issues getting a fuel plant on Duna to work. The Atmospheric intake thing shows "None" for Carbon Dioxide even though the analysis thing shows 96%? When I run the Carbon Dioxide Filter to fill the tanks, it says "Abundance Below Threshold". Why would this be happening?

I'm also running KSP Interstellar Extended, but removing it doesn't change anything.

https://imgur.com/a/q45F7os

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Markus08 said:

I'm having some issues getting a fuel plant on Duna to work. The Atmospheric intake thing shows "None" for Carbon Dioxide even though the analysis thing shows 96%? When I run the Carbon Dioxide Filter to fill the tanks, it says "Abundance Below Threshold". Why would this be happening?

I'm also running KSP Interstellar Extended, but removing it doesn't change anything.

https://imgur.com/a/q45F7os

I can attest that I made a mission where I was able to harvest carbon dioxide successfully from duna, so it's a bug of some kind. Maybe a mod conflict, that "atmospheric composition" window seems like it could come from a mod that messes up the atmospheric settings.

Edited October 24, 2023 by king of nowhere

[JadeOfMaar]

On 10/24/2023 at 2:54 PM, Markus08 said:

I'm having some issues getting a fuel plant on Duna to work. The Atmospheric intake thing shows "None" for Carbon Dioxide even though the analysis thing shows 96%? When I run the Carbon Dioxide Filter to fill the tanks, it says "Abundance Below Threshold". Why would this be happening?

I'm also running KSP Interstellar Extended, but removing it doesn't change anything.

https://imgur.com/a/q45F7os

I'm quite sure that "GC/MS Atmospheric Composition" window is KSPIE (as it lists a couple of resources that are only relevant to that mod), and it seems clear that KSPIE has its own exclusive system for placing and finding resources so that 96% CO2 only exists for that mod. Hopefully this part of my answer is correct and helpful (I tend to avoid installing it so I won't have much in the way of first-hand knowledge).

"Abundance below threshold" translates to "The resource is present but its extraction rate is less than the set minimum limit of this harvester. / Because of implied engineering limitations on this part, it cannot function due to how scarce the resource is at this location." Now that I think of it, this may be a parallel to "grade/quality" of a resource as seen in other games such as Surviving Mars.

[seaces]

I am facing this issue where if I time warp above x1000 long running experiments like seismic observation that take 14 days will show NaN value and will stop running. Also noticed that the craft running this experiment losses connection to the network as far is the Kerbalism mod concerned but when I go to map or check the status in top left corner I can clearly see that the craft has connection to the network.

To fix this I have to change the scene by swithcing to other craft or space center or switching between buildings. Then Kerbalism will refresh the status of the crafts and connections and NaN will disapear only to come back when I timewarp.
Also it seems so far to only affect crafts on the ground I do not think I have seen same bug on crafts in orbit but I am kinda early in the game so I do not have much of experiments that will take ages in orbit.

Any suggestions how to fix this or why I am getting this?

Edited October 27, 2023 by seaces

[king of nowhere]

4 hours ago, seaces said:

I am facing this issue where if I time warp above x1000 long running experiments like seismic observation that take 14 days will show NaN value and will stop running. Also noticed that the craft running this experiment losses connection to the network as far is the Kerbalism mod concerned but when I go to map or check the status in top left corner I can clearly see that the craft has connection to the network.

To fix this I have to change the scene by swithcing to other craft or space center or switching between buildings. Then Kerbalism will refresh the status of the crafts and connections and NaN will disapear only to come back when I timewarp.
Also it seems so far to only affect crafts on the ground I do not think I have seen same bug on crafts in orbit but I am kinda early in the game so I do not have much of experiments that will take ages in orbit.

Any suggestions how to fix this or why I am getting this?

I have also noticed that at time warp greater than x1000 some of the authomated things don't work correctly anymore. the first time I had this issue, I simply had to limit time warp to x1000. the most annoying things was solar storms, I had to stop and wait with x1000 warp for them to end, because otherwise the shielding would not work properly. imagine a 3 years transfer to jool during a solar high with storms lasting a day or two at a time and happening every few hours.

The other times I did play kerbalism I structured things so that I could ignore those malfunctions. I crafted resourse production so that I would have an excess of everything, it's slightly less efficient but it works regardless of time warp. as for radiations, after establishing that the shielding worked I used to deactivate them during interplanetary travel.

I never paid much attention to science, though, because my goal had always been grand tours, and while I like to also collect science I don't really care how much i'm actually getting. so I can't comment specifically on your case

[longboi]

On 8/8/2023 at 12:46 AM, Arzielle said:

well, I'm already in the rabbit hole of modding, so no reason not to dive deeper lol

anyways, I'm trying rational resources now and this seems to fix some of the issue, there is now Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen, and the filters work! however the values seem a little low only making 41.79% of the atmosphere:
(35.25% Nitrogen, 6.07% Oxygen, 0.47% Carbon Dioxide, no ammonia)
not sure what makes up the remaining 58.21% but this is definitely a good start, I am also using simple construction so might mess around with ore extraction to see how rational resources affects mining for nitrogen, water and ore for life support and refining into rocket parts

thanks for the help!

(also just figured out how to insert images)

I have the same problem as yours, but there's still no atmospheric resources after installing rational resources. I installed it via CKAN. also tried making a resource.cfg for carbon dioxide in the resourceconfig folder. still nothing. Was gonna start a base on duna with an isru but when i test i can't extract carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at all. i hope someone can help

[space_otter]

I am wondering what happens to unloaded vessels during CME events. I heard that the vessel orientation can influence the radiation dose, but how do I ensure that all my vessels are in the right orientation? I am worried because I am  about to launch a few long-duration crew missions, and the sun is very active.

[king of nowhere]

3 hours ago, space_otter said:

I am wondering what happens to unloaded vessels during CME events. I heard that the vessel orientation can influence the radiation dose, but how do I ensure that all my vessels are in the right orientation?

yes, vessel orientation does influence radiation dose. cme events damage the crew of parts exposed to the sun, but if there is something else blocking the sun the crew will be safe. the easiest way is to put a large fuel tank on a narrow crew cabin.

to ensure that your ship is properly oriented, you can turn it around during a cme, while checking the irradiation

see in the image, the lower part of the info window, where it says environment, it has radiation and habitat radiation. radiation is external radiation, you can't influence that, but habitat radiation should be down to a few mrad/h, or nominal. in the case of the picture it's not possible because it's the effect of a radiation belt, but with cme you will see the value change as you shift the ship.

afterwards, if you orient the ship correctly and then change ship, the game will consider it oriented correctly as long as it stays out of physical range. but save often, because sometimes the mechanism glitches.

[Thatguywholikesionengines]

psst, how do i turn the radiation detox unit off? my crew aren't getting that much radiation, and the power draw is really big on my tiny craft. https://imgur.com/a/KxEACXl

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, Thatguywholikesionengines said:

psst, how do i turn the radiation detox unit off? my crew aren't getting that much radiation, and the power draw is really big on my tiny craft. https://imgur.com/a/KxEACXl

right click on the hitchhicker container with the detox unit, there is the option. just like you can turn it on from there, you can also turn it off from there.