Planet inhabitation

[Tortoise]

Any of you ever build a city on a planet, for your kerbals to live on?

I'm planning on finding a planet to do this.

Building houses with pods, rovers as cars, SSTO's for a defense force, fuel stations, and everything else.

And things will be connected with docking ports.

[Kerboman]

I'm not doing this, but:

You might want to do it on a flat planet like Minmus, or a place like Laythe with decently flat areas and an oxygen atmosphere.

Duna may work, but everything there is tilted. Literally everything. There are no flat spots on that planet.

[Tortoise]

I'm not doing this, but:

You might want to do it on a flat planet like Minmus, or a place like Laythe with decently flat areas and an oxygen atmosphere.

Duna may work, but everything there is tilted. Literally everything. There are no flat spots on that planet.

I was thinking about Minmus but, it has too little gravity. I went there once and I'm not going back. I ended up constantly hitting my kerbal against the ground while EVAing, and killing it.

[RogueMason]

Unless you're talking about building a fairly large base, I shudder at the thought of the part count of such an endeavour. Be prepared for lag in quantities greater than even Whackjob-sized crafts experience.

Of course, I'll point you to Duna and Laythe as good targets for this goal you've set yourself. Good luck, and take pictures of this computer murderer city

[Kerbonautical]

I love the idea but the framerate would become unplayable pretty quickly, especially with a city. I should think attempting to build a city would actually be stepping into the realms of burning out your CPU.

I've built a number of bases varying in different sizes however I generally find it's best to keep it small for my own tastes in performance. Furthest I go is a mining module, conversion module, solar power module and habitat module. I usually leave some ground transport and a small return ship in the area too which can be used to ferry them around the planet using the mined resources. This leaves me a tiny bit of room for a small vessel to land if they need anything dropped off, but even then I'm pushing the boundaries a bit. Unfortunately when I'm using extraplanetary launchpads I have to put them at least 2.5Km away otherwise it truly becomes a slideshow. Even without it, performance is less than desirable with a build this size.

I wish you luck, but I pity your CPU

[boxman]

Any of you ever build a city on a planet, for your kerbals to live on?

I'm planning on finding a planet to do this.

Building houses with pods, rovers as cars, SSTO's for a defense force, fuel stations, and everything else.

And things will be connected with docking ports.

I tried to make a big duna colony but quickly ran into the wall due to part limits. After a while it became so laggy that if you docked something random stuff would just break or vaporize into thin air.

What we need is some way to make building that are not calculated by physics for this to be possible. The closest thing you can do now unless you can import 3d models into KSP is to use to ubiozur welding plugin to get them down to very low part counts and even then I think you will eventually hit into another wall.

[cantab]

Yeah, anything more than a village really is going to lag things to hell unless you use some mod parts.

What will also help is to place stuff far enough apart. So have say your airport a few kilometres from your village, then the only time both need to load at once is on the drive between them.

PS: I suggest Eve for the venture. Easy to ship new stuff to from Kerbin.

[Tortoise]

Yeah, anything more than a village really is going to lag things to hell unless you use some mod parts.

What will also help is to place stuff far enough apart. So have say your airport a few kilometres from your village, then the only time both need to load at once is on the drive between them.

PS: I suggest Eve for the venture. Easy to ship new stuff to from Kerbin.

I actually re-considered Minmus.

My 2 final choices are:

Eve and Minmus

I haven't been to eve yet though.

[makinyashikino]

I actually re-considered Minmus.

My 2 final choices are:

Eve and Minmus

I haven't been to eve yet though.

Eve? Unless you enjoy one way trips, or lots of driving. Bases there are very impractical.

EDIT: WOO 100th post!

Edited April 24, 2014 by Cavenyanson
100 post!

[boxman]

I actually re-considered Minmus.

My 2 final choices are:

Eve and Minmus

I haven't been to eve yet though.

Duna would also be a great choice I think.. It is easy to land big stuff with parachutes if you aerobrake and land near sea level and also has enough gravity for rovers to work well while still having weak enough gravity for jet packs to work. If you find a nice spot at 3000 meters or below you can pretty much land anything with just parachutes.

And it is also possible to get your kerbals back to kerbin which is near impossible for most people with eve.

[Othuyeg]

You get no lag if you build your city on the minmus flats and leave over 2,5 km between the buildings. Also gives you a good reason to make alot of rovers and other cool equipment to transfer your kerbals.

[Tortoise]

Alright thanks guys!

[Cirocco]

I hadn't thought of it before, but I sure as hell am now.

[Frank_G]

Any of you ever build a city on a planet, for your kerbals to live on?

I'm planning on finding a planet to do this.

Building houses with pods, rovers as cars, SSTO's for a defense force, fuel stations, and everything else.

And things will be connected with docking ports.

You should take a look at the youtube channel of HOCgaming. He did a nice space tourism series with ground based and orbital hotels, spaceplanes for passenger transfer, refueling systems and and...

[pauix]

I've started a base on the Minmus lake. It is near Kerbin and it is flat, which means you don't need a lot of dV to get there. Also, the gravity is low, which means you can use a skycrane to drop the modules near each other.

[InterCity]

Just modding for it now, to set up some nice homes for kerbals, with decent glass windows and IVA.

However, i have some scripting issues.

[NecroBones]

I love the idea but the framerate would become unplayable pretty quickly, especially with a city. I should think attempting to build a city would actually be stepping into the realms of burning out your CPU.

You won't damage your CPU, unless it's already having cooling problems, in which case you'd be having stability problems first, which would show up any time you run the CPU hard (it's already pegged any time your mission timer goes yellow or red, for instance).

A properly configured system will be capable of running the CPU at 100% capacity indefinitely.

Of course, if it's not keeping up, frame-rate will suffer.

Just clarification.

[Dkmdlb]

If you're going to be doing this, you need to plan ahead and save every single part you can. So land your buildings without landing gear. Use skycranes to land them. Keep all the extraneous equipment (batteries, RCS, etc) on the skycrane, and then launch it into oblivion after you've landed your buildings.

Don't put lights on every building. Don't put extra batteries (use no more than 1 per building), etc etc.

[Tortoise]

Thanks for the tips! And how do I make a skycrane? Just make a thing that my buildings will be attached to, then decouple it low over the place?

[cantab]

Decoupler on top of building, rocket thingy on top of decoupler. Set it down, fire decoupler, fly skycrane away.

[Tortoise]

Thank you guys!

[Vaporized Steel]

To reduce lag I would suggest Welded parts Click

Although it doesn't really seem to work with all building configurations since v0.23 it might let you merge all parts together for your interplanetary buildings.

My advice is to make large buildings and weld them together.

Building a home would generally require the living module (hitchhiker container) or mod living module part, batteries, solar panels, ladders, structural panels, landing struts or whatever.

With this mod you can merge the 10-50 parts of one single home into 1. The KSP physics engine will generate one home as 1 part. Thus reduce all the computer power to handle it.

It would be the ideal mod to make a ksp city as large as possible.

Since ksp starts to get laggy between 750-1000 parts on the higher end computers I don't think you can build more then 750-1000 homes assuming you would weld their parts together. Meaning you would have 750 - 1000 ships (homes in this case ofcourse) each counting as 1 parts is still 750 parts (OBVIOUSLY)

But as I said this mod has some incompabilities since 0.23v. But in regard to some issues it's definetely still working.

[NecroBones]

Thanks for the tips! And how do I make a skycrane? Just make a thing that my buildings will be attached to, then decouple it low over the place?

Here's an example of a skycrane lowering a lander: