The Fuel Problem: Kerbonite/Kethane/Interstellar

[Grossbeer]

Hi People,

Im a long Term Ksp Lover :-) and have tried many of the awesome Mods out there. I love MKS/OKS for the complexity and challange to setup a fully functioning base. Tac Life Support for a little bit realism and motivation to look at the time for a change :-). Interstellar, KEthane Scansat Deadly reentry for additional awesomeness :-D

But currently im looking for a Mod that does allow me to refuel my ships in a very specific way.

Interstellar (AWESOME mod) and Kerbonite kind of bug me, because ive the feeling i dont have to work for out of Kerbin-fuel. I always like tofly really big ships so a little lander with an refinery/Drill/Converter is easy to outfit and take with me. Ive got the feeling of getting easy and free fuel for very very little investment. Kethane, while awesome because the deposits are exhaustable, has the same problem: i take a little Kethane Lander/converter and a scanner with me and can refuel almost anywhere in very little time.

The thing im looking for is the following:

- A Resource which is NOT present on EVERY planet. It does not nescessarily needs to be exthausable but it would be awesome.

- The way its extracted should need some serious equipment. Im talking about a real Factory or destillery or the construction of an Oil Platform Sized Station. Its just too convienient to have a little mobile Rover with some tanks on him and fuel a whole Fleet.

OR

- the mining of the Resource takes very very long. The timespan im talking about is this: filling a Half Rockomax tank in 1 Kerbal Month. If you are using some LifeSupport mod you will have to worry about your Kerbals dying before you have enough Fuel to get back.

I love the idea of fueling up somewhere else than Kerbin and the mods out there are awesome, but i cant shake the feeling of getting free fuel.

so my Question: is there a Mod out there which matches my "needs" a little bit? Or a little tutorial for maybe decreasing the drillamount of the Kethanedrill?

best regards

[sal_vager]

Hi Grossbeer, I don't think there's really an addon that does what you want, as any fuel producing addon is only limited by time and we have timewarp.

It is as you say, fuel for free...

There's another option though, that is more time consuming in a real sense, and limited enough to keep the challenge, it also requires no addons.

Fuel can only be refined on Kerbin, so all fuel you use has to come from home, this means fuel barges sent ahead of time on low energy orbits, bi-elliptical transfer is good for this.

Rendezvous, refuel, your supplies can be left in orbit but are of course limited to what you've sent, you can combine this with kethane or karbonite for even more difficulty though by shipping kethane/karbonate back to Kerbin for processing (imaging the refineries are too heavy/require too much maintenance to be sent into space).

Fuel caches will let you extend your missions, but need a real input of effort to achieve

Edited August 7, 2014 by sal_vager

[regex]

There is no mod that does what you want, but using ORS (or even Kethane, but it has some idiosyncrasies that I personally don't like) you can easily set up additional resources in specific places. ORS is much easier for doing, say, polar ice caps because you just have to draw a picture for the planet and assign it a resource, whereas with Kethane you would have to write some code (not hard code by any stretch, and Majiir has made it very easy to hook into it, but if you're not comfortable with that ORS is easier to customize).

[RoverDude]

Heya,

My suggestion would be ORS. If Karbonite is a bit too easy for you, the whole thing is CC, and I encourage folks to make extensions and revisions for it.

So if you wanted to do a new fuel called, say, ReallyHeaveAndHardToGetium, then go for it! Use ORS linear scale and make some planets go dark (Karbonite does this, as Eve has no crustal Karbonite resources - it's ocean only, and some trace atmospheric).

The rub, and I agree, is that timewarp is not our limiting factor. So maybe do a Karbonite pack that replaces all of the converters, distillers, and drills with Tweakscaled massive parts?

Heck, you could do that with MM and have what you want in a few minutes. Then do a distribution pack called 'Karbonite Hardcore mode' or something, that MM's the converters and drills to massive size and weight, makes the resource more dense, and tweaks all of the conversion rates along with blacking out a few of the planets.

If you have ideas, hop on over to the Karb dev thread, lots of folks working on extensions there.

[Grossbeer]

@sal_vager exactly like im plaing the game right now ;-) except for the Kethane to kerbin method

@regex true ORS is awsome and pretty easy to manipulate.

@RoverDude Youre absolutely right! I will get into them Tweak scale configs and have a look how easy it is :-) also changing the conversion rates of the Kerbonite converters seems by the look of it pretty simple too