ISRU stops making fuel

[Tibrogargan]

I have a lander on the Mun that's intended to hop around collecting science and refueling itself.  It seems to be OK with mining ore and refining it into fuel as long as you focus on it.  If you switch to something else, it stops making fuel.  When you come back, the drills say the ore rate is n/a.

Anyone have any ideas where I could start with looking for the problem?  The lander is probably not designed well, but there's nothing that stands out as egregiously wrong.

The lander does have decouplers separating the ISRU and drill sections from the main body, in case the kerbals need to get back to Kerbin on their own.  The decouplers do not have crossfeed enabled - does that affect ore flow, or just fuel?

Edited October 15, 2018 by Tibrogargan

[bewing]

24 minutes ago, Tibrogargan said:

The lander does have decouplers separating the ISRU and drill sections from the main body, in case the kerbals need to get back to Kerbin on their own.  The decouplers do not have crossfeed enabled - does that affect ore flow, or just fuel?

I think that depends on your game difficulty settings. If you clicked the button that says "Resource transfer obeys crossfeed rules", then I think it can affect ore flow.

However, in general, "background" mining and processing of fuel (when the craft is outside physics range) has its own "batch processing" rules. IIRC, it only updates the mining/processing once every 6 game hours.

So, did you leave the vessel untouched for 6 hours before you came back to it?

 

Edited October 15, 2018 by bewing

[Tibrogargan]

4 minutes ago, bewing said:

So, did you leave the vessel untouched for 6 hours before you came back to it?

 

Yes sir, I left it long enough for it to process about 150 science, which is about 15 days or so.  No fuel made.  Currently seeing what happens if I leave the drills running but not the ISRU.

[bewing]

21 minutes ago, Tibrogargan said:

Yes sir, I left it long enough for it to process about 150 science, which is about 15 days or so.  No fuel made.  Currently seeing what happens if I leave the drills running but not the ISRU.

Which version of the game was this, then, please? Did you get the 1.5 upgrade? Was it tested after the upgrade?

 

[Tibrogargan]

10 minutes ago, bewing said:

Which version of the game was this, then, please? Did you get the 1.5 upgrade? Was it tested after the upgrade?

 

Yes, tested after the upgrade.  I think I see what's going on.  Ore was mined, then when I switched on the ISRU it ran out of power and shut down in the middle of the night, but both the ISRU and drills showed that they were still running.  Version 2 needs moar batteries.

[bewing]

Interesting! That seems surprising if EC usage is now being modeled during batch processing. I'll have to look at that. It didn't use to be modeled.