TAC Life Support question

[SupperRobin6394]

Okay so, I'm lazy.

 

Is a space station or any other vessel with the TAC Life Support able to sustain itself without resupply missions (excluding fuel)?

I know resources can be re-used, but does this go for every resource?

[SupperRobin6394]

Nobody?

[Nightside]

Not really, although there are modules that will recycle some waste products but you will not ever be 100% efficient.  

Question is: if you want 100% sustainably, why not just uninstall TAC?

[Gaarst]

No. You can recycle WasteWater into Water and CO2 into O2 at the cost of electricity or maybe another resource; but Waste and Food cannot be produced/recycled. There is no way to recycle Waste into Food, so a mission will always at least need Food resupplying (and Waste ditching, but it gets automatically dumped overboard if your Waste tanks are full).

Edited August 11, 2017 by Gaarst

[SupperRobin6394]

Long story, but I don't want to do resupply missions to space stations thousands of kilometers away.

 

Thanks tho.

[TheRagingIrishman]

So then just don't use tac......

[Zhetaan]

Once upon a time, TaranisElsu was planning to add a waste-to-food converter, but it never happened.  That being said, there are mod expansions (Mod mods?  Metamods?  Modception?) that convert waste into food.  On the other hand, you're not likely to find many that perform the conversion at 100% efficiency.  There are some that reduce the resupply needs to 10% or less, so you could conceivably send a mission that won't need to be resupplied more than once every few centuries, but the consensus was essentially that adding a life support mod and then adding converters so that you never had to pay attention to the life support mod was rather pointless:  the only difference between running TAC with 100% conversion and running no life support at all is that the TAC install runs slower because it keeps calculating the resupply timers for Kerbals who will never run out of food.

On the gripping hand, there's nothing preventing you from taking one of these mods and editing the configuration file yourself.  They may be out of date, but they're just parts, not plugins, and honestly, a few edits to the configuration file may be necessary to get them to work anyway.

This is the munseeker Greenhouse. (Last updated for 1.1.3)

This is the SETI Greenhouse. (SpaceDock link) (Last updated for 1.2.2)

This is BioMass. (Last updated for 1.0.2)

This is Kerbal Planetary Base Systems.  (This was updated for 1.3, but I do not know whether any of the greenhouse parts work in orbit).

[Flush Foot]

On top of TACLS, I have "Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux" installed; this has some hydroponics modules that take waste, CO2, waste water, and "minerals" to make food, oxygen, and water.

After asking a question elsewhere in the forum, I found out that a module that is able to use waste and ore to produce fertilizer could be "repurposed" to instead make "Minerals", meaning that dropping down from orbit onto your nearby planet/moon and mining for ores can help keep these food-farms running; not infinite food/resources, but more self-sufficient. (and I am just noticing the smelting "metal ore" to metal [extraplanetary launchpads] takes normal rocket fuel plus that ore to make metal and CO2 and Water, so I believe that this could further help running food-farms longer-term)

Using the guidance from the other forum page, I was able to tweak this converter to make minerals instead of "fertilizer":

Edited November 25, 2018 by Flush Foot
Realized one of the mods I referenced was not helpful with the scenario I outlized (SETI greenhouses use "nutrients" while the stockalike parts use minerals