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This mod is for you if you want to do more than just plant flags and gather science when you get to other planets. It's a life support mod, but not one that's built around realism - it's built around gameplay. The mod encourages you to make a variety of vessels — you'll need bases, orbital outposts rovers and unmanned probes to be successful. You'll need to make several trips in order to finally reach a self-sustaining colony, starting with a few brave explorers and followed up by large teams of specialist kerbals ready to go to space and stay there.
This mod also features a production chain, but it departs from the many production-based mods that depend on finding just the right spot to land and working out complex interplays between production and efficiency. It uses simple math that doesn't vary depending on where you land so you can easily plan your missions without resort to spreadsheets.
Although the tech-tree is still there, the tech tree just governs what parts are available. If you want to advance your colonies towards self-sufficiency, there's only one thing to do: go live there. It's through actual practical experience that your Kerbals will learn how to survive out there.
So hey, let's dive in and walk through the whole process of setting up colonies!
Early gameplay isn't much affected by this mod. All of the command modules now contain a little bit of snacks in them — enough for a few days in space. So your first tool for planning your missions is just looking at the resource loadout on your command pod:
There you go! It comes with 3 units of "Snacks Tier-4". 3 snacks is enough to supply one kerbal for three days, or three kerbals for one day.
So... Why is it "Snacks-Tier4" and not just "Snacks"? Well, that's because Tier4 snacks are the good stuff - they're produced on Kerbin and they can satisfy all a Kerbal's needs. As we'll see later, there are other tiers that aren't quite so good... But more on that later. For now know you'll be loading up your ships with "Tier-4" stuff on Kerbal.
But you'll notice that it's just the command pods that get the food added to them. Crew modules don't get the benefit of that. But it's not the Kerbal way to let things like that get us down. Let's go anyway with a 3-kerbal crew. Now, a a sub-day Mun mission is a thing but if you're on a shoestring delta-v budget, it's about a day out and a day back... But we're gonna push on anyway and see what happens! It all starts out alright but as we approach the Mun, we can see our stocks of Snacks-Tier4 dropping at an alarming rate. While we can keep looking at the status in the tweakables dialog, we can see it better in the PKS status monitor. You access it via the cupcake in your toolbar:
But we're on our way to the Mun and there's no turning around, so we press on, and the food runs to zero right as we land... But still that's not a problem; although the Kerbal space program management might not be totally on top of looking out for the Kerbals' interests, the Kerbals are.
It seems they've snuck on board 7 days of emergency rations; they'll do fun stuff, if you ask them to. They're happy to do science and run the spaceship and go EVA, but you'll find later that they don't like to do farming or any other stuff while they're living on emergency rations. Once they run out of emergency rations, they'll be unable to do anything to help themselves including flying themselves home or EVAing to a rescue ship! A Stayputnik is a good idea to keep yourself out of danger. But hey, all's well that ends well. We get our crew home before that comes to pass.
So yeah, that Mun mission was a little sketchy! Turns out space is hard! But it's nothing that a little technology can't solve. How hard could it be to research a space-rated lunchbox anyway? Well, the tech you need to get started is "Fuel Systems" and the part we want to get out of that tech is the KRDA-O200 Cargo Container. That's a general-purpose container, and we can use it as snack storage to make sure that our 2-week voyage to Minmus is comfortably outfitted.
Mod Author's Note! This comes from Station Parts Expansion Redux, which defines a bunch of general-purpose parts for space stations and bases that's been adapted to work with this mod. One day perhaps we'll create a few more smaller storage containers that look the part a little bit better for the early missions.
For our mission to minmus, we're going to equip one of those storage modules. So build up a Minmus rocket, and just add this container on. I've built up a 3-kerbal mission with a 1-kerbal lander. The lander can hop all about the surface picking up loads of science while the other two kerbals just sit back and watch the scientist do all the work.
The container is in the "Payload" parts bin, and you kit it out by pushing the "Select Cargo" button on the tweakable dialog. You want to select those tasty, tasty "Snacks-Tier4". Now, you could just look divide the number of snacks you pack by the number of kerbals on board to get the number of days you can stay out, but if you don't want to do the math, but we've got computers for that nowadays. To get the work done for you, you can hit the "Cupcake" button on your toolbar to bring up the PKS dialog. From there, you can go to the "Calculator" tab to enter in the number of days you want to be out and it'll let you know whether you're good to go or not.
So that about wraps up the early-career stuff. Stored snacks is really the only sensible way to go for missions to the moons. For the next phase of your career, there are several things to pursue at once:
- Unlock more of the tech tree and make some cash via missions to the moons like we described above
- Send probes to the other planets once you get enough tech. Note that you can't start colonizing a world until you've made a probe, sent it to the other body, and returned it (or some of it) to Kerbin.
- Do rescue missions, because you're going to want quite a few kerbals. In particular, you want specialist - roughly in this priority: mechanics (if you have Extraplanetary Launchpads), farmers, technicians, miners, biologists, geologists.
- Launch those first orbital platforms to build up your hydroponic skills
The next step in our journey is agroponics. 'Scanning Tech' is one of the technologies you'll need:
Note that Scanning Tech has a couple of other treasures we'll need later - the K&K Planetary Greenhouse and the orbital scanning lab. So let's crack open one of these guys in the VAB.
First, take a look at where we found this part - it's buried in the "PKS" tab - anything to do with progressive production will be found here. You can also find the parts scattered around in life support and utilities, but this is your go-to tab for all things to do with production on your colonies and stations.
Second, there's the crew tab. All of the PKS tabs have a notion of required staffing. They don't require you place the kerbal in the part to work, they just require the right kind of crew to be present anywhere on the station. In this case, it requires a staffing level of .5 — so one kerbal can operate two of these things. Since we're starting at the bottom, this part will have to be Tier 0, so it requires a 1-star scientist or any biologist to run. So you can see that in the early game, generalists are useful to have around, but as you go up in tiers, either you have to be quite adept at shuttling your Kerbals around the planets or you have to get a whole lot of specialists. But in any case, you can see that a 2-star scientist is plenty enough to get you through the early days.
Third, there's the production. First, the "capacity" is how much stuff the unit can produce, "input" is what it requires to do that production and, in the case of food-related things, there's a notion of "quality". For snacks, what it's telling you is that the food it's producing at Tier-0 can only satisfy 20% of a Kerbal's diet. The practical upshot for us is that if we hurl one of these things into orbit, it'll produce 2 units per day. However, each Kerbal will eat no more than .2 of the food produced by this thing (the rest will have to be Snacks-Tier4 supplied from the planet). So, at Tier0, you can jam 10 Kerbals on this station, and they'll eat 0.8x10 or 8 Snacks-Tier4 a day, and they'll go through .2x10 or 2 fertilizer.
A tiered producer like the hydroponics lab here will use one input for each unit of output. (Because one of the goals here is to make the math as simple as possible). Also, the input has to be at least the same tier as the producer. So here, actually, we don't need to bring Tier-4 fertilizer - we could bring Tier-0 if we felt like it. But it's usually just simpler to pack the highest tier. Also note that fertilizer is substantially less bulky and less massive than snacks themselves, so a stupendous number of them fit into the storage containers. Be sure to look at the "Calculator" tab of the cupcake dialog to see that you bring a sane amount.
After you get this thing in orbit, you can see that the production dialog has some tools to help us keep track of when we'll need to send up additional supplies. The "Progression" tab is crucial for you here. It'll tell you how long it'll take to reach the next tier. After you do that, you'll have to push a new hydroponic module into orbit that's configured for the new technology. If you don't have the "Kerbal Alarm Clock" mod, you absolutely should get it. It can be a huge help in managing these things.
If you've played KSP for any length of time, you'll have been frustrated by power and heat management at time warp. To minimize your frustration level, it's a good idea to wait until the ship you're about to hop into is in direct sunlight to ensure it doesn't decide that your ship had no power for the entire 427 days you were time-warping.
Two final notes on progression:
- Only cutting-edge parts will contribute towards future research. So, for example, if you have a station like the one shown here and you reach Tier-1, and then dock a Tier-1 hydroponics module to it, be sure and shut down the old part. This frees up crew resources and it ensures that your Kerbals are eating the maximum amount of the Tier-1 food.
- Hydroponics research is limited near kerbin. You can only research towards tier-3 when you're in a ship that's outside of Kerban's SOI, and you can only research towards Tier-4 when you're well outside it (on your way beyond Eve & Duna).
Finally, if you like building big orbital bases, "Konstruction" is a great mod to get. It allows you to basically dock your pieces together, and then delete the docking port pair. This means you get the fun of hand-building your base and not have so many kraken problems.
When you look hard at the numbers on Tier0 hydroponics parts, you're wise to conclude that these parts, at Tier0, are not serious helps. They really aren't. Even in the mid-tiers the hydroponic lab is barely worth its mass. But hey, space is hard, and these parts are steps along the way to really practical production, but they aren't practical in and of themselves. Off-world farming is a bit like that too, but it becomes a very real, useful, and practical thing in the mid-tiers.
The next thing to know is that all the good parts are in the "Advanced Science Tech" research category, which is pretty deep in the research tree (at the 550 level) and requires the fully upgraded R&D Center. Before you get here, you need to be pretty well-versed in the game - not only because of this requirement but also because you'll need to be able to do reasonably-precise landings and be able to haul some pretty ungainly ships into orbit.
In addition to the landed base, you need an orbiting base doing "Scanning" research. The scanner part at Tier-0 and Tier-1 doesn't really have a function. You just need to do it.
You can pull this off in a couple ways - one is to have a trivial craft that just includes room for a pilot, a scanning module, and snack storage. That'll work.
Another way to go is to have a base that does double-duty as a hydroponic research lab. If you do that route, one thing you can consider is not having the scanning part be integral to the ship — just dock it on. That's a decent plan, as it allows you to carry on the hydroponic research in a not-completely-useless way. If you're using Kerbal Attachment System (and you should, this is one of those mods that makes the game vastly more fun), you can also just directly bolt the part on. If you're using Extraplanetary Launchpads (and you should, for the same reason), you can build the thing in-place as you need it.
You should also set up one or more relay and scanning satellites. In addition to helping with stock game problems (e.g. avoiding those grumpy moments when you want to upload science from your lab and finding that you're not facing Kerbin), when you get to Tier-2, having those up there will make your life easier. We'll talk about why later, but yeah, even at Tier-0, you should get them up there, if for no other reasons than to act like you know what you're doing.
There are two flavors of scanners - a small part that only works for Tier-0 and Tier-1 and only requires one kerbal to run. The larger part requires two crew and can be used at Tier-2 on. These parts need to be run from an orbital base in the same planetary system as the target. For example, you can create a base orbiting the Mun that has scanner parts for both the Mun and Minmus. Each of those scanners requires its own dedicated crew to run, so, for example, if you have the larger scanners for Mun and Minmus, you'd need 4 pilots/geologists to run the scanner and probably a scientist/biologist to run the hydroponic farm.
The really key parts to a landed facility are a Scrounger (okay, okay, it's a drill), a fertilizer factory and a farm. With just those, you can make some food. It's also worthwhile to make some "Shinies", which are just things you can sell back on Kerban for cash and reputation. One thing that doesn't work is hydroponics - that's for orbit and doesn't work when landed.
So yeah, here's a chart that shows what the production chain looks like. At Tier-0 and Tier-1, you need a stuff-scrounger to power everything. Don't worry about that Crush-Ins stuff yet - we'll talk about that more later. For now, you get one of those drills and it produces "Stuff"... Quite a lot of stuff, actually, and that's good given the number of lines you see popping out of the drill in the diagram. The first consumer is Fertilizer factories, which make fertilizer, which goes into the farms. Stuff also flows into the Shinies factories and the rocket part factories, if you have EPL. The Rocket Parts are a little funny in that they also take a percentage of something called "Complex Parts", which are trucked in from Kerbin.
As with hydroponic output, the snacks from your low-tier snack producers won't be enough, by themselves to feed your kerbals. The production chains generally just do what makes the most sense. Kerbals will eat as much locally-produced food as they can. Excess snacks (produced on farms) will be stored until the storage runs out, then the it'll just be excess capacity. Fertilizer is the same story - it supplies the farms first, then pumps excess into storage if you have it. And speaking of Hydroponics, you'll note they don't factor into this diagram. Hydroponics only works in orbital facilities, not landed ones.
You may have noticed this already, but the Cupcake dialog will show the net production. That is, if you're producing 8 units of Snacks, but your kerbals are eating 6 of those, it will show up as producing 2 units of snacks.
For your first base on a body, you really need to think of it as disposable. While it's one thing to shut down a single hydroponic lab or scanning part, it's another to try to shut down a whole supply chain and keep straight which Kerbal is manning what part. It's also hard to build on to a station. So, for your first landed bases, just think of them as science station whose only purpose is to get you to the next tier. They can make a few Shinies to pay for themselves, and they can serve other purposes like ISRU fuel manufacture. But once the next tiers are researched, it's time to abandon them. Maybe they can be an emergency shelter if you run into trouble at your future bases, but that's about it.
So with all that in mind, let's get building a really simple base. We're going to skip rocket parts production on this ship. Firstly because, for the sake of this tutorial we want to keep things simple, second, some folks find EPL cheaty, and third, even if you're going for EPL, it's perfectly reasonable to hold off on researching that line until you've made a bunch of progress in the other stuff - it's easy enough to build iterations of the rocket-part producing parts using the parts you built researching the next tier.
Here's a basic base with just one drill, one shinies, and one farm. When we ask the cupcake about our progress, well, it has a few reservations...
So yeah, we seem to have forgotten the storage. That's easy enough — we're going to blow off storing snacks and fertilizer. The only reason you'd want to store those things is if either:
- You want to use it elsewhere (e.g. on your orbital base)
- You want a buffer in the event you run out of power or need to temporarily house some extra Kerbals or something.
But like I said, our Tier-0 base isn't something we're going to be committed to for very long, so we'll scrimp on that.
You'll also notice that there's a seemingly huge amount of ore storage. That's owing to the goofiness of the stock ISRU conversion mechanism when you're not at the base. If you have a base with an ISRU and a drill and no storage, you'll find that if you turn it on and watch it go, it'll produce fuel. But... If you go to the tracking station, let a few days go by, and come back to your ISRU, no fuel will have been produced! The reason why has to do with the way it calculates these things. Basically, it runs all your parts for a day, individually. So, for example, it'll run your drill for a day - find that it produces a whole lot, but there's no place to store it, so your base has zero ore. Then it runs the ISRU, finds it has no input and produces nothing. So, to get ideal production out of an ISRU, what you have to do is have an ore tank big enough to store an entire kerbal-day worth of ore. Ouch. So yeah, having a big ore tank is a good idea. The ore tank size basically governs how much fuel the ISRU produces when you're not passing time at the base.
But the storage is one thing — what it's really bent about is this: "Need to set up the target for the world-specific parts". What that means is that it wants us to do is set the parts up for a particular body, you do that by clicking "Change Setup" in the part tweakables:
So yeah, set it up for Mun/Tier-0 and press "Setup All Parts". That'll put all of them in this configuration. Going forward, if you add new parts, it'll try to configure them automatically based on the body you choose here.
We should also address the storage issues for Shinies and Tier-4 Snacks and the crew problem before we go on to the "Calculator" view of the cupcake dialog.
First we should look at the crew tab which is telling us that we have to staff .6 engineers or technicians for the shinies & fertilizer and .6 engineers or miners for the drill. In this case, we could take any combination of those two types of kerbals. Plus we also need a farmer or a scientist for the farming part. For this base, we will also need scientists for the research lab and an engineer for the ISRU, so you could, at a minimum, go for 1 scientist, 1 engineer, and one miner.
The crew tab is breaking down for us what types of crew are needed for what parts. In this base, it's pretty easy to figure it out. You could just look at the requirements in the part details and get this far. But as you get up into more complicated bases, having the full list of crew requirements in one spot is helpful.
After that, you can go for as many hangers-on as you like, but that's the minimum to run the gear. One other thing you should take into consideration is that, although we said that we didn't strictly need to have fertilizer and Tier-0 Snacks storage, if we do actually have them, then we end up getting to Tier-1 faster, because progression is based on how much stuff you produce. If you only have a couple of Kerbals on board eating the snacks, then you won't progress as fast as if you were feeding the kerbals and making a stash of supplies.
So let's look at production with just the three kerbals and see where we are if we add the storage for fertilizer and snacks:
On this little base, we can see that we're actually using up almost all of the food that we produce in the farm with our three kerbals. We're producing a steady stream of 6 shinies per day, and we'll have a full load after a year or so. So why are we producing so much fertilizer? Well, if you look at the fertilizer factory in the parts detail, you see that has a "capacity" of 6 (meaning it makes 6 fertilizer per day) and a farm has a capacity of 2 (meaning it makes 2 food per day out of 2 fertilizer per day). So a fertilizer factory can actually support 3 farms, but we're only giving it one. Hence it produces an excess of 4 fertilizer per day. Okay, but since we've shown we don't really need more farms than we have, it's not that interesting.
If we look at our drill, it's actually got a capacity of 25 stuff - we're only using 12 of that right now - 6 on the fertilizer factory and 6 on the shinies factory. We also have engineers/technicians with time on their hands as we saw in the crew dialog. So, we could actually toss up a second shinies factory into the mix. We're still good on our production chain because we're producing 25 stuff, and consuming 18 of it. We're producing 6 fertilizer and using 2 of it, and 12 shinies to truck back to Kerban for some of those sweet sweet funds.
So yeah, there are a lot of means of getting stuff like this to orbit - you can build it in orbit with Konstruction or Extraplanetary Launchpads. But when you're talking this kind of scale, you can do it the Kerbal way by offsetting a lack of aerodynamic efficiency with more boosters. Whatever you want to do to get it there is up to you. You can download the craft file here:
https://github.com/SteveBenz/pksmedia/blob/master/craft/Mun%20Tier%200%20Base.craft
The production tab just shows us that the base is producing as it was predicted to at the SPH, the most interesting part is the "Progression" tab, which shows us how long we have to wait for a breakthrough:
We're going to be advancing to the next tier of production (which is the mining and fertilizer production) in very short order, but farming is going to lag way behind. That might seem surprising, but remember we have only .3 of a Kerbal actually working on maintaining the farm.
If you're in a hurry, you're going to want to add on a couple extra farms and make sure to have storage for the Tier-0 Snacks (to make sure you actually produce all the snacks). Once you get ready to make a Duna mission, where you really want to be certain of completing all your Tier-0 objectives before the next transfer window, that'll be pretty important.
But for now, our tenuous foothold on the Mun is going to require a few supply drops to keep it going. We're going to need to bring it supplies and take away the shinies every 300 days or so. So, here you are, building a space cargo vessel with some actual real cargo. The flexible tank types available through StockAlike Station Parts Expansion Redux and B9 Part Switch really do a great job here, because you can shift the cargo type in-flight. Today you're hauling snacks, then you're hauling rocket parts, whatever, all with the same ship. Basically, you can build a space truck like what's shown here, go to the transfer tab, and press the button. Bam. Snacks out, Shinies in, Refueled and ready to go.
Here I parked my lander pretty close. The requirement to do transfers is 2.2km (physics-range). While seasoned players will have little trouble getting far closer than that, we make it easy.
This mechanism only works amongst landed craft, for orbital stations, you have to dock. (Get Navyfish's Docking Port Alignment Indicator, and MechJeb's Smart RCS mode is extremely helpful.)
The automated decision maker is almost always going to do the right thing. One thing to watch for is that it takes into account whether there are Kerbals on board. So, for example, if you have a rover that's completely unmanned and initiate a transfer, it'll dump all the snacks out of the Rover (thinking it's being abandoned). If you put a Kerbal in it, it'll stock it with supplies instead. If you really have to get that fine-grained control over what gets moved, then have a look at Kerbal Attachment System - it'll allow you to link craft that are close to each other.
So yeah! A hundred days and the Mun base got those production & shinies breakthroughs!
But alas. While we can equip such gear, we're getting a whole lot of hate for the idea in the editor:
On landed bases, everything starts with scanning — you can't dig it up if you can't find it. If you have scanning and production tiers discovered (but nothing else), you could kit out a new base with a next-generation stuff-scrounger. That would work because the Tier-0 fertilizer factory & so forth can use the Tier-1 stuff that the scrounger delivers... But there's no advantage to it. You might as well wait. Consequently, it's most sensible to wait until you have scanning, production and farming up to the next tier before advancing to the next level of gear. Once you're ready to upgrade the tech in your landed base, an easy way to go is to start with the design for the last tier, "Configure" one of the parts, set it to the next tier and tell it to do that for all parts. Bam, instant Tier-1 base. However, usually you're going to want to expand on it and maybe fix some of the things you didn't like about the last generation. Expanding it is a good idea because not only are the demands to reach the next tier higher (requiring more kerbals), but the next tier is also substantially more effective - so even though you're doubling the capacity, you're not actually doubling the number of trips to it.
For the orbital base, you can either abandon it or you can design it in modular sections - so you can just undock and de-orbit the old hydroponic/scanning part and glue on a new one. Or you can just leave the old part stuck on there. No harm in that - unless you forget to shut down the old part (using the tweakables menu). If you don't shut it down, your crew might decide to operate it rather than the newer part.
One of the reasons why PKS insists on a full round-trip from a body to unlock it is to make sure that the player has a really good grip on how long the journey is. For a trip to Duna, assuming you use the minimum delta-V launch windows, you're looking at roughly 3 kerbal years for a there-and-back journey. It's gonna take some time.
To plan this thing, you should break the mission down:
- The en-route phase — where you'll need to house and feed all your kerbals for the ~300 day trip.
- The landed phase — where your station will be landed, with some of the crew on Duna and some in orbit
- The orbital phase — you'll need a pilot/geologist running the scanner
- The return phase — you'll probably want to take some or all of the crew home.
- If you choose to have crew stay at Duna, you'll need to figure out how long they'll have to wait for the next ship to arrive.
The cupcake calculator can't figure out what part belongs to what ship, so if you're figuring on a single-launch, you'll have to design each part of the ship separately and staff it up as you expect it to be for each phase.
Tier-0 and Tier-1 are the training wheels. In these tiers, you can easily use 2-star generalists (Scientists & Engineers) — a really trivial rank to achieve since all they have to do is land on Minmus. At Tier-2, the stakes go up a bit as now you need Kerbals that have been outside of Kerbal's SOI. The other new wrinkle is that the Scrounger now takes a new input, Crush-Ins, which have to be harvested away from the base.
For starters, you'll need to build a base, just like you did at Tier-1, with the caveat that it needs to have storage for Tier-2 "Crush-Ins". Likewise, you need to put a Scanner in orbit, just like before. That's all old-hat and nothing that new.
The new thing is that you should also build a rover or a vessel that's capable of mining and hauling some of those crushins. The crucial part is the Crush-Ins Scrounger:
Bolt that on to a rover or other small craft capable of hopping around on the configured body and configure it like all the other PKS parts. You'll also need some storage for Crush-Ins. Exactly how much depends on how many drills are at the base you're trying to supply.
Once you get this thing to the target world, you'll only have to fetch two loads of Crush-Ins yourself. After you've shown that the craft is capable of the job, you'll no longer need to fetch crush-ins at that base as_long_as_the_rover_is_parked_nearby! So you'll need one of these for each base, and, if you decide to take it for a spin somewhere, it's important to bring it back to the base before very long.
Once you've got your base landed and your crush-ins collector ready, the next thing to do is find some loose crush-ins. That's available as a menu item on the scanner.
When you click this - a waypoint will be created. The more scanners you have in orbit (defined simply as unmanned craft in a polar orbit), the closer the waypoint will be to your base. Get your rover/ship to within 150 meters of the waypoint and you'll be able to start the drill. This part is like any other tiered part - you'll need a Kerbal to run the drill (miner or engineer) and you'll need to keep them fed during the entire mission. As usual, they won't go Tourist for a week, but they won't drill if they don't have food. Note that the resource lode doesn't have an infinite amount of Crush-Ins, so you might need to visit more than one lode to fill your tank. Once you fill the tank, head back to base and initiate a "Transfer" through the Cupcake dialog.
Tip! Waypoint Manager is a great mod to help you navigate to waypoints.
Typically, it'll take your base about a week to chew through the crushins you just provided, after which you'll have to repeat the exercise.
Mod Author's Note! You'll find that scanner satellites are fantastically OP — if you have several of them the waypoints will be within a few km of your base. The reason is that controlling rovers is known to be more than a little bit dodgy in KSP and it's really kindof boring to drive them (except when they randomly spin out of control). I've personally had very little recent success with Bon Voyage... My rovers keep ending up upside down, wedged halfway in the planet, stuff like that. So, until there's a good solution, I'm sticking with trivial rover missions.
Make sure that you have a cache of reserve Tier-4 Snacks someplace where the Kerbals can't reach it but a robotic ship can. At some point, you're going to blow off one of those Kerbal Alarm Clock warnings or the game will glitch something or (hopefully not!) the mod will go sideways and cause your Kerbals to forget to farm. One thing to be particularly concerned about is Solar. If you leave the base at night, you might leave it with zero electrical charge. If you come back to it at night as well, it'll generate none and the whole production could be considered down for the whole duration of the time you last visited and the time you return. Lots of mods and stock game elements are at risk for this sort of thing, so it's a good habit to build even if you don't stick with PKS.
This mod is built to dovetail with EPL, and one of the things you can do with EPL upgrade your parts. That's right, if you have EPL installed and you've got a perfectly good Tier-2 base, you can bump the parts up to Tier-3 once you get the tech unlocked without sending down a whole new base! That sounds pretty good, eh? Well, here's how you do it:
- Before you get going you should double check that you've got kerbals that are actually qualified to run the next tier of gear! Review the crew requirements mentioned above, but for example, for Tier-3 producers, you need 4* generalists or 1* specialists.
- Next, you need yourself a qualified engineer or mechanic to do the upgrade - this will need to be a mechanic or engineer. For example, if you're upgrading to Tier-3, you'll need a 1* mechanic or 4* engineer. How much time it takes depends on the part, but it's usually 10 days. Usually you'll be doing this on a base that already produces rocket parts. Your best bet is to shut down the rocket-part factory and use the mechanics to do the upgrades. You can upgrade parts in parallel, but remember that each part requires a dedicated kerbal.
- You need some RocketParts on the station - the amount varies per part, but it's usually 500.
- You need some buffer. While the part is being upgraded it's not working at all. This can take down all or part of your production chain.
- You need to be careful of always upgrading parts in the right order; that's the tricky part.
The order is dictated by this fact: a converter can use higher-tier inputs, but not lower tier ones. That is, if we upgrade our farms first, that's bad news. A Tier-3 farm can't do anything with the Tier-2 fertilizer that your fertilizer factory is producing. If you upgrade the farm first, it's dead useless until the fertilizer and drill are upgraded. It's the same story we talked about before. You need to wait for the whole chain to be unlocked before you start in.
The first thing to do is upgrade the scanner in orbit, then the drills on the surface - you need to upgrade both the drill on the stations and the drill on your crush-ins rover! Once you do that, you'll need to do the crushins-gathering rigmarole again at the higher tier. So yeah, go to the scanner hub in orbit, locate the right tier of crushins, drive the rover out to it, suck some up, bring it back to the base (and yeah, you'll have to convert your storage over to the new tier of crushins), and dump it on the base. Assuming all goes well, your rover will resume auto-mining the crushins for you.
Now that the drill is upgraded, you can tackle the rest of the parts. Note that usually it's only strictly necessary to upgrade one of your farms.
The upgrade option only opens up at Tier-2 for most parts. (The scanner is the sole exception; it can be upgraded at Tier-0). The reasons are mainly these:
- The idea of Tier-0 and Tier-1 parts is that they're highly experimental. This rule is meant to mimic the idea that the parts need wholesale redesign to really make a go of it.
- It's easy for new players to get sideways with the tiered production; there are guardrails in the VAB that keep folks on the right path.
If you're really committed to upgrading your Tier-0 base, you can always use EPL to do just that.
When you really get far away from Kerbin, a mod like Extraplanetary Launchpads adds a great deal of fun to the game — it can be a drag waiting years for stuff to arrive from the homeworld. PKS does not disable the existing EPL production chain (through metals), but hopefully you'll find it more satisfying to use the PKS chain. The PKS Rocket Parts chain works similarly to the chain for Shinies, but differs in that you have to mix in "Complex Parts", which simulate parts that are just too complicated to make off-world. As you advance through the Off-World Construction tiers, you'll need fewer and fewer of these parts to make a Rocket Part. The Rocket Parts to actual rocket business is the same.
If you haven't played with EPL for a while, there have been a number of new changes that you might like. One of these is the ability to build onto your base. That is, you can place a "KS-MP Disposable Pad" on your base, which acts as a launchpad. When you build a vessel (or more likely a sub-module) on that pad, it gets bolted onto your base. Fantastic!
Be sure and report on your experience with this mod (good or bad) to the forum thread and feel free to file issues here on GitHub.