Moving from Kerbol to RSS?

[Kinniken]

Hi all,

I had a lot of fun with two KSP campaigns in the base game plus some mods (mostly KER and the NF serie), culminating with a manned mission to all the Jool moons with an ISRU lander. It was great, but a bit too easy - it was generally possible to "brute force" issues by adding more dV, and the whole mission sequence was a bit fast for my taste (pretty much all science unlocked the first time I visited Minmus with an ISRU lander).

I feel like restarting KSP, but this time with RSS, looking for a bit of novelty and a new challenge. However there seems to be a lot of options in term of mods to add to it.. RO seems like a popular option, but looks very complicated... I'd like more of a challenge but probably not that much. And I figure that I need some kind of mod to adapt the engines etc to RSS' scale? Also, since in RSS reaching orbit takes around 20 minutes or so, in practice are there physical warp mods that can speed that up reliably?

All tips welcomed 

[king of nowhere]

i was in your very same situation, having more or less completed all the challenges offered by the regular game and reaching a point where they feel easy.

i installed kerbalism. a jool 5 with isru is fairly easy for an experienced player. add in life support, radiation damage and your ship breaking up, it becomes a challenge again. maybe too much of a challenge, for your request.

also, just avoiding isru makes things more challenging. you need to conserve deltaV again, and keeping enough for a large mission is not trivial.

i have no experience with rss, instead

[Cavscout74]

I haven't played RSS but I've been having a blast lately with JNSQ - 2.7x rescaled kerbal system with the "missing" planets added in (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).  The scale is just about perfect for stock & stockalike parts performance to resemble real-scale rocketry.   On the surface it looks like "oh, it's just an extra 1400 m/s to orbit" but it's a whole new game.  Things I could do in my sleep in stock scale I'm having to re-learn in JNSQ.  Reentry becomes dangerous again too. 

The biggest advantage to me is that its not as in-depth a mod as RSS - your game loading time will still be in minutes, not an hour.    I looked into RSS once before and tried to set up an install.  I never got all the bugs worked out to get it to load.

And you can still throw in Kerbalism to up the challenge even more.

Edited May 24, 2021 by Cavscout74

[Kinniken]

3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i was in your very same situation, having more or less completed all the challenges offered by the regular game and reaching a point where they feel easy.

i installed kerbalism. a jool 5 with isru is fairly easy for an experienced player. add in life support, radiation damage and your ship breaking up, it becomes a challenge again. maybe too much of a challenge, for your request.

also, just avoiding isru makes things more challenging. you need to conserve deltaV again, and keeping enough for a large mission is not trivial.

i have no experience with rss, instead

Thanks for your feedback, I was also looking at Kerbalism, possibly with the OPM mod added, it does sound like a cool alternative! Any mods you'd recommend to go with Kerbalism?

And does this mean that the progression is "slower"? I found it unfortunate for instance in the stock game how little need there is for uncrewed probes when interplanetary manned missions are fairly easy.

33 minutes ago, Cavscout74 said:

I haven't played RSS but I've been having a blast lately with JNSQ - 2.7x rescaled kerbal system with the "missing" planets added in (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).  The scale is just about perfect for stock & stockalike parts performance to resemble real-scale rocketry.   On the surface it looks like "oh, it's just an extra 1400 m/s to orbit" but it's a whole new game.  Things I could do in my sleep in stock scale I'm having to re-learn in JNSQ.  Reentry becomes dangerous again too. 

The biggest advantage to me is that its not as in-depth a mod as RSS - your game loading time will still be in minutes, not an hour.    I looked into RSS once before and tried to set up an install.  I never got all the bugs worked out to get it to load.

And you can still throw in Kerbalism to up the challenge even more.

Hadn't heard of JNSQ, I'll look into it. Seems a bit of an odd choice though no to have the scale be closer to real-life but not quite there yet? How long does reaching orbit take?

Also, I did not know about RSS load times being much longer, but if that's the case that would be a huge drawback...

Edited May 24, 2021 by Kinniken

[king of nowhere]

18 minutes ago, Kinniken said:

Thanks for your feedback, I was also looking at Kerbalism, possibly with the OPM mod added, it does sound like a cool alternative! Any mods you'd recommend to go with Kerbalism?

And does this mean that the progression is "slower"? I found it unfortunate for instance in the stock game how little need there is for uncrewed probes when interplanetary manned missions are fairly easy.

 

if by "progression" you mean unlocking tech and money in a career, then it depends mostly on the reward % you set.

I would say, as long as you just go to mun and minmus, there isn't much difference. missions are too short for stress, radiations and malfunctions to become a concern; life support just means adding a few tens of kilograms. occasionally a mission will fail because an engine will explode; if you want to bring redundant engines for safety, that increases weight further.

you feel the full weight of it going interplanetar. radiations start to become relevant. your crew will get too stressed, and it will cause you problems. parts start to fail. On a manned ship you can run maintenance on them and at least avoid the worst of part failure, but at the cost of needing life support.

isru becomes almost impossible. instead of mining "ore" and turning it into fuel, you need to get water and carbon dioxide. Water is fairly rare in all the inner system; eve and moho don't have it at all, while the other inner bodies only have it in a smattering of biomes. Carbon dioxide is even harder to get; on duna you extract it cheaply from the atmosphere, but everywhere else you require a process that's so energy intensive and slow, it takes a convert-o-tron 2 years to produce its own weight in fuel - provided it has 200 electricity per second. if you don't want that extra difficulty you can still use the stock isru, but you are not supposed to.

mods i can recommend to go with it:

- outer planets, because those extra gas giants each have their own radiation belts to add to the flavor.

- near future electrics, if you want to run isru, because you will need a nuclear power plant for it (actually several nuclear plant, you need backups in case one breaks). also, you can mine uranium.

possibly other near future stuff, if you want to try your hand at large missions.

personally, in the last five months i throughly enjoied building vehicles for deep space missions under the constrains of kerbalism. having to provide life support and redundancy for everything makes your spaceships much more interesting than when they were just a crew pod and a bunch of fuel tanks.

[Cavscout74]

3 hours ago, Kinniken said:

Hadn't heard of JNSQ, I'll look into it. Seems a bit of an odd choice though no to have the scale be closer to real-life but not quite there yet? How long does reaching orbit take?

Also, I did not know about RSS load times being much longer, but if that's the case that would be a huge drawback...

The 2.7x scale was picked due to the stock parts being overpowered for stock scale.  But their performance in a 1/4 real scale system is reasonably close to real parts in real scale - for example, I just launched a Mk2 pod with 2-seat lander to Mun atop a 3.75m rocket - essentially a Gemini/Saturn I version of the Apollo/S-V.   In stock scale, I never needed to put together an Apollo-style mission to Mun or Minmus because the dV requirements were so small.   A Making History Saturn V could reach at least Duna if not Jool in stock scale.   

Basically, JNSQ with stock & stockalike parts, it no longer feels trivial to make orbit.   As far has time to orbit, I haven't really kept track but It's longer than stack by a pretty good amount but still shorter than real world launches.  Reentry also takes quite a bit longer than stock, and gets much hotter due to the higher velocities and adjusted atmophere.  The MH pods can't handle a direct return from Mun or Minmus  any more - although they seem safe enough coming back from LKO.    EDIT:  I just did a satellite launch into a polar 250km orbit and it took about 8 minutes, 45 seconds from launch to the end of the orbital insertion burn.

I've been resisting adding Kerbalism (I'm been using TacLS for the life support) but I may have to give in and try it. 

Link to the Mod:

I know it says for KSP 1.8.1 but I was using it just fine in 1.11.1 until a bug wrecked a Mun mission (a 1.11 bug not a JNSQ bug) so I reverted to 1.10 and its been doing great in 1.10 as well.  The only dependencies are Kopernicus and Module Manager, but EVE and Scatterer are highly recommended

 

Edited May 25, 2021 by Cavscout74

[AlpacaMall]

If you're still interested in RSS, I've heard good things about the SMURFF mod, which tweaks the stats on the stock parts to make them fit for RSS. 

(however, like everyone else here, I don't actually use it; I mess around in stock/RSS, but actually getting stuff done feels impractical.)

[Kinniken]

@Cavscout74 @king of nowhere thanks! So as I understand things I have two options:

• JNSQ, which ups the difficulty by making everything bigger so that dV margins are tighter, requiring more efficient solutions (like Apollo-style Moon missions rather than returning with the lander itself). Negative point, that means longer launches to orbit (I got more than a little tired of those even in stock).
• Kerbalism, where the dV part doesn't change, but a lot of extra complications up the requirements significantly
• Or well both, but that sounds like a bit much...

Regarding the science rewards, I understand that Kerbalism reworks that, so if I'm using it, do I also need to rework the rewards?

6 hours ago, AlpacaMall said:

If you're still interested in RSS, I've heard good things about the SMURFF mod, which tweaks the stats on the stock parts to make them fit for RSS. 

(however, like everyone else here, I don't actually use it; I mess around in stock/RSS, but actually getting stuff done feels impractical.)

"actually getting stuff done feels impractical", you mean doing actual missions in RSS? If that's indeed the case I'm not interested  

Alternatively, is there any mod with the real solar system, but at Kerbin scale, since it's the scale change that seems to cause the real issues?

[jimmymcgoochie]

There are a few other options not yet mentioned:

• Rescale the stock solar system to be bigger, making it harder to go anywhere but keeping the familiar Kerbol system;
• Try a planet pack. Each comes with their own set of challenges- a home planet with no air that’s spinning so fast it looks like a pancake; planets orbiting a red dwarf star so all their orbital velocities are very high; packs with multiple stars and solar systems- and there are plenty of them out there to choose from, including several downsized versions of RSS;
• Try a tech tree mod. Probes before crew or similar will make for a more ‘realistic’ experience as you have to launch probes first and crewed missions later, or you could try one of the alternative tech trees that make more radical changes to the way you unlock parts and progress through the game;
• Try a challenge, like a Grand Tour to land on every planet and moon in the Kerbol system with one single mission (or the even harder Ultimate Challenge, which requires all the landings with one single craft), or look through the forum challenges to see if there’s one you like the look of.

The most important part is this- do something that you think is fun! It’s a game after all, there’s no point in playing it if you don’t enjoy doing so.

[AlpacaMall]

50 minutes ago, Kinniken said:

"actually getting stuff done feels impractical", you mean doing actual missions in RSS? If that's indeed the case I'm not interested  

Oops, I meant using non-tweaked stock parts in RSS. It's definitely not impractical with balanced parts.

[Kinniken]

51 minutes ago, AlpacaMall said:

Oops, I meant using non-tweaked stock parts in RSS. It's definitely not impractical with balanced parts.

Ah, thanks. What about loading times etc? Is it true that those are really long? Also, is physic warp a valid solution to the long times to reach orbit?

And that SMURFF mod looks interesting.

Edited May 25, 2021 by Kinniken

[Cavscout74]

11 hours ago, Kinniken said:

Alternatively, is there any mod with the real solar system, but at Kerbin scale, since it's the scale change that seems to cause the real issues?

There is, called Kerbin-Scale RSS:

I have not used it myself, so no idea how well it's done or if it works in current versions, but I knew it existed.

 

Also, when I said the load times for RSS were extremely long (up to an hour), that is for the full RP-1/RO (Realistic Progression-1 / Realism Overhaul) with RSS.  A bare RSS install probably wouldn't be much worse than any other planet pack

[Kinniken]

Thanks @Cavscout74 @AlpacaMall @king of nowhere , I've decided to give a go to RSS with SMURF and Kerbalism, should prove a challenge and I like the idea of flying more "realistic" crafts with altitude, dv values etc that actually matches the real world.

[imcute]

On 5/25/2021 at 3:26 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Ultimate Challenge

ive done it before and the craft(not going to eve)weighs only 0.365 tons and if u use a spark insted of an ant it goes further and includes eve