[1.5 - 1.10] Kerbalism 3.11

[king of nowhere]

6 hours ago, Arzielle said:

hello, just noticed something with kerbalism, I'm making a rover to drive across kerbin and using H2 O2 fuel cells to power it, thought I would save some oxygen tanks and instead use the oxygen harvester to extract it right from the atmosphere, but for some reason, on the runway I get 'abundance below threshold' and the harvester won't run, so I did a test with all the different filters, and out of Oxygen, nitrogen, ammonia, and Carbon Dioxide, only the Nitrogen filter runs, displaying a nitrogen abundance of 76.28% while all the other abundance is 'none'

 

very weird. how do jet engines work if the game thinks there is no oxygen? when the game lets you take off the helmet on a kerbal, how does it know the air is breathable? probably another piece of programming with the actual oxygen value.

anyway, it's clearly not intended.

[JadeOfMaar]

11 hours ago, Arzielle said:

I guess I will have to manually figure out and set custom concentrations for CO2 and O2 for all the planets now that I know how to do it... at least nitrogen and ammonia are setup already

I've done that work for you already, but it comes with a rabbit hole. (If you let yourself fall in, that's on you.) See Rational Resources in my signature.

Kerbalism had more resource placement configs at one time but I may be the reason they disappeared.

4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

very weird. how do jet engines work if the game thinks there is no oxygen? when the game lets you take off the helmet on a kerbal, how does it know the air is breathable? probably another piece of programming with the actual oxygen value.

anyway, it's clearly not intended.

The availability of Oxygen in this case is left up to a single boolean "true/false or yes/no" key in the planet config. Engines have a very generous tolerance for low pressure while an organism (the kerbal) does not, and Kerbalism doesn't interfere with the very basic relationship between that boolean and the jet engines.

In a recent update, KSP made it so that it's a more serious matter when you try to take off a helmet and the air pressure is too low ...or too high (like on some breathable planets in mods). Perhaps complications with that stock feature have appeared and are humbugging you.

Edited August 7, 2023 by JadeOfMaar

[Arzielle]

3 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

I've done that work for you already, but it comes with a rabbit hole. (If you let yourself fall in, that's on you.) See Rational Resources in my signature.

Kerbalism had more resource placement configs at one time but I may be the reason they disappeared.

well, I'm already in the rabbit hole of modding, so no reason not to dive deeper lol

anyways, I'm trying rational resources now and this seems to fix some of the issue, there is now Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide and Nitrogen, and the filters work! however the values seem a little low only making 41.79% of the atmosphere:
(35.25% Nitrogen, 6.07% Oxygen, 0.47% Carbon Dioxide, no ammonia)
not sure what makes up the remaining 58.21% but this is definitely a good start, I am also using simple construction so might mess around with ore extraction to see how rational resources affects mining for nitrogen, water and ore for life support and refining into rocket parts

thanks for the help!

(also just figured out how to insert images)

Edited August 7, 2023 by Arzielle

[JadeOfMaar]

1 hour ago, Arzielle said:

the remaining 58.21%

I'm as lost as Jebediah on a Funday with that one lol. You're welcome.

[Arzielle]

well, I messed around some more and the issue seems to have fixed itself on making a new save, so I think we're good now, values are much more reasonable

Edited August 7, 2023 by Arzielle

[Arzielle]

On 8/7/2023 at 7:13 AM, JadeOfMaar said:

I've done that work for you already, but it comes with a rabbit hole. (If you let yourself fall in, that's on you.) See Rational Resources in my signature.

Kerbalism had more resource placement configs at one time but I may be the reason they disappeared.

well, I tried rational resources but it messed with some of the ISRU parts and other stuff from Kerbalism in ways I didn't want it to/didn't make sense so in the end I decided to use RR to take readings of all the planets including OPM cause I am playing with that, and manually rewrote the resource configs for Oxygen, CO2, Nitrogen, Ammonia and Water, I even managed to make biome specific concentrations, basically increased the ground water at the poles of kerbin and duna, I've been really busy with work this past week so only just got back to KSP and finishing it off, seems to be working exactly as I want it to now.

if mortimer ever wants to re-include the configs into kerbalism so the resource harvesters work properly, I got it all done for them, or whoever is currently maintaining the mod

also I am curious what the compatibility issue with remotetech is, as I kinda want to play with it, and may be willing to dive into some of the code to get it to work, depending on the complexity of the issue

Edited August 20, 2023 by Arzielle

[JadeOfMaar]

1 hour ago, Arzielle said:

but it messed with some of the ISRU parts and other stuff from Kerbalism in ways I didn't want it to/didn't make sense

That would be the effect of RR Companion which explicitly affects ISRU parts and isn't needed for resource placement. I'm curious to where they "didn't make sense."

1 hour ago, Arzielle said:

I even managed to make biome specific concentrations, basically increased the ground water at the poles of kerbin and duna

I'm interested in those configs. At this point I hope for RR users to make those kinds of customizations and share. I've spent all my good energy building up the mod as a whole and addressing comaptibilities with parts.

1 hour ago, Arzielle said:

what the compatibility issue with remotetech is

Kerbalism makes deep changes to how antennas work, right? If so it'll definitely make for a hairy situation when RemoteTech wants to make deep changes too.

[shelshok]

On 1/14/2020 at 4:43 PM, Beetlecat said:

ScienceDialog = true // keep showing the stock science dialog

Oh! You can still see the little science popups? I really like some of that flavor text, but  *really* like the Kerbalism data storage and transfer. Best of both worlds!

Okay -- just trying in my current game, and the above setting is enabled -- but how do you view the stock dialogs? Or am I misunderstanding what this is? -- There's no "run experiment" or "review data" button in the experiment's PAW anymore...

I'm curious about this too.

Edited August 20, 2023 by shelshok

[AnFa]

Hello, everyone. Is there any intention of providing support for Galaxies Unbound?

[kerbnub]

Is there a way to have a crewed craft running drills and ISRU processes that also use water and oxygen (like electrolysis and anthraquinone) not kill the kerbals? The drills produce far more than the kerbals need, but the ISRU processes use water and O2 faster than the drills produce it, so if I turn both on, the kerbals end up dying.

It should be in theory possible to save some for the kerbals use the rest for the ISRU (and I could turn the ISRU on and off to accomplish this), but there seems to be no practical way to lower the ISRU production rate to accomplish this.


Also, why does the splitter (water) process work so much faster than electrolysis?

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, kerbnub said:

Is there a way to have a crewed craft running drills and ISRU processes that also use water and oxygen (like electrolysis and anthraquinone) not kill the kerbals? The drills produce far more than the kerbals need, but the ISRU processes use water and O2 faster than the drills produce it, so if I turn both on, the kerbals end up dying.

It should be in theory possible to save some for the kerbals use the rest for the ISRU (and I could turn the ISRU on and off to accomplish this), but there seems to be no practical way to lower the ISRU production rate to accomplish this.


Also, why does the splitter (water) process work so much faster than electrolysis?

the isru processes use water and o2 faster than the drills, but still you are limited by your other drills - getting CO2 from regolith, right?

so, get your stockpile of hydrogen and oxygen full. after that, the electrolysis will slow down, only working to replenish consumed hydrogen. oxygen should not be a problem, since you get a crapton of it as byproduct of the molten regolith process.

I did refuel ships on the ground in my A'Tuin and A'Twin grand tours, it's perfectly feasible - if long. you may check those mission reports (linked in my signature) for additional input on kerbalism isru. in particular, chapter 1.1 here has some detailed description of the isru machinery involved. section 3.3 of the same report also describes the refueling process in some detail.

another tip: you are using a crewed isru ship, so it must be something pretty big. so, add more water tanks. a few tons of water will have a negligible impact on the deltaV of a large ship, but they will keep your crew alive for years. and you'll have less problems with water running out during isru. also, use large water tanks and only carry minimal amounts of oxygen and hydrogen; you can make those by water electrolysis, and the water tanks are a lot more efficient than pressurized gas containers.

[kerbnub]

On 8/25/2023 at 9:50 AM, king of nowhere said:

the isru processes use water and o2 faster than the drills, but still you are limited by your other drills - getting CO2 from regolith, right?

so, get your stockpile of hydrogen and oxygen full. after that, the electrolysis will slow down, only working to replenish consumed hydrogen. oxygen should not be a problem, since you get a crapton of it as byproduct of the molten regolith process.

I did refuel ships on the ground in my A'Tuin and A'Twin grand tours, it's perfectly feasible - if long. you may check those mission reports (linked in my signature) for additional input on kerbalism isru. in particular, chapter 1.1 here has some detailed description of the isru machinery involved. section 3.3 of the same report also describes the refueling process in some detail.

another tip: you are using a crewed isru ship, so it must be something pretty big. so, add more water tanks. a few tons of water will have a negligible impact on the deltaV of a large ship, but they will keep your crew alive for years. and you'll have less problems with water running out during isru. also, use large water tanks and only carry minimal amounts of oxygen and hydrogen; you can make those by water electrolysis, and the water tanks are a lot more efficient than pressurized gas containers.

I should have probably specified that I'm using LH2 + oxidizer fuels from cryoengines and kerbal atomics, so I'm only mining water, running electrolysis,  H2 liquefication (H2-->LH2), and anthraquinone (O2+H2-->oxidizer) processes, so there is no CO2 requirement. Electrolysis outputs double the H2 as O2, and anthraquinone consumes them at an equal rate, so O2 always is depleted.

[king of nowhere]

Just now, kerbnub said:

I should have probably specified that I'm using LH2 + oxidizer fuels from cryoengines and kerbal atomics, so I'm only mining water, running electrolysis,  H2 liquefication (H2-->LH2), and anthraquinone (O2+H2-->oxidizer) processes, so there is no CO2 requirement. Electrolysis outputs double the H2 as O2, and anthraquinone consumes them at an equal rate, so O2 always is depleted.

huh. that's a problem. kerbalism has some weaknesses there.

what's the depletion rate?

you could authomate the process to shut down h2 liquification when not in sunlight, which will stop hydrogen consumption for half the time, allowing the oxygen level to recover (do remember to set the electrolysis process to dump excess hydrogen in that case). however, automated processes malfunction at high time warp. still, this could be your best option.

if you have multiple chemical plants - with kerbalism, using backups in case of malfunctions is only sensible - you may be able to shut down most h2 liquification plants to have an excess of hydrogen.

if you have enough water supplies to last a few days, you could manually turn h2 liquification on and off.

if none of those is an option, I'm afraid you may have to rebuild your ship with more drills or less liquification capacity. there's a reason all my isru ships worked in push - more resources extracted than used - and it's not the efficiency. though i did discover i could have a lack of CO₂ and the greenhouses would still work at regular speed, as a rule of thumb i made sure to have an excess of everything so i wouldn't have any issues like yours.

the ideal thing would be to have the possibility to shut down a process depending on the availability of other resources, but authomatization options lack that. even if it worked, though, I already said those options have issues with time warping.

[kerbnub]

  

3 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

huh. that's a problem. kerbalism has some weaknesses there.

what's the depletion rate?

you could authomate the process to shut down h2 liquification when not in sunlight, which will stop hydrogen consumption for half the time, allowing the oxygen level to recover (do remember to set the electrolysis process to dump excess hydrogen in that case). however, automated processes malfunction at high time warp. still, this could be your best option.

if you have multiple chemical plants - with kerbalism, using backups in case of malfunctions is only sensible - you may be able to shut down most h2 liquification plants to have an excess of hydrogen.

if you have enough water supplies to last a few days, you could manually turn h2 liquification on and off.

if none of those is an option, I'm afraid you may have to rebuild your ship with more drills or less liquification capacity. there's a reason all my isru ships worked in push - more resources extracted than used - and it's not the efficiency. though i did discover i could have a lack of CO₂ and the greenhouses would still work at regular speed, as a rule of thumb i made sure to have an excess of everything so i wouldn't have any issues like yours.

the ideal thing would be to have the possibility to shut down a process depending on the availability of other resources, but authomatization options lack that. even if it worked, though, I already said those options have issues with time warping.

Oh well, thanks anyhow.  The liquification isn't really the problem; it's the 2:1 hydrogen: oxygen production ratio from electrolysis  vs the 1:1 hydrogen:oxygen consumption ratio from anthraquinone. With just those two processes running, oxygen is depleted.  I also tried running more liquification to push the H2:O2 consumption ratio higher than 2:1, but it just prioritized the anthraquinone and drained my O2 anyway. Even if I figure that out, I'll have the problem of draining water.  I'm also playing with lower resource abundance, so having greater raw production than consumption isn't really an option, unless I use a bunch of small chemical plants in place of the stock ISRUs.. I'll try that.

I think the easiest and most flexible addition to Kerbalism would be to have  a way to lower any converter process rate by some percent; that way one could always ensure some surplus of whatever you want. Trying to balance ratio with raw capacity is strangely crude compared to everything else Kerbalism does. 

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, kerbnub said:

  Oh well, thanks anyhow.  The liquification isn't really the problem; it's the 2:1 hydrogen: oxygen production ratio from electrolysis  vs the 1:1 hydrogen:oxygen consumption ratio from anthraquinone.  With just those two processes running, oxygen is depleted.

 

oh, right. the antraquinone is already enough to consume all the hydrogen produced. still, what i said about tampering with automated processes to make it work intermittently can also be applied to the antraquinone process. set the antraquinone to only work in daylight, and you will lower its hydrogen consumption

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  I also tried running more liquification to push the H2:O2 consumption ratio higher than 2:1, but it just prioritized the anthraquinone and drained my O2 anyway. Even if I figure that out, I'll have the problem of draining water.  I'm also playing with lower resource abundance, so having greater raw production than consumption isn't really an option, unless I use a bunch of small chemical plants in place of the stock ISRUs.. I'll try that.

my A'Twin mothership had 36 large ore drills, 12 large water drills and 12 small uranium drills.

You can always have raw production greater than consumption. just add more drills. Of course, I don't know how much mass you can sacrifice for that.

actually, A'Twin's 96 large convert-o-trons could drain all the produce of those drills, but i didn't use all of them.

incidentally, with all that machinery (and 12 large nuclear reactors to power it) it still took 10 to 30 kerbal years to get the 5000 tons of fuel A'Twin held. However, my limitation was the molten regolith process, that required really a ludicrous amount of chemical plants and energy. you only have water, so you should be a lot faster.

in fact, depending on your need, a convert-o-tron may even be overkill. water is drilled fast, and both water electrolysis and antraquinone are fast processes. well, you can either build lots of datasheet to calculate exactly how much you need of everything, or you can go by trial and error.

Quote

I think the easiest and most flexible addition to Kerbalism would be to have  a way to lower any converter process rate by some percent; that way one could always ensure some surplus of whatever you want. Trying to balance ratio with raw capacity is strangely crude compared to everything else Kerbalism does. 

yes, it could be an easy enough addition; just like engines can be manually limited.

they could also add resource stockpiles to the automated conditions. now you can tell the ship to do stuff when it's light, dark, low battery, high battery, exposed to radiations, and a bunch of other conditions I never used. having the option to authomatically stop the antraquinone process when oxygen level drops below 20%, and restart it when it goes above 80%, would also do the trick.

[kerbnub]

It sucks on the part count end, I just ended up using a bunch of chemical plants instead. Doing the math, they're strangely much much more efficient than the convert-o-tron 125 anyway (haven't unlocked the big one yet). The convert-o-tron 125 is 31.25 times the mass of the chemical plant (1.25t vs 0.04 t) but only runs processes at 18.12 times the rate, AND the chemical plants get 3 slots vs 2 for the convert-o-tron, so it's really more like 12 times the rate, if your processes are distributed well. Sheesh.

[kerbnub]

BTW, does anyone know how hard it would be to make permanent failures repairable with the stock repair kits? Would this be something doable with a MM patch?

[Xt007]

Doable with mm patches but not easy since for each part you'd have to remove the kerbalism repair module and replace it with stock.  Even then, I haven't checked but part of the kerbalism repair system may be hard coded so you'd have to rebuild the dll

Easier solution would be to turn off the kerbalism repair system and use something like kaboom if you want a stock repair system.

Edited September 15, 2023 by Xt007

[AnFa]

Is there any guide on how to make patches for Kerbalism of other mods, like for example Galaxies Unbound?

[kerbnub]

9 hours ago, Xt007 said:

Doable with mm patches but not easy since for each part you'd have to remove the kerbalism repair module and replace it with stock.  Even then, I haven't checked but part of the kerbalism repair system may be hard coded so you'd have to rebuild the dll

Easier solution would be to turn off the kerbalism repair system and use something like kaboom if you want a stock repair system.

Well I really wanted all of Kerbalism's functionality too in terms of tracking,  MTBF, radiation,  etc. What does it take to edit and rebuild a dll?

[king of nowhere]

consider that, if permanent malfunctions could be fixed by a simple repair kit with a mass of 5 kg, it would undermine the whole point of malfunction. instead of carrying 6 backups of every critical system as I did for my grand tours, to deal with malfunctions, I'd just have to pack a few hundred repair kits and be fine.

if you want all malfunctions to be fixable, you can just set critical malfunctions to 0% in the kerbalism options in game.

Edited September 16, 2023 by king of nowhere

[PabyMar241]

@Gotmachine Hi. I'm having some problems with this mod. When i load my save, some vessels won't load because they have some parts missing, specifically: "fairingSize2 and SimplexPart.Consumabbles.Small". Also, there are missing parts on the VAB, specifically, stock fairings. I asked for help on reddit, I'll link  the thread in case it may provide useful info on the problem. Here's a link to the ksp log. I think it has something to do with kerbalism because when i remove it from my game this problem is gone.

[kerbnub]

On 9/16/2023 at 5:26 AM, king of nowhere said:

consider that, if permanent malfunctions could be fixed by a simple repair kit with a mass of 5 kg, it would undermine the whole point of malfunction. instead of carrying 6 backups of every critical system as I did for my grand tours, to deal with malfunctions, I'd just have to pack a few hundred repair kits and be fine.

if you want all malfunctions to be fixable, you can just set critical malfunctions to 0% in the kerbalism options in game.

No it wouldn't. It would  just be a a different, lesser cost, but it's still finite and a mass penalty, while malfunctions really aren't. I'd say it's arguable which one is more realistic to expect by the time we're actually doing interplanetary missions, in a time where I'd expect 3d printers to be much more advanced.

The main reason I want it though is for station or other infrastructure maintenance. With EVA construction, you can literally bring spares and replace broken parts, but that can be cumbersome to impossible if the broken part is deeper in the craft's part tree. I had some fun designing with this in mind at first, making sure parts like chemical plants or reaction wheels or engines are node attached with no child parts, where they could be seamlessly swapped, as I can imagine this being a design consideration/constraint IRL as well, but this leads to higher part counts in making sure I have enough attach nodes. It also gets silly with crewed modules' LS systems, where I would have to use external ECLSS modules to continue this. I would happily do this if high part counts didn't tank performance, but they do, and my save is starting to drag.  So I'd rather abstract it out into repair kits. Maybe kerbalism just isn't compatible with the "space program" style of gameplay. I'm not sure how things will work when I go to Jool, let alone Nara (outermost planet in JNSQ).

[JadeOfMaar]

@kerbnub Kerbalism could introduce and demand a more massive, custom repair kit like part for such situations, whereas, other maintenance mods have traditionally asked for amounts  of a resource representing spare parts.

[king of nowhere]

5 hours ago, kerbnub said:

No it wouldn't. It would  just be a a different, lesser cost, but it's still finite and a mass penalty, while malfunctions really aren't. I'd say it's arguable which one is more realistic to expect by the time we're actually doing interplanetary missions, in a time where I'd expect 3d printers to be much more advanced.

a repair kit is 5 kg. four repair kits are the most that can be carried by a kerbonaut, since he also needs a jetpack to move around. so you can get away with 20 kg of repair kit for any malfunction. even in my longest grand tours - several centuries - I still had to contend with 30ish critical malfunctions, which would require no more than 600 kg to repair.

and 600 kg is nothing on a space station scale. it's not actually a "lesser cost", it's negligible and mostly a nuisance when you have to click on the repair kit 200 times on ship design. even if you run out, getting some extra on a small probe is trivial.

As for 3d printers, how else would they repair a broken engine in orbit? my head canon is that they already have those on board, and that's how they make the spare parts that they use to fix the fixable malfunctions. critical malfunctions are those you cannot just fix with a 3d-printed piece.

4 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@kerbnub Kerbalism could introduce and demand a more massive, custom repair kit like part for such situations, whereas, other maintenance mods have traditionally asked for amounts  of a resource representing spare parts.

That could work; it could make it a real mass cost, unlike the very light repair kit. Actually, having a "spare parts" resource, and a "3d printer" module that can use spare parts to fix malfunctions, that would be the best option. Kerbalism uses the (ir)rational resources, and every planetary surface gives a complex composition that is never really used. Introducting some extra drills that would mine various metals - that the game already has in planetary surfaces - and machinery that turns those metals into spare parts. the idea is that there should be a cost - a real cost, not a symbolic one like 600 kg of mass on a space station - else there is no challenge. and you may as well just remove malfunctions entirely.

However, it would still make sense for some malfunctions to not be fixable. You can't make a microchip with 3d printing. And while I'm not sure on the full capabilities of that tech, I'm pretty sure there are limits. I'd be extremely surprised if you could replace an exploded rocket engine just with printing; you probably can get something that works, but that's not terribly optimized. And I would not want malfunctions to become too cheap. Part of the charm of my motherships was all the redundancy, which actually gave me a good excuse to really go wild on ship design - and size. if I can avoid that by carrying 20 tons of machinery, where's the fun?

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The main reason I want it though is for station or other infrastructure maintenance. With EVA construction, you can literally bring spares and replace broken parts, but that can be cumbersome to impossible if the broken part is deeper in the craft's part tree. I had some fun designing with this in mind at first, making sure parts like chemical plants or reaction wheels or engines are node attached with no child parts, where they could be seamlessly swapped, as I can imagine this being a design consideration/constraint IRL as well, but this leads to higher part counts in making sure I have enough attach nodes. It also gets silly with crewed modules' LS systems, where I would have to use external ECLSS modules to continue this . I would happily do this if high part counts didn't tank performance, but they do, and my save is starting to drag.  So I'd rather abstract it out into repair kits. Maybe kerbalism just isn't compatible with the "space program" style of gameplay. I'm not sure how things will work when I go to Jool, let alone Nara (outermost planet in JNSQ).

I find that kerbalism is not compatible with a complex space program. Having a dozen ships around the place, and having to regularly service each one of them, would be too time-consuming. Kerbalism works best with a single mission, or a small number of missions. I had a lot of fun with kerbalism challenges, but it was always one single massive ship and I would always only control that one. what I love of kerbalism is exactly the challenge it gives in adding extra design constraints, at a time when the stock game had become too easy. ok, I can stick a command pod on a fuel tank with a rocket and do things, now let's add all other complications and see if I can manage a ship that will stay functional in the face of food shortages, radiations, malfunctions and everything else.

In fact, when I became good enough to actually deal with all of that in a controlled manner, I mostly lost interest in the mod. Ok, I can deal with all those problems just by adding extra mass; so I could play stock and add a bunch of useless mass to the ship and pretend it's all the kerbalism stuff, it will be the same thing and it will lag less. Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing in my latest mission - though that's because kerbalism wasn't compatible with the planetary pack.

As for you, if you want to deal with kerbalism, you want malfunctions to take a toll, but you want them to be ultimately fixable, you can easily do that by playing pretend: put on your station some big tank of some resource you don't need. could be monopropellant, or maybe ore. Pretend that's spare parts. Deactivate critical malfunctions, all malfunctions can be fixed. But, whenever you have a malfunction, you vent some of your "spare parts" into space.

It would do exactly what you want - replace critical malfunctions with a different, lesser cost. You could even choose exactly how much "spare parts" you should vent for every malfunctions, thus tuning the cost of malfunctions to what you feel is appropriate. Sure, the game won't display it as such, but as long as your imagination can pretend that ore is your spare parts - and when you go grab more on the planetary surface, you're really collecting raw materials to feed into the 3d printer that you put into that science lab that you added just for the sake of pretence - it will work out the same. And it's a lot easier than programming a whole bunch of new functuons into the mod

Edited September 18, 2023 by king of nowhere