seanth

Would you be willing to expand on this? I agree that what's currently on Github is too complex, but what I think is too complex might not be what other people think is complex. Can you give specifics on what is just too much?

I'm in the process of trying to come up with values for Easy, Normal and Hard modes of Biomass, and am looking at this, too. Along those lines, I'd love to hear from people as to what these different modes would mean to them. I have heard some people say that micromanagement would make something too hard, and others say that too slow growth rates would make things too hard. So what do you think? For example, if a greenhouse is 3.5m long and 2.5m in diameter, the approximate growing area is 8.75m^2. That's about the size of a parking spot. How long do people think it should take for the growing biomass to fill that area (imagine it grows like kudzu. More horizontal and not much vertical)? Right now I'm imagining providing files that would work with Module Manager to let players choose what difficulty level, and here's my very vague idea of what the levels would be like. Ideally all difficulty levels would have all the same parts, but they would act in different ways: Easy: 1 Greenhouse makes enough food, O2, and purifies water to support 3 Kerbils (using stock TAC-LS) indefinitely. The same greenhouse also produces enough biomass to make monopropellant, liquid fuel, and oxidizer. Kethane production would be optional. Compressor parts needed to make the fuels, but they work automatically and don't consume electricity. Plants do not respire. All chemical reaction inputs and outputs are accurate, but the rates are very fast. It would be very difficult to kill all the biomass in a greenhouse. Normal: 1 Greenhouse makes enough O2 and purifies water to support 2 Kerbils (using TAC-LS) indefinitely. Plants respire, meaning you will need to use greenhouse lights for optimal growth. If you also want to make food or fuel, you will require an additional greenhouse. You can make monopropellant, liquid fuel, and oxidizer. Kethane production would be optional. Compressor parts are needed to make fuel, and they consume a minimal amount of electricity. All chemical reaction inputs and outputs are accurate, but the rates are faster than reality. It would be possible to kill all the biomass in a greenhouse, but not likely. Hard: 1 Greenhouse makes enough O2 and purifies water to support 1 Kerbil (using TAC-LS) indefinitely. Plants respire, meaning you will need to use greenhouse lights for optimal growth. If you also want to make food or fuel, you will require an additional greenhouse. You can make monopropellant, liquid fuel, and oxidizer. Kethane production would be optional. Compressor parts are needed to make fuel, and they consume a lot of electricity. All chemical reaction inputs and outputs are accurate, but the rates are close to reality. If you try and make food and fuel from a greenhouse, you'll definitely kill the biomass off through over harvesting. Along these lines: Greenhouses would make food, though less efficiently than if players used the Koylent Maker. I'm pretty resistant to the idea of XenonGas generation through biological processes. I suppose it could happen in the Easy version, but there is simply no way in any universe that you can get a nobel gas from a biological process...unless the life form is some sort of radioactive creature. So, please do say something about how you think the levels should work.

Is there a way to toggle whether oxygen is consumed by kerbils while on the launch pad? I'm interested in testing things groundside without having to launch into orbit.

Is there documentation on generator somewhere? Herp. Github code is the best documentation

Oh, I totally love the RealismVariable idea.I think we can pull it off (I have some ideas)

Ok, thanks Lazro and astropapi

Yes, please. I'm a fan of mods that do one thing and do it well. So, while it makes sense that Interstellar wants to be able to harvest gasses fro other planets, it would be much nicer to have the gas harvesting dll separate from the other parts needed for Interstellar. Having to rely on the entire Interstellar dll just for the ability to harvest gasses isn't very convenient.

This is for players going back a few releases If I understand correctly, Squad changes the densities of resources back around 0.18 I wasn't playing KSP at the time, but am curious what the resources were at that point. Specifically whether XenonGas was around back then, and whether that resource's density was changed at that time. I ask because that resource is not consistant with the others (it's off by a factor of 1000) I'm just looking for a sanity check.

Point 1: Why bundle the greenhouse work in with TAC-LS? Why not a TAC-Greenhouse mod that is 100% compatible with TAC-LS? If you went that route then Roboto and you could just work together. Maybe have a gui where the player could choose "easy" or "hard" for how the greenhouse worked. IMHO BioMass has some good models, but needs a coder and more testing to balance rates. Your coding, Roboto's models and all the eager testers here would whip a TAC-BioMass mod into shape pretty quickly. Point 2: I submitted an enhancement request for atmospheric "mining" to kethane. We'll see if it gets picked up.

Yeah. I'm still trying to balance rates. How everything works feels correct to me, but the rates are not correct. Growth rate is probably realistic, but boring, and CO2 consumption/O2 production is probably too fast. I need to look at it closer. As for the greenhouse doing that weird expansion thing: I hadn't noticed that. Or did you mean the Station Hubs? Because that's a known problem.

As an actual plant biologist I think I can help out. I sent you a PM and we can talk details. In general would would be great is to somehow tie in the biological processes with the biological mass. So, for example, more units of biomass present would result in more O2 production per unit time. Also, a way to deselect ships, reselect them some time later and have resources calculated would be great. Gug. Someday I will learn not to end drafting a message too early. Right now, Roboto and I are assuming that BioMass is glucose, so we do track sugar, but call it Biomass. Transpiration and Respiration are different processes. You can effectively ignore transpiration in my opinion. Respiration always takes place: 1BioMass(C6H12O6)+6(O2)-->6(CO2)+6(H2O) Photosynthesis is 3 to 4x greater than respiration: 1Biomass+6(CO2)+6(H2O)+light-->2Biomass(C6H12O6)+6(O2) The holidays have gotten in the way of me revising things, but the respiration is going to be in line with the calculations you did for TAC-LS. So, 1 unit (kg) of biomass would, for example Respire:0.1795units of biomass+0.04097units of O2 --> 0.1717units of water + 0.0488units of CO2 per 1 human day Photosynthesis would be the opposite reaction and 3.7x greater: 0.6353units of water + 0.1806units of CO2 --> 0.6642units of biomass+0.1516units of O2 Right now I have photosynthesis 3.7x greater than respiration, but in the presence of wasteWater, the rate increases to 4x Dead biomass is what is called Biocake in the science+ version. It's used to make food or fuel in what's on github.

No problem. You can get the github version at https://github.com/VigilanteInc/BioMass. I'll ping Roboto and see if he'll update the OP.

From a purely selfish perspective, I'd like to see it more biological (i.e. what's on github) than what Chris_W is proposing. Chris_W has some good ideas, but are not necessarily in the same vein as what Roboto and I have been talking about.

When I approached Roboto initially, I just wanted to make things more biologically realistic. The "tutorial" idea is just because I'm a plant biology professor and I (unfortunately) think game mechanics that are are pedological tools are cool. That's cool. I'm going to try and look at it tonight and run some tests to see how well it does in matching the balanced rxns. I have no reason to think it won't do well. At the very least, it'd be nice to have the spaceport and github versions have the same parts that do the same general things, even if exactly _how_ they do them differs. My hope is that the two versions will evolve closer and closer until they become one that fuses accurate biology and chemistry with fun and...fishtankiness.

The Spaceport and github versions of BioMass are becoming increasingly divergent. I think we might want to talk about how to unify things so we have a single mod. We need to find a way to make BioMass useful, fun and yet not too much of a cheat. In general, my approach since joining Roboto has been to make things biologically realistic, but not too boring. At the same time, I (personally) want to force the player to make decisions in how they use the biomass mod: do they want it for O2/CO2 control and water purification, food production, or fuel production. Allowing all three, or even two at a time, would make biomass too much of a cheat imho. So, do you want to breath, eat, or go places? If you want all three, be prepared to make a big station/ship. Here's what is on Github part and purpose wise. Any biologic/chemical process (respiration, photosynthesis, biofuel production) is done in a realistic, mass balanced way (masses of reactants going in equals the masses of products coming out). Underlined items are the resources. Might seem complex, but it's actually a lot simpler than rocket science O2 compressor/regulator: Compresses O2 gas into oxidizer for use with liquid fuel/releases oxidizer pressure to make breathable O2 H2 compressor/regulator: Compresses H2 gas into monopropellant/releases monopropellant into H2 gas for use in biofuel reactions (if needed) CO2 compressor/regulator: Compresses CO2 gas into compressed CO2/releases compressed CO2 into gas plants can use O2/H2/CO2/Compressed CO2/water tanks: tanks to hold those things Cryogenic Atmospheric Separator: Purifies O2, CO2, N2, H2, Xenon and Kethane from Kerbin's atmosphere. Seed bank: Store Seeds Snack container: Stores food Plant Greenhouse: In presence of light, seeds are converted to biomass. In the light: Biomass takes water and CO2 and converts it to O2 and more biomass. Always: Biomass consumes O2 and biomass to produce water and CO2 (yes, plants respire. Just about 4x slower than they photosynthesize). In the dark: converts biomass into Seeds. Using wasteWater makes the biomass grow faster. Activate a harvester on the greenhouse and you get biocake. The growth rate of the biomass should be nearly the same as the rate of the harvester. The greenhouse has lights that can replace the sun if you go behind a planet. This is important since the biomass respires (will consume O2 and "eat" itself in the dark). Algae Greenhouse: Works exactly the same as the Plant Greenhouse, but using wasteWater results in faster growth AND clean water BioReactor: Biocake is converted into liquidFuel along with some gasses. This used to be much more complicated, involving a Fermenter and Reactor, but now the fermentation and transesterification steps are invisible to the player and it all "happens" in this one part. Koylent Maker: Biocake and seeds are combined to make food. Composter: Takes all sorts of things (biomass, biocake, seeds, solidWaste, even liquidFuel) and breaks it down into gasses or Kethane. Adding water results in wasteWater for use in the greenhouses Bio Containment Study: Provides science points Biological Systems Study: Provides science points Station Hubs: Their role is sort of evolving Plans: A bit more balancing on rates of biomass growth and conversion to food or fuel. I'd also like to see a whole series of science parts that act as tutorials, telling a player how things work. For example, a mini greenhouse experiment(s) where the player learns that seeds-->biomass, biomass respires, biomass photosynthesizes, etc. Yeah. The generator modules that Squad uses really suck. If you have two input resources and one output resource, and run out of one of the inputs, the other input will continue to be consumed. Pretty much makes doing balanced chemical reactions impossible. Kethane come with better generator modules, thus the reliance on the kethane dll. I'm not necessarily wedded to using the Kethane dll. If the TACLS dll can mimic the biology, it makes _more_ sense to use it vs kethane since kethane is about mining resources.

Yeah. I definitely don't want to have a part for each planet. I _think_ the interstellar mod allows for planets with unique atmospheres, but the code to do so is rolled in with all the rest of the mod's code. I'd love it if such things were offered on their own vs bundled, or at least bundled into a mod that focuses on similar things. For example, if the Kethane mod allowed for "mining" of gasses, that would make sense to me since Kethane is already about recovering resources.

I completely agree with your approach. One could easily achieve this by having an atmospheric extractor for each planet. If the plugins (dlls) for mods could be written in python OR if cfg files could have simple embedded code in them to see what planet the active craft is on, I could very easily do exactly what you propose above. So, you didn't over simplify things at all. The difficulty is in how parts, plugins and the game interact. Along those lines, if someone is looking for a dll project, I have some clear ideas on dll modules I'd love to see if anyone is interested

Oh, I totally agree. Right now there isn't a good way to define gasses on a pre-planet basis. We're working on it, though.

Keep in mind that smaller massed organisms have faster metabolisms, as a rule. Mice and elephants have the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. But these are pretend aliens, so I don't think things need to nail human metabolic rates exactly. FWIW, prior to seeing your spreadsheet from when I posted on github, I had worked out similar back-of the envelope numbers. My values are nearly the same as your: Mass Kerbal (kg): 31.25 Mass Suit (kg): 58.75 Oxygen consumption (kg/86400sec): 0.4234 Water consumption (kg/86400sec): 1.7742 Food consumption (kg/86400sec): 0.3125 Solid waste production (kg/86400sec): 0.0554 Liquid waste production (kg/86400sec): 1.9506 CO2 production (kg/86400): 0.5040 consumption mass is equal to production mass: (0.4234+1.7742+0.3125)=(0.0554+1.9506+0.5040), taking rounding errors into account I'm embarrassed to say that I then assumed plant respiration would consume 1 kg of biomass in 10,800sec (1 kerbal night. 3 hours) and adjusted all other growth rates from there. I'm going to fix that, but thought it'd be nice if I used the same respiration rate as TACLS

Can't help then. Sorry.

I moved this from the old thread-STH I assume you are using the github science+ atmospheric extractor? It's odd that the monopropellant should be working fine but xenon is not. We assume Xenon is 9.5x more common in Kerbin's atmosphere than hydrogen (which is compressed to monopropellant). Can you attach a screenshot? The following can act as a rough estimate of how rapidly gasses(and water) can be recovered. The percentages translate into rates of recovery 1:1: 78.08% Nitrogen 20.95% Oxygen 0.035% Carbon Dioxide 0.0001745% Kethane 0.000524% Xenon 0.000055% Hydrogen ~1.0% other gasses 1% water

I assume you are using the github science+ atmospheric extractor? It's odd that the monopropellant should be working fine but xenon is not. We assume Xenon is 9.5x more common in Kerbin's atmosphere than hydrogen (which is compressed to monopropellant). Can you attach a screenshot? The following can act as a rough estimate of how rapidly gasses(and water) can be recovered. The percentages translate into rates of recovery 1:1: 78.08% Nitrogen 20.95% Oxygen 0.035% Carbon Dioxide 0.0001745% Kethane 0.000524% Xenon 0.000055% Hydrogen ~1.0% other gasses 1% water EDIT: I'm posting this on the other, newer thread as well

I'm interested in helping if you'll have me.

Is this a closed topic? I ask only because I'm putting final touches on a greenhouse and the 1 unit/Kerbal/day for everything is unpossible to accomplish and maintain mass balance. 1 unit O2/Kerbal/day would be a good compromise, but the resulting food/water intake and CO2/waste production will necessarily not be 1 unit/kerbal/day

I am new to the idea of the Modular Fuel System. Can this be adapted to have capsules have atmospheres in that a capsule would hold oxygen, co2 and nitrogen "fuels", but the maximum amount of those combined would have to equal the available volume in the capsule?