[Really WIP] So I've gone over to the dark side and turned into a modmaker...

[shimmy00]

Yes. It happened.

 

After 2 years of KSP playing and enjoying both the stock game and others' mods, I felt the need to create my own. I'd been looking for a good Life Support mechanic for the game, but was not particularly satisfied with the various other mods out there for this purpose, e.g. TAC, Kerbalism and Snacks! because either they were too complicated, the artwork was not ideal (simply rescaled versions of the same part to make different sizes, or even different functionalities, which looks kinda meh), or else the mechanic felt unrealistic or just not to my taste in some way.

 

And so I thought - why not take the plunge and build my own mods to try and address these deficiencies? I had past experience with coding, 3D graphics modelling and other stuff, though hadn't done the latter in a while so I started to fire something up. Had to learn much of Blender and all of Unity on the fly for this project but I finally managed to get something working, and so now have the following set of mods which I call the "Very Simple Life Support System (VSLS)". It is based on the following principles, though this is not yet fully implemented.

 

1. Kerbals use two resources - Food and Oxygen -- to stay alive. Their health is modeled by an HP (hit points) value, initially 100.

2. If no oxygen is available to a Kerbal, it begins losing HP at the rate of 1 HP/s.

3. If no food is available to a Kerbal, it begins losing HP at the rate of 0.0001 HP/s after its first missed meal.

4. When HP reaches 0, the Kerbal dies. Thus it takes 100 s for a Kerbal to die of oxygen loss and 1 Ms for it to die of food loss (starvation), starting at full health.

5. If provisions are restored before death, lost HP regens at a rate of 0.005 HP/s.

6. A Kerbal eats one unit of food once every Kerbin day (21 600 s). The mass of a unit of food is 100 g (0.0001 t) and assumed to have a volume of 0.2 L (density 500 g/L). I base this off that a Kerbal is about half the size of a human.

7. A unit of oxygen resource is taken as a litre of oxygen at 100 kPa. A Kerbal consumes 0.01 L O2/s, thus 0.01 U/s. This is a bit less than half that for the average human, based on considering Kerbals as a smaller sized analogue for humans.

8. Oxygen tanks are pressurized to 200 bar (20 000 kPa). The oxygen contents are based on this figure and the actual volume of the tank in the artwork.

 

Stock pods that contain drawers marked “FOOD” or “SNACKS” come pre-loaded with 10 units of food per passenger seat. All pods are loaded with 600 units of oxygen (a small, 3 liter tank’s worth) for each passenger seat. I do not simulate waste, because it is meant to keep the mechanic simple as said.

 

Supplemental oxygen tanks and food fridges can be fit as needed which provide much larger resources. I don’t yet have an ISRU unit though at this point since it's still WIP; my plan would be to integrate this mod with others that would provide such (some mods already have oxygen processors; the trick is a food processor).

 

Other effects like radiation etc. are NOT included. The idea here is that those could be provided by other, separate yet compatible, mods.

 

Admittedly the artwork part is, alas, still lacking. But it's a good exercise anyways.

 

A setup showing a rocket with life support detail added on top below the parachute (note I'm playing with Nertea's Restock parts btw in this game - love his stuff, real damn cool). The upper can is meant to be an oxygen tank holding 7200 units (enough for 720 ks of flight time, or 33 Kerbal days), and the lower can is food storage (300 meals).

 

 

 

Edited September 26, 2021 by shimmy00