[1.0.x] Civilian Population 1.4

[michaelhester07]

This looks good. I was thinking about how I could create/breed kerbals from my mature offworld bases. I am glad someone else has taken care of that.

If you recruit a kerbal, does the civilian population size change?

Does the population size stay constant (Provided they are provided all the necessary resources) or do they have a life expectancy? If they do have a life expectancy, are they recycled back into the resource system? I can't imagine jettisoning them makes sense if a space colony is trying to conserve their resources. I am not an expert on kerbal burial practices, other than the fact they sometimes explode or poof into nothingness.

Growing a space colony is great. I am wondering if there is an endgame or advantage to growing the colony other than the challenge and kerbal recruitment. Kerbal recruitment alone makes this worthwhile for me.

It occurred to me that if space tourism is involved, could this be used to generate funds?

Thanks

Recruitment costs 1 population. Future releases will have the recruits cost additional resources of Inspiration and Education or Flight Experience, where you can recruit specific kerbal jobs directly.

Population size will stay constant assuming you have resources. I don't have plans to implement life expectancy. It's assumed that your civies are reproducing to maintain population size. They'll reproduce to grow more when your population is big enough. There is no burying a kerbal in space. There's Koylent green. If I do have life expectancy then the dieing kerbals will produce the waste resources. Right now and in the next release if they die from starvation they'll be jettisoned.

I originally built this mod to fill the one niche I didn't see filled. There's all sorts of in-situ resource mods (and this will start using those ISRU soon as I have a feel for the balance now) but none of them allowed producing new crew members. This mod fills that hole.

Space tourism right now is not used to generate funds but may eventually be. The space university and flight schools that will be in the next release will generate reputation when you recruit from them.

On the question of conservation of mass I've come up with the solution to that one: Having a new kerbal "born" among the current population will cost his mass in food. This removes mass from the water/food cycle. You would have to get more water to have more crew. When in kerbin space with the civilian docking pod growth won't incur his expense as the new civilian is "shipped" in from kerbin.

Edited March 4, 2015 by michaelhester07

[SyberSmoke]

Some points of thought.

1. Have you ever watched or read Dune? On Dune, Water is precious, when some one dies, they are vacuum desiccated and their water is recycled. Instead of spacing the kerbals (A loss of water and food in the system), may be have them "processed" back into raw materials (Water and Mulch).

2. Since you are using a different water and food system (for good reason and I like it), are you planning on a module or converter in one of your existing modules to take Water, Food, Snacks...what ever, and turn it to civi_water and civi_food? This way mining operations with water production could transfer water into the system (once implemented)...or out of the system as needed.

[somewhatcasual]

Sounds good. Def aiming to try it out next week when I get more time to play.

[michaelhester07]

Some points of thought.

1. Have you ever watched or read Dune? On Dune, Water is precious, when some one dies, they are vacuum desiccated and their water is recycled. Instead of spacing the kerbals (A loss of water and food in the system), may be have them "processed" back into raw materials (Water and Mulch).

2. Since you are using a different water and food system (for good reason and I like it), are you planning on a module or converter in one of your existing modules to take Water, Food, Snacks...what ever, and turn it to civi_water and civi_food? This way mining operations with water production could transfer water into the system (once implemented)...or out of the system as needed.

I'm planning to go back to the existing water/food systems in the community resource pack, mostly because I don't want to have to recreate all of that work of finding the resource and harvesting it. I'm slowly incorporating some suggestions I see here and I do like the recycling kerbals thing. There is a kind of morbid thought with that. If you were on a generation ship what would you think about eating and drinking your grandparents? You'd have to do it, there's nowhere to get the resources that are in someone's body in the middle of space. It would be easy enough that when a civie dies to starvation (or later life span) to have him generate a refund in "food".

I used the different water system because initially I don't want to break the balance of existing life support mods. I'm getting into Tac life support which is the big one I'd want to balance with. I was able to fix my generators to not use floating point anymore so I can properly integrate. With those two things, the Civie population mod will be finally transitioning to the existing food/water/biomass/waste as already exists.

Don't worry if you already launched a ship with my resource system. I'm going to make my mod able to give you the equivalent mass in the new resources (food, water, waste) that was in the old resources.

[Starwaster]

Some points of thought.

1. Have you ever watched or read Dune? On Dune, Water is precious, when some one dies, they are vacuum desiccated and their water is recycled. Instead of spacing the kerbals (A loss of water and food in the system), may be have them "processed" back into raw materials (Water and Mulch).

You FIEND!

~~~~

[michaelhester07]

Don't worry if you already launched a ship with my resource system. I'm going to make my mod able to give you the equivalent mass in the new resources (food, water, waste) that was in the old resources.

I have to update this part. I worked on the resource consumption balance all tonight, and its too much for me to make good on this statement. I expect to release the new version by sometime Sunday, depends on when I get the models done for the movie theater university and flight school.

[SyberSmoke]

I'm planning to go back to the existing water/food systems in the community resource pack, mostly because I don't want to have to recreate all of that work of finding the resource and harvesting it. I'm slowly incorporating some suggestions I see here and I do like the recycling kerbals thing. There is a kind of morbid thought with that. If you were on a generation ship what would you think about eating and drinking your grandparents? You'd have to do it, there's nowhere to get the resources that are in someone's body in the middle of space. It would be easy enough that when a civie dies to starvation (or later life span) to have him generate a refund in "food".

I used the different water system because initially I don't want to break the balance of existing life support mods. I'm getting into Tac life support which is the big one I'd want to balance with. I was able to fix my generators to not use floating point anymore so I can properly integrate. With those two things, the Civie population mod will be finally transitioning to the existing food/water/biomass/waste as already exists.

Don't worry if you already launched a ship with my resource system. I'm going to make my mod able to give you the equivalent mass in the new resources (food, water, waste) that was in the old resources.

I think my only concern with using an existing system would be the numbers. They are all tied to consumption of a single kerbol, But your mod is looking at many many more kerbals on top of those that are named. I could see some one making a ship that is absolutely preposterous housing thousands of civilians. That could be a rather large load of parts just to house the food, waste, air, and water components...considering the scale and all.

But hey I will be watching, right now I am not playing, rather not until release. though I guess that raises other questions like...how will your parts get into space with the new aerodynamics system. That could be one crazy lift and I have done some crazy lifts. Interesting times ahead.

[michaelhester07]

I rebalanced the load last night on resources such that 1 civilian kerbal will consume 1kg of food and 1kg of water every kerbin day. I'll add tonight the use of oxygen and CO2. I noticed the consumption rates were configurable for TAC so I can't really balance the civies around it. I thus balanced them around the above metric. It changes some of the key metrics in my mod:

Civilian Growth will consume 105kg worth of food when it happens. This obeys conservation of mass.

Civilian death through decay will produce food equivalent to their mass. It's like dune I guess.

Civilian population no longer decays when there's less food than pop. It will start decaying when one of their needs is not met. That is food, water, or oxygen are 0.

Each farm module is scaled to support the size of kerbal population it was intended to.

Small hydroponic farm supports a population of roughly 10 kerbals and carries food store enough for 10 reproduction output. (1 ton of food/water)

Small biosphere supports 25 kerbals and has food store for 25 reproductions (2.5 tons of food/water).

Large Biosphere supports 50 kerbals and has food store for 50 reproductions (5 tons food/water)

Farm biodome supports 60 kerbals and food store for 60 repro.

Recyclers can convert the waste produced by kerbals back into biomass/water at a rate of 1kg /3hours. Should the recyclers not be able to keep up with waste production excess waste will be discarded into space.

all farms will convert 1kg of co2 to 1kg of o2 every kerbin day at the rate to match the size of population they support.

This ends up with the netherdyne farms being very efficient at supporting a crew and sufficient for the size of population they match. You'll need extra farms to cover the reproduction cost if you plan on your colonists reproducing.

[SyberSmoke]

The death of a Kerbal should reclaim both water and "food" (through may be nutrients for growing food could be better?). Assuming kerbals have a similar chemical to water make up as humans you would be looking at a 65/35 (apx) split in Water/Minerals. This value varies as certain tissues have less water...like fat or bone. But reclaiming that would be necessary with out some way of replenishing your resources.

Though really...on Earth it is done for us as humans decay after death. Think about the water we drink...it has been around for billions of years. Eaten and drunk, then pooped and pissed out of a myriad of organisms for all that time. Reality is grose some days...hehe.

[micr0wave]

on an almost totally unrelated note ... could you make the next generation of this mod some sort of touristic thing ? with generating funds instead of more kerbals. smthng like x funds for y time spent on the tourist station/base, maybe have to transfer the tourists actually yourself with some sort of dedicated capsule

[michaelhester07]

I'll make it an expansion pack. There's so much work since I last updated this. The last thing to do is add a laser drill which you can use to collect water and substrate and process the substrate into biomass. All of the other parts and systems are done. I'm shooting to release early tomorrow.

[michaelhester07]

I finished the laser drill model ahead of schedule so I decided to drop the release tonight. Now i can do some playing! Hope you enjoy.

[RoverDude]

Nice work!

[Joshwoo70]

1.0 release hype!

looks good!

[michaelhester07]

Look for a 1.0.1 patch tomorrow. I was playing with the parts and found a huge performance hit. I'm going to play test it a little more tomorrow morning. So far i was able to optimize the farm generator code so that it's about 80x faster. Turns out vessel.getActiveResources is fairly expensive.

[Wercho]

Awesome mod. This is fun stuff.

The unfocused ship simulation is not compatible with the TAC simulation.

The unfocused ship simulation is not compatible with the MKS simulation though.

Just for clarification: By this, do you mean that it isn't balanced to those two mods but they work fine, or that it will break something in them or in the civilian unfocused simulation (if they are installed/exist on the same ship)? Eg. could the Civilians take all the food and Kerbalnauts starve before both of the simulations get their calculations sorted out, or vice versa?

[Starwaster]

Are you using Update or FixedUpdate?

Unless you're updating for graphics related issues, you want FixedUpdate which runs at 20x per second. Update is specifically linked to refresh rate and runs as many times per second as the player's refresh rate is set to. (so if it's set to 120x then Update is running 120 times per second)

Physics and game related functions runs every FixedUpdate and uses fixedDeltaTime for scaling.

[michaelhester07]

Are you using Update or FixedUpdate?

Unless you're updating for graphics related issues, you want FixedUpdate which runs at 20x per second. Update is specifically linked to refresh rate and runs as many times per second as the player's refresh rate is set to. (so if it's set to 120x then Update is running 120 times per second)

Physics and game related functions runs every FixedUpdate and uses fixedDeltaTime for scaling.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check that.

- - - Updated - - -

Awesome mod. This is fun stuff.

Just for clarification: By this, do you mean that it isn't balanced to those two mods but they work fine, or that it will break something in them or in the civilian unfocused simulation (if they are installed/exist on the same ship)? Eg. could the Civilians take all the food and Kerbalnauts starve before both of the simulations get their calculations sorted out, or vice versa?

What this means is probably the opposite: the crew will take all the resources and leave the civies with nothing.

My unfocused ship simulation runs when you get back to the ship and simulates what happened with the farms and civies while you were away. I designed this independent of other mods which do a similar thing as there is no existing public framework for unfocused ship simulation. I didn't do too much testing with MKS and TAC LS installed so I can't confirm everything that will go wrong, hence the blanket statements.

I did notice on one ship with tac ls that when i went to do an eva all of the vital resources 0'd out. I don't know if it was me or TAC LS.

[RoverDude]

I designed this independent of other mods which do a similar thing as there is no existing public framework for unfocused ship simulation.

Regolith

It includes a generator as well as harvesters - they all work off of the same base classes.

[michaelhester07]

I should have said that they won't work with the civilian population regulator class that I had to make from scratch.

Edit again: OnFixedUpdate() is not being called when I override it. What do i need to set to get it called?

Edited March 7, 2015 by michaelhester07

[michaelhester07]

1.0.1 release: patches a performance problem with using multiple farms.

I may be able to generate better performance in the future on my own generators but I'm planning to see if i can move everything over to regolith now that I know about its features. For now i need to get some play time. All i've done this week is mod.

[RoverDude]

If you need any help let me know.

One thing that may help you is that you can override the bit that actually generates the ins and outs. It's how we use the same core code for drills, converters, and asteroid harvesters (just inherit from the BaseConverter class).

[The Pfaffanater]

Great Work By the way, but how do you build stuff in space with the construction module? I have the mod needed I thought you just bring it into space with some rocket parts and build, but i tried that and no menu or anything came up ,as I thought it would, to select what I wanted to build. Do I still need to bring up a lunch pad or workshop?

[pasty2k2]

Really loving this, finally we can do "space tourism" for the civvies! Nice work dude!

[michaelhester07]

Great Work By the way, but how do you build stuff in space with the construction module? I have the mod needed I thought you just bring it into space with some rocket parts and build, but i tried that and no menu or anything came up ,as I thought it would, to select what I wanted to build. Do I still need to bring up a lunch pad or workshop?

The construction drone requires Extraplanetary Launchpads to build things.