Bigger ISRU's please

[RoninFrog]

We really need bigger ISRUs than 2.5m.  3.75m would be great, and 5m would be perfect.  Three reasons:

1.  Waiting for years to refuel is not fun.  I like to find good ore (14% or higher), convert it fast, and get going preferably in a couple days.  The 2.5m ISRU isn't cutting it.

2.  HUGE ships are awesome.  But in order to refuel them in a decent amount of time, it takes many ISRUs.  Many ISRUs means lots of parts.  Lots of parts means lots of lag.  Lag is not good.

3.  Real fuel refineries are massive.  They aren't little tiny 1-meter thingies.  A 5m fuel refinery could weigh 34 tons, require 240 electricity/sec, take 4 ore/sec, produce 8 LFO/sec, and look awesome.

[pmborg]

1 hour ago, MunsterIII said:

We really need bigger ISRUs than 2.5m.  3.75m would be great, and 5m would be perfect.  Three reasons:

1.  Waiting for years to refuel is not fun.  I like to find good ore (14% or higher), convert it fast, and get going preferably in a couple days.  The 2.5m ISRU isn't cutting it.

2.  HUGE ships are awesome.  But in order to refuel them in a decent amount of time, it takes many ISRUs.  Many ISRUs means lots of parts.  Lots of parts means lots of lag.  Lag is not good.

3.  Real fuel refineries are massive.  They aren't little tiny 1-meter thingies.  A 5m fuel refinery could weigh 34 tons, require 240 electricity/sec, take 4 ore/sec, produce 8 LFO/sec, and look awesome.

If you install tweak scale mod you have it

 

Edited February 25, 2020 by pmborg

[FlyingGeeze]

 

6 hours ago, MunsterIII said:

We really need bigger ISRUs than 2.5m.  3.75m would be great, and 5m would be perfect.  Three reasons:

1.  Waiting for years to refuel is not fun.  I like to find good ore (14% or higher), convert it fast, and get going preferably in a couple days.  The 2.5m ISRU isn't cutting it.

2.  HUGE ships are awesome.  But in order to refuel them in a decent amount of time, it takes many ISRUs.  Many ISRUs means lots of parts.  Lots of parts means lots of lag.  Lag is not good.

3.  Real fuel refineries are massive.  They aren't little tiny 1-meter thingies.  A 5m fuel refinery could weigh 34 tons, require 240 electricity/sec, take 4 ore/sec, produce 8 LFO/sec, and look awesome.

1. Years? For a 14% ore deposit one or two large drills will do fine. If it's much less then 14% you need more drills, like 6 of them. You will also need more radiators and solar panels for the drills. If it takes years you either got a small drill with a ISRU. You may also run out of efficiency by not having enough radiator or EC generation so the process stops overnight as the sun goes down, and, your not using a high level engineer to boost the drilling rate. Bottom line, if it takes years your ISRU setup is wrong and you can mend it.

2. You probably only need one. Many S4-1400 fuel tanks can be refueled in days on most deposits using enough drills, a engineer and good EC generation and thermal protection.

3. KSP isn't realistic in all scales. ISRU's are real world analogues for real scale prototypes intended to be used in the future. The real life ISRU's tend to refuel a orbiter over the course of years not days or weeks. Futhermore, real life is no comparison. Massive fuel refineries work on continuous production cycles to make money to sell synthetic hydro carbon fluids for cosmetics, grease oils, plastics, byproducts for chemistry, and benzine/diesel fuels whatnot.
These are complex complexes where 50-200 people are working continuous hours to make worlds litter, while a rocket fuel ISRU's is intended to do a simple thing, create a local fuel from surface or atmospheric deposits.

A ISRU is a distiller, intended to distill a local fuel. In real life that could be methane and oxygen for methalox. In industrial refineries you have multiple fuel distillers in the same building while having 10 of them each for mass production with a great chimney and large containers to get the production going each day for cars, trains, boats, rockets and personal products while being a actual building with walls. On another planet you don't need a building with walls because it's useless and you got a spacesuit.

If you want the actual ISRU to be larger I expect you can use the tweakscale mod to scale them. I believe that mod itself doesn't change the parameters of the ISRU itself so it should only be heavier and larger.

Edited February 25, 2020 by FlyingGeeze

[RoninFrog]

2 hours ago, FlyingGeeze said:

Years? For a 14% ore deposit one or two large drills will do fine.

What I meant by "HUGE" is hundreds of thousands of units of LFO.  I usually need close to 20 large drills for that.

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, FlyingGeeze said:

If you want the actual ISRU to be larger I expect you can use the tweakscale mod to scale them. I believe that mod itself doesn't change the parameters of the ISRU itself so it should only be heavier and larger.

As a matter of fact, TweakScale does, indeed, scale the ISRUs. ISRUs make use the ModuleResourceConverter and the ModuleCoreHeat, and these modules are supported by TweakScale. If by scaling ISRUs you don't get the desired effect, it's a but I didn't caught yet - report it on TweakScale thread and I will nail it.

4 hours ago, MunsterIII said:

What I meant by "HUGE" is hundreds of thousands of units of LFO.  I usually need close to 20 large drills for that.

Drills, on the other hand, are not being scaled correctly. There's something on the heat exchange that it's not working as I expect, and I'm still trying to figure out how to implement this.

[juanml82]

If you want mods, at least for the time being, there is Mining Expansion

Also keep in mind that larger ISRUs which require far more electric power would also require a stock electric generator capable of putting up with it

[Hotel26]

7 hours ago, MunsterIII said:

What I meant by "HUGE" is hundreds of thousands of units of LFO.  I usually need close to 20 large drills for that.

I tackled this problem on the Mun with Snowflake and KP Luna Vista.  That is to say, if you want unusually huge capacity, you should assemble a refinery.  (Not ask for a part.)

A fully-assembled refinery is comprised of 8 ISRUs and 32 drills.  (Does not cause appreciable lag on my under-powered i5...)

 

Zippo (pictured below) can be filled by a fully-assembled Snowflake refinery in just 2 hours.  Zippo transports 31,900 LF, 38,500 OX and 1,500 MP from a lunar surface refinery to a waiting orbital station.

 

I understand you want a mobile refinery with HUGE capacity, but I don't think that's very reasonable.  And KSP is as much about designing and constructing solutions as it is about anything else.

If you really want a magic solution (i.e. "cheat"), then install ShipManifest and simply click the Fill button...

Taking time to build infrastructure is actually fun and multiplies enjoyment.

Edited February 25, 2020 by Hotel26

[Guest]

I think the current ISRUs are fine.

Now I'm feeling a sudden urge to build an absurdly big and powerful refinery out of them however.

[FlyingGeeze]

19 hours ago, MunsterIII said:

What I meant by "HUGE" is hundreds of thousands of units of LFO.  I usually need close to 20 large drills for that.

WoW!

That's probably a heavily modded game? Your using very large motherships in need to be refueled using larger modded fuel tanks?

For you I wish there was something like this. Many people try to build small to medium ships in stock especially due to the reason of lower framerates using more parts, that includes myself.

For that reason I hope there is a mod. You can also use mods like *real heat* (radiators) *Near future solar* for super large solar panels or *near future electrics* for very large reactors. This way you can use several of the 2.5m ISRU's with 1 or 2 large radiator and solar panel parts. This incredibly lowers the part count necessary to build a larger mining and processing rig.

Edited February 26, 2020 by FlyingGeeze

[RoninFrog]

17 hours ago, FlyingGeeze said:

That's probably a heavily modded game?

No mods, just 17 or so of the Making History Saturn V tanks.

[kspnerd122]

Idea

why not just have a refinery in orbit and take ore up to it then just refine the ore there, then just dock your ship to the station and let it do the refining for you my minty ore refinery had 12 large converters.

[Pds314]

"3.75m"

"5m"

Why so conservative? 12.5m ore refineries would be great.

[kspnerd122]

ur sooo kerbal