[1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (September 6)

[DDE]

@Nertea, why did the xenon and argon clusters get canned?

Also, a humble request: add captions to the FFT Imgur album, I lack the radiation shields rating to approach awesomeness of that magnitude.

[K1productions]

I dunno if this is proper to do, and if it is not, I am more than happy to delete the post

Me and my buddy RaiderMan had been putting together a series on Kerbal Space Program using the Near Future Technologies mods, and building a Space Station Complex.  The first video of this series is here, and I would be delighted to have any opinions and suggestions

 

[Eugene Moreau]

Morning all.  I have a couple questions.

1.  I think the grip-o-tron Large Docking Connector is part of this mod, am I correct?

2.  If so, which way should be pointed out.  I noticed the flanges are a little more flush on one side, is that side that docks?

3.  Are they compatible with the regular docking ports?

[Nertea]

2 hours ago, Eugene Moreau said:

Morning all.  I have a couple questions.

1.  I think the grip-o-tron Large Docking Connector is part of this mod, am I correct?

2.  If so, which way should be pointed out.  I noticed the flanges are a little more flush on one side, is that side that docks?

3.  Are they compatible with the regular docking ports?

This part doesn't show up in the editor because it's going to be deprecated next version.

12 hours ago, K1productions said:

Me and my buddy RaiderMan had been putting together a series on Kerbal Space Program using the Near Future Technologies mods, and building a Space Station Complex.  The first video of this series is here, and I would be delighted to have any opinions and suggestions

I don't mind you posting this here, love seeing people using my parts. 

On 8/20/2017 at 1:05 AM, DDE said:

@Nertea, why did the xenon and argon clusters get canned?

Models are hideous.

On 8/20/2017 at 1:05 AM, DDE said:

Also, a humble request: add captions to the FFT Imgur album, I lack the radiation shields rating to approach awesomeness of that magnitude.

Lot of work to go tag all those, I'll make a better album when real release happens. 

On 8/18/2017 at 6:51 PM, AlexTheNotSoGreat said:

Have you considered RealPlume-Stock support for your mods?

RealPlume supports mods, not the other way around. Up to them. 

 

Edited August 22, 2017 by Nertea

[K1productions]

16 minutes ago, Nertea said:

I don't mind you posting this here, love seeing people using my parts. 

Awesome, and let me state for the record (and it will be heard on an upcoming video), thank you so much for this wonderful library of parts

Edited August 22, 2017 by K1productions

[Eugene Moreau]

11 minutes ago, K1productions said:

Awesome, and let me state for the record (and it will be heard on an upcoming video), thank you so much for this wonderful library of parts

I concur!  one of the best library of parts out there.

[RaiderMan]

@Nertea I dont suppose you have plans to develop an NFT line of Lights? the stock ones are..how do I put this diplomatically...well..their shapes mean they have as much business being on a capsule as a dog does trying to fly.

one of the parts K1 and I used in the vids is the gemini light from the fasa realism overhaul, and well..it has a tendency to sink into things.

these two points are why I'm hoping you have plans to make custom lights. I imagine those'd go under the electrical mod...

[Nertea]

15 hours ago, RaiderMan said:

@Nertea I dont suppose you have plans to develop an NFT line of Lights? the stock ones are..how do I put this diplomatically...well..their shapes mean they have as much business being on a capsule as a dog does trying to fly.

one of the parts K1 and I used in the vids is the gemini light from the fasa realism overhaul, and well..it has a tendency to sink into things.

these two points are why I'm hoping you have plans to make custom lights. I imagine those'd go under the electrical mod...

You probably want this mod, it's more or less the same as anything I would make. 

 

[K1productions]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

You probably want this mod, it's more or less the same as anything I would make. 

 

Hmm... looks nice, but I am hesitant to add too many mods until the whole process is completed.  I've had times where a recorded series was halted because an update caused a mod to break, and all my work disappeared.

would be extra nice to see the Near Future set include some lights at some point.

Oh, and have you considered (I may have asked this before) adapting the structural parts to include T-sections instead of just 6-way's?  Particularly the truss-surrounded pressurized module, only option is 2-way and 6-way, that I can find.  Just curious

[RaiderMan]

this truss issue has led to more than a few frustrating moments, and a few creative if HIGHLY questionable from a structural integrity standpoint, solutions...

[Nertea]

50 minutes ago, K1productions said:

Oh, and have you considered (I may have asked this before) adapting the structural parts to include T-sections instead of just 6-way's?  Particularly the truss-surrounded pressurized module, only option is 2-way and 6-way, that I can find.  Just curious

See, this is the thing. I can add this, but then people will ask for another, and then another, and then another. There's nowhere to draw the line once I start catering to this. So probably not. 

50 minutes ago, K1productions said:

would be extra nice to see the Near Future set include some lights at some point.

Probably not going to happen either, sorry

[Lyneira]

Hi all,

First of all I'd like to give my appreciation to the developer(s) for your work on these mods, I've been using NFE and NFP and the models and part balancing are well done. There's one part that I've been experimenting with in Career, the Cryogenic Gas Separator, that doesn't seem to be balanced well though. The argon harvest rate is rather measly, in the order of about 0.1 u/s even when flying at around 280 m/s just above sea level. Considering argon's tiny unit density, that's about 0.0001784 grams per second. The Xenon harvester refuses to deploy, saying there is nothing to harvest. The atmospheric sounder also stated no Xenon was present. I did find an earlier conversation in this thread about this and apparently the CRP values for abundance were off, examining them it looks to me like they were expressed in ranges of 0-1 when the comments say they should be expressed in the range 0-100.

Since it was also said that CRP changes are slow to get done, I decided to roll my own ModuleManager patch (which you can find below) which increases all abundance values for Argon by 100x, which gave a more reasonable Argon harvest rate of ~ 10 u/s while flying at high subsonic speed. Still only 0.01784 grams/s but at least that seems like a value you can wait a few weeks for if necessary with a larger ground based rig.

I also tried multiplying the Xenon values by 100x in the same way, but this did not seem to have any effect at all. The tracking station reflected my argon changes (about 3.4% now instead of 0.0%), but still didn't list Xenon and the Sounder and Separator still said there is no Xenon. Because the abundance values, even multiplied by 100, are so tiny I thought there might be some kind of cutoff happening in the resource system, so I decided to multiply them by another 1000 and assign them absolutely instead of multiplying the original values. That put them in the range of 0.09 to 0.2% for Kerbin so it would be some readable value in the tracking station and on the atmospheric sounder. It worked, the Cryogenic Separator would harvest Xenon now but of course the harvesting rate was too high, especially compared to Argon. I ended up reducing the Cryogenic Separator's efficiency for Xenon by 100x to end up at something that I thought reasonable, if not entirely realistic.

With this patch and my save (3.41% Argon and 0.162% Xenon and 100x reduced harvesting efficiency), the Xenon Loop works out to about ~10% funds/s compared to argon harvesting (which itself is less valuable than monopropellant mining if I'm not mistaken) so it's certainly not going to be a gold mine, and about a 1/64th harvesting rate by mass. That doesn't reflect its true rarity but neither did I want to force silly amounts of timewarping to get a half decent amount from one of these units. I am however curious what you balance experts on this mod originally intended as reasonable harvesting rates for these two so I can fine tune the patch though.

For the interested, here's my patch, would appreciate to hear feedback and suggestions:

// This patch fixes the abundance of Argon and Xenon in atmospheres, as they were specified too low by a factor of 100 in the Community Resource Pack.
@GLOBAL_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[ArgonGas]]
{
	@Distribution
	{
		@MinAbundance *= 100
		@MaxAbundance *= 100
	}
}

@PLANETARY_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[ArgonGas]]
{
	@Distribution
	{
		@MinAbundance *= 100
		@MaxAbundance *= 100
	}
}

// Atmospheric
// Set this artificially high to avoid being truncated to 0, fix this in the cryoseparator later
@GLOBAL_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[XenonGas]]:HAS[#ResourceType[2]]
{
	@Distribution
	{
		// The commented values are the corrected values from CRP before artificial inflation
		//@MinAbundance = 0.000005
		//@MaxAbundance = 0.00005
		@MinAbundance = 0.05
		@MaxAbundance = 0.5
	}
}

// Oceanic
// These are the corrected values from CRP, not modified further because they're not low enough to get truncated
@GLOBAL_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[XenonGas]]:HAS[#ResourceType[1]]
{
	@Distribution
	{
		
		@MinAbundance = .01
		@MaxAbundance = 1.0
	}
}

// Set this artificially high to avoid being truncated to 0, fix this in the cryoseparator later
@PLANETARY_RESOURCE:HAS[#ResourceName[XenonGas]]:HAS[#ResourceType[2]]:HAS[#PlanetName[Kerbin]]
{
	@Distribution
	{
		// The commented values are the corrected values from CRP before artificial inflation
		//@MinAbundance = 0.000009
		//@MaxAbundance = 0.00002
		@MinAbundance = 0.09
		@MaxAbundance = 0.2
	}
}

@PART[cryoseperator-25]
{
	// Fix artificial Xenon concentration by reducing harvesting efficiency... Not entirely realistic but based on roughly equaling funds/s of argon harvesting so as to not make the player timewarp unreasonably long to fill some tanks
	@MODULE,0
	{
		@Efficiency *= 0.01
	}
}

 

Edited August 24, 2017 by Lyneira
Grammar

[K1productions]

49 minutes ago, Nertea said:

See, this is the thing. I can add this, but then people will ask for another, and then another, and then another. There's nowhere to draw the line once I start catering to this. So probably not.

I was only asking.  It will in no way impact my feelings about what we already have.  It was worth a shot, that's all.  After all, one never knows until they try, right? 

[JadeOfMaar]

18 hours ago, Lyneira said:

Since it was also said that CRP changes are slow to get done, I decided to roll my own ModuleManager patch (which you can find below) which increases all abundance values for Argon by 100x, which gave a more reasonable Argon harvest rate of ~ 10 u/s while flying at high subsonic speed. Still only 0.01784 grams/s but at least that seems like a value you can wait a few weeks for if necessary with a larger ground based rig.

I've met with the problem of harvesting Argon and Xenon and made reference to it in my tutorial "How to Near Future." From my experience I must inform you that there are two sides to the problem and you're approaching both of them all wrong.

1. You are correct. Argon and Xenon should have incredibly low abundances. But also, they're at the mercy of the RNG. If you create a new save or edit the seed value in persistence you're likely to have more Xenon to harvest, and possibly less or no Argon, and all other resource abundances will change too. In the resource configs, don't multiply their current abundances but declare a new and better range of abundances.
2. The Cryogenic Separator's ModuleResourceHarvesters are configured slightly differently from say, a Karbonite scoop (which will work as desired and supports Argon and Xenon so study the configs for that). @Nertea may not see much point to harvesting an atmosphere while flying in it so his device both looks like, and is coded like something that should be immoble while operating. I can't guess if he intentionally disabled it from harvesting faster if moving or this inability is a side effect of his code and CRP being bugged.

[Ourshinigami]

Hello I am Oursshinigami and I see a little probleme on the mod new future lunch vehicule (probleme of symmetry)

 

So on the "N-series guidance computer unit" (the 5meters)  there is a probleme of node_sttack (littke probleme but if you can corect this in the future update)

 

 

 

And in the cfg file you have this

node_stack_top =     0.0,     0.231,     0.0,     0.0,     1.0, 0.0, 4
node_stack_bottom = 0.0,     -0.237, 0.0,     0.0,     -1.0, 0.0, 4

 

It was just for that (the node_stack which have the probleme is the node_stack_top)

 

Thanks

 

[Nergal8617]

I just have to say thanks Nertea for all of your awesome mods.  I've been doing a lot of space station building lately and your mods not only make the station look great but they make the sections really easy to launch.  I'm especially thankful for the large radial decoupler that comes with NF Launch Vehicles because I don't need seperatrons on my SRBs anymore.

[Lyneira]

3 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

I've met with the problem of harvesting Argon and Xenon and made reference to it in my tutorial "How to Near Future." From my experience I must inform you that there are two sides to the problem and you're approaching both of them all wrong.

1. You are correct. Argon and Xenon should have incredibly low abundances. But also, they're at the mercy of the RNG. If you create a new save or edit the seed value in persistence you're likely to have more Xenon to harvest, and possibly less or no Argon, and all other resource abundances will change too. In the resource configs, don't multiply their current abundances but declare a new and better range of abundances.
2. The Cryogenic Separator's ModuleResourceHarvesters are configured slightly differently from say, a Karbonite scoop (which will work as desired and supports Argon and Xenon so study the configs for that). @Nertea may not see much point to harvesting an atmosphere while flying in it so his device both looks like, and is coded like something that should be immoble while operating. I can't guess if he intentionally disabled it from harvesting faster if moving or this inability is a side effect of his code and CRP being bugged.

Thanks for your reply, I did encounter your Near Future tutorial a little while back and it was a good read. Though I think you may be misunderstanding my angle where you say I'm approaching the problem all wrong. I'll answer the remark of flying with the Separator first: I'm aware the Separator's intended use case isn't for flying, it does however increase its harvesting rate with speed. It was a fact finding mission and gave me an idea of how low the default rate is even with an exaggerated harvest rate at high flying speed. If I do seriously start harvesting Argon and/or Xenon, it would be with a ground based rig with multiple Separators and plenty of power. But I will also look at Karbonite's fuel scoop configs (perhaps mod up a stock part to do the job) if I do feel the need to scoop Argon at a very high rate while flying!

As for the abundances, you suggested to increase the minimum abundance to get a better value in my save. However in CRP's configs, the abundances were lower than realistic by a factor of 100 because they were expressed as a fraction from 0-1, where CRP expects a value between 0 and 100. A factor of 100 due to a config error is far more significant than the range between min and max abundance for Argon at Kerbin. (a factor of 10) Before my patch, Argon's concentration read 0.0% in the tracking station and 3.4% afterwards, which is somewhat low in the range of 1-10% but makes much more sense and is probably high enough that I can work with it.

For Xenon, the problem was that the Separator did not harvest Xenon at all. Not even when its abundance was absolutely defined (not multiplied via MM) as the correct 100x higher value. Something in KSP's resource system seems to truncate it to zero, and as a result you don't see Xenon at all in the tracking station, nor on the atmospheric sounder or the Separator. The only way I could get Xenon to appear as a resource in the tracking station and on the Sounder/Separator at all was to artificially increase Xenon's abundance well above a realistic value. I don't know what boundary the cutoff is at, but for reasons of readability in the tracking station, I set the abundances in the order of 0.09%-0.2%. That's far too high, but as I said in my original post, I offset it by reducing the Separator's efficiency for Xenon so that it harvests a lot less by mass than Argon. It's not the approach I would have liked to use, but it's the only one that I could get to work at all.

Technical config details aside, I'm mainly interested in the following question: What sort of resource rates for Argon and Xenon, in terms of units per second or grams per second, are (or should be) the intended reasonable harvesting rate for a stationary Separator on Kerbin? Perhaps @Nertea or @Streetwind could weigh in on this?

Edited August 24, 2017 by Lyneira

[Nertea]

@Lyneira This is a somewhat known issue. You may be interested in this discussion here:

It's basically what you just went through. The person who defined the cfg values in CRP just went and threw "real" numbers in there. The changes just haven't gone through yet.

[Lyneira]

@Nertea Thanks for the link, that was an enlightening read! So 0.001 is the minimum value I can work with in my patch, that's good to know. I look forward to the next CRP release with the new values, and I can use my patch in the meantime. In that context I'm satisfied with my choice for a number that's readable in the tracking station (even if it is unrealistically high) and tuning converter efficiency to scale back the harvest rate again.

Still have no idea what the original intended harvest rates are for Argon and Xenon, but if the values in CRP were defined independently from the Cryogenic Separator's Efficiency maybe there never was one? In that case I might just keep tweaking until I find something that's a bit challenging but also fun for me.

[ThreePounds]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

It's basically what you just went through. The person who defined the cfg values in CRP just went and threw "real" numbers in there. The changes just haven't gone through yet.

I thought you and freethinker fixed this a while back? The change logs indicate there was some work done on it.

0.6.0 - (KSP 1.2)
-------------------
Added ARP icon data for RealFuels
Added/Updated distribution data for:
- Antimatter
- Helium3
- ArgonGas
- XenonGas
- LqdHydrogen
Added several new resources, including:
- HeavyWater
- Deuternium
- Helium4
- Silicates
- Borate
- ColonySupplies
- RefinedExotics

Is it still borked?

[Nertea]

1 hour ago, Three_Pounds said:

I thought you and freethinker fixed this a while back? The change logs indicate there was some work done on it.

0.6.0 - (KSP 1.2)
-------------------
Added ARP icon data for RealFuels
Added/Updated distribution data for:
- Antimatter
- Helium3
- ArgonGas
- XenonGas
- LqdHydrogen
Added several new resources, including:
- HeavyWater
- Deuternium
- Helium4
- Silicates
- Borate
- ColonySupplies
- RefinedExotics

Is it still borked?

I don't know about the changelog, but I know I made no PR with this and the config files say otherwise... all we did was discussed it.

[K1productions]

Since it was apparently well received the first time, I'll go ahead and post part two of my station-building process.
Here we start to have fun with the Near Future Construction parts, which are the heart of any Space Station complex

 

[RaiderMan]

by death spiral I mean even with SAS turned on..it would have a lazy roll along its length wise axis, I experienced this whilst trying to modify said saturn nova launch stack.

attempts to correct...saw her simply nose over and proceed to lawn dart. explosively.

now THIS stack? performs beautifully every time.

for like the first three launches..we kept forgetting the remote for the second stage, kept ending up with just enough in the tank for a deorbit, but not enough to really use meaningfully otherwise.

[K1productions]

1 hour ago, RaiderMan said:

now THIS stack? performs beautifully every time.

With both engine mounts.  The one with the three large ports may look cooler, but my gods, clustering 25 medium engines under the skirt gives us more lifting power than we will ever dream of needing.  I love it

[RaiderMan]

..as I said in the video, this thing takes off like a jack rabbit with its tail on fire.

we DID have a bit of a rolling issue til I convinced him to put the smaller fins on the second stage.

that said, she still tends to roll once we're at the low power mode phase of the ascent.

@K1productions how much fuel did we end up left with on the second stage the last few times? if I recall rightly it was enough for a deorbit of the second stage but not enough to do anything with otherwise?