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

[voicey99]

9 hours ago, Glubo said:

Thanks man, ISRU on the push probe was the thing I was missing. This helped me a lot.

Specifically, the unmanned Mobile Processing Units can push to (but can't pull from) PL, not the vanilla ISRUs. Logistics modules can also push (but not pull) without a pilot/quartermaster in them.

[bloodgusher]

Hi, I've build a bunch of fully self-sustaining bases on the Galileo planet pack planets but I can't figure out how to do it on Leto.

I've scanned all the biomes and as far as I can tell, Leto has zero RareMetals and zero Uraninite. I can't create them from dirt or resource lodes since the planetary average is zero. Leto is in the middle of nowhere (it takes 44 years to get there by Hohmann transfer) so lugging stuff there is not very practical, it has no moons and there are no asteroids up there.

BTW, MKS is awesome and I recommend trying it on some of the difficult and interesting planets in the GPP. For example there is Tellumo: a huge earthlike planet with 1.9G surface gravity and a 10atm oxygen atmosphere that hits you like a brick wall. It also has rings and a small moon embedded within the rings!

Any hints?

Thanks.

[voicey99]

1 minute ago, bloodgusher said:

Hi, I've build a bunch of fully self-sustaining bases on the Galileo planet pack planets but I can't figure out how to do it on Leto.

I've scanned all the biomes and as far as I can tell, Leto has zero RareMetals and zero Uraninite. I can't create them from dirt or resource lodes since the planetary average is zero. Leto is in the middle of nowhere (it takes 44 years to get there by Hohmann transfer) so lugging stuff there is not very practical, it has no moons and there are no asteroids up there.

BTW, MKS is awesome and I recommend trying it on some of the difficult and interesting planets in the GPP. For example there is Tellumo: a huge earthlike planet with 1.9G surface gravity and a 10atm oxygen atmosphere that hits you like a brick wall. It also has rings and a small moon embedded within the rings!

Any hints?

Thanks.

The very first lines of the GPP wiki article about Leto say this about settling it:

Quote

This is one of the three most difficult bodies to prepare advanced surface operations for; though it is not also H-class (the most unfriendly to colonists) the others being Thalia and Catullus. Leto shares a distinct lack of crustal resources like Thalia, but not as extreme. As bodies at this distance are expected IRL to contain little more than ice variants it's reasonable to suggest that it may not be worth it to arrange any manned mission for this planet.

I took a look at the cfgs and Leto is indeed designed not to have any of a lot of resources (check /GPP/GPP_Resources), including uraninite and raremetals. There is no way around that. There is a feature coming to MKS in the near^TM future where you will be able to automate shipping resources from bases on other planets, but given Leto's isolation this will probably be costly and slow.

Uraninite can be shipped in as EnrichedUranium easily as you need so little of it, but as far as RareMetals go, you're stuffed unless you're willing to bite the bullet and ship them in from elsewhere. The closest place to get them from would be Hox (given Argo is also devoid of any).

[Cucco-Master]

1 hour ago, bloodgusher said:

Leto is in the middle of nowhere (it takes 44 years to get there by Hohmann transfer) so lugging stuff there is not very practical

The easiest solution would be building yourself a warp ship to make your deliveries not take 44 years.

The alcubierre warp drive even comes as a USI mod

Edited May 13, 2017 by Cucco-Master

[voicey99]

4 minutes ago, Cucco-Master said:

The easiest solution would be building yourself a warp ship to make your deliveries not take 44 years.

The alcubierre warp drive even comes as a USI mod

Even the small warpdrive costs 2M (the large costs 12.5M), so you have to have a lot of money to burn to use them regularly (in career). By burning a bit of extra fuel, transfer times to Leto could probably be reduced to about five years (going off the basis that Plock from OPM takes 70 years normally but can be brought down to 8 years by giving it some welly).

[Cucco-Master]

3 minutes ago, voicey99 said:

Even the small warpdrive costs 2M (the large costs 12.5M), so you have to have a lot of money to burn to use them regularly (in career).

The trick with the warp drive is to make the warp ship reuseable (which should not be difficult in case of a simple resource freighter). Of course the initial costs are still high, but someone who already has multiple mks bases scattered across the system should be able to afford one of these drives.

[jd284]

1 hour ago, bloodgusher said:

Any hints?

It's clearly not the right planet for a huge industrial base, and you won't be able to be completely self-sufficient.

So plan regular resupply missions.

Since you're not constructing new ships there, all you need is resupply of machinery and uranium, of which you require very little. It doesn't make sense to try and produce machinery locally in your case, shipping it in is much cheaper than shipping in Rare Metals and refining these, making Specialized Parts, and then Machinery. You'll save two major production lines that way, since they're pointless without access to all required resources.

So just send a shipment of Enriched Uranium and Machinery every few years and you should be fine. Since KSP doesn't simulate EC in the background, you need much less EU than it seems at first, and machinery is fairly easy predictable, but keep rising bonuses in mind.

Or do the warp drive thing...

[bloodgusher]

 

32 minutes ago, voicey99 said:

The very first lines of the GPP wiki article about Leto say this about settling it:

I took a look at the cfgs and Leto is indeed designed not to have any of a lot of resources (check /GPP/GPP_Resources), including uraninite and raremetals. There is no way around that. There is a feature coming to MKS in the near^TM future where you will be able to automate shipping resources from bases on other planets, but given Leto's isolation this will probably be costly and slow.

Uraninite can be shipped in as EnrichedUranium easily as you need so little of it, but as far as RareMetals go, you're stuffed unless you're willing to bite the bullet and ship them in from elsewhere. The closest place to get them from would be Hox (given Argo is also devoid of any).

Voicey99, Thanks for the detailed reply and info!

If the auto-shipping of resources uses a Hohmann transfer, it will probably be too slow to be practical. For me, with all these colonies, money is not an issue. It's possible to build a big expensive 3-stage nuclear rocket and get stuff to Leto in around 9 years or so. So it would be nice if the auto-shipping feature allowed a tradeoff between cost and travel time. But I expect that would be difficult to implement.  

[voicey99]

3 minutes ago, bloodgusher said:

Voicey99, Thanks for the detailed reply and info!

If the auto-shipping of resources uses a Hohmann transfer, it will probably be too slow to be practical. For me, with all these colonies, money is not an issue. It's possible to build a big expensive 3-stage nuclear rocket and get stuff to Leto in around 9 years or so. So it would be nice if the auto-shipping feature allowed a tradeoff between cost and travel time. But I expect that would be difficult to implement.  

I don't know how the automated system is going to work (it's still not yet finished by a long way), you'll have to ask @RoverDude for that, but I think it might be just a constant stream of resources for a constant periodic fee according to the volume and distance (I'm not sure if the rate will vary with distance, but cost certainly will). It's designed to be less cost-efficient than just shipping them yourself but it cuts out the dull and repetitive supply runs.

Edited May 13, 2017 by voicey99

[DStaal]

I would suggest that for the cargo runs you can look at this:

And for your resupply missions you might consider MateralKits instead of Machinery - maintenance will turn them into machinery as needed, if your bases are manned and you have workshops, and MaterialKits can also be used to expand any DIY-kits you need decide to send them as well.  (Or inflate stuff, if that's what you decide.)  Automated bases definitely need Machinery dropped in to fill them up - and maintenance will never fill more than the minimum required even on non-automated bases - but for manned bases it might be worth considering.

Of course, it's quite possible that if you aren't planning on expanding your base further, then machinery is more mass and space efficient.  (I would think that the maintenance conversion should be somewhat lossy, and machinery is denser in the first place.)

[voicey99]

11 minutes ago, DStaal said:

I would suggest that for the cargo runs you can look at this:

<schnip>

And for your resupply missions you might consider MateralKits instead of Machinery - maintenance will turn them into machinery as needed, if your bases are manned and you have workshops, and MaterialKits can also be used to expand any DIY-kits you need decide to send them as well.  (Or inflate stuff, if that's what you decide.)  Automated bases definitely need Machinery dropped in to fill them up - and maintenance will never fill more than the minimum required even on non-automated bases - but for manned bases it might be worth considering.

Of course, it's quite possible that if you aren't planning on expanding your base further, then machinery is more mass and space efficient.  (I would think that the maintenance conversion should be somewhat lossy, and machinery is denser in the first place.)

If I recall, that thing runs off Karbonite and Karborundum, which actually could be pretty convenient as Leto has decent amounts of both surface and exospheric Ka and Ka⁺ (20-25% Ka all over the surface and 2-8% at whatever altitude in the exosphere, and 0.5-1.5% Ka⁺ over most of the surface and 0.2-0.4% in the exosphere). Bear in mind you will have to shuttle resources to and from the surface in a separate craft.

[jd284]

30 minutes ago, DStaal said:

And for your resupply missions you might consider MateralKits instead of Machinery - maintenance will turn them into machinery as needed,

Huh?? Since when has this been a thing?!

Doesn't that mean you never need a machinery converter at all, since you could just pump machinery out of a part and do maintenance on it to convert MK->Machinery at will?

Sounds like a bug, to be quite honest. Id would remove the need for half the MKS chains.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

I think I may have found an issue in the pre-release- in the settings Kolonists hires are set to 1000 but in the complex they are 50,000. Anyone else see this?

Spoiler

 

[voicey99]

2 minutes ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

I think I may have found an issue in the pre-release- in the settings Kolonists hires are set to 1000 but in the complex they are 50,000. Anyone else see this?

<schnip>

The hovertext for the setting does say base cost, so it probably means the minimum cost rather than an override.

[jd284]

1 hour ago, DStaal said:

And for your resupply missions you might consider MateralKits instead of Machinery - maintenance will turn them into machinery as needed

Thinking about this some more, are you sure you didn't confuse it with the old MaterialKits->ReplacementParts conversion? I don't see anything in the code that would work like this for Machinery too. Maintenance just moves resources, it doesn't convert them except for the special case of ReplacementParts.

[DStaal]

2 hours ago, jd284 said:

Thinking about this some more, are you sure you didn't confuse it with the old MaterialKits->ReplacementParts conversion? I don't see anything in the code that would work like this for Machinery too. Maintenance just moves resources, it doesn't convert them except for the special case of ReplacementParts.

That is quite possible.    I internalized 'Workshop: Maintenance, needs MaterialKits'.

This may have implications for my current career...

[Johould]

20 hours ago, bloodgusher said:

I've scanned all the biomes and as far as I can tell, Leto has zero RareMetals and zero Uraninite.

It may be worth setting up some manufacturing and shipping the missing resources. If you have all the other ingredients, 1t of RefinedExotics is enough to manufacture about 18t of Machinery or 7.5t of ColonySupplies. By units it's exactly 1/25th of the result. (Most MKS converters have the same total number of units in and out, but the various densities mean the mass balances are all over the place. The strangest is that Machinery masses over twice the sum of the specialized parts and material kits that go into making it).

[Johould]

For hab/home time, it seems to be cheaper to send colony supplies or missing ingredients until you need several thousand kerbal-years of hab time. Past that point, the quadratic growth that comes from increasing both the base time and multiplier together might win out, if you want several thousand total kerbal-years of hab time (especially if you can make specialized parts for inflating hab rings and building DIY kits).

[voicey99]

40 minutes ago, Johould said:

For hab/home time, it seems to be cheaper to send colony supplies or missing ingredients until you need several thousand kerbal-years of hab time. Past that point, the quadratic growth that comes from increasing both the base time and multiplier together might win out, if you want several thousand total kerbal-years of hab time (especially if you can make specialized parts for inflating hab rings and building DIY kits).

You know any kerbal with a hab/home timer of >50 years has permanent habitation, right? There's no need for any of that.

[RoverDude]

There are mission durations where all of the parts make sense.  Sometimes all you need are supplies.  Sometimes a Kolonization module and ColonySupplies make sense.  Sometimes you want a greenhouse, or you want a ton of hab.  All of the bits have their break even points.

[voicey99]

2 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

There are mission durations where all of the parts make sense.  Sometimes all you need are supplies.  Sometimes a Kolonization module and ColonySupplies make sense.  Sometimes you want a greenhouse, or you want a ton of hab.  All of the bits have their break even points.

What would work best for a roughly 20-year round trip to a planet (i.e. the most habtime for the least weight)? So far I'm using a cupola, Orca, H-Q 3.75m KT and a H-C 3.75m KT. Is there a better way to do this?

[DStaal]

12 minutes ago, voicey99 said:

What would work best for a roughly 20-year round trip to a planet (i.e. the most habtime for the least weight)? So far I'm using a cupola, Orca, H-Q 3.75m KT and a H-C 3.75m KT. Is there a better way to do this?

You're leaving out an important variable: The size (and composition, if it matters - if it's all scouts and pilots it does...) of your crew. 

[voicey99]

27 minutes ago, DStaal said:

You're leaving out an important variable: The size (and composition, if it matters - if it's all scouts and pilots it does...) of your crew. 

Standard three-piece.

I very luckily found a very rich water spot to mine (for hydrogen fuel) and possibly doing KIS once there (so I need an engineer), I have science to do (scientist needed) and am going to be frequently in the comm shadow (pilot needed).

Edited May 14, 2017 by voicey99

[Wiseman]

What parts increase the efficiency of refining of basic materials (Chemicals, Metals, Polymers)? I've got a setup with what I thought was just about everything, including several Ranger parts set to [Smelter] and [Crusher], but my Assembly Plant with several [Workshop]s is scaling dramatically faster than the basic materials can keep up. More specifically, I have a two TIRs with one of each of the basics running at 300% each, while my two-bay Material Kit producing Assembly Plant runs as high as 4800%. Adding MPUs set to [Smelter] or [Crusher] didn't seem to have any effect. Any ideas on what I'm missing?

[voicey99]

@TheRagingIrishman Any progress on the nullrefs? I managed to track the source of the errors down to the (FTT) Orca Cmd Mod, whatever problem it is with it.

@Wiseman What's your geology rating? Ignoring efficiency parts (get the latest release of MKS in the Constellation bundle, it will tell you what sort of parts boost the efficiency of each part), the production multiplier is (usually) your geology rating as a decimal squared (e.g. 150%=1.5²=2.25x). Take a look this mod.

Edited May 14, 2017 by voicey99