[1.12] Extraplanetary Launchpads v6.99.3

[blu3wolf]

Beautiful!

I have had blizzys toolbar installed for some time, but I didnt know this worked with it. Excellent!

[taniwha]

11 hours ago, goldenpsp said:

Annoying I know but Taniwha has generally been opposed to adding support for the stock toolbar.

Not so much opposed, but I don't feel like going to the effort for that (mostly because I dislike the stock toolbar). However, if someone were to send a PR...

That said: if you don't want it at all, it's easy to disable by editing your save file: search for ExSettings, the set visible to False in the ShipInfo block (as always, it's a good idea to make a backup before editing your save).

 

[edrobotguy]

taniwha, you'll be happy to know that when I installed 5.2.94 the issue disappeared, and I'm mining MetalOre again.

[taniwha]

edrobotguy: While it doesn't help understand the cause, I am glad that things are working nicely.

[Tripod27]

I'm having an issue with the mod

 

When I queue up a ship to build on the orbital launchpad and select it to be filled with fuel and electricity (and have enough of both to fill it) the ship builds fine but has no fuel or power on it

 

Am I missing some step? does the bottom of the ship need a docking port or something for it to fill the resources?

[taniwha]

The ship does not fill until you release it. I'm actually not particularly happy with this particular mechanic, but I have not yet come up with a better way.

[Tripod27]

how do you release the ship? I googled and it said to right click the pad, but when I finalize the ship it only lets me click on parts on the ship and not the station and doesn't let me use the [ and ] keys to change to the station

 

going into map view and clicking on the station and to swap to it there works, but right clicking on the pad still has no release option and opening up the pad menu lets me press finalize again, which then throws me back into the empty built ship that I can't do anything with

 

edit: I was looking through some other bugs and found this https://github.com/taniwha-qf/Extraplanetary-Launchpads/issues/96

 

I don't have the mod that's supposedly causing the issue, but might have a mod that does something similar, although I don't know what to look for as far as mods that break it. I do have RPM but this is an unmanned probe so idk if it's causing the problem

Edited January 7, 2016 by Tripod27

[taniwha]

If your station and ship are separate after finalizing, then definitely something is going wrong. Your best best is to reproduce the problem again, cleanly exit from KSP and then get me your KSP.log file (dropbox etc). Feel free to zip it as it may be large.

[Morty]

7 hours ago, Tripod27 said:

I'm having an issue with the mod

 

When I queue up a ship to build on the orbital launchpad and select it to be filled with fuel and electricity (and have enough of both to fill it) the ship builds fine but has no fuel or power on it

 

Am I missing some step? does the bottom of the ship need a docking port or something for it to fill the resources?

Taniwha already answered this but I would like to add that between "Finalize" and "Release" the ship is in a docked-like state in which you can fill it manually with everything you need (but I don't think it takes on resources automatically, like fuel being created by an ISRU on the station).

This manual mode even seems to take precedence over the sliders that allow you to fill it with resources (but i need to test whether the manual resources and the slider resources are added together).

Also very helpful is the fact that you can transfer crew to the new ship in this state which saves you a docking.

[Tripod27]

3 hours ago, taniwha said:

If your station and ship are separate after finalizing, then definitely something is going wrong. Your best best is to reproduce the problem again, cleanly exit from KSP and then get me your KSP.log file (dropbox etc). Feel free to zip it as it may be large.

alright, I'll try to record it as well so you can better see what's going on and see if I'm just doing something wrong

[mellester]

Got a question I found only two ways to produce rocket parts. The rocket workshop and the construction workshop are there more parts that I missed?
The rocket workshop look fine on the ground but having it in orbit is just unsightly.  Perhaps a 4 ton automated parts producer with lots of heat output.

Edited January 7, 2016 by mellester

[Morty]

13 minutes ago, mellester said:

Got a question I found only two ways to produce rocket parts. The rocket workshop and the construction workshop are there more parts that I missed?
The rocket workshop look fine on the ground but having it in orbit is just unsightly.  Perhaps a 4 ton automated parts producer with lots of heat output.

I haven't experimented with ground based parts yet but I find the construction workshop to be quite nice, with it's distinctive blue color and rounded edges. It actually makes it easier to determine the orientation of your station while approaching in order to find a free docking port.

An automated parts producer (APP) would IMHO break some concepts of EL. You need to have Kerbals on board to do the work, their stupidity and courage are weighted towards their productivity, five-star engineers enable other Kerbals to produce RocketParts and so on. If there were an APP you could simply put unit after unit of those on your station/base and circumvent all that logic that is encoded in EL.

Also such an APP would be a bit "unrealistic" in terms of what NASA and Roscosmos are doing. In aerospace you still have lots of real craftsmen doing the (very delicate) work of building components for airplanes and spaceships. We (on earth) are not yet in the "Henry Ford" age in that respect, so why should Kerbal?

[DStaal]

1 hour ago, mellester said:

Got a question I found only two ways to produce rocket parts. The rocket workshop and the construction workshop are there more parts that I missed?
The rocket workshop look fine on the ground but having it in orbit is just unsightly.  Perhaps a 4 ton automated parts producer with lots of heat output.

As an addition to what Morty said, if you look around for mods that integrate with EL, many of them have their own versions of the workshops, with different strengths and weaknesses.  MKS, MKS-Lite, Civilian Population, etc, all have something you can use, depending on your aesthetics.

[PTNLemay]

I wanted to check with you guys to see if I'm doing something wrong.  I'm playing career mode and I've finally unlocked the mid-tier parts for EPLP.  I wanted to create a test vehicle to see how it all works, but... for some reason my productivity stays at zero.

http://i.imgur.com/eFeg7kY.png

Based on all of the different ship parts I have on this thing, I calculate it should be at least at 6 productivity.  I have a level 1 engineer on-board.  I've tried to change in what vehicle he's seated in, and that does seem to change productivity around, but it still varies between 0.0001 and 10^-9.  And it's inconsistent, sometimes I'll go back to the VAB, reload the ship with him in the same seat, and it gives me a different productivity.  Did I miss something obvious?

This is another test with no pilots or scientists, just my engineer (in case they were distracting him or something).  But productivity stays near zero.   http://i.imgur.com/Px2MjwP.png

Edited January 7, 2016 by PTNLemay

[Tripod27]

12 hours ago, taniwha said:

If your station and ship are separate after finalizing, then definitely something is going wrong. Your best best is to reproduce the problem again, cleanly exit from KSP and then get me your KSP.log file (dropbox etc). Feel free to zip it as it may be large.

Alright here is the video and here is the ksp.log

[taniwha]

Ok, I took a look and wow, DeadlyReentry is broken (though I suspect not the cause). It would be a good idea for you to pass the log file on to Starwaster.

It looks like ModuleOrbitalScanner is throwing an exception at the appropriate time. As it is trying to do something with a resource, I suspect you have a mod that tries to use an undefined resource (it may even be DeadlyReentry).

[Morty]

18 hours ago, PTNLemay said:

I wanted to check with you guys to see if I'm doing something wrong.  I'm playing career mode and I've finally unlocked the mid-tier parts for EPLP.  I wanted to create a test vehicle to see how it all works, but... for some reason my productivity stays at zero.

http://i.imgur.com/eFeg7kY.png

Based on all of the different ship parts I have on this thing, I calculate it should be at least at 6 productivity.  I have a level 1 engineer on-board.  I've tried to change in what vehicle he's seated in, and that does seem to change productivity around, but it still varies between 0.0001 and 10^-9.  And it's inconsistent, sometimes I'll go back to the VAB, reload the ship with him in the same seat, and it gives me a different productivity.  Did I miss something obvious?

This is another test with no pilots or scientists, just my engineer (in case they were distracting him or something).  But productivity stays near zero.   http://i.imgur.com/Px2MjwP.png

I, too, was under the impression that the level of the engineer determines the productivity. But according to the post by Kerbas_ad_astra (linked in the first post of this thread) it's based on stupidity and courage of the Kerbonaut in question (plus a boost for level 2+ engineers). So you could have ended up with an engineer in there with both "elevated" stupidity and high courage, which would mean that he's constantly screwing up because he's so careless. Just a guess, but maybe you can look into that.

[PTNLemay]

@Morty

So to get good productivity I want high courage and low stupidity?  Or low courage and low stupidity?

I did try and check out those graphs in the first post, but to be honest I'm having trouble deciphering how they work (the 3D-ness confuses me a bit).

Edited January 8, 2016 by PTNLemay

[Morty]

2 hours ago, PTNLemay said:

@Morty

So to get good productivity I want high courage and low stupidity?  Or low courage and low stupidity?

I did try and check out those graphs in the first post, but to be honest I'm having trouble deciphering how they work (the 3D-ness confuses me a bit).

Well, I'm also not sure, but I take it from the text of the post and one of the 3D-graphs (the one that looks like a bend roof) that you want low stupidity and low courage in an engineer in order to get the maximum productivity. It makes sense to me, in terms of real world experience

Also the engineer should have at least two stars. One of the graphs seems to show a significant increase for 2+ engineers. But it is very hard to test this hypothesis since all my engineers are 1) level 4+ and 2) spread out all over the Kerbol system, some in stations that require a Kerbonaut to do an EVA in order to move them around. Getting exact numbers is really tricky in these circumstances.

I also find it strange that the KSP team never (AFAIK) clearly stated what "courage" actually was doing (except from changing the animations during stressful phases of flight from "shaking in their boots" to "looking like Chuck Yeager"). It was a bit of genius to pick up this (seemingly) unused attribute and incorporate it into EL.

[taniwha]

For normal kerbals: low stupidity, low courage. For badass: low stupidity, high courage.

A description of what's going on:

• Normal: for stupidity = 0, courage makes no difference, but the more stupid the kerbal, the more courage affects the kerbal's productivity, negatively.
• Badass: a little more complicated, but at stupidity = 0, the effect of courage is only positive. At stupidity = 1, the effect of courage is only negative. In between is a balancing act.
• All kerbals: if stupidity is less than 0.5, then the kerbal will allways be productive, no matter the courage or badassness. For greater than 0.5, it depends on badassness, courage, timed experience (using KerbalStats), and deed experience (stock).
• Bill Kerman: his stats should give him exactly 0, but thanks to the vagaries of floating point math he gets about -1e-8. Give him 2 stars in a full workshop, or 3 anywhere else, and he'll have about 0.5.
• (stock) experienced kerbals (2+ or 3+, depending on the workshop) get their productivity modified such that to get 0 they would need a base productivity of negative infinity, and it only increases as the base productivity improves: the graph wants to be horizontal in the negative direction, and 1:1 linear in the positive direction with a smooth transition in between. For the curious, it's a hyperbola and the equation (slightly modified) is at the heart of arsinh (inverse hyperbolic sine).

Why I don't mind all this being out in the open: the only way I know of to cheat it is to edit the kerbals' stats in the save file (and people would figure out good stats pretty quickly anyway). It's almost as easy (and way more fun) to play(work) around the issue and knowing how the system works only makes it easier to decide how to play around it (install KerbalStats, put low productivity kerbals in a full workshop and warp, and/or (stock) take them on training missions). I found it quite satisfying to take a negative productivity kerbal positive by flying her around Kerbin's SoI: first visit to Mun, all she could do was wield a screwdriver (KIS), but after doing a tour^*, she could dig in with her teammates and contribute.

The whole idea was to make timed builds more interesting. Timed builds came about because people (myself included) did not like having to have storage for 1000t of RocketParts to build a 1000t dry-mass rocket. As just a workaround to the storage issue, timed builds seemed to be an otherwise useless mechanic (even though it's more realistic), thus productivity. It had some unpleasant unintended consequences: certain people started mass-murdering stupid kerbals and thus I created KerbalStats and its experience system. Then Squad added experience too, so I took advantage of that.

^*How to get a level 3 kerbal: plant a flag on Minmus, visit solar orbit, do something at Mun (I don't remember if orbit is enough, pretty sure flyby is not, but planting a flag is guaranteed enough). Note: for stock systems; New Horizons messes this up quite a bit.

[ss8913]

taniwha - I'm still having trouble with post-build resource transfer.  doesn't matter if orbital, ground, or survey stake, but lately i'm mostly building via survey stakes.  When it asks me about the resources, I set the sliders, everything seems happy.  I finish the build, boom, there is the product, but the resources requested, never get transferred.  Well, shouldn't say never.  Sometimes they do.  usually not, though.  resources are from  various mods + stock, such as electriccharge, mulch, fertilizer, supplies, hydrazine, antimatter, etc.. doesn't seem to matter what.  I checked the logs, see no Exception lines in there at the point of finalizing the build - anything I should be looking for in particular?

[przybysz86]

Hi Guys - sorry if this was mentioned but I had not time to study all 136 pages and search was not helpful or I missed it.

I run extensively moded game and my ELP hangs on RECIPIES loading with error:
 

Quote

 [Exception]: ArgumentNullException: Argument cannot be null.
Parameter name: key

Is this something often found out? I assume one of the mod is intorducing incompatible part but I have no Ida what might be wrong or how to find and fix it. Can you help me locate the missing/buggy part and let me know how to fix it?

[taniwha]

ss8913: you cannot transfer resources when building with survey stakes. They don't provide the infrastructure. If you have transfer problems with pads or the orbital dock, then I need to see your logs.

przybysz86: I seem to remember seeing such once, and I thought I fixed it, but I see no reference in my commit logs. Please get me your log file (I suspect it might have to be output_log.txt (windows) or Player.log (linux) as KSP.log might be cut off).

[przybysz86]

taniwha: check PM

[ss8913]

5 hours ago, taniwha said:

ss8913: you cannot transfer resources when building with survey stakes. They don't provide the infrastructure. If you have transfer problems with pads or the orbital dock, then I need to see your logs.

przybysz86: I seem to remember seeing such once, and I thought I fixed it, but I see no reference in my commit logs. Please get me your log file (I suspect it might have to be output_log.txt (windows) or Player.log (linux) as KSP.log might be cut off).

ok.  So I should make sure to use fully controllable nuclear reactors that I can provide external fuel to, since the ones that are designed to be built with a supply of fuel end up empty and useless without the way to transfer resources to the build   (like the KSPIE molten salt reactors, all the MKS/UKS reactors, etc )