[1.12.x] USI Life Support

[DStaal]

May I suggest a different approach to the issue?  Instead of trying to move everything into some pre-made category, use the mod that allows you to create categories easily. 

 

[Ako_Vendetta]

Fantastic mod, really enjoy how it's affected how I tackle career.  Simple yet not.  I like the balance.

im not up for the complexity of something like UKS right now, though the use appeals to me, I'm just sticking with LS right now.

ive noticed that Kerbals don't draw EC, though it says it should in the settings.  Perhaps because it's early in my career, and I don't have any life support supplies added to my ships yet.  Do they only draw EC if they have supplies?

if so, is there a setting I can tweak to make them draw EC even if they have no supplies on board, and die/go tourist if they run out of EC even if they have supplies?  I'd like to simulate that the life support system uses electricity, and they run out of air if there's no electricity.

thanks for any input, and for all your hard work on this mod!

[Jahulath]

Well I created this, it's not exactly the same as the previous one posted as it doesn't add to the mass of a stocked command pod, for me it feels like a more realistic solution because firstly 10 units of rcs fuel are useless and secondly even a jet fighter has emergency rations to last a crashed pilot for a day or two.

I think that KSP head office had enough of Jeb drinking the Monopropellant - nobody needs to be "that" drunk right?

I know that the variable is probably unnecessary but it does allow people to alter the amount of supplies that replace the Monopropellant. At present for every 0.004 mass removed, 0.004 mass of supplies will be installed ie 4x as much supplies as monopropellant! Clearly no fuel is left as it has become clear that Jeb simply cannot be trusted.

 

@PART[*]:HAS[@RESOURCE[MonoPropellant],!MODULE[InterstellarFuelSwitch],!MODULE[FSfuelSwitch],#CrewCapacity[>0]]
{
densityMult = 4 // change this and it will change the multiplier for fuel replacement, Monoprop is 0.004, supplies are 0.001 so you can work it out

 RESOURCE
 {
   name = Supplies

   amount = #$../RESOURCE[MonoPropellant]/amount$
   @amount *= #$/densityMult$

   maxAmount = #$../RESOURCE[MonoPropellant]/maxAmount$
   @maxAmount *= #$/densityMult$
 }
  !RESOURCE[MonoPropellant] {}
 }

hope it's useful.

[Tahib]

There is a major bug with USI Life Support Habitation (or the wiki is wrong). 

I followed the wiki here https://github.com/BobPalmer/USI-LS/wiki/Example:-Mission-to-Duna 

I did the math myself and it says, the Hitchhiker give additional 375 days + 30 days for each slot.

Ingame it translates this 375 days into 12.5 real time earth months. But there is no real time in KSP, we have 426 days per year there. I don't know if it calculates with wrong amount of days or its only a visual glitch, but it is very irritating when trying to do mission plans.

The Cupola multiplier is correct so far, but the formula shown in VAB LS window seems to be wrong too. And i don't get why it tells 5 months whatever i do.

Would be nice if you could add fertilizer into supply prediction too.

 

It's an awesome mod and i really like to use it, but its hard to use sometimes. I did a little calculator for how many habitat and lifesupport my kerbals need with varying mission times.

[tater]

Reading the Duna example in the github link above, I have a question about the amount of stuff consumed... The thread has gotten too long for me to find it if it has been mentioned, sorry, but I poked around a little, first. It says that each kerbal consumes 16.2kg/day (6 hour day, I presume). I read the FAQ, BTW. Still, that's a vast amount. Looking at what NASA lists for people as an example, it seems to be on the order of 5.4kg/day for a human (so ~1.6X as big, with a day 4 times longer, but using 1/3 the resources). That's O₂, food, and water before recycling. You could easily budget far more water for whatever reason, which is very easy to recycle, but even adding 11kg to get it on par with the kerbal value that's still not scaled down to 64%, or divided by 4 for the hours difference per day. Seems like scaled to people we'd have 101.25 kg/day for humans (!?).

Now the first 15 days are free, so that changes things a fair bit for short durations. A mission needing just 30 days of supplies would in fact only pack 8.1kg/day baseline. But as mission length increases, it asymptotically approaches 16.2kg/day.

Am I missing something?

 

Edited August 11, 2016 by tater

[goldenpsp]

14 minutes ago, tater said:

Reading the Duna example in the github link above, I have a question about the amount of stuff consumed... The thread has gotten too long for me to find it if it has been mentioned, sorry, but I poked around a little, first. It says that each kerbal consumes 16.2kg/day (6 hour day, I presume). That's a vast amount. Looking at what NASA lists for people as an example, it seems to be on the order of 5.4kg/day for a human (so twice as big, with a day 4 times longer, but using 1/3 the resources). That's O₂, food, and water before recycling. You could easily budget far more water for whatever reason, which is very easy to recycle, but even adding 11kg to get it on paper with the kerbal value that's still not scaled down to 64%, or divided by 4 for the hours difference per day. Seems like scaled to people we'd have 101.25 kg/day for humans (!?).

Now the first 15 days are free, so that changes things a fair bit for short durations. A mission needing just 30 days of supplies would in fact only pack 8.1kg/day baseline. But as mission length increases, it asymptotically approaches 16.2kg/day.

Am I missing something?

 

Supplies is not just food/water/air.  Don't know where it is but @RoverDude has explained the NASA numbers he based it on.

[Domfluff]

43 minutes ago, Tahib said:

There is a major bug with USI Life Support Habitation (or the wiki is wrong). 

I followed the wiki here https://github.com/BobPalmer/USI-LS/wiki/Example:-Mission-to-Duna 

I did the math myself and it says, the Hitchhiker give additional 375 days + 30 days for each slot.

Ingame it translates this 375 days into 12.5 real time earth months. But there is no real time in KSP, we have 426 days per year there. I don't know if it calculates with wrong amount of days or its only a visual glitch, but it is very irritating when trying to do mission plans.

The Cupola multiplier is correct so far, but the formula shown in VAB LS window seems to be wrong too. And i don't get why it tells 5 months whatever i do.

Would be nice if you could add fertilizer into supply prediction too.

 

It's an awesome mod and i really like to use it, but its hard to use sometimes. I did a little calculator for how many habitat and lifesupport my kerbals need with varying mission times.

One "kerbalmonth" = 30 days, and bears no relation to either the length of a Kerbal year (426.08 days) nor an actual Kerbal Month (38.60 hours).

The resulting figures are relative to Kerbin time scales (6 hours/day, 426.08 days a year) though.

The Hitchhiker pod gives a bonus of 12.5 KerbalMonths, in addition to the four KerbalMonths that the four seats grant you.

[tater]

3 minutes ago, goldenpsp said:

Supplies is not just food/water/air.  Don't know where it is but @RoverDude has explained the NASA numbers he based it on.

In the WIP thread (I just found it, I was actually the first reply after his OP), he said that the supplies were in fact 1.08kg/day in reply to me asking, "What are you assuming the consumables (food/air/water not recovered by standard pod LS) used per day mass wise? About 1-2 kg/day?" 

I could see it going up from there... to perhaps 1.62kg/day. It's the 16.2 that has me confused.

 

 

 

[goldenpsp]

1 minute ago, tater said:

In the WIP thread (I just found it, I was actually the first reply after his OP), he said that the supplies were in fact 1.08kg/day in reply to me asking, "What are you assuming the consumables (food/air/water not recovered by standard pod LS) used per day mass wise? About 1-2 kg/day?" 

I could see it going up from there... to perhaps 1.62kg/day. It's the 16.2 that has me confused.

 

 

 

Yea for that you'll have to go digging.  I know it was discussed at one point.

[tater]

Note that 1.08kg scaled up to humans (multiply by 4, and divide by 0.64) results in 6.75kg for people. Which is slightly higher than I usually see, but if you include things like disposable CO₂ filters, hygiene water, etc, is certainly not even a little unreasonable. Heck, 1.62kg scaled up from kerbals to humans is a little over 10kg/day for humans, which while high, is certainly not unreasonable. Having kerbals use 3x more stuff than people use in 24 hours in a 6 hour period seems... excessive.

Edited August 11, 2016 by tater

[Domfluff]

Ignoring scaling, I'm going to guess that the rates are based on Gemini missions.

Going by one set of numbers, Gemini had a mass budget of 426kg assigned for provisions, which would be 26.3 days in USI-LS terms, with no recycling.

Divided by two crew, that's thirteen and a bit days. Longest Gemini mission was 14 days?


No idea if that mass is accurate of course, and Kerbal scaling screws with this kind of thing at every level really - it's great to have real ISP and plausible mass values/gravity/transit time, but in doing that you have to squint a little (ignoring Kerbin's density, for example), and it often creates some edge case weirdness

Edited August 11, 2016 by Domfluff

[RoverDude]

42 minutes ago, tater said:

Am I missing something?

 

Yes.  You are not accounting for the massive amount of water used for purposes other than drinking and food prep.  To quote NASA:

" The ECLSS Water Recycling System (WRS), developed at the MSFC, will reclaim waste waters from the Space Shuttle's fuel cells, from urine, from oral hygiene and hand washing, and by condensing humidity from the air. Without such careful recycling 40,000 pounds per year of water from Earth would be required to resupply a minimum of four crewmembers for the life of the station. "

Basically, you got about 32kg of mass used per astronaut per day WITHOUT recycling.  We chop that down for our Kerbals to 16.2 (tho I am looking at dropping it to just over 10kg with 1.2 as part of an overall rebalance).

And yes, Kerbal time is scaled down.  But Kerbal distances are also scaled down, so an analogue to an Apollo mission should still feel about right in terms of relative mass and the duration that mass lasts.

Basically - once you're past a couple of weeks... you REALLY need recyclers.

21 minutes ago, tater said:

Note that 1.08kg scaled up to humans (multiply by 4, and divide by 0.64) results in 6.75kg for people. Which is slightly higher than I usually see, but if you include things like disposable CO₂ filters, hygiene water, etc, is certainly not even a little unreasonable. Heck, 1.62kg scaled up from kerbals to humans is a little over 10kg/day for humans, which while high, is certainly not unreasonable. Having kerbals use 3x more stuff than people use in 24 hours in a 6 hour period seems... excessive.

See previous note.  Supplies are not just the water you drink, but also food prep and hygiene.  Water is like... 90% of the mass.

28 minutes ago, tater said:

In the WIP thread (I just found it, I was actually the first reply after his OP), he said that the supplies were in fact 1.08kg/day in reply to me asking, "What are you assuming the consumables (food/air/water not recovered by standard pod LS) used per day mass wise? About 1-2 kg/day?" 

I could see it going up from there... to perhaps 1.62kg/day. It's the 16.2 that has me confused.

 

 

 

It changed when recycling was introduced.  i.e. originally, very efficient water recyclers were assumed.  Now they are not, they are separate parts.

[Merkov]

Roverdude has said in the past that supplies is meant to represent more than just food and water for eating and drinking, but also water (and other supplies) required for food preparation, cleaning, hygiene, the mass of the oxygen breathed... literally any consumables used by your kerbals. You would have to search this thread for his citations, but Roverdude calculated that this broad interpretation of "supplies" works out to about 16.2 kg per day. 

-edit- never mind, RoverDude beat me to it before I posted, and did so much better than I did.

1 hour ago, Tahib said:

...real time earth months...

Be careful, since this is the opposite of what happens. Months are not earth months, but kerbal months, which are 30 6 hour days. Any time a USI mod references time, it is generally using kerbal units of measurement. 

As for the cupola and the VAB LS window, can you upload a screens hot of what you are seeing? Where are you seeing 5 months no matter what you do?

Edited August 11, 2016 by Merkov
I'm just bad at forum-ing

[Merkov]

Double post. That will teach me for using these forums on my phone.

Edited August 11, 2016 by Merkov

[tater]

Gotcha, but what is the station lifetime? Say it's a year, 40,000lbs/year is 12.4kg/day, not 30*. The stats I had otherwise were ~5kg/day, so that's a total of 17.4kg... totally in line with your figure for a kerbal in a 6 hour day.

*math: 40,000lbs/4astronaut days = 18,143.7kg/365.25 = 49.7kg/4astronaut days = 12.4 kg/day.

That's also not what the quote says... the quote says:

" The ECLSS Water Recycling System (WRS), developed at the MSFC, will reclaim waste waters from the Space Shuttle's fuel cells, from urine, from oral hygiene and hand washing, and by condensing humidity from the air. Without such careful recycling 40,000 pounds per year of water from Earth would be required to resupply a minimum of four crewmembers for the life of the station. "

What is the life of the station? My calc above assumes the life is 1 year, and I get 12.4kg/day per astronaut. If the station has a lifetime of 12.4 years, then that number is 1kg/day. ISS has been up nearly 20 years. So what's that actual savings from recycling?

Edited August 11, 2016 by tater

[RoverDude]

You are reading it wrong.  It means 40,000 lbs every year that station is in orbit... i.e. for the life of the station.

See above where I said 90% of that 16.2 is water...  about 14.58kg.

 

1.  We are beating a dead horse that we have beaten to death multiple times in this thread.

2.  It's shifting to just over 10 in the next major update, which I still feel is extremely reasonable (doing so for other balance reasons, more to make sure recyclers scale properly to stock so everything meets in the middle).

3.  If you disagree, and want to assume everything has a 100% water recycler with no mass cost... just change your config.

 

[tater]

 

13 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

You are reading it wrong.  It means 40,000 lbs every year that station is in orbit... i.e. for the life of the station.

See above where I said 90% of that 16.2 is water...  about 14.58kg.

Ah, 18,143kg/yer, every year for 4 astronauts. That's 12.4kg day, plus the other stuff they use (0.8 oxygen, 0.6 food, and another 4 in water), which gets it about 16-17kg overall.

Quote

1.  We are beating a dead horse that we have beaten to death multiple times in this thread.

Sorry, I remember discussing it, but it was in the WIP dev thread, I read a few dozen pages here, and simply didn't see it, sorry. 

Quote

2.  It's shifting to just over 10 in the next major update, which I still feel is extremely reasonable (doing so for other balance reasons, more to make sure recyclers scale properly to stock so everything meets in the middle).

3.  If you disagree, and want to assume everything has a 100% water recycler with no mass cost... just change your config.

 

I don't want no mass cost or 100% recycling at all... heck, I set death = true. Actually, ~10 sounds totally reasonable, that's about 64% of the human value... assuming they use as much in 6 hours as we do in 24... but the whole kerbal day thing is sort of wonky anyway, that's a real can-o-worms.

If I was using a longer kerbal day, I guess I could write a patch to make it use equal whatever your day ~10 kg value is divided by the number of hours (seconds?) in that scaled up day (24 if using a 24 hour day as some rescales do).

Edited August 11, 2016 by tater

[tater]

This came up in another thread and I figured I'd throw it in here...

I wonder if the number of Kerbals could improve the habitation value somehow... kerbals are gregarious, and are less homesick with friends around. Dunno if that's even possible.

[DStaal]

37 minutes ago, tater said:

This came up in another thread and I figured I'd throw it in here...

I wonder if the number of Kerbals could improve the habitation value somehow... kerbals are gregarious, and are less homesick with friends around. Dunno if that's even possible.

They already improve the values a bit, though more on the UKS side - there are some penalties if you have less than 5 Kerbals in a site/ship.

[tater]

I suppose I might be able to install UKS now with 64 bit, I had honestly internalized my "normal" of minimal mods to avoid crashes.

[DStaal]

I should note that while the modifiers exist, they are hard to notice.  Nothing specifically points them out, so their effects can get missed in the general variations over everything else.

[Merkov]

Unless I have missed something, I'm pretty sure the loneliness modifier for having fewer than 5 kerbals on board only affects UKS efficiency ratings, and have zero effect on hab timers for USI-LS.

[RoverDude]

Correct.  The loneliness modifier is strictly a UKS thing

[Terwin]

Edit: Forgot to update the in-save-game config.  Just leaving this here in case someone else searches the forums for the same problem.

------

I just wanted a quick sanity check before I start uninstalling/reinstalling mods looking for some sort of conflict:

under GameData\UmbraSpaceIndustries I have:

FX, Kolonization, Kontainers, LifeSupport, Reactor Pack, and UKS directories

I have updated LifeSupport\Settings.cfg and UKS\USI-LS.cfg

so that  NoHomeEffect = 0 and NoHomeEffectVets = 0

As far as I am aware, this should disable the habitation/home sickness portion of USI-LS, but I just had a Duna mission go all-tourist on me(including vets), and my Jupiter mission looks like it has about 21 days left before it does the same thing...

Setting BaseHabTime = 100 in both files does not seem to have helped, even when loading a saved ship in the VAB.

This looks a lot like I missed a config file, but I did not see one in any of the other USI subdirectories that referenced these values, are there other, non-life support mods that are known to have these values set as well?

(note: I manually deleted, downloaded and reinstalled the LifeSupport and UKS subdirectories, so I am fairly sure this is not a CKAN related error)

 

(If someone else who uses MKS and USI-LS can please verify 'Yep, that looks like it should work' I'll copy my save directory and start building up from a clean install to see if I can find the source of the problem, but I would rather not start that process if I just forgot to update another config file)

Thanks.

------

Edit: I forgot that the config is also saved in the save file, so that was the config file I failed to update.

updating that using the in-game UI fixed the Jupiter mission and I'll edit away the grouchy/Tourist in the persistence file to fix the Duna mission...

 

Edited August 14, 2016 by Terwin

[Domfluff]

Current USI-LS duna transit architecture:

Based partly on this:

 

Relevant mods are USI-LS, Malemute rover, SSTU, Near Future construction and inline ballutes.

Unmanned surface base hab (not pictured) is a combination of UKS and Planetary Base systems, landed with the help of USI Survivability airbags.