[1.5 - 1.10] Kerbalism 3.11

[EimajOzear]

32 minutes ago, canisin said:

Does kerbalism have similar or same functionality as Eva Fuel? 

@canisin Kerbalism changes Kerbal EVA packs to use monopropellant instead of EVA Fuel, so you should probably uninstall the mod you linked. To further clarify, if your command pod does NOT contain monopropellant and you EVA a kerbal, the kerbal will not be able to use their EVA pack.
 

[canisin]

Thanks a lot!

[Gotmachine]

13 minutes ago, EimajOzear said:

To further clarify, if your command pod does NOT contain monopropellant and you EVA a kerbal, the kerbal will not be able to use their EVA pack.

Note that following 1.11, this isn't true anymore since the EVA jetpack inventory item has it's own EVA propellant (in stock) or MonoPropellant (with Kerbalism) storage (5 units).
There is also a "fuel cylinders" inventory item that carry 3 extra units of MP.
Also note that :
- On going on EVA, those inventory items will be (re)filled with the MP stored on the vessel (if any).
- On boarding, the MP stored in the EVA kerbal inventory items will be transferred to the vessel MP storage, if there is some storage available.

Edited December 19, 2020 by Gotmachine

[EimajOzear]

34 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

Note that following 1.11, this isn't true anymore...

@Gotmachine Thanks for that, I didn't know as I haven't looked into 1.11; very interesting!
 

@canisin I'm assuming your game version is pre-1.11 since the mod you linked is listed as being compatible with 1.9.x at most? If so, this shouldn't affect you.

[canisin]

I am preparing for a new campaign in 1.11. I was going to test whether EVA Fuel would continue to work in 1.11. 

Also thanks for the clarifications, and that is exactly how I would have expected it to work!

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, canisin said:

Hello All,

Does kerbalism have similar or same functionality as Eva Fuel? Or should I install EVA Fuel separately so as to prevent kerbals from having infinite refills of eva propellant upon entering a command pod?

 

eva fuel is monopropellant, and it is authomatically subtracted from the ship reserves.

[king of nowhere]

Another couple oddities i noticed

1) i have two gravity rings. i tried to have them deflated for launch and inflating them later, but they do not inflate fully. they reach around 86% extended, and then they stop. they have no problem if i launch them already extended. if i extend only one of them, i get a higher percentage.  it looks a bit like there was a gas needed to fill it, but it's not the case because there's no mention; plus, i have HUGE stockpiles of everything. so, why are they not inflating?

2) i made a few calculation to follow the ISRU chain offered by this mod, and it's basically unfeasible. Worse, it's unfeasible in ways that don't make sense. the bottleneck is the molten regolith process: the convert-o-tron needs 180 electric charge per second to produce 0.4 CO2. that's 450 electric charge for a CO2. then the sabatier process will require 7000 CO2 for a single unit of liquid fuel. that's enormous. It's over 3 million electric charge for enough CO2 to produce a single unit of liquid fuel.

and that makes no physical sense. CO2 is a very stable molecule. it takes very little energy to release it from ore. and it's quite abundant in most minerals. there's no reason it should require so much ore and energy. in comparison, producing a single unit of hydrogen by electrolisis - a very energy intensive process - requires less than 3 electric charge. and a unit of H2 and CO2, judging by the ratios in which they are used in sabatier, are the same number of moles. it really makes no sense that making CO2 is 200 times more expensive than making H2. nor that it is made so slowly. and it makes the whole ISRU process unfeasible, while in reality it is quite feasible - NASA themselves are studying to extract fuel from water on the moon.

I think this needs to be rebalanced. also, i think i won't feel bad about using the regular isru until then.

also speaking of ISRU, we need a process to extract CO2 and water from liquid fuel. it's easy, you just burn it. it shouldn't be a resource sink, especially if you need emergency water.

 

I also take this chance to bump previous questions that haven't been answered

3)

18 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

EDIT: another question: after running the science jr for a while, i get a message that it is depleted, and it won't run anymore. hovering nearby with a scientist doesn't seem to do anything. same for the goo. is there any way to refresh those experiments?

 

4)

11 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i tested a mining vehicle, and to my dismay i cannot find water anywhere. i tried 7 bimes on moho and ike so far.

is it normal? am i just unlucky?

as i need water to get fuel, how can i refuel if water is normally absent? landing on laythe is too expensive!

also, i don't see water from orbit. how can i know in advance where to land?

and i see a lot of different minerals once i am on the surface. alumina, rare metals, uranite... what are they for?

[Gotmachine]

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

i have two gravity rings. i tried to have them deflated for launch and inflating them later,

Inflatable and pressure mechanics are a bit bugged currently. They will usually finish inflating if you unload the vessel and timewarp for a bit. And yes, you need nitrogen to inflate them.

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

is there any way to refresh those experiments?

No.

As for ISRU, yes, ISRU in Kerbalism is hard, slow, and balanced to be relatively realistic regarding what you can make, and where. Meaning that your options are quite limited.
The first thing you need to understand is that we consider LiquidFuel as an abstraction of methane, which effectively require an abundant carbon source to be produced.
Our numbers are an estimation based on various sources, but producing large amount of methane (or hydrogen, for that matter) from the moon regolith (or any regolith) is highly equipment and energy intensive.
It's doable, but the scale of the infrastructure and operations to make enough propellant for anything more than a small payload rocket are simply huge.
Our numbers are certainly questionable, but all things equal, the possibilities are in the ballpark of reality.

Also note that we don't control what resources are available and where, those are defined in the CRP mod. For example, there is no extra water abundance at the mun poles, which can be questionable.

The main viable options for large scale propellant production with Kerbalism are :
- Hydrogen from "crustal" (ie, mined with a drill) water : can be found everywhere, albeit in concentrations that are usually too low. A few places have higher concentrations,  like Laythe and Duna poles.
- Methane/LiquidFuel from atmospheric CO2 sources (+ a water source for hydrogen) : available on Eve, Laythe, Duna

This is the same deal with greenhouses, which are a niche option and not really practical in general.

Also, reading your posts,  you should tone down your expectations about what is achievable in Kerbalism (but to be fair, that is a very common mistake for newcomers).
If your goal in KSP is to make large scale interplanetary manned missions, bases, stations and ISRU, you should seriously consider switching to a mod or combination of mods that are more geared toward that, like USI LS + MKS, TAC-LS, Snacks, KerbalHealth, etc...
Kerbalism makes the difficulty/possibilities in line with real world, current technologies limitations.
You can also check the Kerbalism Simplex profile :

Which retains most of Kerbalism features but is much more forgiving and in line with the stock difficulty balance.

All this being said, for the in-dev next major version, we are rewriting a lot of the current features, with the general intent to make things a bit more relaxed in terms of difficulty for long term manned operations.
This mainly mean easier and more reliable management of resource chains and ISRU operations, more forgiving mechanics concerning stress and radiation, and more late game / high tech options.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Gotmachine

[king of nowhere]

30 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

All this being said, for the in-dev next major version, we are rewriting a lot of the current features, with the general intent to make things a bit more relaxed in terms of difficulty for long term manned operations.
This mainly mean easier and more reliable management of resource chains and ISRU operations, more forgiving mechanics concerning stress and radiation, and more late game / high tech options.

If I can make some suggestions...

As i said, i can accept that isru be difficult, but the problem should not be carbon. carbon is relatively easy to find and to extract.

the major problem is hydrogen. hydrogen is relatively rare on rocky worlds. so, if you want isru to be so difficult, you should focus there. for start, i notice that a H-O fuel cell provides as much energy as the electrolysis process consumes. which would be ok with a 100% efficiency, but that's not the case. i believe you can triple the cost there and it would be realistic. isru would still be very expensive because you'd need to extract hydrogen from water. and water would still be hard to find. just feasible hard, instead of practically impossible.

I made some calculations. the current setup requires 36 hours of energy output of the largest solar panel available (at kerbin, at peak exposure all the time) to produce 5 kg of methane. doing some calculations, best i can estimate a gigantor is 18 square meters. solar power on earth orbit is 1,36 kW/m^2, and efficiency of a solar panel is generally between 15 and 20%. let's use 15%, a gigantor should produce 3.7 kW, which totaled over the 36 hours means 476 MJ. 5 kg of methane have a heat of combustion of 278 MJ, so the numbers actually fit. it's just it should not be carbon the problem, but hydrogen. and then again, every energy cost of expensive processes in this game is much lower than in real life - a gigantor wouldn't be able to power a mining drill, for example. also, there is a large problem of actually fitting so many panels; it's my main struggle here, because i can afford the weight, but i have no space. in real life you can go out of your ship and spread a solar field, in ksp you cannot. also, perhaps most important, you should be able to estimate water content from an orbital scan. in real life we've been doing that with the moon for decades.

regarding food isru, i think 5 tons of greenhouse to support a kerbal sound just about right. a greenhouse also provides living space and life support. i don't think that chain would need help. but i do believe other food should be made heavier. if 300 kg of food and water stores let a kerbal live for a decade, it's no wonder that there's no incentive to building greenhouses, except cool effect.

regaring stress, i think the mechanics are fine. i can get over 20 years duration with a large base with all comfort (and despite the game not recognizing that i have plants).

regarding radiations, the main problem is shielding efficiency. even the best shielding only blocks, by default, 90% of radiation. I have no idea about realistic values here - I am a chemist, I can discuss ISRU and energy requirements in depth but radiations are not my field of expertise - but raising that value would help a lot. though i'm not even sure it's needed, since you provided the radiation shield; for 2.5 tons of mass and some electricity, I can nullify radiations anywhere except in radiation belts. If additional mechanics are wanted, i would suggest adding "radiation shelters", which would basically be lead coffins in which you could order the crew in an emergency; they would be heavy, and sending the crew in them would increase stress and would stop their work, and the instruments would still take radiation damage, but they could protect the crew for a short duration - say, crossing a radiation belt or a solar storm.

finally, regarding the general feasibility of all this, it's not actually all that impossible or futuristic. the technologies are there. it would just be super expensive, and in the real world we don't have unlimited budget. in ksp we do. my self-sustaining mothership weights close to 2000 tons, that's 5 times the space station. and the real space station is already mostly sustainable, it only requires food and some water. i have no doubt that if we could send five times its mass up there, we could create a structure capable of self sustaining for a few decades. and if we could send several tens of tons of mining equipment, producing fuel from ice and carbonatic rocks on some low gravity moon at a scale of more than a ton per day should also be possible.

P.S. hydrogen peroxide would be a poor choice of oxidizer for many reasons. nitrogen tetraoxide, or just plain liquid oxigen, are better choices. but i do not suggest you change the whole chemical setup, because it would take too much work.

P.P.S. you said it is possible to get carbon dioxide from duna's atmosphere. how? my plans can work if i can refuel at duna, but i haven't found the option.

[Gotmachine]

37 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

every energy cost of expensive processes in this game is much lower than in real life

And Kerbalism explicitly re-balance that. How realistic our numbers are will always be debatable. The point is have an order of magnitude that result in relatively realistic possibilities with current technologies.

37 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

the problem should not be carbon. [...] the major problem is hydrogen

I'm not sure what you are arguing for exactly. Our premise is that regolith is basically useless for any meaningful propellant production without industrial scale operations.
If not due to power requirements, for the mass/volume of the equipment that would would be required to process it in those quantities.
The molten regolith process is balanced as something that you can use for producing LS resources in situ (oxygen and carbon for the greenhouses).
Again,the numbers are debatable, but they are in the ballpark given by various real world studies.

37 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

my self-sustaining mothership weights close to 2000 tons

Again, if your goal is to make large scale off-world operations, Kerbalism isn't the right mod for that.
Kerbalism is aimed at reproducing the current space challenges, with the current technologies, at the current operational scales.
While there are some provisions for going a bit beyond that, the mod doesn't really allow that in practice. If you try anyway, you're just bound for a frustrating experience.
The simple fact that you are new to the mod and planning a 12 kerbals Jool mission tell me that  you haven't even tried to do a single long term manned mission, let alone an interplanetary one.
The planner numbers are ideal conditions. Things will go wrong, trust me.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Gotmachine

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Gotmachine said:

I'm not sure what you are arguing for exactly. Our premise is that regolith is basically useless for any meaningful propellant production without industrial scale operations.
If not due to power requirements, for the mass/volume of the equipment that would would be required to process it in those quantities.
The molten regolith process is balanced as something that you can use for producing LS resources in situ (oxygen and carbon for the greenhouses).
Again,the numbers are debatable, but they are in the ballpark given by various real world studies.

 

what i am arguing for, exactly, is that making carbon dioxide should not be energy intensive. hydrogen production is the expensive part of the process.

and anyway, you are not turning regolith into fuel. if that was the case, you could do it anywhere. instead you need to look for "ore"; which i assume is carbon-rich rock. and turning carbon-rich rock into carbon dioxide is not all that expensive. it may even be energetically favorable, depending on the rock. and by the way, if you use liquid hydrogen as fuel, you skip the whole carbon and regolith part.

increasing the mass and volume of the equipment needed would also work very well. i can deal with needing more mass more easily than i can deal with needing more than a couple dozen gigantors. for more mass, i can make a bigger ship. but so many solar panels just don't fit. In real life you can fulfill your power requirememnts this way

in ksp you cannot. you simply cannot physically fit all those solar panels around you ship.

I am not arguing that doing isru should not be difficult. i am arguing that the difficulty is in the wrong place.

 

Quote

Again, if your goal is to make large scale off-world operations, Kerbalism isn't the right mod for that.
Kerbalism is aimed at reproducing the current space challenges, with the current technologies, at the current operational scales.
While there are some provisions for going a bit beyond that, the mod doesn't really allow that in practice. If you try anyway, you're just bound for a frustrating experience.
The simple fact that you are new to the mod and planning a 12 kerbals Jool mission tell me that  you haven't even tried to do a single long term manned mission, let alone an interplanetary one.
 

I disagree. Kerbalism makes it very difficult to make any long term operation, and that is exactly why it is the right mod.

I like challenges. Easy is boring. I started a new career to familiarize with the mod, but got bored after a few days and decided to jump immediately for the large prize.

Anyway, I am testing my stuff extensively, orbiting distant places for an year, and so far it seems manageable.

Quote

The planner numbers are ideal conditions. Things will go wrong, trust me.

I am looking forward to that

Edited December 20, 2020 by king of nowhere

[Gotmachine]

37 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

instead you need to look for "ore"; which i assume is carbon-rich rock

You assume wrong. We consider ore to be generic regolith (because it is available everywhere). The carbon content of regolith is usually ridiculously low. Less than 100 ppm on the moon. There are potential localized source of carbon rich minerals on mars, but we simply ignore that.
Also, while there are some studies that estimate a small energy efficiency advantage (with the whole system considered: ISP, storage requirements, etc) at doing methane instead of hydrogen for propellant production from regolith, both paths are too energy and infrastructure intensive for any kind of large scale operation. IRL, the main expected application of the MRE process is oxygen (and metal) production. In fact, if we wanted to be more rigorous, it shouldn't have a CO2 output at all.
The only realistic fuel production options are hydrogen electrolysis from direct sources of water (water ice) or methane production from atmospheric CO2 + some hydrogen, also produced from water ice. Those are the only viable paths IRL, and the ones we provide in Kerbalism.

28 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

Kerbalism makes it very difficult to make any long term operation, and that is exactly why it is the right mod.

It's difficult because it simply isn't made or balanced for that, on a variety of levels.
There is no large scale parts fit for the purpose. As you already noticed, making 500+ parts vessels doesn't work well.
Also, mixing life support and other EC demanding processes on the same vessel won't end well, especially if you are relying on solar power.
You're free to do as you wish, I'm just warning you that what you are trying to use the mod for is basically unsupported and known to be a bad experience.

[HansAcker]

9 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

In real life you can fulfill your power requirememnts this way

In KSP, you can, too. In the past I used Ground Construction to build a large solar field, then hooked it up to the base with KAS hoses.
In 1.11, the building stage could even be done manually, part by part.

[EimajOzear]

So I am playing around with KSRSS and have made very rudimentary configs for the real planets; all work fine except for Earth.

Is there any reason why this could be?

Here is the config for Earth:

Spoiler

RadiationBody
{
  name = Earth  
  radiation_model = earth                     // model used to determine zones
  radiation_inner = 10.376                    // rad/h inside the inner belt
  radiation_inner_gradient = 3.3              // how fast does radiation increase when you go in the belt
  radiation_outer = 2.214                     // rad/h inside the outer belt
  radiation_outer_gradient = 2.2              // how fast does radiation increase when you go in the belt
  radiation_pause = -0.011                    // rad/h inside the magnetopause
  geomagnetic_pole_lat = 80.37                // lat of the geomagnetic north pole

  geomagnetic_pole_lon = -72.62               // lon of the geomagnetic north pole
  // ...the Earth's magnetic field is currently ... and offset by 462 km.
  geomagnetic_offset = 0.07
}

Edit: all I did was rename "Name = Kerbin" to "Name = Earth" in the Radiation.cfg file. I used the same approach for the other planets which look fine.

Edited December 20, 2020 by EimajOzear

[Gotmachine]

54 minutes ago, EimajOzear said:

all I did was rename "Name = Kerbin" to "Name = Earth" in the Radiation.cfg file. I used the same approach for the other planets which look fine.

Try keeping "Kerbin". If I remember right, with Kopernicus, the home body internal name is always Kerbin.

[EimajOzear]

13 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

Try keeping "Kerbin".

Just tried it thanks, but no luck sadly! 

 

[king of nowhere]

17 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

You assume wrong. We consider ore to be generic regolith (because it is available everywhere). The carbon content of regolith is usually ridiculously low. Less than 100 ppm on the moon. There are potential localized source of carbon rich minerals on mars, but we simply ignore that.

oh, that makes sense. yes, extracting carbon from something with low carbon would indeed be inefficient.

in this case, would it be outlandish to include some additional sources of carbon? I mean, when i am on the surface and use the scanner, i find a lot of different ores, from rare metals to uranite. which i'm not sure what are they for, perhaps some contracts will ask to recover them?

anyway, there are no carbon materials among that list. perhaps you could include some carbonatic mineral in the terrain composition, and have that be used to make carbon dioxide at a reasonable cost and speed? imo, that would be a reasonable and realistic way to make isru practical.

Quote

 or methane production from atmospheric CO2 + some hydrogen, also produced from water ice. Those are the only viable paths IRL, and the ones we provide in Kerbalism.

ok, i asked it twice and i never got answered:

how do you extract CO2 from the atmosphere? i can't find any way. the only thing that looks vaguely like it can take something from an atmosphere is the atmospheric pump; I tried on Duna attached to a scrubber and an empty CO2 container, but it did nothing.

[evileye.x]

I'm not quite sure about Kerbalism go-to-EVA mechanics. Can someone share knowledge on that?

1) I mean if you go to EVA from habitat, this habitat loses pressurization and needs pressure controller with resource nitrogen to pressure it up again?

2) Does it lose oxygen in process or not?

3) Also, does amount of loses depends on habitat you're EVAing from volume or it's just fixed amount per EVA?

4) Also, if you are EVA from unpressurized pod, you don't lose anything? 

5) Seems like Kerbal on EVA doesn't have food or water with him. Does it mean Kerbal on EVA on Kerbin can live forever?

 

[king of nowhere]

In a few days at most i will be ready to launch my mission. i have the big mothership with all the comforts and redundancies to last for over a decade. i have multiple landers, mining vehicles. i even included some fast escape pods. maybe i will manage the complete a grand tour, maybe not, but i will like to try. but i need to know

how do i extract CO2 from the atmosphere?

i can make the mission work if i must refuel only at Duna. i will need a separate expendable stage to send to moho, and i will need to go back to duna for refueling after jool, but it can work. if I know how to, I will try it. If not, I will just use the regular isru. it will be significantly easier.

[eberkain]

Did you look at the atmosphere harvester?  It’s a mode on the atmo science part.

Edited December 21, 2020 by eberkain

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, eberkain said:

Did you look at the atmosphere harvester?  It’s a mode on the atmo science part.

hey, it works!

except, it doesn't.

I went to Eve, and it also said abundance: none. There is some on Laythe and Kerbin, though.

Now, according to the wiki, Duna's atmosphere is supposed to be made mostly of CO2. Eve too. Gas properties are fitting. Also, their real world analogues have atmospheres mostly of CO2. But I can't harvest them.

The only planet where i can try to harvest some atmosphere is Laythe. Which lies straight in the middle of Jool's main radiation belt, it would kill my crew in days. Not to mention that there's too little sunlight to get decent power to speed up operations. And that it has enough gravity that all the precious isru fuel i could mine would be spent going up.

This seems a mistake with the mod, because duna and eve should definitely be good for mining.

I hope I'm not coming across overly polemical. I like this mod. The guy(s) making it are working for free. I want to help making this work. Because it has a beautiful chain of chemical reactions, with a lot of potential, if it wasn't completely unusable. And it's not about realism; real space agencies are actually studying this concept, they plan to make rocket fuel both on the moon and on mars. it must be feasible.

[eberkain]

49 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

hey, it works!

except, it doesn't.

I went to Eve, and it also said abundance: none. There is some on Laythe and Kerbin, though.

Now, according to the wiki, Duna's atmosphere is supposed to be made mostly of CO2. Eve too. Gas properties are fitting. Also, their real world analogues have atmospheres mostly of CO2. But I can't harvest them.

The only planet where i can try to harvest some atmosphere is Laythe. Which lies straight in the middle of Jool's main radiation belt, it would kill my crew in days. Not to mention that there's too little sunlight to get decent power to speed up operations. And that it has enough gravity that all the precious isru fuel i could mine would be spent going up.

This seems a mistake with the mod, because duna and eve should definitely be good for mining.

I hope I'm not coming across overly polemical. I like this mod. The guy(s) making it are working for free. I want to help making this work. Because it has a beautiful chain of chemical reactions, with a lot of potential, if it wasn't completely unusable. And it's not about realism; real space agencies are actually studying this concept, they plan to make rocket fuel both on the moon and on mars. it must be feasible.

It works on duna for me,  

what other mods do you have installed? 

 

[king of nowhere]

16 minutes ago, eberkain said:

what other mods do you have installed? 

 

almost nothing. just kerbal alarm clock and kerbal wind tunnel.

[Cruesoe]

4 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

almost nothing. just kerbal alarm clock and kerbal wind tunnel.

Are you going to follow the instructions above on how to get support, provide logs, screenshot of your gamedata folder or offer us anyway to help you?

[king of nowhere]

18 minutes ago, Cruesoe said:

Are you going to follow the instructions above on how to get support, provide logs, screenshot of your gamedata folder or offer us anyway to help you?

well, fthe first step is to actually figure out whether it is a bug. and whether i should report it or let it pass.

So, i tried starting a new game. and i got 99% abundance on both duna and eve.

started another game, this time 98% abundance. ok, there is some variability, but it's mostly consistent.

started a game with 50% resource abundance, now CO2 was 49%. my game where i got none was with 50% abundance set.

Since I haven't launched anything yet, I suppose I can start a new game and copy there all the ship files.

Do you think I should report my game for bug anyway and upload some files?

Edited December 21, 2020 by king of nowhere