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Charle_Roger

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  1. Charle_Roger
    5m tanks. Chemical Storage 0.3.0
  2. Charle_Roger
    Hello again. My time has been occupied by other things for the last few months, but I'm still here and working on these mods, from which I have now so boldly removed the qualifier "Immersive" in favour of brevity. Today, at last, I have some new versions to pre-release, do let me know if old issues persist or of any new issues. Chemical Core 0.4.0 Chemical Storage 0.2.0 It's a little thing, but I was quite pleased to finally find a satisfying way to do this paint-over effect, where the normal map ("material") and colour/specularity ("paint") can be changed independently with different switches, preserving the default unpainted look of the material when switching back to it. This example shows the effect of painting over foil insulation, which is a silly thing to do, and in future I plan on having the normals switch to something akin to CryoTanks' isohedral variants. Chemical Propulsion 0.4.0 I am very excited to finally get this stuff out. Most of the work since I last posted was in overhauling Chemical Propulsion to use a new system which allows arbitrary bipropellant combinations with automatically computed mixture ratios and changes to the performance of engines. For now, I have stuck with the current design of assigning most engines to one of a small set of categories (monopropellant, hypergolic, kerolox, methalox, hydrolox), with a couple of odd extra kinds (multimode hydrolox/kerohydrolox), but within these types there is now great flexibility in the combination of fuel and oxidizer. At some point later I may decide to abandon these fixed categories and opt for a more open system where any given engine has a particular set of propellants it can use, so there would be much more variation and unique characters to each engine, including such oddities as Hydrazine/LqdOxygen and Kerosene/NTO and limiting things like Pentaborane to particular engines. My new system allows for this very readily without designing the propellant combination bespoke for each engine and getting bogged down with a massive number of propellants, a path down which Real Fuels has already walked. This is achieved with a new (highly experimental) plugin I wrote: FuelMixer 0.1.0 Thanks everyone for your continued interest, and to those of you who submitted github issues (which I also have not really looked at until now). It really does motivate me to build these mods up to an actual playable state.
  3. Charle_Roger
    Right now it's doable, but will be a decent amount of effort for something with as much scope as BDB. I'm not prioritising it, but I won't release v1.0 without support for mods like this. I'm currently working on a new plugin to handle arbitrary bipropellant combinations, complete with some fairly forgiving ignition mechanics. It's almost fully functional, will share some more about it soon. In the long run, it should make extending support to engines from mods simpler and much more robust. This sort of thing is a bit of an unavoidable obstacle which requires bespoke patching in any case.
  4. Charle_Roger
    Engines running LqdHydrogen/Oxidizer and LqdMethane/Oxidizer, like those in CryoEngines, are automatically converted. Likewise MonoPropellant is easy to spot and convert. Regular old LFO engines are pretty much impossible to do automatically since some of them are more appropriate as kerolox and others are best converted into hydrolox with a big Isp boost etc. Right now I just convert all not-directly-supported LFO engines into the hypergolic class (Kerosene/HTP or Hydrazine/NTO), so at least they will function pretty much as originally intended.
  5. Charle_Roger
    If I understand you correctly, Immersive Chemical Propulsion already does this. The only mod-specific patches are to adjust the stats of engines to fit with their newly assigned propellant types. All changes to tanks are performed automatically based on the original contents.
  6. Charle_Roger
    Decided that "Immersive Chemical Exotics" shouldn't be a separate mod, rather all that stuff should show up in its respective domains in the other mods, starting with the use of exotic propellants in Immersive Chemical Propulsion. Immersive Chemical Propulsion 0.3.0 With this update, all the planned propellants are functioning and implemented at the basic playable level. Still wouldn't recommend starting any career saves with it, but I think it's at a point now where you should be able to play with it and really get a feel for what this mod will be like. Most of what's left to do are auxiliary gameplay elements: Tech restrictions on advanced propellants (shouldn't take too long, targeting the next release) A plugin for simulating chemical hazards involved with the advanced fuels (will take a while, presumably) A plugin for simulating engine ignition (ditto)
  7. Charle_Roger
    Immersive Chemical Propulsion 0.2.0
  8. Charle_Roger
    Yep that's right, it shouldn't affect any existing craft.
  9. Charle_Roger
    Immersive Chemical Propulsion 0.1.3 Labradoodle is a quick little mod I made last night which adds a new engine, the RE-L20 "Labrador", taken from the Poodle engine's multi-nozzle model variant, leaving it with only the single-nozzle. The Labrador sits between the Poodle and Skipper on the hierarchy of increasing thrust, decreasing Isp, 2.5m stock launch vehicle engines which ends at the Mainsail. In Immersive Chemical Propulsion, the Labrador is a Kerolox engine like the Skipper and Mainsail, while the Poodle is a very high specific impulse hydrolox engine based on the Vinci.
  10. Charle_Roger
    Labradoodle It always bugged me that there were these two completely distinct rocket engine models in the game assigned to variants of the same part, the RE-L10 "Poodle", when they could easily be separate engines with unique stats. That's what this little mod does. The RE-L10 "Poodle" retains its original stats, but only has the single-nozzle variant The multi-nozzle variant becomes a new part, the RE-L20 "Labrador", with stats somewhere between the Poodle and the Skipper: Mass: 2.25t Thrust: 450kN Isp: 185-335s Compatible with Restock and in theory anything else which patches the Poodle, e.g. for Waterfall effects. Distributed under the GNU General Public License. Download: Github | Spacedock
  11. Charle_Roger
    I'm pretty locked in on the propulsion side of things for the time being, will get back to the converters and such soon. Some hypergolic thoughts: I'd like to find a satisfying gameplay mechanic to express the hypergolicity of hypergolics, or really the non-hypergolicity of everything else, but I find hard limits on reignitions pretty not-fun. Instead, maybe non-hypergolic engines could have a choice of ignitor: Pyrotechnic: Single-use, dirt cheap. Pretty much just for first stages. Starter fluid: Uses a little bit of some liquid resource (e.g. TEATEB), can be restarted until you run out. Plays similarly to monopropellant for RCS. Spark plug: Uses a little bit of electric charge on ignition, infinite restarts, slightly higher cost and mass. High-test peroxide might play a role: Easy to produce in-situ. Monopropellant alternative to Hydrazine with a higher density but lower Isp. Kerosene oxidiser alternative to LqdOxygen with a higher density but lower Isp, not cryogenic and hypergolic. Could be used in early game engines as a low-tech hypergolic combination before Hydrazine/NTO engines are unlocked. Might ultimately be an unnecessary complication. Hypergolic engines are a minority across stock and supported mods at the moment and none are particularly big, so at some point I'll make a separate mod with ~10 new hypergolic engines based on: RD-253/RD-275 RD-263/RD-264 RD-270 YF-40 YF-20/YF-21/YF-24 In the meantime, some minor changes: Immersive Chemical Propulsion 0.1.2
  12. Charle_Roger
    Immersive Chemical Propulsion 0.1.1
  13. Charle_Roger
    The first pre-release of Immersive Chemical Conversion will contain only two parts, the two sizes of "Electr-O-Tron" which handle electrolysis and electrochemical reduction. Here's the first sketch model for the smaller 1.25m one, which just does electrolysis of water and ammonia:
  14. Charle_Roger
    Immersive Chemical Storage 0.1.0 A set of highly configurable tanks for storing single chemicals. This mod can be thought of as an extension of CryoTanks and is intended to be paired with other mods which make use of the supported chemicals.
  15. Charle_Roger
    First pre-releases at last. Immersive Chemical Core 0.1.0 Configuration definitions used throughout the Immersive Chemicals suite of mods, required for Immersive Chemical Propulsion. Immersive Chemical Propulsion 0.1.0 An overhaul to the stock propellant system, replacing generic LiquidFuel, Oxidizer and MonoPropellant with a handful of real chemicals. It should go without saying, but this should not be expected to work very well on existing saves, and since it's the first pre-release version it might not work very well on brand new saves either. Use at your own risk.
  16. Charle_Roger
    Haven't posted any updates in a while, but I've still been hard at work. The scope of this mod has expanded into a whole suite of several mods which I'm now calling Immersive Chemicals, an overview of which can be seen in the original post. I'm almost ready to share the first pre-release versions of two of the mods: Immersive Chemical Propulsion: Replaces stock LiquidFuel, Oxidizer and MonoPropellant with Hydrazine, NTO, Kerosene, LqdOxygen, and LqdHydrogen in various combinations. A soft alternative to RealFuels which aims to be Nertea-like rather than bloating the game with a thousand new bespoke resources. Immersive Chemical Storage: Highly configurable tanks which store single chemicals, useful for chemical factories, rocket stages and giant spacecraft.
  17. Charle_Roger
    @JadeOfMaar This all looks very promising. I've also been thinking about harvesting since I'm a little bit unsatisfied with my current approach of having a few drill types for whole sets of resources but still having them be harvested individually. The idea of sifting useful resources from regolith mixtures has been on my mind for a while, we should talk more about this. I'm interested to see how your converters end up since I think we have quite different approaches there (I just posted some thoughts about chemical converters over in my thread).
  18. Charle_Roger
    In the interest of machines having specific uses and not ending up with a do-everything-machine equivalent to the old Convert-O-Trons, I've decided to split the chemical reactors up into a handful of machines which each has a set of closely related recipes. In stock KSP, the big Convert-O-Tron is 100% efficient at converting mass and the small one is inexplicably 10x worse. This is a pretty weird way to balance them, so some mods give the small one its own benefits in the form of unique recipes. I always found this unsatisfying, if the small machine can do e.g. Ore → Fertilizer, why can't the big one? In Immersive Conversion, all machines operate at the same chemical efficiency (usually 100%) regardless of size. Smaller machines have a couple of very useful recipes, while larger machines have the same recipes running at a higher energy-efficiency plus one or two extra recipes, and some types of machines have even larger, highly specialised versions. The benefit of small converters is simply that the are small, they are perfectly good for the recipes they offer. On the smelting side, the trace-metal-from-Ore pipeline will similarly be split into two parts: Sorting Ore to separate out small amounts of metal precursors which are not always directly harvestable, either because you don't have a specialised metal harvester or because you're on a body where these resources are so rare that they can't be harvested directly. Smelting direct precursors into metals. Chemical splitters 1.25m and 2.5m do electrolysis: Water → LqdHydrogen + LqdOxygen LqdAmmonia → LqdNitrogen + LqdHydrogen 2.5m additionally does electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide: LqdCO2 → LqdCO + LqdOxygen Carbonaceous chemical reactors 1.25m and 2.5m deal with the easily obtainable CO₂ + H₂ in the Sabatier process and the reverse water-gas shift reaction: LqdCO2 + LqdHydrogen → LqdMethane + Water LqdCO2 + LqdHydrogen → LqdCO + Water 2.5m additionally handles CO + H₂ in the Bosch reaction and Fischer-Tropsch process: LqdCO + LqdHydrogen → Carbon + Water LqdCO + LqdHydrogen → LiquidFuel [low yield] + Water 3.75m(?) specialised Organics processor does: Organics → LiquidFuel [high yield] Organics → Polymers Nitrogenous chemical reactors 1.25m and 2.5m do the Haber process: LqdNitrogen + LqdHydrogen → LqdAmmonia 2.5m additionally handles NH₃ + O₂ reactions for propellant synthesis: LqdAmmonia + LqdOxygen → Oxidizer + Water LqdAmmonia + LqdOxygen → MonoPropellant + Water Ore sorters 1.25m and 2.5m can yield the two most readily available and useful metal ores: Ore → Spodumene [low yield] Ore → MetallicOre [low yield] 2.5m additionally yields trace amounts of rarer minerals: Ore → RareMetals [very low yield] Ore → ExoticMinerals [very low yield] Smelters 2.5m and 3.75m do Lithium and Metals smelting (note that the implied produced CO₂ is lost): Spodumene → Lithium MetallicOre + Carbon → Metals 3.75m additionally does direct carbon monoxide reduction (note that since it deals with liquids, the produced CO₂ is captured and condensed, so you could set up a closed-loop carbon cycle): MetallicOre + LqdCO → Metals + LqdCO2 5m(!?) plasma arc furnace does hydrogen reduction: MetallicOre + LqdHydrogen → Metals + Water You might notice that many of these reactions produce Water as a byproduct. These will be provided as two recipes, one which just discards the Water, and maybe the electrolysis reactions will also have modes to discard either of the products.
  19. Charle_Roger
    I think I'm pretty much finished refining the modelling and texturing of the tanks, now I just need to put it all together into actual parts. The largest tanks have stiffener rings in their surface configuration so they look a bit more interesting than just a big uniform sphere: Now that the scope of this mod has increased, I think I'll release it as a series of mods similar to Nertea's Near Future suite, the first of which will be the tanks. Immersive Conversion is not quite a general enough name, so I might go with IC Tanks/Drills/Converters/Smelters/etc, IC Technologies as a whole, where IC could stand for Industrial Chemistry or ISRU Complication or whatever you like, but it is a bit more bland.
  20. Charle_Roger
    Not completely, it will be a long time before all the resources conversions are probably balanced (gameplay-wise, not chemistry-wise), but LqdOxygen in the cryogenic engines plays great imo. It's a fun little bit of rocketry history, OTRAG even briefly had the late Von Braun working for them.
  21. Charle_Roger
    You're right, it is pretty weird to have as the basic fuel mix, but I'm going to end up reinventing RealFuels if I'm not careful, which is not the goal. Any more sensible fuel to pair with NTO would require nitrogen to produce and blurs the line between LiquidFuel and MonoPropellant. LiquidFuel being kerosene is pretty universally agreed upon, much more so than the identity of Oxidizer, and I don't want to overhaul the functioning of every stock engine. I think I'm content with requiring ammonia and oxygen to produce Oxidizer, leaving the exact chemical pretty ambiguous given the inputs, unless you want to run the numbers and figure out you're making something consisting of one part N to two parts O. Kerosene/NTO is a perfectly viable combination which actually did fly a couple of times on one of the most Kerbal rocket system ever designed, so I think it fits.
  22. Charle_Roger
    I've decided Oxidizer should actually be treated as dinitrogen tetroxide or something similar for realism and gameplay reasons, would be curious to hear what people think of it. This is part of a broader overhaul to Oxidizer which reconfigures cryogenic rockets to use LqdOxygen:
  23. Charle_Roger
    I sometimes found that CryoTanks' 10m diameter spherical tank was a bit small for some applications, I'd end up with like 16 of them on a big interstellar ship, so here's a 20m Horton sphere. All these tanks have part switch variants with/without the base mounting, as well as two sizes of stack mounting at the top and bottom.
  24. Charle_Roger
    A more detailed view of the first texturing pass.
  25. Charle_Roger
    If I include 3.75m I feel I should also do 1.875m and 7.5m. I don't think these are particularly necessary for the purpose, but they will be easy to add if I ever see a good enough reason.
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