Mining base calculator

[Blaarkies]

I started making this online tool that can help players design mining bases. It adds up the total resources consumed, produced and stored, as well as a few other metrics about heat generation, and other things of consideration when building a mining base.

This is beta, and still in progress, but the general idea can be seen here:

ISRU Heat & Power Calculator
Light-mode theme messes with the background, here is a workaround in the meanwhile:

1. Use the green menu, go to Delta-v or CommNet planner,
2. Click the Sun Icon right next to the menu. That switches to dark-theme.
3. Use the green menu to go back to pocket calculators (this ISRU calculator)
4. Fixed - Phew...glad I called it beta 

I need to confirm a lot of details about the calculations on how the engineer bonus level, ore concentration, and multiple resource processes affect the final outcome for how much heat was generated. Does anyone have some definitive details on this? I will need to verify this tool's results against in-game tests, but the forum posts have gotten me this far at least 

Anyway, have fun and see if it works well enough for you. Feedback would be greatly appreciated! 

Edited February 6, 2023 by Blaarkies

[Leganeski]

5 hours ago, Blaarkies said:

I need to confirm a lot of details about the calculations on how the engineer bonus level, ore concentration, and multiple resource processes affect the final outcome for how much heat was generated.

Each process produces heat separately, so running multiple converter processes definitely increases the heat output. Conversely, a converter process running at less than full capacity due to a shortage of ore produces less heat. The ore concentration does not affect electricity consumption or heat production, except in the case where a faster ore mining rate allows the converter to process more ore.

Due to conservation of energy, one would expect heat production to be roughly proportional to electricity consumption. In KSP, however, I'm not sure that is entirely true. I don't pay that much attention to heat output, so I'm not sure exactly how it works, but testing the radiator heat dissipation readouts in a variety of conditions should reveal the answers fairly quickly.

[tg626]

This is going to be a great tool. (Gigantor panels should be in the list so when a doofus like me deletes it, they can re-add it DOH)

[Blaarkies]

@tg626 Thanks, I hope it does  As with the other tools for CommNet and Delta-v, i want to make this one accurate, or at the very least, trustworthy. I want to test it properly before release to ensure that players are not given bad info when building/launching a massive mining bases in-game, just to see it lack enough EC to function properly.

I'm thinking of adding features like accounting for the daylight time on the selected planet, then predicting how long the base will run on batteries. How much does that atmosphere affect solar panels, and perhaps calculate static solar panels' output as less than 100% because of a bad light angle. Warn players about the mini-drills having a 2.5% ore limit, or the limitations on the mini-isru heat dissipation, and many more...

Remember to have a look in the "Add part" drop down menu, it should contain the "Gigantor XL Solar Array" unless it is already in the selected list. I'm considering shortening that list, or making it easier to view. For the parts, i have a little parser that reads game part.cfg files, and output them in JSON format that is easy to use in websites, so i can list any parts of the vanilla game if needed.

@Leganeski  This is great, it is mostly what i have been gathering in playthroughs, wiki and this post.  The detail in that is amazing I'll take a close look, I think i mistakenly added engineer level as a factor in the drills power draw. It is weird how the ISRUs have the heat cap limits (mini at 75W, senior at 500W), but I don't see the corresponding value sin the part files. I wonder if those are hard coded somewhere?