[1.5 - 1.10] Kerbalism 3.11

[TBenz]

20 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

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?

There is absolutely something going wrong if you weren't getting any CO2 on Duna or Eve. I don't see any harm in posting logs for us to take a look at. Additionally, resource definitions for Kerbalism (including CO2 distribution) are handled by Community Resource Pack, so you might want to check out that thread. 

 

[king of nowhere]

maybe i figured out a reason:

when the game updated to 1.11, i didn't think about skipping it to preserve the mods. so i opened the save, and the mods were disabled, and on leaving it saved authomatically. this way, it deleted all informations about the mod. i had to reconfigurate all the systems in the crafts, and maybe it also deleted resources that are exclusive to mods. i also could not find water anywhere.

if that's the case, then it's not a bug, and i will just have to import the craft files in another save i'll make for it.

the only thing that doesn't fit is that i did find some CO2 on laythe.

[mLeiska]

I for the life of me can't find a way to toggle on the radiation belts. I did it once but now can't find the menu to do it again.

[Beetlecat]

15 minutes ago, mLeiska said:

I for the life of me can't find a way to toggle on the radiation belts. I did it once but now can't find the menu to do it again.

The hotkey is B for belts (I think?)

[eberkain]

8 minutes ago, Beetlecat said:

The hotkey is B for belts (I think?)

B opens the body info, the numpad 0-4 toggles belts directly. 

[king of nowhere]

ok, so I made some calculations. my main ship takes a bit more than 1000 tons of fuel. for refueling at a decent speed I need 10 tons of mixed fuel per day. that's 900 LF and 1100 Ox over the 6 hours of a kerbin day.

A convert-o-tron running the sabatier process makes 0.045 LF or 0.055 Ox, which is very close to this requirement. It sucks 1249 H2 and 314 CO2

To provide the CO2, I have the spectrovariometers. each one makes 0.2 CO2 per second, so I'd need some 1600 of those. Each consumes 0.5 electricity/s, for a total of 800.

For the hydrogen, a convert-o-tron set to electrolysis makes 90 per second, taking 0.72 water and 216 electricity. I also need hydrogen to make oxydizer (180/s). So I will need 16 electrolysis running, for roughly 3400 electricity. And a water drill makes 0.015 water per second, so i need 5 for each electrolysis, 80 total. And another 400 charge to power them.

So we're looking at 4600 electricity/s, which on Duna would require 550 gigantor. And since half of the time will be night, I'd need 2 of those setup.

And this actually feels right. yes, producing 10 tons of fuel per day would really require tens of tons of machinery and a huge solar park. But it's potentially feasible. I actually designed a modular base that could, with enough pieces, do the trick.

solar array

factory

now i only need to assemble 100 more solar arrays and 20 factories!

Of course, in ksp practice, it's completely unfeasible. the spectrovariometers and solar panels alone would be 2500 parts, there's no way the game can run like this. And a land base that big would be eaten by krakens much before it's completion. Even I am not so crazy as to try that.

What I will do instead will be refueling with the stock functionality at Duna, all the while pretending that I have this huge industrial complex.

It would be much easier to use ion engines and drop tanks and give up on any isru pretence. but I don't want to just explore space, i want to conquer it, and that requires a modicum of reusability.

 

this isru would be adequate if one wanted to send a duna ascent vehicle 4 years in advance to have it slowly gather fuel before the real astronauts arrive. make sure that your stranded kerbonaut has the capacity to turn a regular habitat into a potato greenhouse.

[eberkain]

I am having an issue where if I open the PAW of a command pod in the editor then the game lags badly and none of the options are clickable, working on tracking it down now.  Anyone seen this before?  Removing Kerbalism stops the issue. 

EDIT: So, I pulled out all the career mode mods.  KCT, StageRecovery, ScrapYard, Bureaucracy, CC, ContractPacks, CrewR&R, Stratega.  And the problem went away, so there must be something conflicting there, no log errors showed up tho.  None of it is updated to 1.11, so I think a career mode playthrough may just have to wait a while. 

Edited December 22, 2020 by eberkain

[eberkain]

When using tweakscale on a crew pod the planner reflects the added space, but the PAW does not.   Is this a Kerbalism issue or a tweakscale issue? 

[Gotmachine]

2 hours ago, eberkain said:

When using tweakscale on a crew pod the planner reflects the added space, but the PAW does not.

There are exceptions depending on what parts you are scaling, but as a general rule Kerbalism is not very compatible with Tweakscale. The habitat module is incompatible, and almost all modules we have some background processing for won't account for the tweakscaled values.

The core issue is quite fundamental and while we could partially fix it for some modules, it would require a lot of effort. Moreover, our current development path will make support outright impossible in the future.

This being said, we should probably have a support patch that remove the Tweakscale module from all parts that have an incompatible Kerbalism module. This way, end users would still be able to use it for other parts (structural, tanks, etc...) while preventing the (not very obvious) issues.

[Li0n]

21 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

This being said, we should probably have a support patch that remove the Tweakscale module from all parts that have an incompatible Kerbalism module. This way, end users would still be able to use it for other parts (structural, tanks, etc...) while preventing the (not very obvious) issues.

This would be very useful, while your on the subject, are stock solar panel resized with TweakScale well treated by Kerbalism planner ? I know they produce EC but I've never checked carefully the numbers

[Gotmachine]

1 hour ago, Li0n said:

are stock solar panel resized with TweakScale well treated by Kerbalism planner ?

Not 100% sure. They might work in the latest version as a side effect of the B9PS support I added for NFS.
Pretty sure they won't work in previous Kerbalism versions.
If someone is willing to test if the EC production rate is consistent in the planner / in flight / in the background, we could get a definitive answer.

Edited December 23, 2020 by Gotmachine

[vardicd]

Quick question, and sorry if this has been asked and answered somewhere before, but does Kerbalism break part test contracts? I've noticed here lately that every time I take a part test contract it fails as soon as I leave the mission control building, and I'm just wondering if that's because of Kerbalisms changes to science?

[evileye.x]

1 minute ago, vardicd said:

Quick question, and sorry if this has been asked and answered somewhere before, but does Kerbalism break part test contracts? I've noticed here lately that every time I take a part test contract it fails as soon as I leave the mission control building, and I'm just wondering if that's because of Kerbalisms changes to science?

Just yesterday tried with latest Kerbalism (KSP 1.10.1) - everything worked as intended. Test stack separator suborbital 150 000 - 160 000 meters by staging.

[vardicd]

32 minutes ago, evileye.x said:

Just yesterday tried with latest Kerbalism (KSP 1.10.1) - everything worked as intended. Test stack separator suborbital 150 000 - 160 000 meters by staging.

Okay, then the issue must be coming from somewhere else. I'll investigate, thanks. just seemed like out of my mods, the changes to science from kerbalism made it the most likely candidate.

[HansAcker]

20 hours ago, vardicd said:

I've noticed here lately that every time I take a part test contract it fails as soon as I leave the mission control building

It happened to me occasionally but not every time. Sometimes I'd accept a part test contract and it would fail immediately, as you said. I just shrugged it off as an oddity and went to take the next contract, so I haven't really tried to find a pattern behind it.

 

[Kerminator K-100]

I know that Kerbalism life support doesn't work with MKS, but does Kerbalism Science only Config work? I really like the way that kerbalism does science and I think that the stock system is too OP. 

[king of nowhere]

Are ships inside a planet's magnetopause protected from solar storms?

[Jurassic kerbal]

I’m not sure

[EimajOzear]

3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

Are ships inside a planet's magnetopause protected from solar storms?

From the Kerbalism Documentation (https://readthedocs.org/projects/kerbalism/downloads/pdf/latest/) page 16 :

"Coronal Mass Ejection events are generated in a stars corona, and move toward either a planetary system or a starorbiting vessel. A warning will be issued as soon as the CME is ejected towards a body of interest. When the CME hits a planetary system or a star-orbiting vessel, all vessels outside of a magnetopause and in direct line of sight of a Star will receive extra radiation. Vessels inside of a magnetopause will suffer a communications blackout. The effects last for some time until the situation returns to normality."

[king of nowhere]

So, I actually went and completed the spaceship to try and make a grand tour with this mod. It has 1200 parts for 3600 tons. We'll see if it really is impossible to do complex, long term manned missions with this mod, or if it just takes an inordinate amount of effort.

I think it will also be interesting for the mod builders, if they are considering some balance fixes. To see what happens when one tries really hard to overcome the obstacles set by this mod.

So far (I am around Eve, though I only update the report in chunks), stress and radiations are growing much faster than anticipated. I went to Eve in 200 days, and I took already 10% radiation damage on the crew - despite max shielding and a whooping 9 active shields. It seems there are solar storms every week! I actually didn't knew to stay inside a planet's magnetosphere, and anyway I have some deltaV issues on going to Eve and back, but I may be able to manage with shorter flight times.

What's surprising so far is stress! All my crew members are between 15 and 30% stress level. Despite living in a friggin flying luxury resort! I gave them every single comfort available. Even more than needed, actually. according to the VAB, they should last for 20 years. And yet, they are all very stressed already. Heck, jeb smashed a radiator in the very first day! (it could be fixed by an engineer). I have no idea what happens when I reach 100% stress, perhaps the mission can still continue. But I think stress should be toned down, at least if one has the level of luxury accomodations I have.

And I haven't had a single malfunction yet. Ok, every critical component is high quality, and I send an engineer to inspect the engines after every use, but I'd still expect that with 64 solar panels, one or two should have some accidents already.

It looks like I will probably have to send all the crew back home at some point and get some fresh kerbonauts to continue the trip, with the same ship. Which I would count as "partial success".

[king of nowhere]

A couple of additional remarks:

- the conditions to run experiments are hard to come by. I have deployed a scanner and tried a BEEP experiment, but it says invalid conditions. Except it does not say why those conditions are invalid and what should I do to make them good. A popup message stating "you need an orbit with such and such characteristics" would be helpful

- now that the stock game implemented EVA repairs and repair kits, it would be nice to tie the kerbalism maintenance to them. Have the engineer need an eva repair kit to perform maintenance on the engines and such

- i tested a ship around moho, and it never needed heat radiators. it should

- battery power isn't enough to sustain my life support during occultation, so during the night i am turning on some fuel cells. by day i use electrolysis to get back the hydrogen and get ready for the next night. Every day i have to activate manually the electrolysis and shut down the fuel cells, and viceversa every night. is there a way to make this whole process authomatically?

- pressurized tanks used for xenon are vastly more efficient than the stock xenon tanks.  perhaps they should be equalized?

Edited December 27, 2020 by king of nowhere

[HansAcker]

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

the conditions to run experiments are hard to come by

They are stated when configuring the experiment in the editor and in flight you can press the "document" icon next to its name to show a window that often also describes the requirements (not in the case of BEEP, it seems).

Spoiler

 

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i tested a ship around moho, and it never needed heat radiators. it should

It should? Moho isn't that hot.

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

is there a way to make this whole process authomatically?

You can set up actions on power low/high and sunlight/shadow events. I often use it to turn on fuel cells on low power, turn them off at high power and likewise with electrolysis on in sunlight, off in shadow.
Note that at high time-warp rates, the latter won't work right on all vessels, though. Also, you'll eventually need to cycle through vessels to reset the dump-valves so that fuel cells continue dumping excess water and don't stop producing EC. It's where Kerbalism can get tedious when running long multi-mission games with a number of vessels in the background.

Spoiler

.

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

pressurized tanks used for xenon are vastly more efficient than the stock xenon tanks.  perhaps they should be equalized?

The internal pressure isn't stated afaik and it's pobably a measure of balance. Kerbalism does use realistic-ish volumes for its containers, so maybe the stock containers should hold more gas?

In any case, if you think you can improve the experience, open an issue on the github repository and provide a patch

 

[king of nowhere]

4 hours ago, HansAcker said:

In any case, if you think you can improve the experience, open an issue on the github repository and provide a patch

 

I don't have programming skills. but i can provide feedback.

 

So, I have my spaceship that run out of power. I'm trying to figure out why, it has 4 packs of fuel cells running and i disabled everything that i found, anyway, that's the downside of having a 1200 parts ship. problem is, kerbonauts died of cold. After 5 minutes! It would take far more than that for a spacecraft to cool down, especially a large one. kerbonauts dead because the ship was unpowered for 5 minutes is way too harsh

Edited December 27, 2020 by king of nowhere

[king of nowhere]

On 12/27/2020 at 2:24 PM, HansAcker said:

You can set up actions on power low/high and sunlight/shadow events. I often use it to turn on fuel cells on low power, turn them off at high power and likewise with electrolysis on in sunlight, off in shadow.

Note that at high time-warp rates, the latter won't work right on all vessels, though. Also, you'll eventually need to cycle through vessels to reset the dump-valves so that fuel cells continue dumping excess water and don't stop producing EC. It's where Kerbalism can get tedious when running long multi-mission games with a number of vessels in the background.

  Hide contents

 

ok, i got the hang of it, and i now set up my 4 mining vehicles properly to mine while they have energy, then shut down everything and activate fuel cells when they are low. i m not having any problem with dumping resources, the settings are saved.

it took me a while to figure out how to do this. first i set cycles based on day and night, and i had interruptions i couldn't figure out, until i realized at a specific angle of the sun, my solar panels would shade each other. and i was just about to ask how to stop the continuous messages, when i discovered finally how to block them.

i congratulate with the mod builders on this part

 

[king of nowhere]

I have a question, though: do i have a simple way to shut it off? now that i'm rejoining those vehicles with the mother ship, I don't want those shuttles to start chemical processes randomly. and i'd rather not manually set each one of them again