[1.3.0] Kerbalism v1.2.9

[IGNOBIL]

On 4/18/2016 at 7:38 AM, ShotgunNinja said:

@SmarterThanMe There are very few parts included. Here is a picture of them all, you may find them familiar. The greenhouse and food containers are original artwork by forum user 'zzz', I just retextured them and used the tank lights to indicate when a container is almost empty, and the greenhouse lamps for the artificial light mechanic. The oxygen tank is original artwork by forum user 'blackheart'. The antenna is a (poorly) retextured and rescaled version of a stock antenna.

 

If you have ideas for new models, I can try to help with models and textures.

know nothing about cfg or code, still trying to figure out how to make my Origami antennas compatible with this

[Guest83]

10 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

But the totally game-breaking part is antennas : you simply cannot make a long unmanned mission because no matter how many antennas you put on the ship, they will more or less all break at the same time. I can compensate malfunctions on engines, power sources or torque providers by oversizing and it is an interesting gameplay element but antenna effect isn't cumulative so I'm stuck with a fixed lifetime.

Agreed. Sending an unmanned probe to Eeloo is almost impossible. One way to fix it would be to not halve the range, but to require more energy for science transmissions instead when malfunctioning.

 

@ShotgunNinja

Would it be possible to somehow highlight broken parts (similar to how crew parts are highlighted when you select crew transfer) so that it's easier to select them for repair?

 

 

Quote

As for the difficulty, I find that food is too heavy, the difficulty of going anywhere past Kerbin SOI is increased by several orders of magnitude.

 

As it should be. In the stock game it's about as easy to land on Duna and come back than to go to the Mun. I believe the weight of food is well balanced, it also encourages you to include the greenhouse module for longer trips.

 

 

Quote

i wonder, with all radiation stuff and craziness, maybe a Medical Kerbal (scientist subclass ?) will be fun to add ?

 

Not a fan of this idea. The point of the mod is to make the game more realistic (while still being fun), medics with magic radiation poison healing capabilities would be the exact opposite of that.

 

@IGNOBIL

Not OP, but I think some dedicated entertainment parts could be useful.

Edited May 1, 2016 by Guest83

[ExiledViking]

Thank you for your efforts on the mod...

 

A few questions/ points...

 

Regarding the real issues of cosmic radiation and its effects, rather than extending the efficacy of physical shielding, have you considered a secondary for of shielding for late tech in the form of "active shielding" similar to the recently published SR2S project study, where superconductive coils are used to create a ships own personal magnetosphere?

Secondly, regarding QoL effects, prevention, and result generation, have you considered utilising Kerbals individual personality traits as part of the QoL calculation?

 

Specifically:

Courage as a factor of determination of susceptibility to stress effects, High Courage Less Susceptible.

Stupidity as a factor of the amount of entertainment needed, Less Stupid, less entertainment needed.

Stupidity as a factor of the type of error resulting from stress, Less stupid, less accidental and more deliberate.

and, courage as a measure of what a kerbal does when at rock bottom. More courageous being selfless.

 

Essentially, rather than random susceptibility and effect, we have a matrix of cause effect that would involve careful crew selection on our part depending on mission conditions and length, and provide an actual use for the personal stats in the game by providing a vast array of personalities, from Captain Oates, to Evil Doctor Smith.

 

 

 

 

[Vlyan]

15 minutes ago, Guest83 said:

Not a fan of this idea. The point of the mod is to make the game more realistic (while still being fun), medics with magic radiation poison healing capabilities would be the exact opposite of that.

they can just reduce the rate of decease not cure them totally
this can be technological compliant, with low reduce rate a the beginning like other features.
and add also a possible psychological support ^^

[Paul Kingtiger]

Hi @ShotgunNinja, I'm currently looking to get Universal Storage to work with Kerbalisum.  I'm running into an issue where you don't use the same resource values as the Community Resource Pack, which is going to cause incompatibilities with other mods.  For example 1 unit of Oxygen is a 1 day supply for a kerbal, where as in CRP and other mods use liters.  A slimier problem occurs because your resource is CO2, and CRP uses CarbonDioxide.

The sticking point is that Universal Storage can be made compatible with Kerbalisum via a MM patch, but it'll be making itself incomparable with other mods, such as ISRU mods or resource processors.

 

Would you be open to adopting the CRP standard to maximize cross mod compatibility?

 

If it's helpful I have some usage figures based on a NASA paper.  They aren't 100% but pretty close.
 

KSP Resources research.xlsx - Microsoft Excel Online https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=0742f116b96caaf9&page=view&resid=742F116B96CAAF9!79436&parId=742F116B96CAAF9!169888&authkey=!AM3QDXxpZKNKSLI&app=Excel 

[ShotgunNinja]

@Gotmachine, @Storywalker4 Thanks guys your ideas and review are appreciated.

 

@IGNOBIL I would be glad to help with the Origami cfg (that BTW they look great )

@PART[NAU_ORI69Gm]:NEEDS[!RemoteTech,!AntennaRange,Kerbalism,EnableSignal]
{
  @MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter]
  {
    @name = Antenna    
    %scope = far
    %relay_cost = 0.2
    %min_transmission_cost = 8.0
    %max_transmission_cost = 32.0
  }
}


@PART[NAU_ORI350Gm]:NEEDS[!RemoteTech,!AntennaRange,Kerbalism,EnableSignal]
{
  @MODULE[ModuleDataTransmitter]
  {
    @name = Antenna    
    %scope = far
    %relay_cost = 0.2
    %min_transmission_cost = 8.0
    %max_transmission_cost = 32.0
  }
}

The 'EnableSignal' bit at the end of the NEEDS filter is something that's coming in 0.9.9.5, where the user can disable some mechanics. You have to remove it for 0.9.9.4.
I made both equivalent in term of range and ec costs. Fell free to tweak how you like. You can use 'orbit','home','near','medium','far','extreme' for the ranges (then they are computed automatically from the solar system features). Here is some specs for the Antenna module. Cheers

 

@Paul Kingtiger That is much appreciated! I suggest to wait until next version, 0.9.9.5, that bring some changes. Most importantly, it will be shipped as an 'engine' plus a set of 'profiles' (one being the current set of mechanics, it default to this one). This in some way means you will be adding support for a specific profile (as they can have arbitrary resources and modules). I have intentions to ship 0.9.9.5 with these profiles:

• Classic: equivalent to 0.9.9.4 gameplay-wise (DEFAULT ONE, CONFLICT WITH CRP)
• Barebone: no LS resources or mechanics, just play with radiation and quality-of-life
• Snacks: emulate Snacks using a rule in the new framework, mostly as an example
• Realism: uber-realistic rate of consumptions (REQUIRE CRP), water
• none: degenerate into background resource simulation with EC planner/monitor
• custom: the user can write its own profile with ease, arbitrary resources etc

 

@Guest83 Highlighting malfunctioned parts is on the todo list.

[AlexTheNotSoGreat]

Ok, the malfunction rate early game is immensely high! In a single year of my IP probe, all parts that can malfunction (antenna, solar panels, reaction wheels, and engines) are down to either 3%, 2%, or 0%, any my Terrier is at 6.55 MILLION% overheat! On top of that, they each occurred once every 5-15 kerbal days. Any way I could adjust this? (I haven't gotten better manufacturing researches, but this is absurd!)

[ShotgunNinja]

@AlexTheNotSoGreat I seriously decrease the malfunction rates in next version, especially for the antennas. I also lowered radiation influence over malfunctions.

[AlexTheNotSoGreat]

On 4/30/2016 at 0:24 PM, Death Engineering said:

Played Kerbalism to the third Mun landing and wanted to start again in 1.1.1 but this time set difficulty to 'Hard'.  Oops.. I don't think there is enough SCIENCE! on hard nerfing to get past the third tier. Anyone else tried playing with "Hard" levels set?

Yea, I've learned that playing on hard with this mod is near impossible without science grinding. I found normal with kerbalism is the right balance.

Edit: Actually, not even science grind would work, as several experiments no longer are biome-dependent!

Edited May 1, 2016 by AlexTheNotSoGreat

[Itsdavyjones]

In regard to the radiation removal, what if there were to be a part that is insanely large that launching it is extremely difficult, but would remove the radiation issue when the kerbals visit it.  What I am thinking of for the cure is the longevity treatment from the Mars trilogy, since what it does is repairs damage to DNA, it could effectively remove the radiation, but not all cases will be removed, say no more than 1%.  In the 1% of cases where the cure doesn't work, radiation doesn't go down, but they also cannot try again for a kerbal year.   However, because it failed already, they have a higher chance of it failing still, say 50% tops.  This way, it makes it so you can have colonies, but you would need to research an expensive part that is very high up in the tech tree.  It may be possible to set up a medical branch in the techtree that makes it so that radiation has less effect over time, but would have to come in a resource that is consumed in a solar storm for example.  Doesn't make them immune but would give them more time to get to safety.

[Enceos]

@Itsdavyjones I say let Kerbals restore and loose rads over time when they're protected by a magnetic field.

[Gotmachine]

8 hours ago, Guest83 said:

As it should be. In the stock game it's about as easy to land on Duna and come back than to go to the Mun. I believe the weight of food is well balanced, it also encourages you to include the greenhouse module for longer trips.

I agree with the intent. But I'm talking about the balance against stock engine ISP range. For a round trip to Jool, you can go down to a 4 years trip if you use about 20% more dV than the optimal transfer window (and using aerocapture). Accounting for some maneuvers at destination, let's be optimistic and say we can do the round trip on a 5000 dV budget. To last 4 years with a crew of 3 kerbals, you need about 110 tons of life support :

• 37 tons : dry mass for modules (1 command pod, 1 cuppola, 1 hitchiker, 2 gravity rings, 2 greenhouses, 2 big food containers, 6 oxygen tanks)
• 18 tons : radiation shielding
• 50 tons : food (to last between each greenhouse harvest)
• 7 tons : oxygen

Because of greenhouses, the food mass stays more or less constant for the whole trip, so you can perhaps plan for a 80 tons payload when calculating your ship dV. Not to say that this ship require a constant 1,34 EC/sec, accounting for malfunctions, you will need about 30 PB-NUK generators to keep that. Let just say that summing up everything (aerocapture equipment, some structural things, reaction wheels, docking ports, science parts...), this is a 120 tons ship. At Nervs 800 ISP and with MK3 liquid fuel tanks dry mass ratio, this makes for a 300 tons ship, without any lander and on a tight dV budget. In the stock game, the same mission would require a 30 tons ship, this is what I meant by "harder by several orders of magnitude".

While this said, going to Duna can actually be harder than going to Jool because the round trip window is a lot tighter, you actually need a lot more dV for a no time-warp round trip to Duna than for Jool. And for Duna, you still need two greenhouses and 35 tons of food. Instead of 50 kg/unit of food, something like 20 kg/unit would be more balanced (on a realism note, this is still completely absurd but I don't care for realism, only for gameplay balance). And reducing the greenhouse from 10 tons to 5 tons would be more in line with stock part weight and balanced with the proposed food weight.

@ShotgunNinja

Noted that you intend to reduce malfunction rates in next version, but this does not fundamentally resolve the problem. What do you think of the idea of not applying malfunction "decay" on shutdown/retracted/deactivated parts ? Apart from that, thanks for staying true to the "Is it good for gameplay ?" rule, this is how mods should be done, and certainly the first and only one around to do things that way. Don't let the realism or overcomplicated systems maniacs rip that away.

Edited May 1, 2016 by Gotmachine
module mass correction

[ShotgunNinja]

I'm going with these values for the 'realism' profile:

Consumption per-day:
  Food: 2.81kg (10L)
  Water: 1.0kg (1L)
  Oxygen: 0.141kg (100L)

I'm assuming density in resource definition is in ton/liter, and that amount/maxAmount in a part represent liters of volume. Correct me if I'm wrong please.

 

@Gotmachine I'm making the reliability increase more from technologies too. BTW would you try calculate that roundtrip weight estimates but using these values up there?

 

[Terensky]

@ShotgunNinja: the density of oxygen of 1,41 Kg/m^3 (kilograms for cubic meter) refers to the pressure of 1 atm at 0 degrees Celsius. In the industry a compressed oxygen cilinder of 40 liters (0,04 m^3), at a pressure of 200-220 bar (equivalent to about 200-220 atm), weights (gross) about 55-60 kilograms (valve included) and contains the equivalent of 8.5 m^3 (8500 liters) of gas at a pressure of 1 atm (that is about a net weight of 11 kg of oxygen). I hope this helps you to size your containers, though I have no idea how oxygen is stored in a spacecraft: being kerbals, maybe they just use the same cilinders welders use...

P.S.: beautiful mod, btw

 

[DasBananenbrot]

Just stumbled upon this in Addon-Dev and instantly thought of your mod. Since you have coronal mass ejections as a feature, I guess you have your own system already set up, but I still thought this maybe could interesting. If not just ignore this  

Btw: I really like your mod.Though  I couldn't play with it that much so far, I think it looks very promising

Edited May 1, 2016 by DasBananenbrot

[astroadrian99]

I'm having a problem, for some reason my satellite lost signal after one orbit, it has  solarpenels and a whole ton of electricity so thats not it.

[Gotmachine]

I made an error in the previous estimation, dry mass for modules was 37 tons, not 24. I accounted only one greenhouse and gravity ring. Those greenhouses are really too heavy.

@ShotgunNinjaHard to do without the real thing in hands. Is the water recycled somehow ? Does the greenhouses/scrubber have the same relative efficiency ? Assuming no and yes, this is a rough estimate :

• Modules mass : 34 tons + 18 tons of radiation shielding
• Food : 3 tons
• Water : 6 tons
• Oxygen : 1 ton

This gives a 62 tons payload, nearly half the previous one. Adding about 10 tons of extra payload (same as before), you need a 180 tons ship to get the 5000 dV with Nervs at 800 ISP.

But this setup is silly, because food storage for 4 years would weight 16 tons, so you wouldn't want those 20 tons of greenhouses. Not using greenhouses, the payload get down to 55 tons, and the whole ship to 150 tons. But remember that the situation is specific to Jool as greenhouse efficiency is divided nearly by half, being so far from the sun. Having 5 tons greenhouses would restore their superiority, the payload would be 52 tons.

About reliability/malfunction, still think that you won't be able to find a "sweet spot"... With the current way you do this, either this is annoying and tedious because it happens too much, with no way of recovery for unmanned mission, either it almost never happen and it is an useless game element. When I first read the mod description, the key gameplay element I saw was the need to plan for redundancy in case of failure and the increased need for engineers. It is very interesting because the two cases of unmanned and manned can be covered while adding some depth to the ship design and mission planning. You plan for redundancy on unmanned missions and you plan for additional life support and redundancy on manned missions. But as for now, you can't really plan for redundancy, because there is no way to add a redundant system, every part will fall apart at the same time. After some more testing, both on a mid-career tech level and on sandbox (I'm sick of timewarping for today ) this is what I think, as a better alternative than my "inactive parts" idea :

I don't know how you affect malfunctions, but perhaps this could be done "per ship". The idea is that when a malfunction is triggered on the ship, it has a high probability to "choose" an already damaged part. This way, redundancy is effective because parts will fall apart one after another. It also limit the amount of different parts malfunctioning, thus limiting the tedious EVA repair work. And it feels somewhat realistic : a part begins to fail, then things get worse if nothing is done.

@astroadrian99 Seems that your antenna is malfunctioning and/or is out of range.

Edited May 1, 2016 by Gotmachine

[ShotgunNinja]

@Gotmachine Indeed I'm doing some tests and I'm postponing the realistic profile indefinitely. The idea on malfunctions is good.

I'm going to nerf malfunctions a lot in next update.

Edited May 1, 2016 by ShotgunNinja

[Gotmachine]

@ShotgunNinja I know what you mean, balancing things is hard. About the malfunction idea, an afterthought : perhaps you need to limit how many malfunctions can happen on a single part, so another one is chosen next. What use do we have for this 0.00001 EC/sec solar panel anyway ?

[PauloRazen]

This mod have parts to build a base ? i want a mod just like this, survive system + base system.

[dboi88]

1 hour ago, ShotgunNinja said:

@Gotmachine Indeed I'm doing some tests and I'm postponing the realistic profile indefinitely. The idea on malfunctions is good, and its not hard to do. Will add to the next version. 

The change in malfunctions to per ship basis will be a great change, i sent two unmanned missions to duna and eve and both had all 3 antennas fail by the time it got there, long range missions without an engineer just aren't really feasible at the minute.

Edited May 2, 2016 by dboi88

[astroadrian99]

2 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

@Gotmachine How much is the range? It says no malfunctions and I'm at a 134km orbit. It was working before, just in this mission it failed, 

[Jacke]

7 hours ago, ShotgunNinja said:

I'm going with these values for the 'realism' profile:

Consumption per-day:
  Food: 2.81kg (10L)
  Water: 1.0kg (1L)
  Oxygen: 0.141kg (100L)

Based on figures I've seen in the past (old textbooks I don't have to hand), for people the 2.81kg food per day is high but may be due to factors like packaging and other things included.  Just the food (non-dehydrated) is about 1kg/day.  Packaging shouldn't increase by more than 50%, so packaged about 1.5kg.  The 10L volume is about right.  Above that has to be including other personal requirements grouped with food.

1.0kg/day of water is an absolute minimum.  People even doing mild work put that up to 4.0kg and it can go higher.

I think oxygen will ramp up less than water.  It's common to store Oxygen as LOX even in things like aircraft supply systems

Here's numbers from my first source below, quote copied in the spoiler.  Third column is what I think are good working values.  Oxygen almost certainly would be carried as LOX, 1.141 kg/L, as the space reduction is a greater benefit than needing the equipment to warm it to deliver as a gas.

INPUTS	Source says	Working values
Food	0.62kg	1.00kg
Water	3.52kg	4.00kg
Oxygen	0.84kg	1.00kg
OUTPUTS
Solid wastes	0.11kg	0.20kg
Liquid wastes	3.87kg	4.50kg
Carbon dioxide	1.00kg	1.30kg

 

Spoiler

Human physiological and metabolic needs

A crewmember of typical size requires approximately 5 kg or 11.0231 lb(total) of food, water, and oxygen per day to perform the standard activities on a space mission, and outputs a similar amount in the form of waste solids, waste liquids, and carbon dioxide.^[3] The mass breakdown of these metabolic parameters is as follows: 0.84 kg of oxygen, 0.62 kg of food, and 3.52 kg of water consumed, converted through the body's physiological processes to 0.11 kg of solid wastes, 3.87 kg of liquid wastes, and 1.00 kg of carbon dioxide produced. These levels can vary due to activity level, specific to mission assignment, but will correlate to the principles of mass balance. Actual water use during space missions is typically double the specified values mainly due to non-biological use (i.e. personal cleanliness). Additionally, the volume and variety of waste products varies with mission duration to include hair, finger nails, skin flaking, and other biological wastes in missions exceeding one week in length. Other environmental considerations such as radiation, gravity, noise, vibration, and lighting also factor into human physiological response in space, though not with the more immediate effect that the metabolic parameters have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_support_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_spaceflight#Safety_concerns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_food

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_medicine

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/500436main_TA06-HHLSHS-DRAFT-Nov2010-A.pdf
DRAFT Human Health, Life Support and Habitation Systems

Edited May 2, 2016 by Jacke

[Peder]

I have a small suggestion.

I started a new career game and I think the oxygen level of the black capsul mk1 need to be increased. It only have like 10-15 minutes  ( a guess ).

It would be nice if the amount of oxygen the mk1 capsul had would be larger so that the player could at least fly one time arround the planet in orbit and then land.
Example std. oxygen 60 minutes   ( or maybe 10 houres this will limit people to space arround kerbin without extra oxygen anyway ).
- when starting a new game we have limited science points, and it is a bit annoying that I for example only can fly to space for example 1-2 minutes and then we have to enter the atmosphere again, and the pilot almost die due to lack of oxygen.

I am aware I can bring extra oxygen and food ect. but it require quite allot of science before I can unlock this. And my only option really to get some science is to create a small aeroplane and go do scome science.. I am just saying not all players like to do this, they want to go into space ;-)

Edited May 2, 2016 by Peder

[TheSaint]

8 hours ago, ShotgunNinja said:

I'm going with these values for the 'realism' profile:

Consumption per-day:
  Food: 2.81kg (10L)
  Water: 1.0kg (1L)
  Oxygen: 0.141kg (100L)

I'm assuming density in resource definition is in ton/liter, and that amount/maxAmount in a part represent liters of volume. Correct me if I'm wrong please.

Sorry, but I think your numbers for food are way off. If you look at military MREs, a case of 12 meals (which would be four man-days of food) weighs roughly 10kg and has a volume of about 27L. So one man-day of MREs would be about 2.5kg and 7L. So far, you're not too far off. But there are some big problems here:

1. MREs are not astronaut food. They are not worried about minimizing mass or volume at all. They have a full set of supplies in each set, incuding an eating utensil, matches, TP, ration heater, etc. Plus they aren't generally dehydrated or freeze-dried, they are fully hydrated. Out in the field guys will field strip their MREs down to just the food before an extended op and reduce the weight by a quarter and the volume by a third. 

2. MREs provide way more food than an astronaut will need. Three MREs will provide roughly 3,750 calories per day. NASA shoots for astronauts to intake about 2,000-3,200 calories per day. You could cut down on the amount of food you're shipping up by about 1/4 and still meet the caloric requirements. 

3. A case of MREs provides four man-days of food. MAN-days. We're not feeding men, we're feeding kerbals. Kerbals appear to be about half the height of a man. Assuming that they have a roughly mammalian physiology then half the height should require half the calories. 

So, here are my assumptions: Kerbal food is roughly modeled on MREs, with a density of about 0.357kg/L. But, compared to MREs, they have 1/4 less weight due to eliminating the accessory packet and ration heater, they have 1/4 again less weight because of a lower caloric requirement for astronauts, and they require 1/2 of the weight again because we're feeding little green bug-eyed aliens. (Notice that I'm still assuming that the food is fully hydrated, packaged in individual plastic retorts instead of bulk packaging, and provided in a wide variety of meals and courses rather than in blocks of generic tofu. I think I'm still being pretty conservative.) With all of these assumptions, our one kerbal-day of food now masses about 0.7kg and takes up about 2L of volume. 

Why do I go to all the trouble of pointing this out? I'm intrigued by your mod, but the whole, "one 2.5m food module only provides 500 kerbal-days of food" thing is really cramping my style.