Lonapse

Radio chatter mod for Kerbal Space Program that reacts dynamically to your flight and EVA.

Your crew talks to Mission Control and to each other about what is actually going on during the flight or EVA. A quiet coast in orbit stays mostly quiet. A capsule tumbling through space gets a crew shouting over each other while Mission Control tries to keep them calm. Probes get their own voice too in the form of beeping noises. This way your crew will react dynamically to your flight and EVA!

loñapsE is the language of the kerbals. Under the hood it is Spanish with every word spelled backwards ("Separación" becomes "nóicarapeS"), rendered with a text to speech voice and pitched up. It sounds like a real language without being one you can follow. If you are not fluent in loñapsE, the English subtitles show what your Kerbals are saying. They are on by default.

Each kerbal has their own voice based on their gender, and their own personality too! The personality is based on the Kerbal's stats as seen in the Astronaut Complex. For example, a Kerbal with high stupidity would make more jokes in flight, while one that has a low stupidity would make fewer jokes. The voice is generated based on a seed, and the seed stays the same even after restart. That means that the Kerbals will keep the voice that is unique to them.

0.8.2

This update focuses mostly on impoving the ambience with new sound effects. Additionally, it changes the way science is communicated by running the lines at runtime and puts new checks for docking in place.

New

• Airlock sounds. Docking and undocking have an airlock sound now. It plays on contact when you dock and when you undock.
• Undocking talks. About five seconds after an undock, when the airlock sound is done, a kerbal says a line over the radio. A probe does this too, with beeps.
• A calm docking is no longer silent. A slow close approach, under 0.4 m/s, used to get no lines at all. Now a kerbal calls the distance and Mission Control answers. A fast, tense approach still plays the recorded scenes.
• Distance callouts. At 500, 250 and 100 m, and again at 30, 15 and 5 m, a kerbal calls the distance and Mission Control answers. The same goes for probes. Before, a probe was silent until the dock itself.
• Other chatter waits during a docking approach. From the approach call until the dock, an undock, a lost target or at most 240 s, no other chatter, chat, report or event call starts. Crew lost and parts lost still come through, and so does everything once the crew gets stressed.
• The mod checks that you mean to dock. Before the docking calls start, you must target another ship. The mod looks for three signs: the target has a free port of the same size, you fly from one of your ports (Control From Here) or target a port, and the two ports face each other. With two of them the docking call always comes, so a normal docking needs no Control From Here. With one it often comes. Going up on debris or an asteroid now rarely gets a docking call.
• Added new settings under Sounds to toggle the new sound effects.
• Flag sound. Planting a flag has its own sound.
• Enter and exit sounds. Entering and exiting the ship now have sounds too.
• Jetpack sounds. Switching the EVA jetpack on or off has a click and a hiss. While the thrusters fire, a soft hiss loops under the radio and fades out when you let go.
• Ground thuds. A kerbal who falls over on the ground gets a heavy thud, at the same moment as the fall lines. Landing after a jump or a jetpack flight gets a lighter one.
• Footsteps. An EVA kerbal makes footsteps. Walking, running, backwards and sideways follow the playing walking animation.
• Volume sliders for the sound effects. Hatch, airlock, jetpack (switch and thrusters together), helmet breathing, ground thud and footsteps each have a slider to adjust the volume.
• Science talk is spoken live now. The lines can say what really was tested by the player. Every stock experiment has 28 to 31 talks of its own, and 29 more fit any experiment. There are 535 total talks. If you do multiple experiments at the same time, they will be sent as 1 batched radio message instead of separate radio messages.
• More probe talk. Every probe core has 10 new scenes with Mission Control: chats, hails and sleepy moments, in the character of that core. These are done on runtime.

Changed

• The settings window is wider. The name column is wider too, so long names fit and the value at the right of a slider stays in view.

Fixed

• Fall lines wait until the kerbal is calm. After a fall, the talk starts when the kerbal has not been tumbling for 1.5 s, and at the latest 12 s after the first fall. Before, it could start in the middle of a second fall.

• Kerbals no longer sometimes sound very deep and slow. Each kerbal plays at their own pitch, pushed apart from the rest of the crew and lowered a little under G. For a low-voiced kerbal this could undo the whole Kerbal shift. It happened most on stations with many kerbals, in intercom chats and under high G. The pitch now has a floor, so every kerbal keeps the Kerbal sound. On a big station the voices sit a bit closer together because of this. G strain lowers the voice by at most 6% instead of 12%.

• Tense and panicking kerbals no longer sound like chipmunks. Under stress the crew voice went up in pitch, in the recordings and again in game. That is gone. A tense or panicking kerbal now has their normal voice and only talks a bit faster.

• Reset data gets no report. The talk waits until the results dialog is closed. An experiment you reset or discard there is left out. Data you keep or transmit still gets its report.

For modders

• The runtime tables have three new kinds, undock, dock_close and dock_callout, and three new events for on=, undock, dockclose and dockcallout. The lines are in Phrases/Runtime/undock.tsv and dock_close.tsv.
• New runtime kind science_talk: a kerbal and Mission Control after an experiment, in Phrases/Runtime/science_talk.tsv. New values {temp_c}, {press_kpa}, {grav_g}, {sci_flight} and {exp_runs}. See docs/API.md.

Install

1. Download CKAN.
2. Search the mod "Lonapse"
3. Click the checkbox and press "Apply".
4. The mod will now install automatically, and you will get updates when they release!

OR

1. Download Lonapse-0.8.2.zip using the download button.
2. Copy the GameData/Lonapse folder into the GameData folder of your KSP install.

That's all. Lonapse has no dependencies.

To update, delete the old GameData/Lonapse folder first, but keep GameData/Lonapse/PluginData if you want to keep your settings.

Settings

Click the antenna button on the toolbar in flight. There you can set how chatty the radio is, the volumes, which events Mission Control reacts to, the probe behaviour, the subtitles, time warp chatter and a bunch more just to your liking. Most of the new lines need the runtime voice, so keep "Speak names and new lines at runtime" in the General tab on.

Hotkeys:

• Alt+Y mutes and unmutes.
• Alt+C starts or stops the launch countdown on the pad.

You can change both keys in the window.

Settings are saved in GameData/Lonapse/PluginData/settings.cfg.

Compatibility

• Built and tested on KSP 1.12.5. Other 1.12 versions should work but I have not tried them.
• I play the Windows version of KSP on Linux under Proton. Windows and macOS should be fine since it is a plain plugin, but I have not tested them.
• The runtime voice (names and real numbers) works on Windows and Linux. On macOS only the recorded lines play. The Linux build of the runtime voice is not tested in game.
• The runtime voice starts a small program (Piper) next to KSP. It runs on your own computer and downloads nothing. If your virus scanner complains, the file hashes are in the readme on GitHub. Lonapse keeps working without it.
• Don't run it together with Chatterer. Both would talk at the same time.
• RemoteTech is supported for the radio signal simulation, but I have not tested it in game yet.
• Modded probe cores get a generic probe voice, unless the mod gives them their own.

Known limits

• Subtitles are English only.
• The download is fairly big (about 190 MB) because of the voices.
• Not everything has been tried in every situation. I need help with this! If something sounds wrong, please open an issue in the GitHub and attach your KSP.log. Lines from this mod start with [Lonapse].

Credits and license

Inspired by Chatterer. Lonapse contains none of its code or sounds.

The voices are spoken by Piper, a neural text to speech engine, with three Spanish voice models. Their credits are in the GitHub in audio/CREDITS.md. The beeps and static are synthesized.

I wrote the mod with help from Claude (an AI assistant) for code and documentation. The design, the testing in game and the decisions are my own.

The code is MIT licensed. The sounds and the phrase text are CC BY 4.0. The runtime voice keeps its own licences (MIT, GPL-3.0 for espeak-ng, and CC0, Apache-2.0 and the Unlicense for the voices). See LICENSE on GitHub.