[WIP][TechTree @ 0.23.5] - [MS19e] - Realistic Progression LITE

[Scripto23]

Not sure if it has been discussed already, but have you considered making science rovers actually useful? For instance, most biomes are too large to travel between on a rover, everything seems geared towards landing at one spot and going to orbit again. There's some interesting discussion taking place on the subject here.

[MedievalNerd]

Not sure if it has been discussed already, but have you considered making science rovers actually useful? For instance, most biomes are too large to travel between on a rover, everything seems geared towards landing at one spot and going to orbit again. There's some interesting discussion taking place on the subject here.

That's because of the fact that there is a lot of abstraction with Science in the stock system. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when we land a rover on another celestial body, I don't think it goes on for an epic drive around the entire surface right?

That's because even though they land in a single region, there is lots of experiments they can do. It's not like they take 1 sample ah go, ok, this entire region is now surveyed. Need to send the rover hundreds of miles in another direction to get anything useful.

With custom experiments, you could easily make experiments requiring the probodyne rover core for example. And that it needs to be landed in a specific biome in order to acquire science. The fact that all 'missions' in KSP are these open ended, change your mind on a whim, don't really make sense. I doubt that half way to Mars they'd change the landing spot they designated years/month before launch.

You can make multiple experiments, requiring varying degrees of time to be completed. All within the 'same biome'.

The more interesting thing, and this would require huge amounts of work most likely, would be to have a resource system like Kethane, but that would track 'unique samples' or something. Each region could have a very low amount of them, making moving around perhaps worth while on a smaller scale? Then again, I don't recall the size of each zone when it comes to Kethan's map grid. (Probably still a long drive from one hex to another).

Maybe have some more interesting requirements, like a specific altitude to get samples (below X) and having to transmit results from a higher ground? (This is all very gamey, but I just got a horrible cold, and I'm rambling)

One thing is for sure, rovers do interest me, and i was totally intended of making a Lunakold mission replica for sure. (Not model the thing obviously, just make an experiment to mirror it's achievements... I'm no moddeler)

Another Idea I had would be to create a sort of processing pre-science resources and create pre-existing conditions to existing experiments. IE, you send a rover on Mun. And you have to find a specific mineral let's say. So you get your rover on the ground, and 'dig up rocks/dust'. Then when you are full you process it, and you only have X chance that you find said mineral. Then let's say that once you do, then you unlock another experiment... Meh, I think the fever is getting to me. Not sure if that's make sense. This would basically create a sort of series of experiments to carry out on the surface rather than land, click, click, click, all science acquired. Time to go home...

[Visari]

Not sure if it has been discussed already, but have you considered making science rovers actually useful? For instance, most biomes are too large to travel between on a rover, everything seems geared towards landing at one spot and going to orbit again. There's some interesting discussion taking place on the subject here.

I'd suggest spawning items to specific places that can be interacted with, and detected by scansat. This way you'd be sending an LRO sat with perhaps radar scanning/surface photography (not sure how scansat works, still didn't use it :/ ). After obtaining the necessary data to detect special items/locations (some of which would be spawned in close proximity), you'd send a rover with the required parts to drive around within a small area of interest, investigate and transmit any findings.

Spawning rocks and soil samples on the Lunar surface in a balanced way and making them bugfree and adding an item to be able to interact with them, allowing them to be detected by scansat, this could all be quite a bit of work, maybe something for a separate mod?

Edited February 1, 2014 by Visari

[Visari]

also, @MN: if you have a cold, go back to bed

I've actually been playing the RPL career, a LOT. In fact, I pretty much completed it. I've got plenty of feedback for you if you're ready to hear it. (can imagine the cold / development of RPL 19 would make it less useful at this point).

[MedievalNerd]

I'd suggest spawning items to specific places that can be interacted with, and detected by scansat. This way you'd be sending an LRO sat with perhaps radar scanning/surface photography (not sure how scansat works, still didn't use it :/ ). After obtaining the necessary data to detect special items/locations (some of which would be spawned in close proximity), you'd send a rover with the required parts to drive around within a small area of interest, investigate and transmit any findings.

Spawning rocks and soil samples on the Lunar surface in a balanced way and making them bugfree and adding an item to be able to interact with them, allowing them to be detected by scansat, this could all be quite a bit of work, maybe something for a separate mod?

That sounds like a cool idea, but yeah, not that simple to implement i'm afraid. I have ideas on how to make it work without this, with chance based processing of 'rock samples'?

also, @MN: if you have a cold, go back to bed

I've actually been playing the RPL career, a LOT. In fact, I pretty much completed it. I've got plenty of feedback for you if you're ready to hear it. (can imagine the cold / development of RPL 19 would make it less useful at this point).

Bah, I feel like **** sitting or laying down. I just hate when I have a cold that affects my reasoning, I feel stupid and it's so annoying.

And pretty ****ty that it's my 3rd week back at work, and already getting a cold over the weekend. I blame it on the testers at my company, lol, they work hard but have varying levels of sanitation. When you work with hundreds of people, I guess it's just something that happens. Heh...

The worst thing that plagues me today, is I have this huge pack of stew meat, that I HAVE TO COOK, or it will go bad... And that's totally not something I feel like doing right now, would rather crawl through my task list for Milestone 19. I mean since I got the chemical release trail thing solved and buttoned up, it's more MM/cfg file stuff. And then the epic sweep of the tree with all the updated mods who added hundreds of cool parts, which I'll have to look up and figure out where to place. Why are people so productive dammit!?

/shake fist

[Visari]

Well, to be fair, you did pick up one of the most high maintenance ideas there could be.. although I haven't worked with TreeEdit since first version.. hm.. idea!

Do you know if TreeEdit automatically adds new modparts into your tree, or would they remain unassigned?

If automatically added, would the positions of these parts be based on the stock technode it would be assigned to within the part's cfg?

And does the unassigned list in TreeEdit actually work now?

If applicable, perhaps an MM file to assign all modparts to the starting node for easy removal -> reassignment would be a nice tool for future tech tree sweeps.

Though again, I haven't used TreeEdit in a while, don't mind me if this doesn't even make sense.

chance based processing of 'rock samples'

Do you mean the scattered rocks on the moon surface added by the WIP scatter feature to be interacted with?

Edited February 1, 2014 by Visari

[MedievalNerd]

Well, to be fair, you did pick up one of the most high maintenance ideas there could be.. although I haven't worked with TreeEdit since first version.. hm.. idea!

Do you know if TreeEdit automatically adds new modparts into your tree, or would they remain unassigned?

If automatically added, would the positions of these parts be based on the stock technode it would be assigned to within the part's cfg?

And does the unassigned list in TreeEdit actually work now?

If applicable, perhaps an MM file to assign all modparts to the starting node for easy removal -> reassignment would be a nice tool for future tech tree sweeps.

Though again, I haven't used TreeEdit in a while, don't mind me if this doesn't even make sense.

Do you mean the scattered rocks on the moon surface added by the WIP scatter feature to be interacted with?

Tree Edit, may the gods of Kerbal bless r4m0n for making it, without it any of this would be possible. But the interface is very painful to work with, the dynamic re-sizing of the item lists is very hard to deal with. Unless all the items are assigned or not, it'll play tug of war with those 2 fields for display real estate. So you can end up with only seeing the first 3-4 letters of a part. But you can then, just create sorting nodes and dump them, anyway, enough of that.

New items will be placed within the tree to their stock assigned node. But, considering the massive changes to the RPL tech tree, I wasn't always able to keep 'stock' nodes in locations that made sense. And there are a very high number of new nodes intertwined, so in some cases you could have parts appear in funky locations which have nothing to do with it's intended use. This is mainly due to the high amount of crossover in the stock tech tree. The lack of definite tech lines causes some ambiguity when you try reorganize the tech lines. That was really fun to do. lol

Problem with new parts and career games, is I'm not sure if MM files can alter parts in a tech tree. Since the tech tree basically reassigns nodes based on the tree layout, which is done post MM files. (when you load the tree with mumech loader). But parts not within the tree, i'm curious if they'd appear to a new tech node you set it to? I'm still using TreeEdit a lot so maybe the handling is different with TreeLoader.

For the rock samples. It would be more an experiment set to a specific biome, where you have to land rover. 'drill' for rocks. And then "process them" and you have only a % chance that it triggers a discovery. (You found ore, sample, something, wtvr.)

[Visari]

For the rock samples. It would be more an experiment set to a specific biome, where you have to land rover. 'drill' for rocks. And then "process them" and you have only a % chance that it triggers a discovery. (You found ore, sample, something, wtvr.)

Would be nice if the player had a reason to move around though.

Biomes are too large to really move between for a rover in RSS, even the kethane's grid can have too large a distance between nodes to cross.

Also, since I'm done actually playing through KSP in every way possible, I'll go check what I can do with MM & TE to make reassigning new parts less painful.

[MedievalNerd]

Would be nice if the player had a reason to move around though.

Biomes are too large to really move between for a rover in RSS, even the kethane's grid can have too large a distance between nodes to cross.

Also, since I'm done actually playing through KSP in every way possible, I'll go check what I can do with MM & TE to make reassigning new parts less painful.

Might be a way to force a certain distance between the lander and the rover? Or perhaps going the way of MCE, and make missions to go to a set of 3 locations, close by, and you'd try to land near them.

[Visari]

Okay, so I've been doing a little bit of testing with TreeEdit.

As it is, new mod parts that are not yet saved to a node in your tree will be assigned to their stock node if that node is still in your tree, otherwise it will be unassigned, however sometimes not visible as an unassigned part for some reason (then only shows under the 'all parts' list). I noticed you had a lot of the stock nodes left in your tree, so most likely many new mod parts will get mixed in.

By creating a simple MM file:

@PART[*]

{

TechRequired = temporary

}

ALL parts that are not yet assigned by you in your tree, will be assigned to a temporary node you would create. Note that if you saved after parts were automatically assigned to their stock nodes in your tree, this counts as you saving them to RPL, obviously.

You can then remove all the parts from this node to have them added to the unassigned list and easily assign them to the proper nodes as required (assuming you understand what they are, part names still leave some questionmarks at times).

Not sure whether this would help you in any way, but the realistic career mode you're building is so aweome, the least I can do is try.

Might be a way to force a certain distance between the lander and the rover? Or perhaps going the way of MCE, and make missions to go to a set of 3 locations, close by, and you'd try to land near them.

In my experience, finding coordinates can be tricky. Scansat would probably still be required to find and land near these coordinates, so the rover can drive around to them.

Forcing a distance between lander and rover would be dull and achievable by rocket way too easily.

Edited February 1, 2014 by Visari

[Draft]

Maybe a datarecorder that only functions in situation landed, but also requires a nonzero surface velocity? Sure you could just do donuts while you wait for the data to accumulate, but that's still something

[Visari]

Rovers generally do science while standing still.

[MedievalNerd]

Rovers generally do science while standing still.

Well, the way I saw it was a prerequisite that you'd have to drive at X speed for Y time. And 'then' do the experiment. That or distance from lander to rover.

Ultimately though, as I stated previously, I'm not thinking of ways to make this 'cheat' free. If someone wants to cheat themselves out of the potential experience, it's their choice. (IE, do donuts, skip using the roving and doing your displacement with rockets, that type of thing)

I'm sure the ones who are enthused by these ideas wouldn't be the types of people to cheat around it. Am I too hopeful?

[Guest]

Hi, been messing around with RPL 18C in 0.23 until MS19 is out. I think everything other than the added 0.23 science "grinding" seems great. Although i would like to recommend that Kerbins (earths) "high space" borderline be lowered under 35,786KM geosynchronous orbit, seeing the similar sized planets of Duna (mars) and Eve (venus) have a high space altitude is 2,000KM, I think 2,000Km should do as a low/high space "borderline" for Kerbin (earth) aswell. This would make a more delta-v/RT2 range reasonable sub-orbital "pop up" probe to high space (with the bonus of the "pop up" probe being able to survive a "free fall" re-entry) before starting the first of manned orbital missions and the establishment of a geosynchronous comms sat network. This would also allow Tier 0 (zero) rockets/SRB's to preform the task for MCE costs that are more obtainable in the early game (also i feel that "high space" sub-orbital's, and super light {1 metric ton?} near space orbitals, should be close to the limit of tier 0 rocket/SRB combo rockets), that is once MCE is fully integrated into RPL

I hope that others feel the same about the near/high space borderline of Kerbin (earth) as i do to allow this to be altered in time for the MS19 release, Any thoughts on the subject of 2,000KM as a good borderline between near/high space? Or on that 35,786km as the borderline is far to high an altitude? I want to make sure i'm not alone feeling this way, thanks a ton everyone

On a side note, has anyone else noticed that Redstone(140 thrust/390 ISP atmosphere)/Agena(Thrust 65/IPS 395 vacuum) rockets in a 2-stage combo allows for your 1st rocket to have a 9.75KM+ (orbit capable) delta-v budget @ tier 0 without using any SRB's (i can get to about 10.5KM+ (polar orbit capable) delta-v with a 3-stage design using 9 additional tier 0 SRB's as stage 1)? Anyone feel this might be just abit too powerful for a tier 0 combination, even though its a "mere" 0.075T payload??

Edited February 2, 2014 by Guest

[MedievalNerd]

Hi, been messing around with RPL 18C in 0.23 until MS19 is out. I think everything other than the added 0.23 science "grinding" seems great. Although i would like to recommend that Kerbins (earths) "high space" borderline be lowered under 35,786KM geosynchronous orbit, seeing the similar sized planets of Duna (mars) and Eve (venus) have a high space altitude is 2,000KM, I think 2,000Km should do as a low/high space "borderline" for Kerbin (earth) aswell. This would make a more delta-v/RT2 range reasonable sub-orbital "pop up" probe to high space (with the bonus of the "pop up" probe being able to survive a "free fall" re-entry) before starting the first of manned orbital missions and the establishment of a geosynchronous comms sat network. This would also allow Tier 0 (zero) rockets/SRB's to preform the task for MCE costs that are more obtainable in the early game (also i feel that "high space" sub-orbital's, and super light {1 metric ton?} near space orbitals, should be close to the limit of tier 0 rocket/SRB combo rockets), that is once MCE is fully integrated into RPL

I hope that others feel the same about the near/high space borderline of Kerbin (earth) as i do to allow this to be altered in time for the MS19 release, Any thoughts on the subject of 2,000KM as a good borderline between near/high space? Or on that 35,786km as the borderline is far to high an altitude? I want to make sure i'm not alone feeling this way, thanks a ton everyone

When working on the new altitudes with Nathan, we concluded that getting further away from Kerbin was the initial challenge, and getting closer to other bodies was the next. Also, we didn't arbitrarily pick the number, Geosynch altitude is the cutoff for High Earth Orbit.

And as I mentioned in previous post, I intend to separate low space into LEO/MEO. (in a future update)

Don't worry, there will be much more low space experiments in Milestone 19, like 8? something like that, where possible most probes will have 2 experiments. Hopefully you'll enjoy it.

[NathanKell]

Aazard: use the realism patch for FASA in the second post of the RO thread.

And yeah, High Space was picked to be supersynchronous for Kerbin since IRL it's not hard to get above 2,000km altitude even with a wimpy sounding rocket; indeed, the first US satellite was planned for an MEO orbit; it ended up being the second US satellite, because of booster issues (the source of the "stayputnik" pun). It's <500m/s to have a 2000x200km orbit vs a 200x200, and IIRC way less than that for a sounding rocket to shoot to 2000km rather than 200km.

Edited February 2, 2014 by NathanKell

[kasperhangard]

Hey, how close are you to release? Really looking forward to it!

Thanks for the time you take to bring us this awesome masterpiece!

[MedievalNerd]

Hey, how close are you to release? Really looking forward to it!

Thanks for the time you take to bring us this awesome masterpiece!

Any day now, plugin is finished and tested. Most of the experiments were created. I'm basically at the stage were I need to do the antenna/power con overhaul. Then download all the mods, and sweep up the tree and update the new parts.

Then, well, that's it for MS19.

If I didn't have the flu this weekend, it would have gone much faster i'm afraid.

Ugh, timing le sucks!

[kasperhangard]

Ah. That is amazing!

Do you have any donate thingy btw?

[MedievalNerd]

Ah. That is amazing!

Do you have any donate thingy btw?

I've been thinking about it, but not just yet.

If you haven't already feel free to rate the thread and/or award some rep. Sounds silly, but it always makes me smile. It's the little things in life!

And at the same time, anybody who uses any mods that work with RPL, please go rate their threads and give them rep too! It's basically their amazing work that gave me inspiration to do this, so let's make sure they know that the community cares for their work and that we acknowledge it!

Thank you everyone for your feedback and patience,

[MedievalNerd]

As the fever grows to an end, I feel like my cognitive functions are coming back online! Woo!

Started downloading all the mods last night, so will start making the final edits to the tree with the new tech lines for probes and antennas/dishes. With the Lazor & IR sub trees too!

I hate colds! They can suck a pine cone! (random object that came to mind, heh.)

[asmi]

Can you please also include NP's escape towers to the tree?

[MedievalNerd]

Can you please also include NP's escape towers to the tree?

Sure!

Would you mind PM'ing me the link? I remember it's in a separate thread, but haven't bookmarked it.

Thanks!

[asmi]

No, it's a part of the "main" NP package.

[MedievalNerd]

No, it's a part of the "main" NP package.

escape towers... confusing with the launch towers. /facepalm

Sorry!

Yup, everything in all the packs will be double checked in case they sneakily moved into another node!