[WIP] Radioactivity - test release 0.1.1 (Sept 7, 2016)

[Errol]

Im hoping you make this very configurable, id love to see .cfg options for:

-% of total dose healed at ksc

-Cost in funds of heal at ksc action

-amount of radiation that a kerbal can recieve at ksc on the surface (like a difficulty/lifespan lever)

-Possibly ability to create new kerbal if enough male and female kerbals are kept together long enough. Semi random traits based on parents and job assigned *through either random or influenced by other present roles somehow* after a maturation period...

All this would allow lifespans and generations of kerbals to become a thing! I don't mind abstracting a desired game mechanic by piggy backing off of another mechanic. Perhaps in the kerbal's universe radiation is the only thing that ages them, and their reproduction, logistically speaking, is more like cell division but with two donors. Poof! New young, in-experienced kerbal, perhaps with tourist restrictions for x time to represent maturation.

Edited February 25, 2016 by Errol

[Nertea]

8 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Well in your current model you seem to assume, the reactor itself is the source of the radiation but for other Engines like the Inertial Confinement D-T VISTA engines, the radiation is only present when it is fusing and only from a single point just behind the engine. THe engine itself acts as a shadow field

Nah that's not true. The post you quoted indicates this - if you specify the emission point as behind the engine it'll work exactly like that (plume emission)

2 hours ago, Errol said:

Im hoping you make this very configurable, id love to see .cfg options for:

-% of total dose healed at ksc

-Cost in funds of heal at ksc action

-amount of radiation that a kerbal can recieve at ksc on the surface (like a difficulty/lifespan lever)

-Possibly ability to create new kerbal if enough male and female kerbals are kept together long enough. Semi random traits based on parents and job assigned *through either random or influenced by other present roles somehow* after a maturation period...

All this would allow lifespans and generations of kerbals to become a thing! I don't mind abstracting a desired game mechanic by piggy backing off of another mechanic. Perhaps in the kerbal's universe radiation is the only thing that ages them, and their reproduction, logistically speaking, is more like cell division but with two donors. Poof! New young, in-experienced kerbal, perhaps with tourist restrictions for x time to represent maturation.

All fields are totally configurable, but I'm not doing anything related to lifespans. Out of scope, and breeding is really really out of scope.

[FreeThinker]

Besides engines which flux is controlled by it's throttle, we also need solution for the reactors. It would be nice if the Mod would expose a set of public interfaces which can be accessed by other  mods to configure the reactor radiation flux

[Nertea]

There is a IRadiationEmitter class that is polled by RadioactiveSources. All you should need to do is implement GetCurrentEmission in that class according to your reactor implementation. The system should take care of the rest. 

[Drew Kerman]

8 hours ago, Nertea said:

I'm not doing anything related to lifespans. Out of scope, and breeding is really really out of scope.

Well you mentioned a tracking system for radiation dosage. As long as that's exposed in the UI anyone can keep their own record of lifetime dosage and apply it however they want

[JPLRepo]

1 hour ago, Gaiiden said:

Well you mentioned a tracking system for radiation dosage. As long as that's exposed in the UI anyone can keep their own record of lifetime dosage and apply it however they want

I'm looking at how to incorporate this mod (once released) into Roster Manager to manage radiation exposure as part of a kerbal's lifespan and other attributes.

Edited February 26, 2016 by JPLRepo

[PocketBrotector]

Real-world solar and cosmic radiation is attenuated by Earth's atmosphere and/or magnetosphere, right? It could be interesting to see that incorporated here - for example, Jool is presumably radioactive like Jupiter, but maybe Laythe has an active core while Vall is geologically dead, so Laythe would make a better choice for habitation despite being closer to the giant's radiation. 

Regardless, I look forward to seeing how the gameplay strategies emerge with this mod...

[TiktaalikDreaming]

This looks totally awesome.  Especially as I spent quite some hours getting shadow shields right using ray casting for my Nexus nuke engines, having that maybe finally mean something in game is pretty darn good. 

 

[Nertea]

On 2/26/2016 at 7:08 PM, Gaiiden said:

Well you mentioned a tracking system for radiation dosage. As long as that's exposed in the UI anyone can keep their own record of lifetime dosage and apply it however they want

Yes, that's basically what I'd want. I implement a very simple system as described before that can be disabled via MM, then anyone can use these fields to do things with more complexity.

23 hours ago, PocketBrotector said:

Real-world solar and cosmic radiation is attenuated by Earth's atmosphere and/or magnetosphere, right? It could be interesting to see that incorporated here - for example, Jool is presumably radioactive like Jupiter, but maybe Laythe has an active core while Vall is geologically dead, so Laythe would make a better choice for habitation despite being closer to the giant's radiation. 

Regardless, I look forward to seeing how the gameplay strategies emerge with this mod...

Radiation exposure from the sun should indeed be attenuated by LoS. I plan on defining this more or less via a simple curve, so flux at a ship would be computed by scaling the flux at a planet's orbit by the appropriate attenuation value sampled from the curve. Curves defined per planet, and in config files for easy editing. Initial test release will just be point radiation though.

15 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

This looks totally awesome.  Especially as I spent quite some hours getting shadow shields right using ray casting for my Nexus nuke engines, having that maybe finally mean something in game is pretty darn good. 

 

I'm hoping it will add some nice design considerations for people who like to deal with the real nasty problems of all those super-fancy atomic engines!

[Nertea]

I mocked up approximately what I want to do with the UI. What do we think?

 

[HebaruSan]

15 minutes ago, Nertea said:

I mocked up approximately what I want to do with the UI. What do we think?

Aren't Sieverts implicitly scaled to the (human) body receiving the radiation? It's the "absorbed dose" rather than the emitted dose. Granted, all kerbals are exactly the same mass and volume, but it still might be more accurate to show Grays or mSv/kg/hr.

[Nertea]

I haven't really decided on units yet. I want to present something relatively easy to understand (radiation doses and fluxes can get confusing quite fast) and consistent across the board, and also be representative of approximately what you would get if you moved a kerbal towards that source. 

[RedParadize]

It looks really cool. I am not quite sure if the average player will know how to interpret Sv effect on kerbals, same with any other measurement units. You might want to dumb that part down a bit. Or maybe have a 'translator' that say how severe the effect will be on a given amount of time. It could look a bit like your science penalty measurement.

Edited February 29, 2016 by RedParadize

[Nertea]

6 minutes ago, RedParadize said:

It looks really cool. I am not quite sure if the average player will know how to interpret Sv effect on kerbals, same with any other measurement units. You might want to dumb that part down a bit. Or maybe have a 'translator' that say how severe the effect will be on a given amount of time. It could look a bit like your science penalty measurement.

I think I'll probably rework the Dosimeter section to have the maximum dose displayed as a kind of progress bar, with icons representing the different statuses.

Maybe something like this (excuse my ascii):

==================--------               0.4 mSv/hr
0 Sv                     20 Sv                   50 Sv

[soundnfury]

This looks really awesome, and your approach is way better than my Kappa Ray mod.  Feel free to comb the kapparay source for ideas though — and also, when you get to modelling non-local sources, for a bunch of models of radiation environments at various places in space.

Looking forward to this mod!

[TiktaalikDreaming]

8 hours ago, RedParadize said:

It looks really cool. I am not quite sure if the average player will know how to interpret Sv effect on kerbals, same with any other measurement units. You might want to dumb that part down a bit. Or maybe have a 'translator' that say how severe the effect will be on a given amount of time. It could look a bit like your science penalty measurement.

You can always use that other measure of radiation, the banana. 

[Nightside]

7 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

You can always use that other measure of radiation, the banana. 

I guess we will need some configs for Banana for Scale !

"A banana emits approximately 0.1 microSieverts of radiation per hour."

[Buster Charlie]

3 minutes ago, Nightside said:

I guess we will need some configs for Banana for Scale !

"A banana emits approximately 0.1 microSieverts of radiation per hour."

I'm down for banana dosage schemes, call them dB, for deciBananas 

[SpaceMouse]

Since a banana is all squishy and organic, perhaps the banana would be better as a measure of how much radiation is being received. Perhaps by how much it glows.

[riocrokite]

very nice UI @Nertea

A question, will source have a configurable particle energy variable? For example Jool rings might emit 10 keV particles that is easily attenuated by thicker aluminum cabin while galactic cosmic radiation with 20% of particles being >1GeV can't be stopped by anything and it's effect is increased due to secondary radiation along with thicker wall? (so player would have to use standard thinner materials for long interplanetary travels not to increase negative GCR radiation and then be worried mostly about shielding from nuc engines and SPE sun particle events - mostly by positioning craft backwards to sun)

Edited March 1, 2016 by riocrokite

[123nick]

omg this is literally the best idea ever! it will put new meaning into craft design- no longer do you just need CoT too align with CoM, and RCS thrust aligned too CoM, but now, inorder too have nuclear reactors, you need shielding! amazing!

[Nertea]

1 hour ago, riocrokite said:

very nice UI @Nertea

A question, will source have a configurable particle energy variable? For example Jool rings might emit 10 keV particles that is easily attenuated by thicker aluminum cabin while galactic cosmic radiation with 20% of particles being >1GeV can't be stopped by anything and it's effect is increased due to secondary radiation along with thicker wall? (so player would have to use standard thinner materials for long interplanetary travels not to increase negative GCR radiation and then be worried mostly about shielding from nuc engines and SPE sun particle events - mostly by positioning craft backwards to sun)

Not planned at the moment, there is only one attenuation constant specified (at a medium gamma energy level). In the future this might be replaced by a floatcurve field where attenuation is specified for many energy levels, but I don't think this is massively important. In terms of modeling more radiation types, neutron radiation is imo more interesting, so I would do that first.

18 hours ago, soundnfury said:

This looks really awesome, and your approach is way better than my Kappa Ray mod.  Feel free to comb the kapparay source for ideas though — and also, when you get to modelling non-local sources, for a bunch of models of radiation environments at various places in space.

 

Thanks :). I don't think this approach is better, it's just more deterministic. I already had a look actually, 'cause I was curious ;). 

 

Edited March 1, 2016 by Nertea

[Starbuckminsterfullerton]

The UI looks good, will it be visible in the VAB? It would make it easier to take radiation into account during construction. Why does one fuel tank have a different color ray passing through it than the other, is it empty?

I see in the mockup the two engines next to each other don't interact in terms of radiation. I know real NTR plans usually involve a neutron shield to separate reactors if there are two or more on the same vessel, perhaps a given dose of radiation could decrease core life? 

Although then you would need to add the shields so that there was something we could actually do about the core life, which might be getting out of scope...

[Nertea]

1 hour ago, Starbuckminsterfullerton said:

The UI looks good, will it be visible in the VAB? It would make it easier to take radiation into account during construction. Why does one fuel tank have a different color ray passing through it than the other, is it empty?

 

Yes, it's visible in the VAB, though some kinks need to be worked out. And yes, the tank on the right is empty.

1 hour ago, Starbuckminsterfullerton said:

see in the mockup the two engines next to each other don't interact in terms of radiation. I know real NTR plans usually involve a neutron shield to separate reactors if there are two or more on the same vessel, perhaps a given dose of radiation could decrease core life? 

Although then you would need to add the shields so that there was something we could actually do about the core life, which might be getting out of scope...

Yeah, I don't plan to do that (gets complex fast, and adds a bunch more connections to monitor), but the system would be extensible enough for that to be done later by myself or someone else. You'd just need to put a RadiationSink on the engine and write a module implementing IRadiationAbsorber to apply the effects. 

[aeroeng14]

This really seems promising, the first true concrete steps toward a "simulated" radiation mechanic. I do appreciate and fully support the simplifications and balance you're making and think they will be totally justified given KSP, the user base, and what's fun. Really wish I could contribute in someway to the development, but my modding skills are non-existent. Perhaps in the testing phase. I'll be keeping a watch on this for sure and keep trucking Nertea!