[0.90] MoarKerbals - Populate your colony in space! (v1.1) [2014/12/27]

[strideknight]

Kerbthulhu Kinetics Program's MoarKerbals

This is a fairly simple mod that adds two parts, an orbital station and ground station Klone Bay, that lets you klone your kerbals. There's a small chance that an accident can happen - this is experimental technology after all You can disable accidents or change the requirements in the part's .cfg file if you want, or just save before operating.

It requires a large amount of electricity to operate, and I always play with Roverdude's MKS and TAC's Life Support, so it automatically integrates with them to require Biomass or other materials. Also, I included configs for the Community Tech Tree. Both require ModuleManager to integrate.

MoarKerbals was inspired by my desire to have a small colony of Kerbals living in zeppelins around Jool who populate the planet, evolve their own society, and then to go to war with the "grounders" back on Kerbin.

This is my first mod and it runs fine on both my 32bit/64bit installs, so let me know if you find any bugs. All constructive feedback/suggestions are also welcome. Enjoy!

To do

• Kerbal Inheritance
  
• I plan on adding a second part, the "Kuddle Shack" that will let you make new Kerbals in the more... traditional sense.
  
• Recipes may require re-balancing
  
• Kerbal training program for specialty
  

-Other mod idea: Use civilian/tourist kerbal setting to create base infrastructure requirements - X civilians to support Y sized base.

Known bugs

• Because I use the stock lander can for internals, which is only sized internally for two, if you clone a third kerbal into the bay it won't show up in the kerbal profiles at the bottom right. They will show up properly once you transfer them to another module though.
  

Dropbox Download

KerbalStuff Download

Source and license are included in the zip.

Change Log

v1.1

-Now with 100% more parts, includes an OKS branded orbital pod and an MKS branded ground version. Original textures from the awesome RoverDude.

-Added success/failure sounds

v1.0

-Initial Release

License

CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA

Screenshots

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Edited December 28, 2014 by strideknight
Added KerbalStuff

[lordmuffin]

Wow... that's kinda cool.

[Yski]

Sounds great, I was just thinking I'd have to either edit Kerbals into my colonies every few years to simulate reproduction or code something myself

[rabidninjawombat]

I like this gonna test it out for a bit.

Im assuming i can KloneBay module to a part and use it as a Kloneing facility yes?

This would go very nice with MKS.

EDIT: Also noticed the accident rate field. Totally like that idea =P Maybe a way to lower the accident rate as you progress in tech?

[strideknight]

I like this gonna test it out for a bit.

Im assuming i can KloneBay module to a part and use it as a Kloneing facility yes?

This would go very nice with MKS.

EDIT: Also noticed the accident rate field. Totally like that idea =P Maybe a way to lower the accident rate as you progress in tech?

Yup, should be able to. I was actually thinking of asking RoverDude if I could mod the texture for the BioLab for this - that was what I had in mind when I made it.

Good idea about the tech progression, I'll look into it!

[hieywiey]

Could you add a cool sound when the Kerbals are cloned in a similar way to DeepFreeze?

[rabidninjawombat]

Yup, should be able to. I was actually thinking of asking RoverDude if I could mod the texture for the BioLab for this - that was what I had in mind when I made it.

Good idea about the tech progression, I'll look into it!

The licence allows it and as far as i know he's cool with it, I did it the EPL adaptation i did. (for a rocket building part) Just make sure you give credit

[strideknight]

Could you add a cool sound when the Kerbals are cloned in a similar way to DeepFreeze?

Great idea, definitely going to add them!

The licence allows it and as far as i know he's cool with it, I did it the EPL adaptation i did. (for a rocket building part) Just make sure you give credit

Good call, I'll start goofing around with it today, thanks.

[Whirligig Girl]

How do low-tier astronaut complexes handle this?

[Whirligig Girl]

Also, what about some kind of method to force you to have two Kerbals, one with a male name, one with a female name, with a female name defined by what TextureReplacer sees a female name to be and oh my god I just realized this is a horrible idea.

[strideknight]

How do low-tier astronaut complexes handle this?

Thats a good question, I haven't tried it yet on a non-upgraded one. I wonder how it handles rescue missions too for that matter.

Also, what about some kind of method to force you to have two Kerbals, one with a male name, one with a female name, with a female name defined by what TextureReplacer sees a female name to be and oh my god I just realized this is a horrible idea.

Hehehe, I was thinking the same thing for the Kuddle Shack, but honestly, I find TextureReplacer's female name recognition isn't great (not it's fault, just the nature of names obviously). But since you can't even have females without using TR *finger wag at Squad*, I was going to have a requirement of two kerbals but not do anything further for the ease of use.

Maybe a better option would be to have a built in way to name the Kerbals when they're... produced. Then popup the TR window to replace the texture if I can?

[paladin061]

Thank god it was clones!

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

If you see a faded sign in the Tracking Station that says

"15 km to the Kuddle Shack!"

Some thoughts on Kerbal inheritance:

• Kerbals' stats should mostly come from their parents' date=' with some chance of mutation (maybe set up a bimodal probability distribution with peaks at the parents' stats, and then pick a value at random).
  [*']Similarly, Kerbals are likely to be of the same career as either parent, again with some chance of mutation. EDIT: Unfortunately, a Kerbal's career is derived from the name.
  
• BadS should probably have different rules, with any new Kerbal having the same low chance of being BadS. Otherwise, colonies would be teeming with BadS Kerbals, which is surely a risk to colony safety...
  

Edited January 16, 2015 by Kerbas_ad_astra
Learned new stuff about careers.

[wasmic]

• BadS should probably have different rules, with any new Kerbal having the same low chance of being BadS. Otherwise, colonies would be teeming with BadS Kerbals, which is surely a risk to colony safety...
  

This orbital outpost ain't big enough for the ten of us!

[dbmorpher]

Could you post your source file please?

[Vaporo]

Now this, this is good. I have never really had much reason to build "colonies," for the very reason that they will never get beyond me shipping out ever-larger life support containers and living quarters. Perhaps I will build one, now.

EDIT: Do the new Kerbals take time to clone, or are they instantaneously created?

Edited December 27, 2014 by Vaporo

[Kitworks]

Sounds awesome. Definitely needs its own model... Maybe something similar to the cryo bay mod?

[_Augustus_]

Kuddle Shack?

YUSSSS! I WUV IT! YUSSS!

Now all we need are baby kerbals.

[RuBisCO]

I always figured the kerbals reproduce via budding and asexual reproduction.

[Gaalidas]

I always figured the kerbals reproduce via budding and asexual reproduction.

Kerbal reproduction is a field that has yet to be fully explored. The issue is in the lack of a significant body. I have always maintained that the "body" of a kerbal is little more than a "hub" of some sort for the attachment of their limbs. The rest of the inner "body" is then contained within the cranial cavity. One theory that I like is that they breathe through their eyes, which seem to be lidless. If this is true, then reproduction must either happen within the cranium as well, or the kerbal might be an egg-layer. Also, considering there are very few differences between the male and female kerbal, if indeed there are any physical attributes to differentiate them besides their preference in aesthetics, the issue of genetic diversity becomes an important question. One thought is that every kerbal has the dormant genes to produce an unlimited number of variations, or we must assume that some sort of "exchange" is made in which either one or the other kerbal (we cannot assume that they even have a specific sexual-physical orientation that is always used to produce the offspring) combines the elements within their own body and generates a new kerbal as the output, or that an "egg" of some sort is then given the opposing genetic material and absorbs it before hardening for the growth period (think fish laying eggs, and then "spraying" the genetic data over the eggs.)

If the latter rings true, then one "production" kerbal could receive the genetic diversity data from a number of donor kerbals and spread the new data between a number of potential kerbal "eggs" to ensure the stability of the bloodline. The question that comes to mind is this: do kerbals "mate" at all and, if so, do they mate for life or do they mate as a social activity?

Questions within questions, and no answers to speak of.

[rabidninjawombat]

Could you post your source file please?

Source Code is in the download.

If its all cool with your Strideknight I was gonna make a new part to use with your plugin

I wanted to integrate it into MKS, so that it uses a significant amount of recourses used in MKS. (like biomass, spare parts etc) to make the kloneing expensive (as it should be)

[strideknight]

If its all cool with your Strideknight I was gonna make a new part to use with your plugin

I wanted to integrate it into MKS, so that it uses a significant amount of recourses used in MKS. (like biomass, spare parts etc) to make the kloneing expensive (as it should be)

Edit: New version is up, branded it with MKS/OKS. Also, increasing the resources sounds good to me, tbh. I wasn't sure what a good place to start with is, but thats about what it a lone kerbal and aeropod will make in roughly two weeks. The ResourceMods.cfg file is already setup for it and can easily be changed to whatever.

Either way tho, feel free to use it however you'd like

Edited December 27, 2014 by strideknight
updated

[strideknight]

Now this, this is good. I have never really had much reason to build "colonies," for the very reason that they will never get beyond me shipping out ever-larger life support containers and living quarters. Perhaps I will build one, now.

EDIT: Do the new Kerbals take time to clone, or are they instantaneously created?

Kloning occurs instantaneously. For the Kuddle Shack I'd like to have a delay built in, I don't know if 3 months sounds ridiculous - based on relative size to humans/gestation rates.

Now all we need are baby kerbals.

That'd be pretty nifty. Then have a training school where you can specialize their role.

There's actually settings for both Tourist and Civilian in the kerbal's info. I'm not sure what it does/if its implemented at all, but it'd be fun to build them out and have infrastructure required. Say X number of civilians to support a base of Y size... now that I think about it, that'd be pretty damn nifty and not hard to code...

I always figured the kerbals reproduce via budding and asexual reproduction.

Yeah, but where's the fun in that?!

[RuBisCO]

Yeah, but where's the fun in that?!

Have you ever seen gremlins?

Imagine having a Kerbal take a swim on Laythe and suddenly green balls pop out of its head, fly off a couple of meters and then grow into new kerbals in seconds and (optional) they are evil... how is that not fun?

Edited December 28, 2014 by RuBisCO

[Gaalidas]

That's one way to look at the reproduction of kerbals. What if they are, in fact, not animal at all but rather a plant? That would explain the green coloring and the lack of any rational physical qualities that would make them viable animal organisms, much less allow them to advance to a space-faring species without first eliminating themselves from the cosmic dance due to their inherent stupidity which, coupled with their natural genius, would surely have been their doom many times over.

In such a case the reproduction chamber, aka. the "Kuddle Shack" (Kuddle Kompartment?), could be a place of high humidity/heat and suitable soil in which to take root and concentrate all their energy into growing the spores which would eventually take root themselves and grow into new kerbals, ready to take on the universe. I would suspect that this would include a rudimentary form of genetic memory, allowing the new kerbal to not only share attributes from the parent, but also come pre-packaged with some of the skills that the parent possessed, minus the experience which would have to be experienced first hand by the new organism. As for genetic exchange, the... um... Floral Seeding Room?... would have the secondary purpose of gathering donations from other kerbals who are unwilling or unable to produce seedlings (Kerbal-Kones? okay, now we're getting ridiculous) but wish to help maintain the genetic diversity of the species. Kerbals who are ready to produce the next generation have only to enter the pod (hey, some plants produce a pod for their seeds, so it kinda fits as a name for the room... focus Gaalidas.... that's not the point we're making here...) and activate an exchange program and wait for the seedling production process to complete while enjoying a nice hibernation for a few days or so.

Not only would this help repopulate an off-world colony, but could also help with air-recycling systems. The rooted kerbal, and its offspring, would revert to a carbon-dioxide -> oxygen system, and only enter the oxygen -> carbon-dioxide breathing system once they separated from the traditional plant form.

Yes, I know I'm over-thinking all this stuff. You should see how long it takes me to decide what to eat in the morning. It's a gift, I think...