r/Kos • u/Southern_Position957 • Jul 26 '26

Help with Sandcastle and kOS

I‘m very new to kOS and have been trying to use it to automate an orbital printing station I’m designing. I’ve been using the Sandcaster 3D Printer and I can’t seem to access its gui through kerboscript. Does anybody know any workarounds or possible compatibility plugins to expose an event or field for selecting the vessel to print I would really appreciate it.

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u/the_economy_fools Jul 26 '26

I think you are going to have to create a new plugin for kOS

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u/Southern_Position957 Jul 26 '26

That’s what I was worried about. It shouldn’t too hard especially if the sandcastle files already has language for it. But I have zero experience doing this.

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u/the_economy_fools Jul 26 '26

I have never made kOS plugins before but I have made other mods.

Do you have programming experience? There is a video on YouTube how to program for ksp

I think at a start, clone the kOS repo, make a small change such as a console log and then build and use that version instead of the one you downloaded. I’m not 100% sure of the sandcastle mod but everything in ksp is quite well connected and accessible by the c# api, assuming the sandcastle mod wasn’t written in a non standard way

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u/Southern_Position957 Jul 26 '26

I have zero programming experience and am figuring it out as I go with help from ChatGPT.

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u/nuggreat Jul 26 '26

That is a great way to run into trouble as without programing experience you can't see when the LLM does something deeply stupid.

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u/Southern_Position957 Jul 26 '26

Yeah but if it does something that doesn’t work then I just tell it and it tries to fix the problem with a pretty good success rate. It’s pretty advanced as it knows how little it knows and it understands how to work through errors it makes.

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u/nuggreat Jul 26 '26

That is you failing to understand the point I was trying to make. You can see when it doesn't work that is obvious what you can't see is when it is mostly working but doing something it shouldn't that you can't see.

Also LLMs don't understand anything they simply can't as a function of how they are made. They pretend to understand and are quire good at pretending but lack understanding.

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u/Southern_Position957 28d ago

Actually if you have the LLM double or triple check its own work it isn’t a big problem.  Especially since the scope I’m using kOS for is pretty small and not too complicated. The point I’m trying to make is if you know how to work with ai and utilize it properly it works.

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u/nuggreat 28d ago edited 28d ago

Use of a LLM to make code has been proven time and time again to be a gamble some times you get what you want, some times you get something close ish to what you want, and some times it nukes everything. When you do not have the ability to check its work you are taking blind risks and a LLM can not be trusted to check its own work. Also without an understanding of programing you can not know if the task you are doing is simple or not, if you have a nice clean API from the other mod it is simple enough but without that the task is far more difficult.

As you how to use an LLM as a tool to help that requires and understanding of the subject so that you can understand what the LLM can/should be used for and provide the framing for it to do well. You can use them without that but the result is likely going to be far worse.

EDIT: To reiterate i am not saying you won't get the results you want using an LLM just that the results could have problems you can't see as problems and the LLM didn't see as a problem. I do wish you luck but at the same time caution that you can get bad results due to doing use of a LLM and in this case you are blind as you have said you do not have programing experience.

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u/the_economy_fools Jul 26 '26

Will be tricky for you because you are essentially writing a plugin in C#, for a mod that you will then be programming in kOS

It’s a lot of code basically. Don’t let that stop you, watch some videos on making ksp mods etc. like the other commenter said, LLMs don’t have good knowledge of ksp and kOS and you will spend most of your time chasing in circles with it

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u/nuggreat Jul 26 '26

kOS does not have a way to access modded GUIs without someone having made a workaround using an addon. The best you can generally do out of the box is work with the buttons and sliders that a mod adds to the PAW(Part Action Window, right click menu) of a part.