Newnard

Excellent, thanks for the info. A recollection of a past conversation is plenty good enough evidence for me to go buy the flash drive for that purpose, seeing how worst case I can use the drive for something else. I just didn't want to go off without sanity checking myself.

Hi all. Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I couldn't decide what section would be most appropriate. If I copy KSP in its entirety to an external USB drive, can I take that with me to a friend's house to demo the game and run it directly off the flash drive? I'm imagining it would work, but I was just curious if anyone here had tried it.

Excellent -- but mysteriously, my running copy of KSP seems to be using a different value for tons/unit of hydrogen than what the CRP specifies. I verified that my CRP folder contains a CommonResources.cfg that matches what you linked, so that's not the problem... and the container definition for the compressing hydrogen tank doesn't specify any mass, just a number of units (presumably gets the mass from looking up the resource name in the CRP)... so why is my KSP reporting a mass of 10kg for 114,068 units when it should be 10.2547132kg? Oh... I'm an idiot... of course it's rounding off to the nearest kg. Ok so Ramarren and Newnard are in complete agreement at this point, I think, that the conversion rate should be 4450:1 for hydrogen:liquidHydrogen. Plus or minus some tiny fraction that I can't be bothered with.

For the record I 100% agree, magic mass is bad. I don't have Universal Storage installed, so my only point of reference for the non-liquid "hydrogen" resource is the compressor that comes with this Dibnah pack. That compressor tank holds 10kg of hydrogen for a total of 114,068 units, or 11,406.8 units per kilogram, or 0.00008766700564575516 kg/unit. This is slightly off (after correcting for my five orders of magnitude error) from my figure before which was based solely on the conversion rates being used by the electroliser, but I'll trust this one more. So using this value for "hydrogen" kg/unit, 4450 units would be about .39kg, whereas we know that "liquid hydrogen" is exactly .4kg/unit. My current math (which should not be confused with correct math, lol) says that 0.4kg/unit of "liquid hydrogen" / 0.0000876670056457 kg/unit of "hydrogen" is a conversion ratio of 1:4562.72. So now I have to go back over this thread and figure out where the 4450 number is coming from and why my 4562.72 number is probably wrong. Regardless, we should make every effort to make the conversion factor between hydrogen and liquid hydrogen exactly correct from a conservation of mass perspective; any gameplay enhancing hand waving should take place on the power consumption and/or rate-of-water-conversion side of things.

I can easily imagine deploying five 4000 EC/s fission plants to minmus, to cut the production time down to 25 earth / 100 kerbin days per huge tank. Especially if I can do something creative and subsequently take a couple of those fission plants with me on the ship using the hydrogen. Reuse is good. So if I assume the numbers above (16 tons of hydrogen in 1222 hours) that means processing 144,000kg of water in the same time period, or 118kg per hour, which works out to 0.032733etc units of water per second. I figure if I'm running five fission plants to power the operation, there are probably multiple separate electrolysis units at work... possibly 10-ish? So if the per-electrolysis-machine water consumption were 0.0033-ish units per second, that would be sufficient for my whims. Which is only, um... 187? times faster than the current configuration.

Ramarren is correct, and I am mortified. I was using a calculator to do the math and the answer was 8.927847625628397e-5 -- I only paid attention to the beginning part and missed the e-5 at the end. I will lamely mention that it's been a while since I slept and that might have contributed. That makes a lot of sense... On my copy I edited the converter to process water a hundred times faster than what Deadpan110 had it at, but at the same (not 100x) energy cost... and that felt a lot better, gameplay wise. But I think I'd be willing to invest in a huge power infrastructure on minmus if that's what would be required... I just don't want it to take years and years to fill my tanks. In reference to the bolded (by me) part of your quote above, I have two questions: 1) Can you point me at a reference that explains the theoretical power needs of this process? Keeping in mind that I'm bad at chemistry. 2) Does anyone have a clue how much energy one kerbal energy unit is supposed to represent? I've seen a couple different values for kilowatts and megajoules flying around at various points since I started playing this game, and don't know if any of them had a basis.

Ok, continuing to brainstorm here and I might submit this comment just to checkpoint my current thinking, don't take it as final opinion or in any way authoritative. H2O is roughly 2 parts hydrogen, 16 parts oxygen by mass. So, for every 18kg of water, we should get about 2kg hydrogen out. In the default TAC life support, it seems that water is simply 1 unit == 1 kilogram. A standard sized water tank from TAC holds 240 units/kilograms of water. Which should translate to a little over 26kg of hydrogen. In Near Future Propulsion, it seems that liquid hydrogen is 1 unit == 0.4 kilograms. So one unit of water should give us 1/9 kg of liquid hydrogen, or 0.04444444 units. Reversing this logic means that for each unit of liquid hydrogen, we would need 3.6 units of water. My favorite liquid hydrogen tank is 40,000 units large, so I *should* need 144,000 units of water to convert and fill it up. So that's my idea of how the ratios SHOULD work. Now to examine what you have implemented at the moment to see if it matches: Input water per second = 0.0000176697 units. Weird value, but ok. Translates to 0.0000176697 kg, which contains 0.0000176697/9 == 0.0000019633 kg of actual hydrogen. The output resource we care about is the hydrogen resource from US, which is NOT the same as the liquid hydrogen I am seeking. We get 0.0219907427 units of this hydrogen resource out. We must assume at this point that the 0.0219907427 units of "hydrogen" equates to 0.0000019633kg. So I'll simply take the kilograms and divide by the number of units to get kg/u which is about 8.93kg per unit? That seems like a rather large value, but maybe that's why they are using such weirdly small numbers in the conversion process. So now we need to convert this "hydrogen" resource to "liquid hydrogen". The converter simply takes the input resource, divides by 851. I'm still murky as to where this 851 number comes from. But that means that 0.0219907427 units of "hydrogen" converts to 0.000002584106 units of "liquid hydrogen"; at 0.4kg per unit of liquid hydrogen that is only 0.000000103364243blah kg. Going back to the start, we determined that our output should be 0.0000019633kg of liquid hydrogen. So somewhere the numbers are off by a factor of about 19. It seems to me that the universal storage people went to some effort to come up with a reasonable value for "hydrogen" units/kg, and that the near future propulsion people likewise chose what seemed like a good number for "liquid hydrogen" units/kg. We needn't question either of their choices, we just need to assume that they are talking about the same element with the same atomic weight and convert appropriately. So: "hydrogen" == about 8.93kg per unit and "liquid hydrogen" is 0.4kg per unit. So when converting between them, we should use a factor of 8.93/0.04 == 22.325, not 851. My point with all this is that we should try to conserve mass when doing our conversions, as mass is critical to spaceflight and having it mysteriously grow or shrink is very, very confusing.

First of all, thank you so much for making this mod, it is really appreciated. Game balance is now way off in the other direction. Example: I want to fill one of the big hydrogen tanks from future propulsion (40,000 units liquid hydrogen). Assume I have an infinite supply of water. Each second, one of your devices produces 0.022 units of hydrogen. There are 851 units of hydrogen per unit of liquid hydrogen. 851 * 40,000 = about 34 million units of hydrogen required, and at 0.022 per second that's about 1.5 billion seconds, which is just under 430,000 hours, or 71633 kerbal days. Of course, if I wanted to fill the tank in about six hours, I could always just use 71,633 devices but that would cost over half a million units of energy per second, which works out to 125 or so fission reactors. I don't know the compression level of gasseous to liquid hydrogen, but this feels like it is off by a couple orders of magnitude. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage may be useful; I haven't wrapped my head around it yet.

Heh... did I just see a mod post a reaction gif?

Fixed that for you.

You can. I have tested this.

I downloaded and tried the .craft file. Had to edit out some parts because you are using a mod (MechJeb) that I don't use, but I don't think that has anything to do with your problem. I worked on it for a while and made some improvements, but it was still breaking when I finally gave up. Here are the improvements that seemed to help: 1) Move the launch gantries down so that they are supporting the structure from the bottom instead of letting it hang from the top. 2) (more) struts tying jumbo-64 fuel tanks to each other vertically. Here are the improvements that I think you should make but I didn't try yet: 3) Build wider, instead of taller. Your rocket is so tall that it is breaking under its own weight. 4) Use the kind radial decoupler that leaves some space between the tanks, instead of the hydraulic detatchment manifolds. This allows you to do the following two steps: 5) Put a strut connecting each radial decoupler to its parent tank, and 6) Put a strut or two connecting each radial decoupler to the tank it is supporting. Good luck!

Very nice. Any tips on configuring the stick? I have a HOTAS setup that I now want to try out with KSP... Loved watching you land on the water tower, that was funny.

I had one design that ejected a cloud of about 36 pieces of junk all at once after achieving LKO, then one of the fuel trucks sent up to top it off hit one of them a few hours later while trying to meet up in orbit.

I made an attempt, it wasn't the best. I think it was 0.21 when I did it, might have been one release before (did that one have the clamp-o-tron Sr?). Regardless it was all stock except for kerbal engineer redux. My craft was a big square kind of shape, with the kerbal on an external command seat. It had some excess mass due to my not being very bright. For example, FOUR clamp-o-tron seniors because I am terrible at docking to refuel and needed more (and bigger) options to aim for when my fuel trucks met up with it. That and it made it more symmetrical. During descent, a couple parachutes tore off when I opened them, resulting in a harder than planned landing which broke one of the Clamp-o-trons off but didn't dislodge it from it's place on the corner tank. When I tried to get back up, the clamp-o-tron slid off, causing a sudden imbalance, tumble, and then very bad things.

Aha! Looking closely, it appears that the fuel line from west to center may be connected to an RCS block rather than the tank itself. That pretty much explains it, thank you for helping me know what to look for! Edit: Sorry, newbie question: How do I switch the label on this thread to [Answered]?

I escape Kerbin and do it there. If you think about it, no matter what inclination you are at in Kerbin orbit, you are still at approximately the same inclination as Kerbin in solar orbit. Changing your Kerbin inclination doesn't really change your overall inclination in the solar system. So I think escaping Kerbin first isn't as inefficient as you think.

Thank you for your response, Monty845. I'll go ahead and try deleting all the fuel lines and re-installing them in the VAB. Too bad that leaves Bill Kerman stuck in Munar orbit. I guess this qualifies as a bug... do you (or anyone) know if it's been reported yet? I don't feel like I have enough information to file a quality bug report, although I do have a save file that demonstrates the problem.

Maybe an unmanned probe on a kerbin-escape mission? Should be able to beam back some science from interplanetary space.

I observed that behavior in sandbox mode in 0.21; Jeb seems to respawn after being dead a while. Maybe it's a different Jeb, might be a common name for kerbals?

Hi all. I have a strange problem that I can't decide if it's a bug or if I did something wrong somehow. My craft has five LV-909 engines, each below a FL-T800 fuel tank. One of the five is in the center, and the others are arranged in a + shape around the center engine. I'll call them North, South, East, and West. North has a fuel line pointed at East. South has a fuel line pointed at West. East and West have fuel lines pointed at Center. In other words, a standard small asparagus staging setup. I've done it a hundred times or more, never had trouble until now. When I throttle up the engines, the fuel in the North tank is consumed at a faster rate than the fuel in the South tank, leading to a weight imbalance and my craft starts tumbling. After shutting off the engines to figure out what's going wrong, I examine the fuel levels in each tank and find that the center, east, and west tanks are all full (as they should be, since I didn't burn very long) and the north and south tanks are both partially used, but NOT by the same amount. North is significantly emptier. All five engines appear to be burning, it's not like one of them is turned off or something. Is there anything I could possibly have done wrong to cause this behavior, or does it seem like a bug? Has anyone else run into this kind of problem with .22? I have only one mod installed, it's the chatterer mod that adds background radio transmission noises to the game. I don't think it does anything to modify the actual game mechanics.