totm may 2024 [1.12.x] - Modular Kolonization System (MKS)

[Omnipius]

So...interesting things start happening when you go truly enormous with MKS. I built this:

Minmus City:

1x Tundra Pioneer Module, 10x Ag Modules, 17x Refineries, 5x Assembly Plants, 3x Kerbitats, 3x Kolonization Modules, 2x Industrial Sifters, 1x Ag Support Module, 1x Academy, 1x Med Bay, 1x Recycler, 1x Nuclear Fuel Plant, 1x PDU, 2x 3.75m Reactors, 3x EL pads, 2x Stock ISRU units, and a well-rounded collection of 1.25m flat warehouses for PL access. Raw materials from and supplies delivered to 5x manned mining outposts.

LS Kerbal Kapacity: 103

Material Kit Production: 10,230 kg/Kerbin day

Specialized Parts Production: 680 kg/Kerbin day

With this many converters running things get weird. Namely, there's a huge performance hit, even and especially while warping when loaded. Additionally, any warp rate greater than 100x results in inaccurate production due to more resources being produced or requested per timestep than the size of the warehouses. This is particularly noticeable when returning from warping for a few days elsewhere and you come back to only a maybe 2000 more MKT when it should have been tens of thousands. 

Any thoughts on how to fix these issues? It would seem that both the performance issue and the production issue could be addressed by calculating the effective output of the entire vessel and simulating as a single hybrid converter instead of running each converter bay as an independent agent. That way, you would only have to solve for the new effective converter when the user makes a relevant change to the vessel. Would KSP even let you do that?

[jd284]

2 minutes ago, Omnipius said:

Any thoughts on how to fix these issues?

Build bigger warehouses. Your storage should cover 6 hours worth of production for each intermediate resource. Otherwise at least background production will not work correctly, and with even less storage larger timewarp is affected too, as you've found.

4 minutes ago, Omnipius said:

Would KSP even let you do that?

No, not with a complete rewrite of the converter mechanics. It would also break many legitimate use cases of the current system.

So just add more storage.

[TauPhraim]

4 minutes ago, Omnipius said:

Would KSP even let you do that?

I don't think it would. The converter calculations would be extremely complicated, to get an equivalent result: even in the same vessel, two converters load can differ due to required resource presence (typically machinery in the part), and the governor slider. Then you'd need to plug in the merge/unmerge logic somewhere, in a system already heavily plugin-loaded.

 

Out of curiosity: did you build that in-place or hyperedit it (or flew it, who knows) ? And do you really need that much production ?

[DDay2021]

6 hours ago, Fury1SOG said:

Do you have enough Machinery? The Refineries need Machinery onboard in order to operate.

I

I think it has everything that it needs.

Edit:  Strange now everything is working this morning.... 

Edited March 26, 2017 by DDay2021

[danielboro]

On 20.3.2017 at 7:43 PM, Terwin said:

PL currently only works for landed vessels.

well maybe not exactly

i had my fuel deliver landed next to my ISRU
went to do a burn (KAC reminder) and wen i got back i just lunched the fuel deliver without filling it.

seeing that its nearly empty i pressed the PL button and wily still gaining height i filled it whit LF and mono
i had ships marked as landed wily in orbit but i dont think this is one of tham
the fuel deliver was off the ground but not far yet (less then 150? maybe)

 

edit: sorry for the late post
i keep the page open and didn't see im so far bihaind

Edited March 26, 2017 by danielboro

[RoverDude]

11 hours ago, rspeed said:

I've been seeing the same issue for a while now, and it's 100% reproducible both from the VAB and in-flight.

I'm also on a Mac running 10.12.3 and (currently) 10.2.4b8.

No mods installed other than those required by UKS.

Here's the kicker: Installing USI-LS fixes it.

If you do not have USI-LS, they are just pretty parts and there's no point to the converters.  You're seeing missing USI-LS bits.

4 hours ago, Omnipius said:

I built this:

Now I want to see a pic

As to solving your problems -  two ways.

First is larger modules (which are underway thanks to GC being a bundled part of the mod now).

Second... well, don't open Christmas presents early

[rspeed]

5 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

If you do not have USI-LS, they are just pretty parts and there's no point to the converters.  You're seeing missing USI-LS bits.

They still shouldn't crash the game.

And what's wrong with pretty parts?

[Terwin]

55 minutes ago, danielboro said:

well maybe not exactly

i had my fuel deliver landed next to my ISRU
went to do a burn (KAC reminder) and wen i got back i just lunched the fuel deliver without filling it.

seeing that its nearly empty i pressed the PL button and wily still gaining height i filled it whit LF and mono
i had ships marked as landed wily in orbit but i dont think this is one of tham
the fuel deliver was off the ground but not far yet (less then 150? maybe)

I would not be surprised if RoverDude does something like check for landed in the last minute and currently in range.

That would alleviate problems with vessels that are slowly sliding and flicker back and forth between landed and not landed.

You might try landing one vessel on a high area then have a vessel orbit within 100m and see if you can transfer that way...

[Tarheel1999]

32 minutes ago, rspeed said:

They still shouldn't crash the game.

And what's wrong with pretty parts?

What RD is saying is that the converters serve no purpose if you don't have USI-LS installed. In other words, don't mess with the bays. Problem solved.

Rover is aware of the problem and there is/was a github issue on this. It's just not a high priority. He will get to it in his own time. 

[RoverDude]

1 hour ago, rspeed said:

They still shouldn't crash the game.

And what's wrong with pretty parts?

This would fall in the category of 'Then don't do it'... i.e. the bays have no purpose if you don't have USI-LS, so there's no need to change them.  As noted, I'm aware of the issue, but given there's a simple work around, the priority is low.

[RoverDude]

So a quick heads up.

I am up to my armpits in new code for the next MKS phase.   That being said, if there are still outstanding issues, please be sure to log github issues and attach save files.  When I go through my stuff pre-release, I hit all of the Github repos, and any issue with a save attached to it is going to get priority.

 

Thanks

[TauPhraim]

2 hours ago, RoverDude said:

This would fall in the category of 'Then don't do it'... i.e. the bays have no purpose if you don't have USI-LS, so there's no need to change them.  As noted, I'm aware of the issue, but given there's a simple work around, the priority is low.

Just be aware, when weighting costs vs benefits, of the time you spend guiding people who have the problem toward the workaround  That said, since a fix is probably "just" MM patches, lots of people should be able to do it themselves.

 

Unrelated: has there ever been a request for more multi-storage parts ? Like the inflatable ISM, but with more than 3 resources for each configuration. Potentially configurable independently a-la converters bay.

[jd284]

4 minutes ago, TauPhraim said:

That said, since a fix is probably "just" MM patches, lots of people should be able to do it themselves.

It's not, there's an infinite loop in the code if a module has less than two bay configuration options.

(Well I suppose you could add a placeholder configuration which does nothing, to workaround the bug using MM though.)

[TauPhraim]

2 hours ago, jd284 said:

It's not, there's an infinite loop in the code if a module has less than two bay configuration options.

OK, here goes. It will still leave users wondering why this part is there, and what this button does, but at least it won't crash  I could not find a relevant issue to refer to, in the huge lists.

[RoverDude]

Thanks

[rspeed]

6 hours ago, RoverDude said:

As noted, I'm aware of the issue, but given there's a simple work around, the priority is low.

I apologize, but I didn't see you actually acknowledge that there's a bug. Only saying "don't do that" as though I were looking for support rather than trying to help report a bug.

[Cornholio]

I have a large assortment of mods.  If I followed correctly (definitely suspect) the option for Kerbals to 'Disassemble' and recycle items leads back to MKS, correct?  Hopefully I'm posting this in the correct thread.  If I send a Kerbal on EVA and click the disassemble option, the part explodes and gives me text about the quantity of MaterialKits that I could have saved, but could not because I did not have storage.  This is probably an easy answer, but how do I retain these MaterialKits?  Thank you anyone for your help.

[notthebobo]

14 minutes ago, Cornholio said:

I have a large assortment of mods.  If I followed correctly (definitely suspect) the option for Kerbals to 'Disassemble' and recycle items leads back to MKS, correct?  Hopefully I'm posting this in the correct thread.  If I send a Kerbal on EVA and click the disassemble option, the part explodes and gives me text about the quantity of MaterialKits that I could have saved, but could not because I did not have storage.  This is probably an easy answer, but how do I retain these MaterialKits?  Thank you anyone for your help.

The Wiki page on Kontainers may have the answer you're looking for.

[Omnipius]

14 hours ago, TauPhraim said:

I don't think it would. The converter calculations would be extremely complicated, to get an equivalent result: even in the same vessel, two converters load can differ due to required resource presence (typically machinery in the part), and the governor slider. Then you'd need to plug in the merge/unmerge logic somewhere, in a system already heavily plugin-loaded.

Out of curiosity: did you build that in-place or hyperedit it (or flew it, who knows) ? And do you really need that much production ?

The math for the effect of slowly depleting machinery resources is really the only hard part as that presents a partial differential equation. Everything else is deterministic and can be superimposed on a central "virtual" converter. The math and logic to do this converter bucketing could be a function of the logistics hub.

Built entirely in-place with local resources. Build time was approximately 180 Kerbin days. I landed the mining outposts first as automated units, set up a relatively small production facility (only 14 modules ) , which I then used to construct this monstrosity.

12 hours ago, RoverDude said:

Now I want to see a pic

As to solving your problems -  two ways.

First is larger modules (which are underway thanks to GC being a bundled part of the mod now).

Second... well, don't open Christmas presents early

Odd that my first image didn't work:

Do I really have to wait for Christmas?

As to why I need this much production: Firstly, I pretty much never launch anything from Kerbin anymore with the exception of additional crew and some select NFT resources which do not have ISRU chains. Secondly, I was building this:

Yes, those are 4 class B asteroids strapped to the bottom and 4 large space docks. Total vessel mass: 1.5 million kg

I'm considering adding 4-sets of medium and small space docks as well, so this might get even bigger. 

[RoverDude]

@Omnipius - Probably sooner than Christmas   Was just working on something today.  But it's going to be a fair bit of code, though nothing too rough.

[Kaa253]

Good grief @Omnipius. What is your PC!

Are you running KSP on Titan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory or something  ?

Gratz. Your exploitation of off-world resources is most impressive.

[Urses]

23 minutes ago, Kaa253 said:

Good grief @Omnipius. What is your PC!

Are you running KSP on Titan at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory or something  ?

Gratz. Your exploitation of off-world resources is most impressive.

Maybe the NSA's Omega?

I thought same here realy BadS base and i though my bases with 20-30 Modules are big....

Funny Kabooms 

Urses

[sh1pman]

On 26.03.2017 at 6:09 AM, DDay2021 said:

Anyone know of a reason that my 'Tundra' Industrial Refinery has zero efficiency for producing Refined Exotics or Chemicals?  It's part of a base that has all the raw materials, there is plenty of storage and power, and there are 4 - 5 star engineers onboard.

Try reloading the scene.

[DDay2021]

10 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Try reloading the scene.

I agree, solved the same issue that I had.

Yes it solved the issue.

Edited March 27, 2017 by DDay2021
edited for large amounts of hurp a durp.

[RoverDude]

Fix for that incoming.