king of nowhere

I will open a detailed mission report for it as soon as i have the whole thing assembled. Several people told me it's impossible to make a grand tour with kerbalism, and I intend to settle the matter one way or another. But first I want to have the whole ship assembled, because I wasn't sure the game would even be playable at all with it. Now I am quite optimistic. As long as I can deal with the roughly 5 frames per second, and the couple minutes load whenever the main ship comes into physical radius. I like my monstruosity enough to deal with that. the only thing I regret is not being able to put a gigantic "DREAM BIG" logo on it.

ok, putting some autostruts stabilized the structure against shaking. I hope it won't mess too badly with kerbalism. I felt safe in autostrutting to heavier, because 1) I have 4 S4-512 tanks on the main body that are, without competition, the biggest parts. no risk of priority being swapped 2) the heaviest parts were often quite far from the center. as in, the mining vehicles are attached through a docking port, and attached to that is an RGU, 2 food containers, one adapter, a crew pod, a crew living space, a convert-o-tron, and finally a big S3 tank. If I root the S3 tank to grandparent, I fear it may get strutted to a crew pod, or food container, with no gain; i need it strutted to the main body. Even then, I quickly speed up the game every time i finish manuevering, just to ensure there is no remaining structural stress. For now it's holding. i never had problems with shaking again. And I am almost done. I only need to attach 2 more pieces, a rather small one with 40 parts, and the big eve lander, that's a 200 parts behemot. On the plus side, Eve is my first stop, so I will drop that pretty fast. It still lags horribly, but there's not much to be done for it. It's less bad if I restart the pc regularly. Yes, the smart thing would be to not launch a ship so big. but as soon as i installed kerbalism, I wanted to see if I could run a grand tour mission, dealing with life support, radiations, and malfunctions all along the way. planning and anticipation have been obsessing me for the last couple of weeks, and I will see my dream to the end, successful or not. thanks everyone. any further advice would still be welcome

it's already in orbit. the biggest part i launched from the ground was 550 parts, reduced to 330 after staging. to that i added 4 refueling vehicles, because i will have to do a lot of refueling, and with a chance to blow up an engine at every trip i wanted backups. and 4 crew escape pods. and now I will need a few landers, but i'm mostly done

also, my behemot is making the game lagging hugely. which is absolutely expected, but not also when i'm not controlling it. i am in the space center, going from the tracking station to the vab, and still it lags hugely. why is that?

I have discovered that when it starts shaking, i can quickly speed up time to stop it. the loss of rotation upon speeding time is considered a bug, or an engine limitation at best, but in this case it's saving me. anything else?

I have a ship with 900 parts, and i'm afraid that count is going to become higher before it can become smaller. No, don't ask, I need ALL of them, and I already tried to keep the numbers down. I am using kerbalism, so I need to include extra redundancies in case something breaks. I really do need this huge thing. And I spent a couple weeks planning the mission, I'm not keen on giving it up. As you all know, ships with too many parts, especially when connected by docking ports, are prone to breaking. at some point some parts will start shaking, and the shaking will propagate to everything and get worse, until you lose some parts of the ship. turning SAS off helps, but only mildly. I'm not sure if autostrutting makes things better or worse, but it has some problems with kerbalism, so i'm trying to use it as little as possible. Any advice on how to handle ships with huge part count without them disassembling spontaneously? thanks

I've made extensive use of them, but they are quite complex. you need to do 3 main things . first thing to discuss is angle of attack. if your propeller blades are flat, you won't get any propulsion. in fact, they need to be angled just right, and the right angle changes with air speed. for this, you need to tie your blade angles to a KAL controller, and move the controller to change the blade angle during flight. i guess you'll also need instructions on the KAL controller... it's easier to do than to say it. You place the KAL anywhere on your vehicle, then you select it and open the editor. Now from the editor you go in the actions menu, and you select the blades. you select the angle of attack, and you put the two extreme values you want (you will have to experiment with those, they depend on how you made the propellers). Now you can open the KAL and mode the bar on it, and it will move all the propellers. Use f12 to activate aerodinamics show during flight, it will show you a bunch of blue, red and purple lines; you are looking at the purple ones, you want them to point forward. move the KAL to make them do so. if they always point backwards, you got the angle inverted. - Also, one propeller will cause your plane to spin. You need two propellers rotating in opposite directions, so their momentum will cancel - to accelerate the propellers with the normal accelerator, you have to go in the action menu, under "main accelerator", and select the propellers and their torque. I don't feel like i'm doing a good job of explaining. It's easier done than said. unforrtunately, very few people in this forum understand propellers, so not many to explain. feel free to ask clarifications

pictures?

I generally call stuff "mun lander", "laythe plane", "orbiter", or some other unimaginative things. sometimes random bouts of creativity strike me, and i give real names. they are generally caused by random though associations, they often are references to something and they generally refer to some actual traits of the ship. for example, a ship with a nuclear engine made to explore multiple planets was called Marco Polonium, joining the great explorer marco polo with nuclear power. or another whom i flooded with lights, i dubbed it flying christmas tree. but sometimes i am more serious, my latest mothership, built using the kerbalism mod in an attempt to have life support run for decades, I decided to call it Home, because that's what's supposed to be

hey, i was missing this key piece of question. and the answer is: depends. planes are different. some do require SAS on, but without pointing at any direction. some will need to point prograde, while others will become unstable if you try to do it. and others will have to be flown by hand. In any case, i've never seen stability assistance (as in, not trying to point at a specific direction, only to stand still) to do any harm

yes, of course. we mean to go slow when you touch. when you are still 50 meters from your target, you should go a bit faster

show us pictures. we can't see the problem if we can't see the craft

anyway, you should try to go slow. if you are moving fast, your vessels will bump into each other and then separate. if you are slow, they can stick together

especially because it would be quite hard having to stay there for weeks while something else may require your attention. the safer thing is to change craft, and then time warp. isru goes fine while outside physics bubble

ok, so I made some calculations. my main ship takes a bit more than 1000 tons of fuel. for refueling at a decent speed I need 10 tons of mixed fuel per day. that's 900 LF and 1100 Ox over the 6 hours of a kerbin day. A convert-o-tron running the sabatier process makes 0.045 LF or 0.055 Ox, which is very close to this requirement. It sucks 1249 H2 and 314 CO2 To provide the CO2, I have the spectrovariometers. each one makes 0.2 CO2 per second, so I'd need some 1600 of those. Each consumes 0.5 electricity/s, for a total of 800. For the hydrogen, a convert-o-tron set to electrolysis makes 90 per second, taking 0.72 water and 216 electricity. I also need hydrogen to make oxydizer (180/s). So I will need 16 electrolysis running, for roughly 3400 electricity. And a water drill makes 0.015 water per second, so i need 5 for each electrolysis, 80 total. And another 400 charge to power them. So we're looking at 4600 electricity/s, which on Duna would require 550 gigantor. And since half of the time will be night, I'd need 2 of those setup. And this actually feels right. yes, producing 10 tons of fuel per day would really require tens of tons of machinery and a huge solar park. But it's potentially feasible. I actually designed a modular base that could, with enough pieces, do the trick. solar array factory now i only need to assemble 100 more solar arrays and 20 factories! Of course, in ksp practice, it's completely unfeasible. the spectrovariometers and solar panels alone would be 2500 parts, there's no way the game can run like this. And a land base that big would be eaten by krakens much before it's completion. Even I am not so crazy as to try that. What I will do instead will be refueling with the stock functionality at Duna, all the while pretending that I have this huge industrial complex. It would be much easier to use ion engines and drop tanks and give up on any isru pretence. but I don't want to just explore space, i want to conquer it, and that requires a modicum of reusability. this isru would be adequate if one wanted to send a duna ascent vehicle 4 years in advance to have it slowly gather fuel before the real astronauts arrive. make sure that your stranded kerbonaut has the capacity to turn a regular habitat into a potato greenhouse.

that's very situational. we can distinguish two different phases of reentry. first, you are in high atmosphere. lots of heating, little drag. you can stay there for a long time, if you survive the heat. then you get lower, and drag goes much higher. you will slow down fast, but if you must explode, shielding won't save you. So, a steeper entry helps you if you can't survive the first phase but you can survive the second. actually, i've never seen that in my (admittedly limited) experience; if you cannot survive the heat in high atmosphere, then going lower will disintegrate you immediately. if you can survive the heat in high atmosphere, you still may explode later. for example, when reentrying eve, i usually explode around 50 km of altitude. that's when drag increases a lot; sure, if i could survive a half minute i'd be fine. if. there is, on the other hand, also a case where you want to have a steeper entry because too shallow entry will make you slow down a lot in the high atmosphere. and then you will fall down fast, and will get too deep in the atmosphere too fast. while a steeper entry will make you go faster in the middle strata, and you will spend longer decelerating there before reaching the low atmosphere. this is a case i actually witnessed, and a case where a steeper reentry will help. basically, you have to experiment. damn, i hate spaceplanes. but somehow, i keep making them.

maybe i figured out a reason: when the game updated to 1.11, i didn't think about skipping it to preserve the mods. so i opened the save, and the mods were disabled, and on leaving it saved authomatically. this way, it deleted all informations about the mod. i had to reconfigurate all the systems in the crafts, and maybe it also deleted resources that are exclusive to mods. i also could not find water anywhere. if that's the case, then it's not a bug, and i will just have to import the craft files in another save i'll make for it. the only thing that doesn't fit is that i did find some CO2 on laythe.

well, fthe first step is to actually figure out whether it is a bug. and whether i should report it or let it pass. So, i tried starting a new game. and i got 99% abundance on both duna and eve. started another game, this time 98% abundance. ok, there is some variability, but it's mostly consistent. started a game with 50% resource abundance, now CO2 was 49%. my game where i got none was with 50% abundance set. Since I haven't launched anything yet, I suppose I can start a new game and copy there all the ship files. Do you think I should report my game for bug anyway and upload some files?

almost nothing. just kerbal alarm clock and kerbal wind tunnel.

hey, it works! except, it doesn't. I went to Eve, and it also said abundance: none. There is some on Laythe and Kerbin, though. Now, according to the wiki, Duna's atmosphere is supposed to be made mostly of CO2. Eve too. Gas properties are fitting. Also, their real world analogues have atmospheres mostly of CO2. But I can't harvest them. The only planet where i can try to harvest some atmosphere is Laythe. Which lies straight in the middle of Jool's main radiation belt, it would kill my crew in days. Not to mention that there's too little sunlight to get decent power to speed up operations. And that it has enough gravity that all the precious isru fuel i could mine would be spent going up. This seems a mistake with the mod, because duna and eve should definitely be good for mining. I hope I'm not coming across overly polemical. I like this mod. The guy(s) making it are working for free. I want to help making this work. Because it has a beautiful chain of chemical reactions, with a lot of potential, if it wasn't completely unusable. And it's not about realism; real space agencies are actually studying this concept, they plan to make rocket fuel both on the moon and on mars. it must be feasible.

In a few days at most i will be ready to launch my mission. i have the big mothership with all the comforts and redundancies to last for over a decade. i have multiple landers, mining vehicles. i even included some fast escape pods. maybe i will manage the complete a grand tour, maybe not, but i will like to try. but i need to know how do i extract CO2 from the atmosphere? i can make the mission work if i must refuel only at Duna. i will need a separate expendable stage to send to moho, and i will need to go back to duna for refueling after jool, but it can work. if I know how to, I will try it. If not, I will just use the regular isru. it will be significantly easier.

oh, that makes sense. yes, extracting carbon from something with low carbon would indeed be inefficient. in this case, would it be outlandish to include some additional sources of carbon? I mean, when i am on the surface and use the scanner, i find a lot of different ores, from rare metals to uranite. which i'm not sure what are they for, perhaps some contracts will ask to recover them? anyway, there are no carbon materials among that list. perhaps you could include some carbonatic mineral in the terrain composition, and have that be used to make carbon dioxide at a reasonable cost and speed? imo, that would be a reasonable and realistic way to make isru practical. ok, i asked it twice and i never got answered: how do you extract CO2 from the atmosphere? i can't find any way. the only thing that looks vaguely like it can take something from an atmosphere is the atmospheric pump; I tried on Duna attached to a scrubber and an empty CO2 container, but it did nothing.

what i am arguing for, exactly, is that making carbon dioxide should not be energy intensive. hydrogen production is the expensive part of the process. and anyway, you are not turning regolith into fuel. if that was the case, you could do it anywhere. instead you need to look for "ore"; which i assume is carbon-rich rock. and turning carbon-rich rock into carbon dioxide is not all that expensive. it may even be energetically favorable, depending on the rock. and by the way, if you use liquid hydrogen as fuel, you skip the whole carbon and regolith part. increasing the mass and volume of the equipment needed would also work very well. i can deal with needing more mass more easily than i can deal with needing more than a couple dozen gigantors. for more mass, i can make a bigger ship. but so many solar panels just don't fit. In real life you can fulfill your power requirememnts this way in ksp you cannot. you simply cannot physically fit all those solar panels around you ship. I am not arguing that doing isru should not be difficult. i am arguing that the difficulty is in the wrong place. I disagree. Kerbalism makes it very difficult to make any long term operation, and that is exactly why it is the right mod. I like challenges. Easy is boring. I started a new career to familiarize with the mod, but got bored after a few days and decided to jump immediately for the large prize. Anyway, I am testing my stuff extensively, orbiting distant places for an year, and so far it seems manageable. I am looking forward to that

If I can make some suggestions... As i said, i can accept that isru be difficult, but the problem should not be carbon. carbon is relatively easy to find and to extract. the major problem is hydrogen. hydrogen is relatively rare on rocky worlds. so, if you want isru to be so difficult, you should focus there. for start, i notice that a H-O fuel cell provides as much energy as the electrolysis process consumes. which would be ok with a 100% efficiency, but that's not the case. i believe you can triple the cost there and it would be realistic. isru would still be very expensive because you'd need to extract hydrogen from water. and water would still be hard to find. just feasible hard, instead of practically impossible. I made some calculations. the current setup requires 36 hours of energy output of the largest solar panel available (at kerbin, at peak exposure all the time) to produce 5 kg of methane. doing some calculations, best i can estimate a gigantor is 18 square meters. solar power on earth orbit is 1,36 kW/m^2, and efficiency of a solar panel is generally between 15 and 20%. let's use 15%, a gigantor should produce 3.7 kW, which totaled over the 36 hours means 476 MJ. 5 kg of methane have a heat of combustion of 278 MJ, so the numbers actually fit. it's just it should not be carbon the problem, but hydrogen. and then again, every energy cost of expensive processes in this game is much lower than in real life - a gigantor wouldn't be able to power a mining drill, for example. also, there is a large problem of actually fitting so many panels; it's my main struggle here, because i can afford the weight, but i have no space. in real life you can go out of your ship and spread a solar field, in ksp you cannot. also, perhaps most important, you should be able to estimate water content from an orbital scan. in real life we've been doing that with the moon for decades. regarding food isru, i think 5 tons of greenhouse to support a kerbal sound just about right. a greenhouse also provides living space and life support. i don't think that chain would need help. but i do believe other food should be made heavier. if 300 kg of food and water stores let a kerbal live for a decade, it's no wonder that there's no incentive to building greenhouses, except cool effect. regaring stress, i think the mechanics are fine. i can get over 20 years duration with a large base with all comfort (and despite the game not recognizing that i have plants). regarding radiations, the main problem is shielding efficiency. even the best shielding only blocks, by default, 90% of radiation. I have no idea about realistic values here - I am a chemist, I can discuss ISRU and energy requirements in depth but radiations are not my field of expertise - but raising that value would help a lot. though i'm not even sure it's needed, since you provided the radiation shield; for 2.5 tons of mass and some electricity, I can nullify radiations anywhere except in radiation belts. If additional mechanics are wanted, i would suggest adding "radiation shelters", which would basically be lead coffins in which you could order the crew in an emergency; they would be heavy, and sending the crew in them would increase stress and would stop their work, and the instruments would still take radiation damage, but they could protect the crew for a short duration - say, crossing a radiation belt or a solar storm. finally, regarding the general feasibility of all this, it's not actually all that impossible or futuristic. the technologies are there. it would just be super expensive, and in the real world we don't have unlimited budget. in ksp we do. my self-sustaining mothership weights close to 2000 tons, that's 5 times the space station. and the real space station is already mostly sustainable, it only requires food and some water. i have no doubt that if we could send five times its mass up there, we could create a structure capable of self sustaining for a few decades. and if we could send several tens of tons of mining equipment, producing fuel from ice and carbonatic rocks on some low gravity moon at a scale of more than a ton per day should also be possible. P.S. hydrogen peroxide would be a poor choice of oxidizer for many reasons. nitrogen tetraoxide, or just plain liquid oxigen, are better choices. but i do not suggest you change the whole chemical setup, because it would take too much work. P.P.S. you said it is possible to get carbon dioxide from duna's atmosphere. how? my plans can work if i can refuel at duna, but i haven't found the option.

Another couple oddities i noticed 1) i have two gravity rings. i tried to have them deflated for launch and inflating them later, but they do not inflate fully. they reach around 86% extended, and then they stop. they have no problem if i launch them already extended. if i extend only one of them, i get a higher percentage. it looks a bit like there was a gas needed to fill it, but it's not the case because there's no mention; plus, i have HUGE stockpiles of everything. so, why are they not inflating? 2) i made a few calculation to follow the ISRU chain offered by this mod, and it's basically unfeasible. Worse, it's unfeasible in ways that don't make sense. the bottleneck is the molten regolith process: the convert-o-tron needs 180 electric charge per second to produce 0.4 CO2. that's 450 electric charge for a CO2. then the sabatier process will require 7000 CO2 for a single unit of liquid fuel. that's enormous. It's over 3 million electric charge for enough CO2 to produce a single unit of liquid fuel. and that makes no physical sense. CO2 is a very stable molecule. it takes very little energy to release it from ore. and it's quite abundant in most minerals. there's no reason it should require so much ore and energy. in comparison, producing a single unit of hydrogen by electrolisis - a very energy intensive process - requires less than 3 electric charge. and a unit of H2 and CO2, judging by the ratios in which they are used in sabatier, are the same number of moles. it really makes no sense that making CO2 is 200 times more expensive than making H2. nor that it is made so slowly. and it makes the whole ISRU process unfeasible, while in reality it is quite feasible - NASA themselves are studying to extract fuel from water on the moon. I think this needs to be rebalanced. also, i think i won't feel bad about using the regular isru until then. also speaking of ISRU, we need a process to extract CO2 and water from liquid fuel. it's easy, you just burn it. it shouldn't be a resource sink, especially if you need emergency water. I also take this chance to bump previous questions that haven't been answered 3) 4)