[1.12.x] USI Life Support

[spcan]

On 9/2/2017 at 8:54 PM, RoverDude said:

Show us your GameData folder please.

Edit: Uhhmm... I don't know if the image was posted so just in case here's the link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9-xUa44GzYaNW8tUGw1Z3VSb3M/view?usp=sharing

 

Edited February 11, 2017 by spcan
Don't know if image was attached

[goldenpsp]

@spcan

while it is technically supposed to be ok it is generally recommended to remove older versions of modulemanager leaving only the latest dll

[Aramazia Kin]

On 2/7/2017 at 10:38 PM, WuphonsReach said:

Well, things are a bit borked right now with regard to the hab-values (possibly the multipliers not working if another vessel is within 150m...)...

What's wrong with habitation atm? I'm asking because I have a station that should have several years of habitation but only actually had 60 days?

[maja]

1 hour ago, Aramazia Kin said:

What's wrong with habitation atm? I'm asking because I have a station that should have several years of habitation but only actually had 60 days?

Did you by any chance forgot to start habitation in right click menu of hab parts?

[omelaw]

Maybe it's stupid idea but Can I use this in my ongoing career save?

[danielboro]

@omelaw

yes

but.

do you have kerbals not on kerbin?

can you get them back to kerbin?

once you add LS you cant use the old ships you have as they dont have supplys and probably insufficient hub room

using an MM you can add sum supplays to stok parts like the PPD(thers a copy in this tread somewhere)
but the hub problem will stay for any thing out of kerbin SOI
in kerbin orbit and MUN adding extra parts for the hub and supplays is not hard or long
but minmus needs a week and that can be too long a time for the kerbals whit LS

i add USI-LS to an ongoing career save my self

Edited February 12, 2017 by danielboro

[Aramazia Kin]

1 hour ago, maja said:

Did you by any chance forgot to start habitation in right click menu of hab parts?

Ah that was it, not played for awhile so didn't know that was a thing, thanks.

[JadeOfMaar]

Hey all, and @RoverDude. I've begun to make my own textures and a mod that adapts to various LS mods. It has 3 slots for converter/recycler parts in the form of short Mk2 fuselage. For USI LS, what converter or generator parts can/may take these slots? I'll post screenshots soon.

The new avatar is a pleasant surprise, RoverDude.  

Edited February 13, 2017 by JadeOfMaar

[DStaal]

27 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Hey all, and @RoverDude. I've begun to make my own textures and a mod that adapts to various LS mods. It has 3 slots for converter/recycler parts in the form of short Mk2 fuselage. For USI LS, what converter or generator parts can/may take these slots? I'll post screenshots soon.

The new avatar is a pleasant surprise, RoverDude.  

USI-LS uses the following types of parts:

• Recycler
• Purifier (90% recycler with a water input)
• Greenhouse  (MKS adds two extra types of greenhouses, with different inputs.)
• Habitation
• Habitation Multiplier

Both habitation and habitation multiplier parts should at least in theory be accessible by a Kerbal.  (A hab multiplier can get away with 'they can poke their head in when they want on occasion'.)

And of course for a modular system it's always nice to have storage for Supplies, Mulch, Fertilizer, and/or a combination of all three.

[JadeOfMaar]

2 minutes ago, DStaal said:

USI-LS uses the following types of parts:

Thanks. That's more than I expected so I may have to provide for more placeholder tanks in case no LS at all is installed (which I guess is fine since TAC LS also has 5 such parts but I assume I can realistically compress its 2 water converters and its two carbon processors into one part respectively). Is it safe to assume that the appropriate USI ones for Mk2 short size are the Purifier, Greenhouse and Hab Multiplier?

Modular tanks for consumables are the primary focus already. The long and short fuel tanks are firstly repurposed this way. Should I include Replacement Parts in them or leave that for any crewed parts.

[DStaal]

14 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Thanks. That's more than I expected so I may have to provide for more placeholder tanks in case no LS at all is installed (which I guess is fine since TAC LS also has 5 such parts but I assume I can realistically compress its 2 water converters and its two carbon processors into one part respectively). Is it safe to assume that the appropriate USI ones for Mk2 short size are the Purifier, Greenhouse and Hab Multiplier?

Modular tanks for consumables are the primary focus already. The long and short fuel tanks are firstly repurposed this way. Should I include Replacement Parts in them or leave that for any crewed parts.

I'd say the appropriate ones are: Recycler, Greenhouse, and then debate on exactly what the part is and how it works between Purifier and Hab Multiplier.  Purifiers are a bit of a specialty part: They should be heavy, take a heavy resource, and work best in combination with multiple recyclers.  Hab Multiplers are things like cupolas; things which make the ship nicer to live in.  They aren't that powerful on small ships, but quickly make large ships much more habitable.  Purifiers tend to excel on large planetary bases (where you have access to water), while hab multipliers tend to be a bit more widely used - anytime you want to go over 3-4 months of habitation time, multipliers start being very useful.

But the two basic parts you always want access to are a recycler and a greenhouse.  Even a trip to Minmus and back may find a recycler worth the weight, and an extended stay of over a month or so starts to mean greenhouses are useful.

I'm not sure Replacement Parts do much of anything at the moment - Wear was confusing, so RoverDude is rethinking the mechanic.  (And even when it was there, it wasn't a visible resource - basically, you'd include it if the part is supposed to wear out over time.  While it's full of Replacement Parts, it'll work at 100% efficiency, but it will use them up slowly...)  In fact, they've *never* done anything in straight USI-LS, at least not out of the box.  They were enabled by MKS - which brings up the point that there's a lot of overlap between the two mods.  You might consider having storage for Machinery, MaterialKits, and SpecializedParts - all of those are MKS, but the first handles a wear-like mechanic for industrial parts, and the latter two are useful for a lot of things in MKS - including switching converters between modes, where they are configured to do that.

[JadeOfMaar]

46 minutes ago, DStaal said:

I'd say the appropriate ones are: Recycler, Greenhouse, and then debate on exactly what the part is and how it works between Purifier and Hab Multiplier.

Okay then. The most important converter for me is a greenhouse. There needs to be a part that produces Supplies (namely for spaceplanes that skip between moons). The hab multiplier part gives me ideas now for a modified crew cabin which was not in the plan but can find a place in it and possibly the other LS mods.

Tell me a little about the Recycler part, how it really works. I've never used full MKS, only MKS Lite and said Recycler (assuming it's now the RT-500, I have it open in Notepad++) was nothing more to me than a leech on my batteries. I never saw its significance. If it's not the RT-500 is it in the full MKS mod? I'd like to study it.

As for industrial resources, I may consider changing one of the Mk2 long tanks for this instead of holding only Mulch... For Mulch alone I think that'd be a lot of wasted capacity. While I fear that having a tank at all hold industrial material may be going out of scope since my mod is about keeping crew fed and alive in style, I have a fair grasp on MKS' vision so maybe it would be just fine to go ahead with industrial tankage...? _{I might need a yes or no from RoverDude on this one?}

Edited February 13, 2017 by JadeOfMaar

[danielboro]

@JadeOfMaar

my thinking of mk2 for USI-LS is

an MK2-long that the first half can be 4 kerbal Habitation or Habitation Multiplier and the second half is a 4 kerbal 60%  Recycler whit room for supply's and mulch

an MK2-short Greenhouse  (? EC+1 fertilizer+10 mulch --> 11 supply's)

and an MK2-short 4 kerbal 60%  Recycler

 

Edited February 13, 2017 by danielboro

[JadeOfMaar]

21 minutes ago, danielboro said:

my thinking of mk2 for USI-LS is

New variants of the Mk2 cabin, even a long cabin sounds pretty epic actually. But while I've begun to make textures I'm far from able to model. I don't use Blender or Unity. I do use another software and maybe I could export and submit open-format object files for someone else to convert to .mu and insert things for me like emissives for lights or ray-catchers for solar panels.

If it's as easy as adding the light animation module to a tank and a named texture that fits it I can easily fake/emulate the cabins and greenhouses.

Here's the raw concept before being made aware of crewable converters and industrial resources. It began around TAC LS and the texture theme is based on the 1.25m Supplies container.

Edited February 13, 2017 by JadeOfMaar

[DStaal]

8 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Okay then. The most important converter for me is a greenhouse. There needs to be a part that produces Supplies (namely for spaceplanes that skip between moons). The hab multiplier part gives me ideas now for a modified crew cabin which was not in the plan but can find a place in it and possibly the other LS mods.

Tell me a little about the Recycler part, how it really works. I've never used full MKS, only MKS Lite and said Recycler (assuming it's now the RT-500, I have it open in Notepad++) was nothing more to me than a leech on my batteries. I never saw its significance. If it's not the RT-500 is it in the full MKS mod? I'd like to study it.

As for industrial resources, I may consider changing one of the Mk2 long tanks for this instead of holding only Mulch... For Mulch alone I think that'd be a lot of wasted capacity. While I fear that having a tank at all hold industrial material may be going out of scope since my mod is about keeping crew fed and alive in style, I have a fair grasp on MKS' vision so maybe it would be just fine to go ahead with industrial tankage...? _{I might need a yes or no from RoverDude on this one?}

The RT-500 is one of the recyclers - there's also the more powerful (but more situation-dependent) RT-5000, and MKS has a variety of them in various sizes.  What it does is directly reduce supply usage (at the cost of EC): So for the 500, instead of using 10.8 Supplies per day, your Kerbal will use 10.8*(1-0.6) = 4.32 Supplies per day.  Note that the 500 can only efficiently recycle the output of one Kerbal - any Kerbals in excess of that (assuming you have only the one recycler) will use the full 10.8 Supplies.

So, for short trips, you're better off carrying more supplies: The 500 weighs the same as 600 liters of supplies, so if you need less than that, it's not saving you anything.  However, let's say you're on a 60-day trip: you need 648 supplies with no recyclers.  With a 500, you need 259.2.  That's nearly half a ton of supplies you no longer have to carry.  On a 100-day trip you save three quarters of a ton.  200-day trip you save a ton and a half.  Etc.  And this is per-Kerbal, with the least powerful recycler.

This works in synergy with a greenhouse: If you have recyclers you don't need to produce as many supplies, so you don't need as much capacity from your greenhouse - or you need fewer, which means you'll also need less Fertilizer, etc.

Now, so far we've been talking about one recycler - they do combine, but they do it in a bit of an odd way: If all of your recyclers are the same, you just add up their Kerbal capacity and you're done.  However, if you have one that's more efficient, then that sets the max total recycling percentage for your whole ship - and you can use more smaller ones to get that percentage.  So if we were to have an imaginary RT-700 that recycles for 1 Kerbal at 80%, with a crew of two you could use one 700 and two 500s to recycle for *everyone* at 80%.  (And still have some capacity left over, I think.)   This is why purifiers are nice, but situational: They can do up to 90% recycling, using water as an input - but *one* purifier means that's now the max for your whole base.  Really good when you have *lots* of Kerbals and access to water, not so useful for smaller crews or when you need to ship water in.

[WuphonsReach]

If wear does come back in, I'm hoping that it only has an effect as the part wears down below 20%.  Repair should probably be a mix of specialized parts, machinery and material kits.  For simplicity, you should be able to just right-click one module on the vessel and have it start with the most worn parts and refurb everything that it can (until it runs out of material).

[JadeOfMaar]

Here it goes.  Down the core stack: the undecided modified crew cabin "short rec centre" with hab multiplier (and only 2 crew capacity for kerbals to really stretch their legs and store stuff to keep them sane but I'll still keep 4 crew if anyone insists), followed by the Agroponics with a more fitting texture (in order to emulate the Mk2 long cabin idea) then the discreet Recycler, then the ISRU to produce Fertilizer. i might delete the ISRU, or put it into a separate group.

The waste tanks (with black and brown spots) are changed to MaterialKits, SpecializedParts or Fertilizer with some Mulch storage.

Spoiler

With lights.  

 

[brygun]

Im doing yet another replay of Kerbal and debating on which/if on life support mods. USI is on my short list. One concern I have is what can happen during high time warps with multiple ships in play. For example if flying to Dres you might time warp over a year. You might have the Kerbals on the other ships die off or become non-recoverable. 

Im wondering how playable it is while still having some life support concerns. What are people's experiences and views on this over other life support?

 

Edited February 16, 2017 by brygun
making a clear question

[Fobok]

37 minutes ago, brygun said:

Im doing yet another replay of Kerbal and debating on which/if on life support mods. USI is on my short list. One concern I have is what can happen during high time warps with multiple ships in play. For example if flying to Dres you might time warp over a year. You might have the Kerbals on the other ships die off or become non-recoverable. 

Im wondering how playable it is while still having some life support concerns. What are people's experiences and views on this over other life support?

 

 

I did have that issue once, where I fast forwarded past a space station running out of supplies, though I had the difficulty set so they just became tourists rather than dying. There may be integration with KAC, but I'm not sure, I haven't really looked into it. I'd just been setting alarms manually since then.

I do, however, think this is the best of the life support mods. For one thing, it doesn't over complicate the supply situation with separate resources you'd always bring together anyway. You just have supplies to represent all of them. However, what I most like is that it takes habitation into account. That's something you don't see anywhere else. One of the big difficulties in long-distance space travel is having enough room for astronauts not to get too cramped over long voyages. Imagine spending years trapped in your car, unable to leave. It just wouldn't work. Even the short duration of a few days was difficult for early astronauts in the tight early spacecraft.

[RoverDude]

5 hours ago, brygun said:

Im doing yet another replay of Kerbal and debating on which/if on life support mods. USI is on my short list. One concern I have is what can happen during high time warps with multiple ships in play. For example if flying to Dres you might time warp over a year. You might have the Kerbals on the other ships die off or become non-recoverable. 

Im wondering how playable it is while still having some life support concerns. What are people's experiences and views on this over other life support?

 

Plan ahead.  Use recyclers to diminish supply demand.  Use greenhouses to extend your supplies.  Use Kerbal Alarm Clock.

Probably the only time you will have an issue with fixed duration missions, regardless of length, is if you planned poorly, and you're kinda hosed there regardless of whether you time warp or not.

[Liquid5n0w]

9 hours ago, brygun said:

Im doing yet another replay of Kerbal and debating on which/if on life support mods. USI is on my short list. One concern I have is what can happen during high time warps with multiple ships in play. For example if flying to Dres you might time warp over a year. You might have the Kerbals on the other ships die off or become non-recoverable. 

Im wondering how playable it is while still having some life support concerns. What are people's experiences and views on this over other life support?

 

You can use the mod that freezes them, I forget its name.

[voicey99]

1 hour ago, Liquid5n0w said:

You can use the mod that freezes them, I forget its name.

Assuming it's compatible, that's this mod:

(the OP is pretty outdated btw) On its own, USI-LS is a very simple LS mod ((fertiliser->)supplies->kerbals), but when used with MKS (as is intended), USI-LS is still simpler but harder than TAC, the main thing being habitation. In TAC you can just pack them off on a ship with all the various types of supplies they need and that's that, but in USI-LS/MKS you have to give them both food (and power) and living quarters-while supplies are easily renewable, their habitation timers will constantly tick down and, unless you are very far along the MKS manufacturing tree, cannot be replenished without returning to Kerbin, though they can be extended with certain parts from MKS. It depends on your personal preference really, either you stick a load of TAC supply containers on your ship and be done with it or have to build a proper mothership with USI-LS/MKS to stop your kerbals going nuts.

[Gilph]

12 hours ago, brygun said:

Im doing yet another replay of Kerbal and debating on which/if on life support mods. USI is on my short list. One concern I have is what can happen during high time warps with multiple ships in play. For example if flying to Dres you might time warp over a year. You might have the Kerbals on the other ships die off or become non-recoverable. 

Im wondering how playable it is while still having some life support concerns. What are people's experiences and views on this over other life support?

 

 

6 hours ago, RoverDude said:

Plan ahead.  Use recyclers to diminish supply demand.  Use greenhouses to extend your supplies.  Use Kerbal Alarm Clock.

Probably the only time you will have an issue with fixed duration missions, regardless of length, is if you planned poorly, and you're kinda hosed there regardless of whether you time warp or not.

In addition, USI will allow you to redshirt Kerbals, making them immune to the bad effects when you run out of stuff.  If you are unsure in your planning, send a redshirted Kerbal to test your design. Or, use the interface to disable the effects for everyone on your first trip.

[Flamingo]

In mission control I found a rescue contract and quickly accepted it so I could get a new kerbal for my space program easily. Everything was going great, and after the rendezvous, I shifted to Munbrett's module to get him out on a quick EVA and over in the rescue module.
But then this happened:

Dang it! 

This felt as bad as burning up in the atmosphere because your craft lost control because you didn't have enough hab-space.

Well, guess I will have to use a winch or similar to get him down to Kerbin safely.

[maja]

4 minutes ago, Flamingo said:

Dang it!