scottpaladin

That's the plan; I'm just waiting until i have release candidate ready.

Small update for anyone paying attention: Coding is pretty well done for now. I still have to do a balance pass for electricty/glykerol usage, part mass and costs. If I have the time, I'll see about adding some sounds to the processes of freezing/thawing. I'm poking my artist with a stick to get the part models done. Here's another WIP of the big canister's exterior: On another front, I've been doing some coding for a couple of other part modules. Time will tell if I can get them working well enough to release but here's a gif of one of them:

Glad to hear you're excited. Things are coming along still on the code and models. I'll see if I can get something screenshot/video worthy to post.

I've done a sort of rough sketch of a different take on this. Let me know if I can be of any help.

This pack was designed for the old version of B9 and the creator hasn't been around since before the B9 updated to release 5, which moved some textures referenced by D12 and broke stuff. I hate to be one of those "look through the thread" people but there are some updated packs that will fix it here, or you can go into the part.cfg files and try fixing it yourself if you feel up to it, you just need to find the texture file referenced and update the path.

Stockalike is our goal.

It's not really useful to us but I can think of another lever: manpower. If the karbonite > karborundum converter requires a substantial number of kerbals on board to work, it increases the complexity, mass and cost of the ship required to make the converter work (and thus the amount of time and effort the player has to invest). EPL and (to and extent) MKS/OKS are already using this lever. But I don't think it's a good fit in this case. I suppose we can kick the issue around until we're all sick of it; there comes a point when you've just got to pick a solution and go with. If you've got two VABable resources, one heavy/bulky and one expensive that you have to haul all of out past the orbit of Minmus just to make yourself some karborundum that's not so bad (read: it's not so easy).

Hm.. the ISX modules are 2.5 meter parts but they're a funny length. Comparing it to the stock mobile processing lab (same form factor as our big cryo chamber part) it looks like it's just longer. Huh, you're actually kind of getting a bad deal on some of these ISX parts, you could almost fit a regular mobile processing lab AND a hitchhiker container into the same place on the ship (the combo is maybe half a meter longer). As for look, the ISX stuff texture wise matches stock pretty closely. I'm reluctant to ask my artist to do a whole other model, but maybe a reskinned version of the ISX model might be best. No promises but I'll add it to the "nice to have" list on the design document.

You are extremely helpful; thank you. From your numbers it's pretty clear that the weight of the glykerol consumed needs to be minimal. So I'll be switching to 5 liters per freeze (which fits with the model that this mostly for replacing fluid inside the kerbals). For your 5 kerbal crew you'd need 10 freeze events (provided everyone went under) or about .6t of glykerol and another 3.5t of dry weight for the part for a total payload weight of 4.1t. This would make the cryonic choice clearly cheaper for a couple of mod, and give us a slight edge on TAC. And the larger the crew and longer the journey, the more DeepFreeze should pull ahead. I'll pass your compliments on to the artist. I'll do my best to be ready for you; it's slow going as I'm learning as I go.

The problem being that if you let people make karborundum from a single tweakable resource (karbonite), rather then being incentivized to head off into the wild black yonder in search of that sweet sweet karborundum, the quickest (in player time) way to get it will be to load up twelve karbonite tanks and a distiller on the launchpad start the conversion and warp until they've got as much karborundum as they need. Karborundum is the tantalizing cool thing that takes you out to those places that are normally too troublesome to visit.

This sounds like the best solution so far. Karborundum can be tweakable without Karbonite (but expensive). But if you've got Karbonite, you can fly yourself out to Jool and gather up a mess of zeonium and karbonite (if you want to make this tedious, ensure they can't do both at the same time) from its atmosphere but you can't process any of it yet. You have to fly far enough out from Jool to start processing it into Karborundum. Or, if that doesn't appeal, you can grab K+ and truck yourself out to Eeloo, brave the depths of Eve's atmosphere or dive into the sun to get some Karborundum directly.

The Joolian system would be a pretty good spot to find the secondary resource to combine with Karbonite; it's probably the easiest place to reach after Kerbin's moons. Combining something realistically named like Helium-3 with our kerbalized named Karborundum sounds a bit weird thematically (not egregiously so but still); Maybe the old Squad resources are a better fit. Edit: I hate to swell the part count by adding another collector, are we comfortable tacking on another module to one of the existing ones (Karbonite or KSPI)?

Could be a Kerbin day to Earth day conversion problem, or maybe I made a mistake at the transfer window planner just now. Any data you could provide would be helpful for balance purposes.

I'm definitely open to reducing the amount of glykerol needed per freeze event. Adopting the methodology you propose would probably put us in the range of 5 or so liters per freeze (Humans have about that much blood. Kerbals are smaller than humans, but let's assume we're replacing some other fluids as well). This would cut total weight of the payload significantly. I may need a better idea of how much weight in life support we'd be replacing with the cryochamber and glykerol. Knowing your trip to eeloo was going to take 12 tons is useful. That was for the full 8+ year round trip? How big was the crew?

Using the particle collectors to get karbonite at Kerbin aren't really the worry. I think it'd be easier to just launch a rocket filled with it from the VAB, or mine it on the Mun.

Which particle collectors? KSPI or Karbonite?

I'll admit I feel like I've got a little skin in the game just because I've got some plans for Karborundum myself, and I'd like it to be a challenge to gather. Hm.. EnrichedUranium is tweakable though. In a perfect world, I think you'd have at best one resource you can get in the VAB. So you can't just launch a rocket with both EnrichedUranium and Karbonite from the VAB, go straight to high orbit and convert yourself up some Karborundum. You'd like to design a challenge that is at least on par with going to Eve, Eeloo or Kerbol. I think if I was given those options or, say, going to two different locations (another medium/low difficulty planet to gather and a very low gravity orbit to process) I'd give serious consideration to both. The CRP is a little thin on non-tweakable candidates though. Actinides and Depleted Uranium are just a nuclear reactor + time. Megajoules, Waste Heat, and IntakeATM are out for obvious reason. Charged particles and exotic matter got removed from KSPI, right? I don't know enough about NFT to speak to Polytetrafluoroethylene but it doesn't have an ORS name so I have to assume it's not gatherable. My first thought for a candidate was Antimatter, but it became VAB available in KSPI-Lite. This will require some additional pondering.

I rather think I agree with you, RoverDude. I was thinking about this this morning and I quite like the microgravity conversion idea that had been brought up earlier in the thread. You take two resources that you can't get in microgravity (say Karbonite and Uranium) and you have to get them both (either gathered or from the VAB) out to a ship far from the gravity well of a planet, then do your conversion to get a little bit of Karborundum. Although for preference you'd want two resources that you just CAN'T get in the same place. Rather than players investing a bunch of in-game time warping on rails to convert/gather minute amounts of stuff into Karborundum, they have to invest player time going to a couple of places to get it done.

Something I'd like to get some opinions on is our new resource, glykerol (pronounced with the first syllable rhyming with "fly"), and how it's consumed by the chamber to store kerbals. Glykerol is supposed to be based off real world glycerol/glycerin, so it's about 20% denser than water and like CRP water, we measure it in litres per KSP unit. Here's the updated cfg file: RESOURCE_DEFINITION { name = Glykerol density = 0.012 flowMode = ALL_VESSEL transfer = PUMP isTweakable = true unitCost = 0.8 } I'm assuming that we'll be filling up the whole cryopod with glykerol whenever we freeze a kerbal. The volume of the pods works out to be about 220 litres. But that's based on external dimensions and we're shoving a kerbal in there which will displace some fluid. Let's make the math easy and say you need 100 units of glykerol to put a kerbal into suspended animation. That works out to 1.2 tons of resource per freeze. The big chamber planned for the mod has 10 cryopods (which double as glykerol storage) so we can reasonably assume that it can hold 1000 units. With the weight of the chamber itself (at the moment, same as the science lab), a fully loaded cryochamber is 15.5 tons. As things stand now, that only gets your crew frozen once. That seems like a lot of weight. I'd like to keep glykerol as the principal limiting factor for how many freeze/thaw cycles you can handle on a journey. At the moment, you don't get any of the glykerol back when you thaw a kerbal out, but that doesn't need to be the case. If we allow a 90% return rate, our 1000 unit will now let us fill the 10 pod chamber up, then empty it and freeze 9 of the 10 crew again. So instead of needing to pack 1000, extra glykerol for the return trip we only need 100 units extra. My only hesitance for this solution is that it makes the math more annoying the more freeze/thaw cycles you're planning, which could make figuring out how much glykerol to pack a chore if you're planning, for example, a grand tour of the Kerbol system with 6 crew. So I have a couple of questions for the community: 1. Is the example 15.5t payload too heavy to favourably compare with the alternative? (life support or whatnot for 10 kerbals for a trip to Jool, for example) 2. Would the % return solution make planning tedious enough to reduce the fun?

According to TMarkos, Karborundum should be tweakable if you haven't got Karbonite or K+. If you've got just Karbonite, it's not tweakable, but you can distill it from Karbonite. Finally if you've got K+, you can't distill it, you'll have to go and get some from Kerbol, Eeloo or Eve.

You know, I hadn't but it's a good idea. Adding an item to my design doc.

Updated the OP to add the github link.

Well, I haven't taken a gravioli detector to low Kerbol orbit and done the observation, but surely 2000m is well within... Actually, I have a few minutes to test.... Looks like 1g is at about 90,000,000m. And if I'm reading the wiki and doing my calculations right, the "hard limit" of 1.25 target radius is at about 10,000,000m. So you'll still have a trip to make 2000m altitude even if you're jumping in at a beacon.

Wouldn't you also run into a problem with the sun's gravity well too?

I love the new science IVA.