Camaron

Oh. we can just do things the easy way. Neat. Thanks, ExplorerKlatt. But wait... Link says "Nothing Here"

If there's anyone else out there who likes my conversion rates and the reasoning behind them, and perhaps would like to use them, Here's a little guide. (Current target rates - a little different from the original proposal, but proportionally the same) 6.4 Kethane/sec in, 2.96 Monoprop per sec out. 5.0 Kethane/sec in, 2.5 Xenon out. 4.5 Kethane/sec in, 1.53 Liquid Fuel 5.5 Kethane/sec in, 1.87 Oxidizer And for the C090: 1.6 Kethane/sec in, 0.74 Monoprop per sec out. 1.0 Kethane/sec in, 0.5 Xenon out. 0.9 Kethane/sec in, 0.306 Liquid Fuel 1.1 Kethane/sec in, 0.374 Oxidizer You will need to open up the Kethane>Parts folder and open up the folders for the two converters. The configs are in the document named "part" If you were to try to actually correct your own copy of the part files with these configurations, you will need to use the Kethane amount coupled with the decimal form of the byproduct percentages from earlier. Like so: // --- Converter parameters --- //C090 MODULE { name = KethaneConverter InputRates { Kethane = 0.9 ElectricCharge = 4.5 } OutputRatios { LiquidFuel = 0.85 } } MODULE { name = KethaneConverter InputRates { Kethane = 1.1 ElectricCharge = 5.5 } OutputRatios { Oxidizer = 0.85 } } MODULE { name = KethaneConverter InputRates { Kethane = 1.2 ElectricCharge = 3 } OutputRatios { MonoPropellant = 0.925 } } MODULE { name = KethaneConverter InputRates { Kethane = 1 ElectricCharge = 8 } OutputRatios { XenonGas = 0.025 } } } //C190 MODULE { name = KethaneConverter HeatProduction = 675 InputRates { Kethane = 4.5 ElectricCharge = 9 } OutputRatios { LiquidFuel = 0.85 } } MODULE { name = KethaneConverter HeatProduction = 825 InputRates { Kethane = 5.5 ElectricCharge = 11 } OutputRatios { Oxidizer = 0.85 } } MODULE { name = KethaneConverter HeatProduction = 800 InputRates { Kethane = 4 ElectricCharge = 6 } OutputRatios { MonoPropellant = 0.925 } } MODULE { name = KethaneConverter HeatProduction = 1200 InputRates { Kethane = 4 ElectricCharge = 16 } OutputRatios { XenonGas = 0.025 } } }

Hey. Rune, that's awesome work, but what's up with your Ion Engines?

Squad's numbers are fine. It's the Kethane mod's converters we're targeting. I completely agree with that. I don't want to hurt the game, but we don't have to here. Realism can be easily maintained along with balance and fairness. There's a problem, with a clear solution that has been proposed.

Unfortunately, Khaos I still feel like you aren't paying attention here: "The large converter can produce much larger amounts much faster, but running material at such bulk rates leads to more waste." That would be a fantastic point if the ingame Kethane converters didn't currently do the exact opposite! The small generator loses a horrid amount of monopropellant v.s. the bigger one. The bigger one is almost triply efficient. So, based on your own description of real world mechanics from personal experience, that's completely backward, which has been my argument all along, You're literally in agreement with us if that's your stance. As Aedile specified, "The big produces 1.28 units of monoprop from 3 kethane, while the small one produces only 0.23 from 1.5." In other words, the C190 gets 1.28 mono per 3 Kethane VS the smaller C090's 0.46 for the same 3 Kethane.

But again, makes no logical sense. If either of these units should be dealing with heat, it should be the small one. We already have a tradeoff with the fact that it's so much slower. Also, The difference in monoprop yields is tragically wider than any of the other materials. Why did monopropellant get singled out for abuse?

@Khaos See? That is a much more respectable argument. Why couldn't you say that the first time? Instead you had to give me crap about how Kerbal isn't about Physics (Seriously?!? It's almost purely about physics!) Granted, the first set of numbers I presented IS a density comparison, but whatever, you rose another valid point. I can see how, if you're only using one self-contained ship, that it would have been slightly advantageous to convert first,and blast off, when Kethane is heavier than the resultant fuels. But the way I see it, that makes perfect sense! And it complies with the laws of physics. Imperfect Conversions would always lose mass if waste is ejected, so why not do it on the ground? What was the problem there? The way I play, there's always some un-landable behemoth in orbit. I can't convert on the ground because the drilling rig and its 300K Kethane far exceeds its in-house fuel/mon/xenon capacity. So in that case, mass of the fuels would be irrelevant to whether I converted on the ground or in orbit. For me, it would always be in orbit no matter how the mass plays out. So, I realize that's pretty much a "me" thing, but nonetheless, it turns your "always" into "usually". And you know what else? While I respect Majiir and his immense contribution to our game, nobody is perfect. No you, not me, not Majiir. Even if nothing else were considered, and we assume that his numbers are otherwise flawless, why do Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer convert at rates different than a 9:11 proportion? If you run out of Kethane in conversion you now have significantly different Fuel VS Oxidizer. This has happened to me twice now, once in orbit, and once on the ground when the Kethane vein dried up. Where's the benefit in that? And yes, Aedile, now you see what I'm talking about. Either there were some major typos while entering these numbers, or they just don't make much sense.

Khaos also didn't read - one of my largest points is directly about creating balanced game mechanics, practically word for word. I even explicitly re-iterated that 3 separate times! And from a game mechanics standpoint, it is absolutely NOT logical for Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer to manufacture at a rate different from 9:11, for example. Please, guys. If you're going to trash-talk my points, at least bother to read it. Really.

First, it's plain you didn't read the vast majority of it. Second, your first point is a known statistic, and your other two points are literally one-line jokes. (lame ones, too.) Also, I can easily edit my own copy to make sense for myself. I don't need another mod's help with that. If your reply was going to be: TL: DR, Ignore, and fire back with trash-talk, why bother answering at all? In addition to that, I didn't ask for drastically heightened game complexity with 10 more completely unnecessary fuel types. Not even a little bit.

Hi, I recently downloaded Kethane, and have really enjoyed it. It's created a very fun and interesting dynamic, and I'm very thankful that the creators have put the time and effort in to create a very stable, diverse, and well-integrated expansion for Kerbal. However, as I'm playing, and seeing the numbers on the KE-C090 Converter and KE-C190 Converters, I can't help but notice that, not only are the ratios radically different between the two units in many ways, but also, physically impossible. My ship gains mass while converting Kethane to either of the Liquid fuel components, and according to the simplest of the laws of physics, The Law of Conservation of Mass, ....this simply cannot be. It defies physics at its very core. I'll explain all of my reasoning, but my ultimate goal with this long-winded post is to propose a realistic set of conversion rates that don't break the laws of physics, and maintain fairness and balance within the Kethane game mechanism. So, logically, any Kethane Conversion, even in a perfect conversion, should never raise the mass of your spacecraft. However, if we are assuming that the converters are, in any realistic way, converting a raw material to a refined material in each circumstance, surely there should be imperfections - flawed yield ratios, so to speak, so any and all conversions should actually yield less mass, varying upon what material is being generated, and the waste material, would probably be simply ejected from any sensible converter. In short, reason says all material conversions from Kethane to anything else, should yield a certain amount of refined material of lesser mass than the original Kethane used, in addition to a certain amount of byproduct. Whether this byproduct should stored as some kind of secondary material or assumed to be ejected from the spacecraft, isn't particularly important to my point. So, if we were to consider imperfect yields, how imperfect should they be? Well, at this point, we come back to the fact that Kethane is essentially imaginary, so we can prioritize numbers that favor game balancing for each of the materials. I personally feel that the waste amounts should roughly reflect the ISP of the fuels in question. Monoprop is 290, so we'll round to 300. Xenon is 4200, and liquid fuel is the tricky one, since many engines get wildly different ISP's. Despite that the majority of them see high 300's, I'm going to say that the vast majority of engines used in space are probably the LV-N Nuclear Engines at 800. The average, if we had access to any statistic, would probably be around 600. The point of those numbers I just came up with, is for a byproduct ratio. Based on the weight comparisons you will see shortly, we would want Xenon's byproduct to fall in the high 90%'s. This actually makes sense anyway, since Xenon is a noble gas, and if anything in the real world were to convert a material to Xenon, I'm willing to bet that the byproduct percentages would actually be extraordinarily high. A number that works well here is 7.5% per 300 ISp. So, in this proposal, the conversion of Kethane to Monopopellant would lose 7.5% of the mass to waste. 15% for the Liquid Fuel components, and 97.5% to the Xenon. Just a reminder, my goal here is to propose a set of conversion rates that are both balanced as a game component, and also makes sense with real-world physics/chemistry/reason&logic. Let's see how the numbers compare with the actual mass of Kethane and the Fuels: 500 Kethane = 1T 200 Liquid Fuel = 1T 200 Oxidizer = 1T 250 Monopropellant = 1T 10,000 Xenon = 1T Let's lay out some simple stuff here to try and keep the math in check. Irrational numbers would actually really hurt things, so let's keep things even to within a few decimal places. By Mass: 200 Kethane = 100 Monopropellant 5 Kethane = 100 Xenon 250 Kethane = 100 Liquid Fuel or Oxidizer So, if we now account for the byproduct/waste ratios I mentioned earlier... 200 Kethane = 92.5 Monopropellant 5 Kethane = 2.5 Xenon 250 Kethane = 85 Liquid Fuel of Oxidizer. And so, finally, based on those rates, I offer you my proposed Conversion rates on the KE-C190 Kethane Converter, without Heat or Elec consumption amounts: 4.0/sec Kethane in, 1.85/sec Monoprop out. 4.0/sec Kethane in, 2.0/sec Xenon out. 4.5/sec Kethane in, 1.53/sec Liquid Fuel out. 5.5/sec Kethane in, 1.87/sec Oxidizer out. And for the C090: 1.0/sec Kethane in, 0.4625/sec Monoprop out. 1.0/sec Kethane in, 0.5/sec Xenon out. 0.9/sec Kethane in, 0.306/sec Liquid Fuel out. 1.1/sec Kethane in, 0.374/sec Oxidizer out. These ratios also accomplish converting Liquid Fuel and Oxy per second at a perfect 9:11 Ratio, keeping them perfectly even as time passes if converting them simultaneously, which the current ratios fail to do. Just remember, the exact numbers I proposed aren't really the point here, but rather the proportions, and the reasoning behind them. I just would love to see ratios adopted that reflect the logic I've presented here - in short, the Conservation of Mass, and a game-balanced output yield, preferrably accounting for conversion losses, especially for Xenon which is currently a big offender. Thank you for your time, and I hope that what I had to say here has made an impression!

Seems to me that as soon as you leave that craft, it's going to re-simulate the craft as not moving over the surface of Jool and just eliminate it, same as if you leave any other craft on a collision course with a planet.

That first ship looks a tad provocative, don't you think?

My very successful Skorpion Ion-powered Asteroid Tug.

I launched a Fuel Storage ship with a capacity of 1,000,260 Fuel, named Andromeda M. I have yet to actually load it with the vast majority of that capacity, but the launcher is capable of acting as an SSTO. It would lose a lot of it's maximum orbit altitude if launched as an SSTO, but it can do it. Biggest SSTO you've ever seen. Of course, it's not smart to fly it as an SSTO, but how many people have built a 2500-ton SSTO? I'm proud of that.

I forgot that I hate rovers, because rover wheels are disastrously incapable of their jobs. Nevermind that. After painfully reminding myself how needlessly difficult such a thing is, I would recommend you also abandon that effort. There's a mod, (I don't know what it's called) that involves a fuel hose that can be manually attached with a Kerbal's help. It might be a mod worth adopting for future incidents like this.

You broke it. It's dead. Oh BTW are those damaged mining rigs still there? I would enjoy building a claw-based recovery Rover if you would like. Seems a shame to completely waste 300K Kethane on the ground.

Then I will leave it as-is! I still feel like I want to bring it up to the Kethane Devs. We'll see if there's anything they want to say about that.

It doesn't look like you're using any of the NASA SLS large parts. Why not?

Nah, we'll gladly check out your custom works! That said, please include a little info on what we're looking at. What thrust are the custom engines? How strong are those panels? Also, please tell me what mods you're using in this by name. I've just started investigating the necessary info to create mods of my own, since I already have modelling and texturing experience and I learn best by tearing down existing ones. Those engines have a cool exhaust that I wouldn't mind examining. Note: Please edit the info into the existing post, rather than making a new one. Thanks. Also, Awesome large craft, to Redshift! It's really about time someone besides myself posted something heavier than a desk.

The wider tank would pretty much solve your center of mass problem on the spot, unless that's necessary for the style of rocket you want.

Use this one. Same fuel, but wide and flat. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Rockomax_X200-8_Fuel_Tank Also, that engine is among the worst in the game for power-to-weight. It's almost twice as heavy as it should be given its stats. Personally, on a tiny ship like this, the Rockomax 48-7S has proven very noteworthy. Also, I doubt you need 300 units of monoprop. It's pretty heavy stuff to haul around if you don't need it. RCS typically should only be active for emergency maneuvering or docking.

Edit: removed bulky Kethane discussion. It was boring anyway, you guys haven't missed anything. Regardless, Saltpeter, I hope you have tons of fun with Emerald Grinder and your newest Triskelion.

Could always do a half-N'-half You overbuilt the heck out of that thing but it's awesome. Best of luck. I know what you mean. That big rig at the top of the page destroyed the deposit it was sitting on. Only got about 45,000 fuel from the whole vein.

What I mean though, is that it WOULDN'T be unwieldy and ultra-heavy if it was empty, and could refuel on location. I wanna see the lander though. I love monster ships.

Five trips with a driller that has an eight-tank capacity? How big is your lander? Also, what if your lander just included a barebones drilling kit, and just refueled on the ground? Land it on a Kethane field.