[1.12] Extraplanetary Launchpads v6.99.3

[taniwha]

QUESTION:

do 2 kerbals build ships faster that 1 kerbal ??

(I took the liberty of tweaking your English)

So long as both kerbals have positive productivity, yes. While I had considered implementing diminishing returns for additional kerbals (Mythical Man-month), I decided against it as I didn't know enough about it (certainly not any relevant math) and I figured basing kerbal productivity on the stats would make things more interesting and, more importantly, better playability.

[mkrco]

mkrco: once the initial setting is done, there is no dialog, but it is easy to fix.

1. Go to your save directory: <KSPDIR>/saves/[savename]
   
2. Make a backup of persistent.sfs (always good advice when editing your save)
   
3. Open persistent.sfs in your favorite text editor and search for ExSettings
   
4. To use resources when Kethane is not installed and not in career mode, change ForceResourceUse to True (resource usage is automatically forces if either the game is in career mode or kethane is installed).
   
5. To use progressive builds, change TimedBuilds to True
   

The rest of the data in the ExSettings node is just GUI stuff and scenario stuff.

Thanks, that's just what I was looking for. I guess it did that because I'm not using Kethane, but Karbonite instead?

EDIT: Unfortunately, that didn't actually seem to work. Here's what my exsettings looks like

SCENARIO

{

name = ExSettings

scene = 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Settings

{

ForceResourceUse = True

TimedBuilds = True

ShipInfo

{

rect = 1332,582,300,409

visible = False

}

BuildWindow

{

rect = 0,0,640,162

visible = False

link_lfo_sliders = True

}

}

}

And still, the moment I load a craft it appears somewhere above my base instantly, without using any rocketparts.

EDIT 2: And further I've noticed that after I create a craft I can no longer switch to other nearby craft/kerbals using the [ and ] keys.

EDIT 3: I started a new game, and the progressive builds option was checked on at startup. Still the same problem persists. I do have the karbonite conversion installed, could that be causing the problem?

Edited October 25, 2014 by mkrco

[gl0ryh0und]

So, finally got my first space dock up and running.. churned out a couple parts for my growing station. Then started building in earnest a large ship... however as I'm sure many of you have run into.. parts stopped building.. turns out I have filled up my scrap metal and my metal.. and now parts won't build.. I presume its' because of the workshop generates scrap metal when making parts and there is no more scrap metal storage, and can't process the scrap metal into metal because the metal bins are full... really?? I mean.. that's it.. I can't just toss away some scrap metal or take a big hit in productivity or something.. I have to ferry some sort of bin up and attach it to the station?? anyone got a solution that doesn't require an hour of my life to haul a dang bin to the station?

[taniwha]

A lack of scrap storage does not stop anything.

A lack of ore storage will stop mining, but you won't have much of that going on in orbit.

A lack of metal storage will stop smelting.

A lack of parts storage will stop parts building.

[Wisq]

I'm getting some really weird results with the survey site. I landed a ship on the flat lakes on Minmus with a survey unit, seven Kerbals, two Karbonite drills using the EPL-Karbonite conversion, and a rocket workshop from said conversion (so I could mine for ore, turn ore into metal, turn metal into rocketparts). I set down two survey stakes with the same name, both set to Origin, hoping the launchpad I was going to build would appear inbetween them.

So far, I've gotten all but the correct results:

Trying to load a simple launchpad + solar + antenna (need the antenna for RemoteTech)  sometimes it appears next to my ship, nowhere near the survey stakes, and it's at a 45 degree angle and high in the air, and it flops to the ground. It's uncontrollable, and in fact, it completely breaks my ability to switch between ships with the square brackets until I go back to the space center and come back. When I come back, it's gone. Also, it doesn't require that I spend time building it, and doesn't cost me rocketparts  it skips the build dialog entirely and just spawns the instant I say "load".

Other times, it seems to maybe appear underground; not sure. In any case, it blows up instantly. Also doesn't prompt me to make it, or cost me parts.

Trying to load a very simple clampotron + fuselage + recycling bin (an attachment I made for my old space station)  seems to work fine, except that it spawns directly on top of only one of the stakes, and ends up floating into the air due to the collision. Prompts me for rocketparts and takes time to build, as normal.

Trying to load a big subassembly of stock parts (a three stage heavy lifter base)  tells me I need 44k rocketparts, which I don't have, but at least this is normal.

Various other ships  I've stopped trying these, since they also blow up like the launchpad, but unlike the launchpad, they have a ton of parts and totally kill the game. The last time I tried, they blew things up so bad that the screen went black (except for the UI elements), and even loading my game or returning to the space center wouldn't fix the black screen.

[taniwha]

Wisq: same old same old: pics and logs. It sounds like some PartModule is throwing an exception during startup and this is interfering with EL's sequence.

[Wisq]

tl;dr: Solved; conflict with ScienceAlerts. See bottom. I wrote the rest of this as I debugged it.

Okay, cool, happy to help debug this.

Started out by loading up Kerbal, loading my game, not touching the survey stakes, and trying to create the launchpad. The stakes are set up as 2x origin, same name.

Result: the instant I hit "load", instead of making me spend parts, it spawns a floating launchpad.

I alt-F4ed. Here's the KSP.log: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32378574/KSP.log

Looking through the log, I notice that it seems like an exception is being caused on vessel create by the Science Alert mod. I removed that mod and everything works fine now. It's unfortunate; that's a pretty handy mod. But, it makes sense  now that I think about it, the only vehicles that worked were subassemblies that lacked any sort of command module (the launchpad counting as one). And where there's a command module, there's science alerts.

Anyway, mystery solved. It turns out this wasn't anything special about the survey system, it was just that my only prior experience with EPL was in a previous savegame where I was building many ships successfully using the orbital construction dock (so I knew what to expect), and this game I decided to go straight for a land base on Minmus, but I also installed more mods and created the conflict. I should have tried more stuff before assuming surveys were the problem; now that I know the issue, I realise I can't even VAB a launchpad or orbital dock and try to create ships on it right on the KSC launchpad if ScienceAlert is installed.

Edit: I've reported it in the ScienceAlert thread.

Edited October 25, 2014 by Wisq

[gl0ryh0und]

A lack of scrap storage does not stop anything.

A lack of ore storage will stop mining, but you won't have much of that going on in orbit.

A lack of metal storage will stop smelting.

A lack of parts storage will stop parts building.

I added a metal bin, which allowed me to smelt some of the scrap into metal.. once I had space for scrap metal, the workshop started working again... So while I have no doubt that your intended function was as you stated, I seem to be experiencing something different.. it's not game breaking fortunately it is just another thing to keep in mind, an over abundance of ore and lack of metal handling capability can bind up the process.

[Wisq]

New bug, fun.

I accidentally dropped a survey stake instead of attaching it to the ground, so I quickly picked it back up again, I think via the hotkey. But I then found that I had a stake on my back that couldn't be dropped (no right-click options on it at all), and it seemed to affect physics (made it hard to jetpack around). I couldn't put it into containers. I decided to return to the base to see if coming back inside would get rid of it. When I tried to EVA again, I could see it spawning a Kerbal (in mid-air near the base) every time I hit the EVA button, but it wouldn't actually leave the base.

Since my last autosave still had the unusable stake on my back, I just quicksaved, edited my quicksave, removed the part from my Kerbalnaut, and quickloaded. Worked fine.

Logfile: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32378574/KSP.log.zip . Sorry, it's pretty long; this happened well into a play session.

[taniwha]

Wisq: thank you for your help. Btw, I appreciate you marking the stakes

The problem is exactly as I thought: there is an exception occurring when EL initially loads the ship to find out how much it will cost to build, and thus EL does not get to destroy the ship.

The problem is in Science Alert. I am not sure I can do anything about it on EL's end because I need to initialize modules for things like MFT and TweakScale to do their things, so it would be best if Science Alert becomes more robust. Anyway, it would be good if you can pass this on to Science Alert's author.

[EXC 11:29:31.445] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ScienceAlert.ScienceAlertProfileManager.OnVesselCreate (.Vessel newVessel)
	EventData`1[Vessel].Fire (.Vessel data)
	Vessel.Initialize (Boolean fromShipAssembly)
	ExLP.ExBuildControl.getBuildCost (.ConfigNode craft)
	ExLP.ExBuildControl.LoadCraft (System.String filename, System.String flagname)
	ExLP.ExBuildWindow.craftSelectComplete (System.String filename, System.String flagname)
	CraftBrowser.drawList (Int32 id)
	UnityEngine.GUI.CallWindowDelegate (UnityEngine.WindowFunction func, Int32 id, UnityEngine.GUISkin _skin, Int32 forceRect, Single width, Single height, UnityEngine.GUIStyle style)

Edited October 26, 2014 by taniwha

[taniwha]

I added a metal bin, which allowed me to smelt some of the scrap into metal.. once I had space for scrap metal, the workshop started working again... So while I have no doubt that your intended function was as you stated, I seem to be experiencing something different.. it's not game breaking fortunately it is just another thing to keep in mind, an over abundance of ore and lack of metal handling capability can bind up the process.

There are two possibilities here: something in Kethane is not working properly with optional outputs, you are using something other than Kethane (Karbonite?) and the converter either does not support optional outputs or the person setting up the alternate config did not set the ScrapMetal output to be optional.

I have just verified that lack of ScrapMetal storage does not halt RocketParts production: both for complete lack of storage and storage filling up. This is with Kethane 0.9.2.

New bug, fun.

I accidentally dropped a survey stake instead of attaching it to the ground, so I quickly picked it back up again, I think via the hotkey. But I then found that I had a stake on my back that couldn't be dropped (no right-click options on it at all), and it seemed to affect physics (made it hard to jetpack around). I couldn't put it into containers. I decided to return to the base to see if coming back inside would get rid of it. When I tried to EVA again, I could see it spawning a Kerbal (in mid-air near the base) every time I hit the EVA button, but it wouldn't actually leave the base.

Most of this is probably a problem with KAS (I haven't had a chance to look at the log yet), though the difficulty jet-packing round sounds like the mass of the stake got set to something silly. I though I had fixed that .

[gl0ryh0und]

There are two possibilities here: something in Kethane is not working properly with optional outputs, you are using something other than Kethane (Karbonite?) and the converter either does not support optional outputs or the person setting up the alternate config did not set the ScrapMetal output to be optional.

I have just verified that lack of ScrapMetal storage does not halt RocketParts production: both for complete lack of storage and storage filling up. This is with Kethane 0.9.2.

Hmm.. I was using Karbonite conversion configs, so perhaps something in the cfg modules..? Not a big problem, I'll poke around the cfgs when I get chance.

[Astraph]

Does lack of 64-bit support mean the mod deactivates in 64-bit build (like FAR), or it should work, but I should expect regular 64-bit bugs & oddities?

[SnappingTurtle]

How can I disable progressive builds on a current save file? Thanks.

[Jivaii]

Can we get a video/slideshow tutorial on the survey stake thing? It sounds confusing to me.

[evonix]

I started a progressive build without enough resource space now there is no way to cancle the build so I can build something else.

[taniwha]

evonix: You could use TAC Fuel Balancer to dump some RocketParts.

[stanbeard]

Hi,

I'm having a problem where the textures on the expanding containers aren't loading. Where can I look to make sure they're there?

Many thanks, I love this mod!

T

[mkrco]

Hi, quick question. I've been a long time user of EL, and I'd like to add a little extra challenge to my game. I'd like to slow down the rate of construction per kerbal. I'd like to see if I could maintain multiple bases if it takes me years to build the really large ships with just a handful of kerbals. Is there an easy way to edit this rate, without modding the workshop efficiency of all the various parts that have the workshop capability?

thanks

[Starstrider42]

Hi, quick question. I've been a long time user of EL, and I'd like to add a little extra challenge to my game. I'd like to slow down the rate of construction per kerbal. I'd like to see if I could maintain multiple bases if it takes me years to build the really large ships with just a handful of kerbals. Is there an easy way to edit this rate, without modding the workshop efficiency of all the various parts that have the workshop capability?

thanks

Modding all the workshops is not that hard if you have ModuleManager. Here's a (fairly masochistic) config I've been using:

//--------------------------------------
// Bring EL build times in line with KCT build times

// Goal: a fully staffed Workshop (productivity 10-20) is about as good as a primitive KCT pipeline (speed 1.0)
// That should ensure that, while KSC construction is still faster, a dedicated spacedock can compete if the 
//	player puts in the effort -- and not just because building in space, you don't need moar boosters 
@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ExWorkshop]]:Final:NEEDS[Kerbal_Construction_Time]
{
	@MODULE[ExWorkshop] {
		@ProductivityFactor *= 0.01
	}
}

Just delete the ":NEEDS[Kerbal_Construction_Time]" if that's not why you want to slow things down, and change the multiplier to suit your taste.

[Draft]

Hmm.. I was using Karbonite conversion configs, so perhaps something in the cfg modules..? Not a big problem, I'll poke around the cfgs when I get chance.

Yeah, looks like somebody else figured out how to fix that little niggle

[Wisq]

Any way to change the order of the pads?

I've got a ground base that has a survey module to place new "buildings" (pad-0) and a launchpad (pad-1), and it always defaults to pad-0, so I repeatedly find myself accidentally building ships using the survey module  to the point that I made and loaded a ship called "WRONG PAD DUMMY" to remind myself.

Even when I remember to use pad-1, there's the annoying niggle whereby clicking "finalize" causes it to reset back to pad-0, so I have to re-select pad-1 in order to release it.

Edit: I guess remembering the last pad used (even across reloads and finalizes) would work fine too, since it would default to the one I used last and not reset when I finalize.

Edited October 29, 2014 by Wisq

[Kamuchi]

@Wisq

The pad numbers in the UI are in order of their connection.

Removing the survey stick and adding them back will set the launchpad to 0 and the sticks to 1.

Ran into this on my first attempt with my second pad and went clueless after adding the 3rd, untill I had to suffle things around and figured that out

[Wisq]

Hm, nope, doesn't work for me. I had no survey stakes out at the time, so I went out, planted one, came back; the order was unchanged. Went back out, picked it up, planted it again, came back; same. Went out, picked it up, stored it in a container, came back; same. It treats the survey module itself as pad-0 (and highlights it), not the actual stakes.

Since my base is also hooked together via KAS winches, I tried toggling between docked and undocked modes. If I connect everything together except the building with the survey module, I can indeed get the launchpad to be pad-0 for the main base; but as soon as I hook it back up, the survey module is pad-0 again.

[Kamuchi]

Ah bugger, atleast it`s 1 for the manual, thanks for trying though