Can you make Xenon gas?

[Cant think of a username]

I can mine fuel and mono-propellant, but are there anyway I can mine or get Xenon from space? is there any mod? My ion crew transporter is out of Xenon gas and it's suck in kerbol orbit.

[peteletroll]

You can't mine xenon. Refueling mission!

[Cant think of a username]

5 hours ago, peteletroll said:

You can't mine xenon. Refueling mission!

Ok so are there any mod that can?

[ARS]

1 hour ago, Cant think of a username said:

Ok so are there any mod that can?

Do you want a renewable resource that's suitable for long range mission? AFAIK, I never come across a mod that allows you to make xenon gas (I could be wrong though). But if you want mods for sustainable long range mission fuel material, I can think of 3:

1. Buzzard Collector: this mod adds a gigantic (and by gigantic, I mean it. They are roughly 3-5 times the width of ISS) deployable collector dish, available in S/M/L sizes. The dish is extremely fragile, and can only be used in space. When supplied with electricity, it can (very slowly) turn Kerbol wind into fuel (it only generates liquid fuel, which, in vacuum, can only be used by nuke engine). Think of it like a "fuel panel" (that consumes electricity)

2. Solaris Hypernautics: this mod adds 2 new fuel resources: virtual particles and dust, alongside miscellaneous parts such as fuel tanks, boosters, and engines associated with those resources. It's easier to place on craft  than buzzard because of much smaller part sizes, but the resource chain is more demanding and/or complicated. Virtual particle requires reactor that consumes electricity to generate said particle, and just that. The trade off is, the thrust is extremely low (even lower than ion) and the electricity demand is extremely high (even more than ion). Luckily, said reactor can also consume xenon to generate electricity (xenon consumption rate is roughly lower than ion engine and much more higher electricity output than fuel cell). The dust resource is more complex: it requires dust collectors placed on the outside your craft to gather dust particles (only work in vacuum) and storing them in dust tanks. The part gathers dust passively, but you can feed it electricity to speed up the process (mind you, the output in passive is so low you need multiple collectors to get reasonable output per minute). After that, you use dust compressor to turn said dust into ore (also costs electricity) before storing it on ore tanks, and then use ISRU to turn said ore into LF, LF/OX or monoprop. The hardest part is setting the balance of collector parts vs resource consumption, but if you did it right, your craft is essentially self-sustaining in terms of fuel

3. GN Drive: this is the "cheat engine" mod for KSP (pun intended). It adds GN particle resources, which can be used for propulsion. The engine is extremely broken because: it naturally regenerates the particle at no cost, sometimes at a rate much higher than particle consumption, act as a reactor with respectable electricity output, can be used as antigrav engine that allows your ship to ignore gravity, and can be overdrived to provide even more thrust. So broken that sometimes it's easier to bolt this engine on unflyable design than fixing it, and the design will fly with flying colors through sheer thrust. Any craft becomes SSTA (to anywhere) with this thing strapped on. The overdrive mode is also handy for testing aerodynamic heating (you can literally reach escape velocity in level flight). The only limitation is your design's resistance against aerodynamic heating and large G-forces (30G with this thing overdrived is normal) as well as it's massive price tag: 40,000,000 kerbucks apiece

Edited July 20, 2020 by ARS

[Incarnation of Chaos]

Near future suite and specifically Kerbal Atomics and Near Future Electric has some Uranium Reprocessing kit that can turn Depleted Uranium into Xenon. And you can use the same reprocessor as IRSU for mining and refining Enriched Uranium, but how you end up depleting it is the bigger question. (Though technically most of the output should be "Depleted Uranium" since that's what's left after seperating the fissionable isotope).

[Spricigo]

https://spacedock.info/mod/1010/Xenon ISRU

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

There are a few mods out there that might help, including one that adds xenon production to the standard ISRUs.

Near Future Propulsion has a dedicated part that can harvest xenon (and argon) from atmospheres, but xenon is really rare in most cases so it takes a long time to get any plus it’s on the surface of a planet so you then need to carry it into space.

Near Future Electrical has a part that deals with nuclear waste and can produce xenon from that, but it’s pretty power hungry and you’ll probably need one of the reactors from that mod to power them if you want to produce xenon at a reasonable rate. Depleted fuel is cheap but pretty heavy too.

For a ship in a solar orbit you’ll need to send either a refuelling or a rescue mission, or just cheat and enable infinite propellant/change the values in the save file.

[Zhetaan]

This is my shortlist:

Near Future Propulsion:  Includes the Cryo Separator part that will strain xenon gas from the atmospheres of some planets.  However, the xenon is not generated by this mod, but rather by the bundled dependency Community Resource Pack.  The base implementation includes a 50% chance of being present in any other atmosphere and guaranteed presence in Kerbin's atmosphere, Kerbin's Water, and Laythe's Crater Bay--you have to mine the ground in those biomes; it's not in the water.  Although it is extremely inefficient to strain Kerbin's atmosphere for xenon (for the most part, Kerbin resources are more for testing purposes than anything else; you can simply buy most resources in the VAB, after all), xenon is expensive enough that it may be worth it, provided you're willing to be liberal in your use of time warp.

Near Future Electrical:  Includes the Nuclear Recycler part that can generate xenon from depleted nuclear fuel.  The problem with this is that it requires you to have a source of depleted fuel; i.e., a nuclear reactor.  Nuclear reactors are heavy, expensive, and require a lot of radiators.

USI Reactor Pack:  The link is to MKS, but there are, I think, several mods that make use of the USI Reactor Pack.  So far as I know, it is not available as a stand-alone mod but is a hard dependency for a few other USI mods, MKS being one of them.  These reactors are designed to give off a tiny amount of xenon gas as a side product.  Of course, like the Near Future reactors, these are neither lightweight nor cheap.

Community Resource Pack:  This mod does not include the parts needed to obtain resources; however, for most crustal resources, special harvesting parts are unnecessary because the stock drills serve adequately.  This includes asteroidal xenon, which has an 80% chance to appear.

 

I have not tried Xenon ISRU or any others.  You may notice a certain bias towards Community Resource Pack and asteroidal xenon.  From this list, it really is your best option.

... Aside from more conventional propulsion, that is.  To be completely honest, a reusable crew shuttle that also makes a point of using the most expensive and difficult-to-obtain resource in the stock game seems to me to defeat the purpose.  However, I say that without judgment; it's your game.  On the other hand, it's also your stranded crew.

Edited July 20, 2020 by Zhetaan