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BioMass Ongoing Development


Roboto

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What am I doing wrong?

here is a screen shot of the ship...

EDIT: sorry drop box was full had to remove these images

the greenhouse seems to be working ok. it has filled up with biomass, and filled the ship with oxygen. it is supplying the soilent green factory with biomass and it has filled my ship with food. however the microbiome does not seem to be making liquid fuel, oxidizer or monopropellant. as yo ucan see I have 3 of them on the ship, and 3x all the gas compressor modules. as well as storage facility for all the gasses. so why is it not making the fuels?

Edited by Bit Fiddler
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here is a screen shot of the ship...

First of all, those are some great images. Nice ship design.

however the microbiome does not seem to be making liquid fuel, oxidizer or monopropellant.

I can easily answer on of those: Oxidizer==compressed oxygen. To make oxidizer, you just need to compress the oxygen gas.

For liquid fuel, make sure you have biocake, hydrogen and CO2 that the bioreactor can use.

To get monopropellant (hydrogen), there a number of ways. It gets sort of complicated, but only because we aimed to maintain mass balanced reactions. All of these happen in the microbiome:

-If you are using TAC life support, waste will break down to hydrogen and CO2, but you need to actively remove(compress them), because CO2 and hydrogen will be converted into kethane gas and oxygen.

-If you start with biomass, biocake, or seeds, these will be broken down to carbon dioxide and kethane gas. The kethane gas, in the presence of oxygen, will convert to carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

We should make a flowchart....

Lemme know if this help. :)

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What am I doing wrong?

here is a screen shot of the ship...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75023494/SS_03-12-2014_23-25-22.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75023494/SS_03-12-2014_23-41-01.png

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75023494/SS_03-12-2014_23-50-31.png

the greenhouse seems to be working ok. it has filled up with biomass, and filled the ship with oxygen. it is supplying the soilent green factory with biomass and it has filled my ship with food. however the microbiome does not seem to be making liquid fuel, oxidizer or monopropellant. as yo ucan see I have 3 of them on the ship, and 3x all the gas compressor modules. as well as storage facility for all the gasses. so why is it not making the fuels?

Yep definitely an awesome craft!

I noticed from the pics that I don't see a BioReactor attached....

This guy

BLv4L91.png

That's the part that will convert biomass to liquid fuel.

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ah the bio reactor is not attached no... I thought the micro biome module was the fuel guy...

@seanth I do have Biocake, H, and CO2. The resource panel shows all of these are full. I guess the question is; "am I missing a part? ... (BioReactor)?" or will the microbiome do it for me. and if all I need is micro biome why is it not pulling the resources from the supply and consuming it?

As for the ship design. I love designing and making ships... This one has been my long term project. I am making it in career mode so I keep adding the new parts in as I get them researched. If you notice all the docked modules are "Probes" with full RCS capability, self sufficient power, reaction wheels etc. so they can be docked, undocked, moved to new spots or new ships. Or even just turned loose in the wild to be used later.

I have a "shuttle" that can dock and re-land as well, but it is on the surface right now swapping out crew. I'll post a screen shot of it docked next time I get it up there.

on a side note...

is the system totally self sufficient? or will I eventually need to resupply one of the resources. and what about CO2, waste, waste water? will the system consume as much as I make? or is there some way to "vent" excess CO2? or is that even necessary? If the CO2 is "full" will things break down? as there is no room to produce more? and if so is there a way to vent the excess to space? same goes for waste and waste water.... If they fill up and this will break the system we need a "blow it out your air lock" idea.

Edited by Bit Fiddler
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on a side note...

is the system totally self sufficient? or will I eventually need to resupply one of the resources. and what about CO2, waste, waste water? will the system consume as much as I make? or is there some way to "vent" excess CO2? or is that even necessary? If the CO2 is "full" will things break down? as there is no room to produce more? and if so is there a way to vent the excess to space? same goes for waste and waste water.... If they fill up and this will break the system we need a "blow it out your air lock" idea.

I don't think it will break anything if your resources max out... tho I don't know that for absolute certain. Sean and I had talked at one point about making it so things can be killed off in certain circumstances like that, but we haven't implemented it yet that i recall. The mod is made so that it can be used by itself, so the usage of waste created by TAC is optional. If it's there, it consumes it. If it's not, it runs anyway. My thought behind this was that there is always some kind of waste...Food scraps from kerbals meals and their bathroom breaks...etc. :)

We also talked about venting as well, so that will probably become a thing soon enough. When balancing, I tried to make it as self sustaining as possible. Some modules when activated consume resources in a way that tries to balance out the production and consumption rates so it won't run out of any one resource if used properly. But it's not perfect. Usually if something runs dry it's the CO2, but with kerbals on board that should replenish as well. Really it comes down to balance of parts vs kerbals. If you find something out of whack, you can add or remove a part or add or remove crew to help balance the system. at least, that's how it's supposed to work...it's not perfect.

If you find anything about the mechanics of this that can be tweaked to balance better, let us know.

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ok so if the bio reactor makes the fuel, what exactly is the microbiome doing? is it making all the monopropellant oxidizer etc?

Plants cannot break down waste materials on their own, and therefore cannot access the nutrients contained in the waste unless it is digested by bacteria first. The MicroBiome is where we keep the anaerobic bacteria and other microbes that are responsible for decomposing biological waste (kerbal poop, food scraps etc..). While they digest, the organisms in the MicroBiome release the nutrients locked away in the waste materials, while excreting resources such as CO2 and the alcohols which are needed in later stages of fuel processing. The MicroBiome is one of the most important, if not THE most important part of the BioMass system. With out it, it would be impossible to feed our plants, maintain a healthy biosphere for extended periods of time, or process BioMass into fuels. Think of it as the stomach of the BioMass system.

The compressors are the parts that process monopropellant and oxidizer.

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ok so if the bio reactor makes the fuel, what exactly is the microbiome doing? is it making all the monopropellant oxidizer etc?

What Roboto said is entirely correct. Here is a simple way to think about where fuels come from:

Greenhouse: CO2+Water+Light+Biomass-->Oxygen

Oxygen compressor: Oxygen<-->Oxidizer fuel

BioReactor: Biocake+CO2+Hydrogen-->Liquid fuel

Microbiome: Put practically anything(biomass, biocake, seeds, food, waste, even liquid fuel) into it and you'll eventually get hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide

H2 Gas Compressor: Hydrogen<-->Monopropellant

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I can't seem to get this to produce seeds, either at night or with any combination of "harvest seeds" (which oddly just converts seeds to biocake) or "ir light converter" or with the panels closed/lights on/off. Under what conditions should it work?

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I can't seem to get this to produce seeds, either at night or with any combination of "harvest seeds" (which oddly just converts seeds to biocake) or "ir light converter" or with the panels closed/lights on/off. Under what conditions should it work?

The greenhouses will only start producing seeds when the greenhouse is full of biomass. This may change in the future, but that's the way it is now.

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yeah.. I tried that. Let the large greenhouse fill to 25. Still didn't produce any seeds.

Hmmm. The plant greenhouse should only produce 0.0000138889kg of seed/second on the difficulty level you are on. Have you let the greenhouse run for a long time with the IR lights off? If you leave the IR lights on, any seeds made will germinate into biomass.

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Tested it again just now. Created a large greenhouse with a couple batteries, solar panels, CO2 canister, seed canister, and an autopilot unit. filled the large greenhouse with biomass from the VAB to 22.5, with 5.0 seeds, CO2, water, and O2 up to half. Launched, opened the doors, turned on IR, turned on lights. Seed count starts to go down, biomass count starts to go up. Time accelerate to 10x. Biomass generated up to 25, seeds dropped to 0.02. Time down to 1x. Turned off IR. Time back up to 10x. No seeds incrementing after 60 seconds.

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Tested it again just now. Created a large greenhouse with a couple batteries, solar panels, CO2 canister, seed canister, and an autopilot unit. filled the large greenhouse with biomass from the VAB to 22.5, with 5.0 seeds, CO2, water, and O2 up to half. Launched, opened the doors, turned on IR, turned on lights. Seed count starts to go down, biomass count starts to go up. Time accelerate to 10x. Biomass generated up to 25, seeds dropped to 0.02. Time down to 1x. Turned off IR. Time back up to 10x. No seeds incrementing after 60 seconds.

I wonder if this is a bug related to the small amounts of seed mass being produced per second. In testing I noticed that generators often do not like very small numbers.

Thank you for this test. I need to think a bit about to come up with a good solution that won't terribly violate physics/biology

Edited by seanth
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Tested it again just now. Created a large greenhouse with a couple batteries, solar panels, CO2 canister, seed canister, and an autopilot unit. filled the large greenhouse with biomass from the VAB to 22.5, with 5.0 seeds, CO2, water, and O2 up to half. Launched, opened the doors, turned on IR, turned on lights. Seed count starts to go down, biomass count starts to go up. Time accelerate to 10x. Biomass generated up to 25, seeds dropped to 0.02. Time down to 1x. Turned off IR. Time back up to 10x. No seeds incrementing after 60 seconds.

I've encountered the same thing

Also, I've noticed that the rate of biomass production with respect to real-time, decreases as the in-game time compression is turned up past a certain point. I suspect it's something to do with the amount of light fluctuating between maximum and another smaller value under time compression. As the time compression increases the lower value that it fluctuates to gets even lower. Perhaps increase the amount of light storage to buffer against this effect?

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Very interesting mod, as other I also have issues with seed production also some issues with oxygen production and time warp.

Is it only me or does the fuel production sounds kind of unnecessarily, we have kethane and its required for this mod anyway, simpler to mine for fuel.

Far more interesting to generate water, CO2 and oxygen from fuel+oxidizer or kethane, we can already do oxidizer+power->O2, fuel+oxidizer->water+ CO2+ power had made a lot of sense.

Also water+waste->waste water for plants. They oxidizer->oxygen converer has

I like how seeds are required, also how the food raw materials has to be processed, and how you can select outputs, the models are also good.

----

Did some more testing, just 3 kerbals and the large greenhouse, I gain oxygen and consumes co2, however it peaks at timewarp 100x is far lower at 1000x and is negative at 10.000x, biomass is also negative at 10.000x warp but is positive at at lower as it should be.

Has not been able to produce seeds.

Edited by magnemoe
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hmm still can't get this to work... I am wondering if there is some conflict with another mod I am running... Can you post a ship file made with nothing but stock parts, and your parts, that I can DL and try. it does not need to fly just sit on the runway and make fuel is fine.

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This mod is really confusing me.I've been trying to get it to work in the runway on kerbin and most of all I can't seem to get it to consistently do the same thing. I originally was running the space port version but it wasn't working so I came to this forum from the spaceport link only to find this is apperently different from what is on spaceport. So I abandoned that and downloaded the version mentioned in this thread, or at least I think I did because I didn't see a link for it so I just searched github and what I found seems to match this forum.

Now I have a bioreactor hooked up to a large greenhouse along with each tank/compressor and all the batteries and solar panels to keep it at full power. When I try to run it sometimes it consumes CO2, sometimes it produces it. Once I got it producing CO2 and oxygen all while duplicating biomass but I can't seem to replicate that. I can't interact with the bioreactor, clicking it just list the storage with no options but in the SPH I can set up action groups for it. Sometimes toggling it via the action group consumes biocake but other times it doesn't.While building all the infoboxes have dozens of generators listed as kethane generators but I don't really understand which are active when. Half of them will say things like produces x 0/sec or they produce the exact same thing they consume in equal quantities.

I really like the idea behind this but there is just so much going on between all the parts with very little explanation. I'm sure I'm probably hit requirement barriers on the various resources but my resource page now covers the entire screen and sometimes resources don't seem to transfer between modules. If someone could help me I would greatly appreciate it.

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[sPACEPORT VERSION]

Had to make a small update to biomass production due to comments on the spaceport saying that the mod was not working. Turns out it is working, but was apparently too slow, so I sped it up a bit. Also while I was in there, I added the new model for the MicroBiome with the bubbling particle emitter! Let me know if any problems pop up. [sPACEPORT VERSION]

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