[1.12.x] USI Core (Reactors and Kontainers)

[goldenpsp]

16 minutes ago, Targa said:

@RoverDude, can you please add Kontainer MK2 to this download? I love that kontainer for a side-by-side LF/OX refinery. I thought it was originally part of FTT, but I downloaded that also and can't find it...

Which one is that?  Is it the old half Hexagonal tank from FTT?  If so those were depricated long ago and @RoverDude probably removed them from the mod finally.

[Targa]

Yeah, the half of a hex. I *love* those for refining/refueling operations. Makes it so, so easy to build a refueling ship, like this:

Photo Album

 

[goldenpsp]

31 minutes ago, Targa said:

Yeah, the half of a hex. I *loveD* those for refining/refueling operations. Made it so, so easy to build a refueling ship, like this:

Photo Album

 

Fixed that for you.  They are gone.

[KerbMav]

Has anyone a patch to add RocketParts to the big Kontainers, with texture maybe?

[DStaal]

59 minutes ago, KerbMav said:

Has anyone a patch to add RocketParts to the big Kontainers, with texture maybe?

Somewhat unlikely, since there's no use for RocketParts with MKS installed.

[Blackline]

1 hour ago, DStaal said:

Somewhat unlikely, since there's no use for RocketParts with MKS installed.

Even not if he is using the stock EL production chain instead of the (more complex) MKS one? Don't you provide such patches yourself?

1 hour ago, DStaal said:

Somewhat unlikely, since there's no use for RocketParts with MKS installed.

Even not if he is using the stock EL production chain instead of the (more complex) MKS one? Don't you provide such patches yourself?

[DStaal]

1 hour ago, Blackline said:

Even not if he is using the stock EL production chain instead of the (more complex) MKS one? Don't you provide such patches yourself?

Even not if he is using the stock EL production chain instead of the (more complex) MKS one? Don't you provide such patches yourself?

Well, *I* don't... 

[JDCollie]

Is there a tutorial or something out there for the USI reactors? The interface is very attractive, but it doesn't have any tooltips and I can't find any documentation for how to actually use these things. 

 

Nevermind, I'm using this with Near Future Electrical, which is giving me grief because I'm an idiot who doesn't properly attach radiators.

Edited August 1, 2017 by JDCollie

[Omar X]

I'm still learning about all of the USI systems. I have all of the kontainers in the VAB logistics tab, but I have no options at all to set/change the contents or the skin. Except for the specifically designated KIS containers at the top of the list, I don't even have an inventory option on any of them. Is this a bug, or am I missing something? 

[goldenpsp]

3 minutes ago, Omar X said:

I'm still learning about all of the USI systems. I have all of the kontainers in the VAB logistics tab, but I have no options at all to set/change the contents or the skin. Except for the specifically designated KIS containers at the top of the list, I don't even have an inventory option on any of them. Is this a bug, or am I missing something? 

The tank switching etc is a function of Firespitter.  Is the Firespitter dll present?

[Omar X]

46 minutes ago, goldenpsp said:

The tank switching etc is a function of Firespitter.  Is the Firespitter dll present?

The Firespitter core is installed. In that folder and its subfolders under gamedata I find firespitter.dll.mdb, firespitter.pdb, and firespitter.cfg. No firespitter.dll though. Is that where it should be?

[goldenpsp]

1 minute ago, Omar X said:

The Firespitter core is installed. In that folder and its subfolders under gamedata I find firespitter.dll.mdb, firespitter.pdb, and firespitter.cfg. No firespitter.dll though. Is that where it should be?

Sounds like you downloaded the source rather than release files.  Those would be files that would be compiled into the dll.

[Omar X]

Just now, goldenpsp said:

Sounds like you downloaded the source rather than release files.  Those would be files that would be compiled into the dll.

Thanks. I have already started the process of reinstalling it. It has 17 dependent mods. I'll reinstall all of them. 

[KerbMav]

First, just to wrap that part up: since I have no ability or inclination to create a new texture, I circumvented my problem by choosing one cargo type and changing it for RocketParts. The way to target the Kontainer parts might not be very elegant, but it works at least.
(I have no clue what I intended to do with the Rock container prices there though ... but somehow cheap rock even makes the empty Kontainer more expensive?)

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[FSfuelSwitch]:HAS[#resourceNames[MetallicOre;Uraninite;Substrate;Minerals;Karbonite;ExoticMinerals,RareMetals;MaterialKits;Metals;Polymers;Supplies;Ore;Machinery;Recyclables;SpecializedParts;Fertilizer;Hydrates;Gypsum;Dirt;Silicates;Silicon;RefinedExotics;ColonySupplies;Organics;Rock]]]
{
	@MODULE[FStextureSwitch2]
	{
		@textureDisplayNames[13,;] = RocketParts
	}
	
	@MODULE[FSfuelSwitch]
	{
		@resourceNames[13,;] = RocketParts
		@tankCost[13,;] = #$resourceAmounts[13,;]$
		@tankCost[13,;] *= 1.5
		@tankCost[23,;] /= 2
	}	
}

//  0 MetallicOre
//  1 Uraninite
//  2 Substrate
//  3 Minerals
//  4 Karbonite
//  5 ExoticMinerals,RareMetals
//  6 MaterialKits
//  7 Metals
//  8 Polymers
//  9 Supplies
// 10 Ore
// 11 Machinery
// 12 Recyclables
// 13 SpecializedParts
// 14 Fertilizer
// 15 Hydrates
// 16 Gypsum
// 17 Dirt
// 18 Silicates
// 19 Silicon
// 20 RefinedExotics
// 21 ColonySupplies
// 22 Organics
// 23 Rock

There is for sure a way to just pull out everything I do not use - since I am not (yet?) playing with that many resources in my games - but for now I have what I need.
@Blackline Pinging you in case you were actually interested.

But I have a question out of curiosity regarding a design decision @RoverDude, why does a Kontainer have five times the units capacity than a fuel tank of similar size?

[monstah]

Had to remove the link on the OP, we've had reports kerbalstuff.com had been hijacked (seems like a harmless dead site now, but it's not coming back anyway).

[Wyzard]

@RoverDude, I'm putting together a patch to fix the kontainers' LH2 capacity as I mentioned in the CRP thread, and while testing, I noticed that the kontainers seem to have 25% more tank volume than similarly-sized stock fuel tanks.  That's a separate issue, not specific to LH2 — for example, the 2.5m cylindrical kontainer tank is very close in size to the stock Rockomax X200-32, but the former holds 4000 units of LF+Ox and the latter holds only 3200.  Is that intentional, or a mistake?  I'm willing to make the change and submit a PR to reduce the tank volumes, but I won't do so unless you give me the go-ahead (since the discrepancy may be by design).

Also, there's something weird with ArgonGas capacity: Nertea's NearFuture argon tanks hold 2.56 times as much as USI kontainer tanks of the same physical size.  I'm not sure which is right, because I'm confused by both: the CRP's definition of ArgonGas says "volume = 1", which I think means 1 unit equals 1 liter, but argon tanks (both USI and NearFuture) have capacity numbers that are much too big for that.  The stock Mk1 Liquid Fuel Fuselage holds 400 units of LF, which should be 2000 liters of volume, but the 1.25m USI cylindrical kontainer holds 250000 units of ArgonGas, and the NearFuture ARH-05M tank holds 640000.  (All three tanks are physically the same size.)  I'd like to fix the USI/NearFuture argon discrepancy, and I could just multiply the USI argon capacities by 2.56, but it's hard to tell whether that's really the right thing to do.

[DStaal]

47 minutes ago, Wyzard said:

@RoverDude, I'm putting together a patch to fix the kontainers' LH2 capacity as I mentioned in the CRP thread, and while testing, I noticed that the kontainers seem to have 25% more tank volume than similarly-sized stock fuel tanks.  That's a separate issue, not specific to LH2 — for example, the 2.5m cylindrical kontainer tank is very close in size to the stock Rockomax X200-32, but the former holds 4000 units of LF+Ox and the latter holds only 3200.  Is that intentional, or a mistake?  I'm willing to make the change and submit a PR to reduce the tank volumes, but I won't do so unless you give me the go-ahead (since the discrepancy may be by design).

Also, there's something weird with ArgonGas capacity: Nertea's NearFuture argon tanks hold 2.56 times as much as USI kontainer tanks of the same physical size.  I'm not sure which is right, because I'm confused by both: the CRP's definition of ArgonGas says "volume = 1", which I think means 1 unit equals 1 liter, but argon tanks (both USI and NearFuture) have capacity numbers that are much too big for that.  The stock Mk1 Liquid Fuel Fuselage holds 400 units of LF, which should be 2000 liters of volume, but the 1.25m USI cylindrical kontainer holds 250000 units of ArgonGas, and the NearFuture ARH-05M tank holds 640000.  (All three tanks are physically the same size.)  I'd like to fix the USI/NearFuture argon discrepancy, and I could just multiply the USI argon capacities by 2.56, but it's hard to tell whether that's really the right thing to do.

I just wanted to mention I'm watching this with interest, as I had an old partly-completed project to centralize all of this, but held off as I couldn't get the volumes to ever agree with each other.

Pay attention to the volumes of the gases in the different configurations Kontainers as well - the ratios in the spherical and the non-spherical don't match up either, last I checked.  I was never sure if there was a systemic thought behind that (and what it might be) or not.

[Wyzard]

8 minutes ago, DStaal said:

Pay attention to the volumes of the gases in the different configurations Kontainers as well - the ratios in the spherical and the non-spherical don't match up either, last I checked.  I was never sure if there was a systemic thought behind that (and what it might be) or not.

I don't know how to determine what a tank's volume "ought" to be — presumably it's derived from the part's physical size and shape, but for example, the 3.75m spherical kontainer holds 30000L of resources, but the volume of a 3.75m sphere is actually about 220893L, more than 7 times as much.  I guess there's some implied tank wall thickness and internal structure that reduces the usable volume, but I don't know if there are any guidelines for the relationship between a tank's internal volume and external size.

So I'm not trying to do any rebalancing based on the tanks' sizes and shapes.  I'm just taking each tank's LiquidFuel capacity as a given, and adjusting its LqdHydrogen capacity to match the defined unit-volume ratio between those two resources.  I'll do the same sort of thing for ArgonGas if I can figure out what the ratio actually ought to be, since NearFuture doesn't seem to use the unit volume from the CRP resource definition either.

The only other change I'm making is fixing some small discrepancies in the tanks' resource costs — mostly around a tenth of a percent from what I've seen, though for some reason the 5m cylindrical tank had an LH2 tankCost about 11% below what it should've been.  Since the small discrepancies go both ways (some too high, some too low), and there's nothing special about that one 5m tank that justifies LH2 being 11% cheaper in it, I'm assuming these are mistakes.

[Nertea]

16 minutes ago, Wyzard said:

I'll do the same sort of thing for ArgonGas if I can figure out what the ratio actually ought to be

So the CRP gas definitions are supposed to be at STP. In order to define the approximate pressurization, I chose to make it so a similar volume of tanks would give a similar amount of reaction mass to Xenon... that is, if a 2.5m Xe tank stores ~25t of fuel, a 2.5m Ar tank stores a similar number. That number is 320x. 

[Wyzard]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

So the CRP gas definitions are supposed to be at STP. In order to define the approximate pressurization, I chose to make it so a similar volume of tanks would give a similar amount of reaction mass to Xenon... that is, if a 2.5m Xe tank stores ~25t of fuel, a 2.5m Ar tank stores a similar number. That number is 320x. 

Hmm, OK.  It makes sense that the argon is compressed, though I'm puzzled as to why resource definitions use STP when KSP doesn't model the effects of temperature and pressure on resource volume.  And liquid hydrogen isn't at STP (it'd be gaseous).

Anyway, it sounds like you're saying that the "volume = 1" in the CRP definition isn't applicable here because argon tanks are pressurized, and the 2.56x 3.2x^* discrepancy between USI and NF tanks really just means that the USI tanks use a lower pressure.  That means it'd be OK to leave it as-is, but I'm inclined to submit a patch to make the USI kontainer tanks use the same pressurization as NF, just to avoid confusion.  @RoverDude, what do you think?  Should USI kontainers hold 2.56x 3.2x^* more ArgonGas?

(BTW, if I understand phase diagrams correctly, argon pressurized to 320atm isn't really a gas anymore — it's way into supercritical fluid territory, or liquid if it's cold enough.  Wikipedia says argon's critical pressure is 4.863MPa, and 320atm is 32MPa.)

^*The USI tanks currently hold argon pressurized at 100atm on a units-per-liter basis, but the 25% bonus liters in the same physical space (mentioned in my earlier post) makes it effectively 125atm.  Assuming the bonus liters are by design and should be preserved, we'd multiply by 3.2 to go from 100atm→320atm aka 125atm→400atm.

Edited October 22, 2017 by Wyzard
Corrected pressure ratio — tanks that hold 1.25 liters per liter make things weird

[DStaal]

BTW: If you're interested, this is what I was trying to work on: https://github.com/DanStaal/KPBStoMKS/blob/Development/New_Parts/USI_Cargo_Switch.cfg

The intent was to do all this calculation in-game, instead of trying to do it by hand or in a spreadsheet someplace.  That same repository has some examples of it being used.  What held me off was trying to get the math right for the fluids - I never could find a good set of ratios that would match what the current kontainers had.  (Could of course be that the kontainers didn't all have the same ratios...)  I'm pretty sure the fluids ratios aren't fully balanced even at the moment - I've been trying to tweak them based on some comments in the KPBStoMKS thread.

[Nertea]

33 minutes ago, Wyzard said:

Hmm, OK.  It makes sense that the argon is compressed, though I'm puzzled as to why resource definitions use STP when KSP doesn't model the effects of temperature and pressure on resource volume.  And liquid hydrogen isn't at STP (it'd be gaseous).

Anyway, it sounds like you're saying that the "volume = 1" in the CRP definition isn't applicable here because argon tanks are pressurized, and the 2.56x 3.2x^* discrepancy between USI and NF tanks really just means that the USI tanks use a lower pressure.  That means it'd be OK to leave it as-is, but I'm inclined to submit a patch to make the USI kontainer tanks use the same pressurization as NF, just to avoid confusion.  @RoverDude, what do you think?  Should USI kontainers hold 2.56x 3.2x^* more ArgonGas?

(BTW, if I understand phase diagrams correctly, argon pressurized to 320atm isn't really a gas anymore — it's way into supercritical fluid territory, or liquid if it's cold enough.  Wikipedia says argon's critical pressure is 4.863MPa, and 320atm is 32MPa.)

^*The USI tanks currently hold argon pressurized at 100atm on a units-per-liter basis, but the 25% bonus liters in the same physical space (mentioned in my earlier post) makes it effectively 125atm.  Assuming the bonus liters are by design and should be preserved, we'd multiply by 3.2 to go from 100atm→320atm aka 125atm→400atm.

Some long time ago, probably because of RSS/RF guys, gasses were defined in CRP as STP densities. Gasses *only*, anything with a *Gas name applies, so it doesn't apply to things with a Lqd prefix. This was a decent concession to make to RF people, I think because they wanted to be able to have different pressurizations easily. I don't necessarily agree... but compromises. 

The "Volume" item in the CRP definitions is almost as ambiguous as anything. 

[Wyzard]

OK, I've made a pull request here: #97.

So far, I've only fixed the tanks' LH2 capacity and made a few small typo-ish sort of corrections.  I haven't changed the argon pressure/capacity, or done anything about the USI tanks having 25% more volume than stock tanks, but I'll amend the PR with those changes if RoverDude says it's OK.

[RoverDude]

@Wyzard -  best bet (and to minimize disruption) is to keep the volumes the same since for almost all resources, that's going to be correct (1L for CRP stuff, 5L for LFO, etc.).  In the case of the pressurized tanks I have no problemo making the ratios consistent with NF, just use the volume already established for that tank.  If a specfic tank appears to be REALLY off, let's discuss.  Since messing with these is like pulling that loose yarn on a Christmas sweater.

[Domfluff]

The issue is that the Kontainers are (now) so much more efficient than the NF tanks, that any USI+NF ships are much better off only using the Kontainers - the difference is that big, and compounded since the Kontainers don't boil off/need cooling. I believe this is something that changed a few versions back in NF - where Nertea had the tanks at double density or something similar. Could be wrong about that. Fully support Wyzard's PR here.