Tyko

good conversation. I've (finally) been able to get my drilling rigs to run in the background. It was a PITA to figure it out and had to do with my rigs overheating when the sun rose each morning. You'd mentioned that you hadn't revisited since 1.0.5. If you want to try again I'll be more than happy to walk you through what I've learned, send you a breakdown of my rig's design or just share the Craft file if we are using the same mods.

Totally get that everything is a tradeoff and it's really helpful to have you and other Devs on here taking the time to clarify things. I think for me the game experience is a repetitive series of frustrations, discoveries and revelations. I read up what I can. I make a best guess based on what I can read. I find out that it doesn't work as advertised because of some mechanic that's not fully explained. Then I re-think and re-work my plans with my new info and try again. One could argue this is wonky or one could say "this is what NASA went through"

again, I have to disagree...time is another "currency" in KSP that you spend to accomplish tasks. If time passing weren't important then why bother with requiring players to wait several years to get to Jool? You could equally argue that KSP should include warp drive so players don't have to wait to get to other planets. I'm not saying "your wrong in wanting to play a certain way"...what I am saying is that KSP (at many levels) gives players the experience of running a (semi-) realistic space program. I just think that the Mining/ISRU system should reflect a certain degree of "realism" just like the rest of the game does NOTE...I used a lot of qualifiers because I realize KSP isn't entirely realistic, but it does do a pretty good job of giving players a sense for how it might work.

I get your point of view. For the record, I disagree and wouldn't want to see the game go in that direction. In my opinion ISRU refueling is a late game endeavor for people who've spent the time to master launching, landing, rendezvous and are looking for a new challenge. Furthermore, most places where ISRU makes sense (i.e. other planets) take years to get to, so those player are also accustomed to a longer time scale than newbies. To present those experienced players with some instant super-simple way of generating fuel is actually taking away from the coolness/challenge of being able to accomplish it. I think the system should work as advertised (heat, etc) and I think it should be easy to understand. I think the implementation of that system should be (somewhat) complicated and take time to make it a challenge for advanced players.

The Mars Direct mission plans expected it to take 10 months for the fueling mission to create enough fuel for the return trip. As this is kind of the working model for how ISRU would work in real life, I think that we could probably use that as the measuring stick for Stock Mining - "How many drills would it take to mine enough fuel in 10 months to return a lander from Duna back to Kerbin". Excerpt from Mars Direct Wiki "96 tonnes of methane and oxygen would be needed to send the Earth Return Vehicle on a trajectory back home at the conclusion of the surface stay, the rest would be available for Mars rovers. The process of generating fuel is expected to require approximately ten months to complete." To be clear, I don't think that Stock Mining is perfect, but I think that we have to manage our expectations rather than just expect a full tank of fuel overnight.

Congrats! Landing on moons was one of those early frustration items that took me a lot of practice to master. Like so many things in KSP - once you get it it'll be second nature

I've been running Nukes without radiators too. I think they must have changed the heating mechanics on nukes because I lot of older threads talk about having to cool them.

I'm struggling through this too, but have a few insights. To the question of how many drills. @KerikBalm mentions 8 drills, you talk about 2. Maybe it's just about expectations as to how big your drilling expedition has to be? 2 drills might be great for a Mars Direct style "park the drill out here and let it sit for months and months" style mission. My first rig had 4 small drills and was hideously slow - I almost gave up until I realized I just needed moar drills. On the heating question. Are you accounting for daytime solar heating of your rig? I was having the same problem with my rig shutting down despite having "enough radiators" based on my VAB calculations. Then I watched the rig run (in time acceleration) for a full day and discovered that when the sun rose in the morning there was a sudden heat spike that took my radiators some time to compensate for. THIS was shutting down my rig. Once I added enough radiators to overcome that morning heat spike my rig ran just fine.

hmmm..that's a good question. I'm in the midst of a long Career game. I can't uninstall USI-LS to compare because all of my craft have LS parts, so I'm not sure how I would do a comparison. Any ideas?

Yep, I think that's it! sounds like a workable system

Thanks for the continued explanations..I'm going to restate this to make sure I'm following you. I think you're saying that - "every 6 hours it does a catch-up calculation that accounts for production by greenhouses, recycling (reactors and solar panels too?). As long as I have enough Supplies, battery EC, etc for over 6 hours without counting power generation, greenhouses and recycling then I should be fine because on that 6 hour cycle my out of focus craft will be "visited" and have their production quantities adjusted to account for everything I'm generating"?

YES! thanks

cool. I believe that @Yemo is working on an update for SETICTT. It would be great if he could add Kerbalism support

I think the middle ground I'm looking for is to be able to access the VAB Interface to update an existing craft. Right now I can build it in the VAB with the tools to exactly place parts (symmetry, CoM, etc). Once I leave the VAB my current option is to use KIS, which isn't all that accurate and doesn't have the VAB tools. So - you have to launch / build an orbital workshop like Pandaman said. Then you have to launch parts in KIS-type boxes - there's no way I'm imagining that I can fab a nuclear engine in space that IS too high tech. The benefit of the orbital workshop is that when you dock your ship you go into a full VAB style interface where you can fully modify your ship, change Action Groups, etc with the limitation being that the only parts that show in your orbital workshop are parts you've already launched up to it from KSC. This would let you upgrade your ships without using KIS which is great for adding a light, but weren't really intended for swapping out heavy parts like engines or of upgrading parts that aren't surface attached. The best part is that Squad wouldn't have to invent a whole new system. VAB already exists. Re-skin the VAB background to look like a space dock and then build a workshop part or parts that enable you to trigger access to this new VAB when you are docked to it. The parts could limit the size or part-count of what you can edit just like the VAB limits part count on what it can build. Need to work on bigger ships? you need a bigger workshop

This is great! Thanks for the update! Does Kerbalism work with Community Tech Tree? What about any other Tech Tree mods?

Sure! can you please explain a bit more? I just learned today that USI-LS doesn't properly report Supplies/energy use when the vessel is not active. RoverDude referred to it a problem with Catch-up mechanics. Kerbalism claims to have " coherent background simulation". If ShotgunNinja has figured out how to do it, I'm pretty sold on that. EDIT: @RoverDude and @Merkov clarified that while USI-LS doesn't accurately report when the craft is not active, the accounting is automatically corrected when you switch to the craft or every 6 hours when Catch-up mechanics happen. I didn't want to misrepresent USI-LS as being broken. It works correctly. It's just the reporting mechanism that's a bit wonky.

What about my question about heat and ISRU? Are my drilling rigs heating up and shutting off due to catch-up mechanics too? If so, what's the workaround?

I'm trying to get rid of the Cupola model change because I don't like the little window covers, but it's not working. For other parts I've been able to comment out the code in the appropriate .cfg file. For example. I commented out the new antenna's and those models reverted to Stock, so I know that works. The Cupola is different for some reason. If I comment out the parts pertaining to the Cupola in the Command.cfg file I still get Ven's model with the windows covered, but now my right-click menu doesn't offer the option to open the covers up. So, something's changing, but the model change is still there. Any ideas?

I think you'd have to plan on reusing a ISRU multiple times to pay for itself. You're using a launch to send a complete ISRU system that has to land on Duna and then start processing. If it's just single use, you can just send a full tank of gas and have it waiting there.

THIS..I've screwed up more launches that way. I always put a few flat solar panels on my ships now just in case I forget to open them. I really try to remember to open them as soon as I surpass 70Km just to be safe.

I did a ton of docking this weekend. It's really fun and satisfying when you get the hang of it. A few things I've learned: First I try to keep my target vessels in at least 125Km orbits - I chose this because orbits can get strange and jittery below 100Km (it's a game bug). By choosing 125Km it allows my approaching vessel space below for faster orbits that are still above the 100Km mark. always remember to select your docking port and "control from here" on target vessel, select it's docking port, "control from here" and point it at the inbound vessel 0.2 m/s is a safe docking speed and it still gives me enough forward velocity that I'm not waiting all day. I always use that speed for the last 20-30 meters If you're open to Mods, the Docking Port Alignment Indicator is just brilliant. Lastly - I have a rule that ships within 100 meters always shut their main engines down before docking - right click on engine and "shut down". I made this rule because there have been way too many times when, after docking I accidentally hit my throttle buttons and the ship pushed my whole station out of its orbit.

yea, I'm not sure what's up. the Life Support window will tell me I'm out of food, or out of power and I'll jump to the ship and everything will be fine. I've also seen my drilling/ISRU rigs just shut down from over-heating when they're not active even though I can watch them over time as an active vessel with zero over-heating issues.

Here's part of the problem - My greenhouses only seem to process when the ship is active. In the Life Support Status screen the ship shows "sup" ticking down every second (supplies are decreasing) when it's not active, but the "sup" goes up 3 seconds every second (supplies are increasing) when the ship is active.

Okay..I tried mining this weekend and it wasn't all that successful. I set up a lander with 4 mini-drills, a 1.5m ISRU and two .625m reactors, also added 8 Small TCS. According to the reference numbers available in the VAB. 1.5 ISRU: Required Cooling 100Kw, Max cooling 50KW = 2 x 50Kw TCS Since the KSPedia has a lot of pretty pix, but doesn't actually explain the numbers, I just went with the higher of the two. 2 x .625 reactors: Max Cooling 25Kw (each) = 1 x 50Kw TCS 4 x Drill-o-matic Junior: Max Cooling 50Kw (each) = 4 x 50Kw TCS This looks like I should need 7 Small TCS (50Kw each). To my amazement it took 12 Small TCS to get it running steadily.

How did you make these awesome pix?