Morale and Efficiency: How to fix OPness of one man craft and many other problems

[CaptRobau]

One of the major annoyances that the game still has and few mods have been able to address is the OPness of one man spacecraft. More than one Kerbal in your spacecraft is more often than not useless. You can add them as backup in case one of your Kerbals dies or is lost or if you want to move two ships independently (Apollo CSM/LM situation). The former is no longer an issue if you have experience and the second can also be done with a probe body. So there are too few uses for multi-Kerbal ships. The majority of multi-crew missions are done out of a need to roleplay. There should however be a gameplay reason too. To do that, I propose the introduction of the Morale/Science Efficiency System.

Making Multi-Crews Useful

To make multiple crews useful there needs to be an incentive to use them. The most obvious way is through implementing bonuses to currency collection (funds, science, and reputation), the backbone of career mode. I’ll focus on science in this thread, although it should be possible to do it with the other two currencies. By giving a percentage bonus to manned science gathering (surface samples, crew and EVA reports) it suddenly makes sense to bring more Kerbals with you on your missions. You wouldn’t need to bring all your Kerbals out on EVA to get the bonus for surface samples of EVA reports, it would just count the crew of the last ship the player left. To prevent 100-man crew from collecting incredible amounts of science, there would be diminishing returns. After let’s say a six Kerbal crew, the advantages would rapidly decline and beyond 10 it would just be not worth the extra space needed (planned human mission aside from colonization don’t go over 10 either).

Preventing Ships Crammed With Crew

While the above would incentivize multi-crew ships and reduce single-seater OPness, it would not get rid of the problem of building very compact ships that can transport Kerbals without penalty for years. Real-life ships and stations with lots of crew are big and not just size of the inhabitants, but have separate sleeping comparts, commons rooms, etc. To solve this, I proposed introducing Morale. Every Kerbal would have a Morale variable and cockpits, capsules and crew cabins would all produce extra morale. The morale production would not be equivalent to crew capacity. If you want to keep a single Kerbal’s morale are 100% you’d need a crew capacity let’s say just for him. This would force players to think about their crew’s accommodations. Short trips wouldn’t be an issue, but if you wanted to keep morale up for long stretches of time then you need to build a bigger ship or station. What would this morale be good for: collecting science. The science efficiency described in the paragraph above would not only be determined by the amount of Kerbals but also by their morale. So if you leave your Kerbals in cramped corners for a while they might only collect 50% of the science possible and if you send them to Jool in just a Mk2 Landercan or have them on EVA for a weeks, they’ll drop to 0% science.

Solving Other Problems

The Morale/Efficiency System solves a host of problems. The OPness of one-man craft is severely reduced (especially outside of Kerbin’s SOI), multi-crew ships have a use and players will be encouraged to build normal looking stations and interplanetary craft for reasons other than roleplaying. It’s also an elegant solution to the Life Support debate. It’s not too difficult to comprehend and mistakes don’t result in Kerbal deaths meaning then learning curve is less pressing. It also isn’t as high maintenance as traditional life support systems, it doesn’t require constant resupply missions and it does crew space better than traditional LS (as with them you just need a big tank or a greenhouse).

The Morale System could also be used to make electrical management (EM) more interesting. Life support is a big part of the electrical requirements of ships, so it would help to make EM a bigger part of gameplay. At the same time it wouldn’t be too punishing as Kerbals wouldn’t die due to the electrical system being insufficient to provide enough morale. One would sometimes still have the possibility to send an extra power module up to fix it. With standard LS that would often be too late.

When combined with SCANSAT like science-over-time, it would make space stations more useful. Without the science-over-time you’d just need to send a compact 6-10 man craft to get most of the Kerbin orbital science in one suborbital hop, but if you had to be in an orbit for a while to get the full amount of science you’d need to build an actual space station. Enough pods to keep the morale high and enough solar panels to keep the morale producing.

There’s plenty a whole range of other things that it could tie into, but at the moment these are the main ones that I could think of.

EDIT:

Addendum

It just dawned on me that the Snacks! mod shows a way how the other currencies can be involved in the Morale/Efficiency system. Snacks! acts not too dissimilar to the Morale portion of my system: Kerbals need snacks and pods have a compartment of snacks onboard. If Kerbals don't get their snacks, reputation is lost everytime they want to eat (every 2 hours I think). Adding this to the Morale/Efficiency System would get both reputation and funds involved. If you have a lot of Kerbals at 0% morale, then your reputation will go down. Low reputation influences the contracts that you will get, which will influence how much funds you'll be able to make. Additionally Funds will be necessary to buy the extra parts (habs, solar panels, etc.) that you'll need to build the bigger ships or stations that the Morale/Efficiency System will entice players to build.

Thoughts, comments, critiques?

Edited October 11, 2014 by CaptRobau

[Whirligig Girl]

Very interesting ideas. Somewhat similar to this old idea from June.

[Spacepetscompany]

I like it!

[Darnok]

Wow, best idea for life support I have read

I would add few things to make things harder...

- kerbals with 0% morale shouldn't listen commands, that means we wouldn't be able to control them

- morale should be decreased very fast when kerbal is near RTG or nuclear engine both in EVA and when inside craft

- in EVA morale should be dropped to 0% after few hours and only way to increased it should be sending other kerbal to help him

Edited October 11, 2014 by Darnok

[Thomas988]

This is awesome! Undoubtedly one of the best ideas for KSP I have heard! You're right; space stations and multi-crew missions need a higher purpose than they do now.

[Sirrobert]

Wow, best idea for life support I have read

I would add few things to make things harder...

- kerbals with 0% morale shouldn't listen commands, that means we wouldn't be able to control them

- morale should be decreased very fast when kerbal is near RTG or nuclear engine both in EVA and when inside craft

- in EVA morale should be dropped to 0% after few hours and only way to increased it should be sending other kerbal to help him

Note you're just trying to limit use of existing mechanics.

RTGs don't even produce radiation in real life, and why does everyone keep hating on the nervas? If Kerbals has a problem with radiation they couldn't spend years in outer space anyway. They can, so a few minutes next to a nerva wouldn't be a problem either

[Darnok]

Note you're just trying to limit use of existing mechanics.

RTGs don't even produce radiation in real life, and why does everyone keep hating on the nervas? If Kerbals has a problem with radiation they couldn't spend years in outer space anyway. They can, so a few minutes next to a nerva wouldn't be a problem either

I've read that radiation from Sun is on list of planned features. As for nervas I said only that kerbals should have lowered morale while they are near those engines, same thing could be with radiation from other sources. That would be more realistic IMO.

[Sirrobert]

I've read that radiation from Sun is on list of planned features. As for nervas I said only that kerbals should have lowered morale while they are near those engines, same thing could be with radiation from other sources. That would be more realistic IMO.

Would it? Where has it been indicated that kerbals get grumpy from radiation?

[mattinoz]

Have to say I do like the ideas.

If Kerbals had skills and specialisation like science, engineering or various flight skills then having a range of skills on board could have a moral boost. On the flip side put a Science skilled Kerbal in a lander can (so you get science boost from surface samples) without a skilled pilot and well moral is going to tank.

[Ninenium]

This is a great idea! The kerbals are definitely OP at this point. A probe core dies when it runs out of electricity, but a kerbal can survive forever while being cramped up mk1-pod without food or anything?!..

The morale system seems a bit to complicated though. Why not use a mechanism that 90% of the games already have?

Suppose each kerbal has a health bar that represents both emotional health (i.e. morale) and physical health.

Then there could be certain events that would drain health such as: fall damage, going on EVA near the sun, going on EVA for too long, staying too long in the pilot seat, etc.

And there could be live support systems that regenerate health over time. Where only the largest systems (the ones that include sanitary, medical and sleeping accommodations) can fully regenerate health.

[Tw1]

I do like your ideas about multiple crews, but I disagree with the idea that the advantages of having lots of kerbals should decline. Bringing 100 kerbals to Jool, with life-support would be quite a feat. I like your idea of morale it's a good solution to many issues.

But I think life support resource, where depletion eventually leads to a kerbal's death is important. Maybe that could last for so long after freezing? 0.5 to 2.0 times depending on difficulty settings?

[Vallius]

I like this idea, as it adds to the gameplay without getting too focused on life-support. On the other hand, if it was fun, I could see SQUAD doing both.