Kerbal Life-Support System (KLSS) [v0.7.0 for KSP2 0.2.1]

[Safarte]

  Kerbal Life-Support System (KLSS)

Because your Kerbals need Snacks.

Download: SpaceDock | GitHub

 

Please report any other bug you encounter here, with reproduction steps if possible.

Known issues:

• Life-support recyclers stop working properly at very high time-warp (>100 000x)

Installation:

It is highly recommended to use CKAN (Download Here) to install Kerbal Life-Support System!

Dependencies:

• Community Resources
• Patch Manager
• SpaceWarp + BepInEx

Features:

• Kerbals consume Food, Water & Oxygen, producing Waste, Waste Water & Carbon Dioxide
• All crewed parts come with a Water & Oxygen recycler (works at 75% efficiency i.e. can cover the needs of 3/4 of the total crew capacity)
• Life-support resources storage parts: S and M size inline parts, XS and M radial parts (Parts Gallery)
• M sized Greenhouse: produces enough food for 2 Kerbals when unfertilized and 4 when fertilized with Fertilizer made in a Composter
• Life-support planning & monitoring UI

Planned Features:

• More storage parts (Larger inline & radial parts, ...)
• More greenhouses (Cupola, L size, truck rover form-factor, ...)
• More recyclers (Air filters, water electrolysis, ...)

Changelog:

Spoiler

v0.7.0

• Added: Non-lethal life-support system:
  • Enable this mode by setting the "Kerbals Die" option in the Mod Settings to false.
  • When running out of supplies, a Kerbal will stop working and go on strike instead of dying.
  • When on strike, Kerbals cannot control vessels or perform experiments.
  • On strike Kerbals in EVA can still move to enable rescue missions (but they cannot perform experiments).
• Enhancement: Food/Water/Oxygen storage parts for each size have been merged into single parts with variants selectable in PAM thanks to the great V-SwiFT part switching mod.

v0.6.0

• Added: New and improved Life-Support monitor UI visuals. Current / max crew supplies duration have been merged into a single line per vessel with a button to switch between the two.
• Added: Ability to filter only Vessels/Kerbals in LS monitor.
• Added: Search bar for vessel names in LS monitor.
• Added: Options to show/hide empty vessels and show active vessel on top in LS monitor.
• Added: Ability to pin vessels to top in LS monitor.
• Added: In-game notifications when a vessel runs out of a supply and when a Kerbal dies due to lack of a supply.
• Bugfix: Kerbals in EVA are new properly destroyed when running out of supplies.
• Other: Added French localization.
• Other: Added Chinese (Simplified) localization by @fengyuan0529

v0.5.5

• Bugfix: Fixed a bug that prevented science labs from being loaded properly

v0.5.3

• Added: Reentry meshes to KLSS parts
• Added: Support for Where's My Crew Capsule (@cheese3660)
• Bugfix: Fixed Kerbals dying with supplies left at high time warp and in other situations
• Other: Removed life-support supplies from the orbital & aquatic labs

v0.5.2

• Other: Support for Patch Manager version 0.7.0

v0.5.1

• Fixed: Life-support supplies not being consumed for unloaded crafts
• Fixed: Kerbals on unloaded crafts dying before supplies ran out

v0.5.0

• Added: Stock Tech Tree integration for KLSS parts

v0.4.1

• Bugfix: re-added 1 day of supplies to External Command Seat

v0.4.0

• Enhancements: Life-support supplies are correctly transferred to and from Kerbals going on EVA. If other Kerbals remain in the part from which an EVA is started, the amount of supplies is split evenly.
• Added: M-size inline Composter (converts Waste into Fertilizer, capacity of 10 Kerbals)
• Balancing: M-size inline greenhouse: changed production capacity for Unfertilized mode from 4 to 2
• Balancing: M-size inline greenhouse: changed production capacity for Fertilized mode from 8 to 4
• Balancing: Changed Fertilized mode to consume Fertilizer instead of Waste

v0.3.0

• Added: XS-size radial life-support containers
• Added: M-size inline life-support containers
• Added: M-size radial life-support containers
• Balancing: Removed Water & Oxygen recyclers from the External Command Seat
• Balancing: Set the amount of life-support resources for the External Command Seat to 1 day (same as EVA)
• Balancing: Modified some other life-support containers values

v0.2.1

• Enhancement: Made the code completely modular with regards to LS resources present to enable further moddability (documentation TBD)
• Bugfix: Incorrect base EVA supplies quantities (7 days => 1 day)
• Bugfix: Incorrect grace period for Food & Water (assumed 24h days instead of 6h)
• Bugfix: Life-Support UI in the VAB does not report resource quantities changes
• Bugfix: Life-Support UI in the VAB breaks down sometimes
• Other: Various texture fixes

v0.2.0

• Enhancement: Separate consumption rate settings for each base resource
• Bugfix: First vessel built in the VAB does not appear in the Life-Support UI
• Bugfix: Life-Support UI in the VAB does not take "Fertilized" greenhouse mode into account
• Other: GRN-100 Greenhouse mesh and textures improvements

v0.1.2

• First release

Links:
Source Code
Parts Gallery
License: MIT

Edited February 24 by Safarte
image reposition

[Kerb24]

Sounds interesting, definitely going to give this a try next time I play KSP 2.

[dansiegel30]

A few issues found:

 

1) the parts in the VAB part selector show the water in a value of TONS when it really is LITERS.  However, you may want to stick with TONS(t) as the other components always discuss mass, never volume.  Therefore the amounts in the water description should be divided by 1000, as of course 1000L=1t (for water).  The mass is actually all A-OK.  I was altering the amount of water in the parts, and the wet mass from the Engineers report showed the mass change properly (by 1kg for every liter of water I adjusted).  In general you are always using Liters when discussing water - I personally think you should always stick with Tons.

 

2) the KLSS app, which in the VAB does nothing.  No text appears, so therefore not useful when planning your rocket.  However, when launching said rocket, the KLSS app seemed to show the appropriate data - UPDATE - this only happened on the very first vessel I created, subsequent vessels or entering/re-entering VAB didnt have this issue - perhaps an issue due to initialization.

 

3) While food, O2, and H20 seem to be properly displayed in the Useful Resources window, waste, CO2, and wastewater are not displayed there.  I can however see all 6 KLSS resources if I go to resource manager.  I'm not sure if you wanted it this way or not, so I am bringing the issue up.

 

Suggestions:

 

1) I assuming you added mass to the capsules for the recycling equipment.  However I think you should have an option at construction to not have any scrubbers.  As well, for your plans of additional scrubbers, I think you should have a module dedicated to waste recycling.  If I have a space station or a ground base which has crew but no capsule connected to it, how will I recycle the stored waste on board?

[Safarte]

6 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

A few issues found:

 

1) the parts in the VAB part selector show the water in a value of TONS when it really is LITERS.  However, you may want to stick with TONS(t) as the other components always discuss mass, never volume.  Therefore the amounts in the water description should be divided by 1000, as of course 1000L=1t (for water).  The mass is actually all A-OK.  I was altering the amount of water in the parts, and the wet mass from the Engineers report showed the mass change properly (by 1kg for every liter of water I adjusted).  In general you are always using Liters when discussing water - I personally think you should always stick with Tons.

 

2) the KLSS app, which in the VAB does nothing.  No text appears, so therefore not useful when planning your rocket.  However, when launching said rocket, the KLSS app seemed to show the appropriate data - UPDATE - this only happened on the very first vessel I created, subsequent vessels or entering/re-entering VAB didnt have this issue - perhaps an issue due to initialization.

 

3) While food, O2, and H20 seem to be properly displayed in the Useful Resources window, waste, CO2, and wastewater are not displayed there.  I can however see all 6 KLSS resources if I go to resource manager.  I'm not sure if you wanted it this way or not, so I am bringing the issue up.

 

Suggestions:

 

1) I assuming you added mass to the capsules for the recycling equipment.  However I think you should have an option at construction to not have any scrubbers.  As well, for your plans of additional scrubbers, I think you should have a module dedicated to waste recycling.  If I have a space station or a ground base which has crew but no capsule connected to it, how will I recycle the stored waste on board?

Issues 1) and 2) are definitely bugs/issues, for the water unit I'll discuss it with other contributors to Community Resources (this is where units are defined) but I agree that using mass for everything is useful to have a clear mass breakdown of each part.

For 3), this is intentional: I do not want to clutter this UI element and make it too "long" so I only put the consumption resources here as they are the most relevant IMO.

For suggestion 1), the recyclers currently do not add mass to the pod but I like your idea of being able to remove them to save mass. This would require a bit more modding infrastructure to implement in the current way my mod is made but I'll definitely write that down for future versions.
And for Waste recycling: this currently is the purpose of greenhouses which can run in "Fertilized" mode where they use Waste to increase their Food production.

[theJesuit]

19 hours ago, Safarte said:

Kerbals consume Food, Water & Oxygen, producing Waste, Waste Water & Carbon Dioxyde

Well done!  This first chance to mod a mod is coming!

I'm a fan of fewer resources to deal with, like combining Food and Water together, and then O2 to Air to keep balancing the mass changes from O2 to Co2 and Food/Water to Waste.  How easy would it be to mod your mod to swap out the resources?

 

Congrats on release!

[Safarte]

28 minutes ago, theJesuit said:

Well done!  This first chance to mod a mod is coming!

I'm a fan of fewer resources to deal with, like combining Food and Water together, and then O2 to Air to keep balancing the mass changes from O2 to Co2 and Food/Water to Waste.  How easy would it be to mod your mod to swap out the resources?

 

Congrats on release!

First of all thank you, and modifying the resources consumed and produced in the mod should theoretically be as easy as writing a Patch Manager patch that overrides the values I set in the mod and making sure this patch would be applied after mines.

However changing the UI to take into account those changes would be pretty hard with the way I deal with it now, I could make it more modular in the future, I'll look into it.

[theJesuit]

18 minutes ago, Safarte said:

First of all thank you, and modifying the resources consumed and produced in the mod should theoretically be as easy as writing a Patch Manager patch that overrides the values I set in the mod and making sure this patch would be applied after mines.

However changing the UI to take into account those changes would be pretty hard with the way I deal with it now, I could make it more modular in the future, I'll look into it.

When I get some time I need to start looking into the whole modding thing as it seems a little more complicated than the MM patches I am used to manipulating (damn it Jim, I'm a priest not a coder!).

Thanks for looking at modularity .

[Safarte]

v0.2.0 Released!

• Enhancement: Separate consumption rate settings for each base resource
• Bugfix: First vessel built in the VAB does not appear in the Life-Support UI
• Bugfix: Life-Support UI in the VAB does not take "Fertilized" greenhouse mode into account
• Other: GRN-100 Greenhouse mesh and textures improvements

[Alpha_star]

Wow! I love all sorts pf LS mods and this is just amazing, finally do we have realistic life support systems! I will sure try this mod out and hopefully can bring me a pleasent playing experience!

[Angelo Kerman]

Nice to see something like Snacks in KSP 2.

[dansiegel30]

Are there plans to have resource consumption while on EVA?  It would be nice that a Kerbal just can't sit outside the capsule with unlimited oxy and subsistence. 

[theJesuit]

3 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

Are there plans to have resource consumption while on EVA?  It would be nice that a Kerbal just can't sit outside the capsule with unlimited oxy and subsistence. 

Except on Minmus... eating that minty icecream :!

 

Oh wait - Minmus is now a glassy body, not a sweet sickly dessert.  My bad.

Edited November 7, 2023 by theJesuit

[Safarte]

12 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

Are there plans to have resource consumption while on EVA?  It would be nice that a Kerbal just can't sit outside the capsule with unlimited oxy and subsistence. 

Yes definitely! (And Kerbals should already be consuming supplies in EVA, if they don't that's a bug I'll look into it asap)

Edited November 7, 2023 by Safarte

[dansiegel30]

4 hours ago, Safarte said:

Yes definitely! (And Kerbals should already be consuming supplies in EVA, if they don't that's a bug I'll look into it asap)

Yeah, I am pretty sure all I see in Monopropellant during EVA.

[dansiegel30]

My mistake - I had recalled at one point perhaps I only saw MP resources, maybe I was playing no mods to test something or I do know that I was not running your latest version for a few days.  Sorry for the mistake.

[dansiegel30]

I'd also like to suggest that the Life-Support Storage containers simply have a max volume, and you can put whatever in there you want.  For example, if I recycle wastewaster and CO2, the oxygen and water can last several times longer than the food.  Now, yes, I understand you have the green house, but at 10Ec/sec, there will be plenty of situations where I can't afford to have a greenhouse and I just need to pack more food.  Or if I want to have a large food storage at a station, to easily feed several crew for a long duration - greenhouses can help extend that, but I am sure that I would need a lot of greenhouses (and a LOT of Ec generation) to keep the crew indefinitely fed.  

In the case that KSP2 doesnt allow for variable maximums of a resource, then I think you would need to provide a food only storage, a water only storage, an oxygen only storage, etc.  Also make some radially attached storage units rather than only center lined, that would be helpful and can help reduce craft length.  Right now it is still extremely limited to what I could do with KSP1 Kerbalism,  But its a great start!

 

EDIT - oh, I didnt read in your synopsis that greenhouses can feed 4 Kerbals, indefinitely I suppose - that is a bit far fetched.  IIRC in Kerbalism, 2 greenhouses were required to feed 1 Kerbal indefinitely - it made indefinite food generation nearly impossible or let's say impractical, however a few greenhouses where you could spare the mass and connections, etc , did help to extend the duration of food supplies.  Colonies of course should easily have the ability to crank out spare food to help spacecraft re-stock their food supplies.

Edited November 8, 2023 by dansiegel30

[dansiegel30]

Also I just found another bug - the Life-Support planner does not update if you adjust the amounts of food, water, or oxygen.  Its stays as if it is maximum.  The mass however does adjust fine (I had to test food and oxy with the medium storage as their mass is too small on the small storage).  That is however until you set that resource to ZERO, only then the planner will update (btw, if there zero left, it shows "00m00s  /!\"  - suppose those characters are intentional?)

[Safarte]

2 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

In the case that KSP2 doesnt allow for variable maximums of a resource, then I think you would need to provide a food only storage, a water only storage, an oxygen only storage, etc.  Also make some radially attached storage units rather than only center lined, that would be helpful and can help reduce craft length.  Right now it is still extremely limited to what I could do with KSP1 Kerbalism,  But its a great start!

Yeah right now the game doesn't allow the variable capacities system, we'll have to wait for something like a Part Switcher mod for that I guess. And yeah, single-resource containers are definitely on my todo-list in the meantime, especially as you said as food isn't as easy to be self-sufficient on as other resources.

2 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

oh, I didnt read in your synopsis that greenhouses can feed 4 Kerbals, indefinitely I suppose - that is a bit far fetched.  IIRC in Kerbalism, 2 greenhouses were required to feed 1 Kerbal indefinitely - it made indefinite food generation nearly impossible or let's say impractical

The balance of this mod is definitely very WIP, however I'm not 100% sure about making food nearly impossible to fully automate –at least until colonies and automated supply routes are out– as it would introduce a lot of tedious micromanagement for resupplies. I might still look into making recycler/greenhouse efficiency a user-defined setting to allow for more challenging gameplay.

2 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

the Life-Support planner does not update if you adjust the amounts of food, water, or oxygen.  Its stays as if it is maximum

This is a known issue, it should be addressed in the next version hopefully.

2 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

"00m00s  /!\"  - suppose those characters are intentional?

Yes this is intentional, don't hesitate to tell me if you find this design decision weird / confusing (I'm all ears for feedback on everything including UI/UX)

[dansiegel30]

7 hours ago, Safarte said:

Yes this is intentional, don't hesitate to tell me if you find this design decision weird / confusing (I'm all ears for feedback on everything including UI/UX)

Well, it just seemed weird when I noticed it, but after all I had spent several minutes playing with all the resource allocation possibilities to be sure of the issue, so when I did see it, it seemed "off"....however, it certainly grabbed my attention which is its intent.  Maybe replace it with "KERBAL DEATH", lol.

[dansiegel30]

So, I found a few more bugs.  First of all, yeah with a mass of 31t for the greenghouse, ok, that is quite a trade off for infinite food.  Good enough for now.  So, definitely some water only and oxy only storage modules are needed, maybe even only water....I mean plants do create oxygen right, so perhaps oxygen should be partially or fully replenished by greenhouses (IIRC, Kerbalism greenhouses generated twice as much oxy as food, so it was much easier to have inifinite oxy, much harder to have infinite food).  I'm assuming you are not wanting infinite water/oxy because you foresee harvesting of water on distant bodies and easy production of oxy from that? (EDIT - while researching info for below bugs, learned ISS originally was designed to reclaim 80% of water from urine, but it was lowered to 70% because of very high amounts of calcium in the urine due to zero-g bone loss - is this where you are getting your 70% reclamation efficiency from?)

So, the bugs:

 

1) while experimenting with the greenhouse, I discovered an issue where the planner goes haywire in the VAB.  First of all, I have all of the major QoL mods, and Even Better Timewarp.  To reproduce it everytime, follow these exact steps:

 

a) place a Mk3 Wanderer module (works on anything really)

b) pull up the planner

c) add 3 more Kerbals

d) Set Wanderer Conversion rate to 100% and Enable Converter

e) Add a Green House

f) Set Conversion Rate to 100%

g) Set GreenHouse from Unfertilized to Fertilized

h) Now toggle Converter on the Wanderer module, and then toggle it back - note that Water/Oxy doesn't change anymore - its borked now, now mater what you do, you can't get the Resource Converter toggle to change oxy/water resources - the only way to recover is start a new vehicle - it all goes to hell once you set the GreenHouse from Unfertilized to Fertilized.  

 

2) I was pretty sure while I was figuring out bug #1, I recalled seeing infinite oxy/water - which if I understand you correctly, you never want to happen - the only time you should see infinite, is when there are NO Kerbals on board.  However, I was able to reproduce this in the VAB fairly easily.  It's involved with having extra unmanned modules using excessive Converters.  The good news is that it is NOT creating infinite water and oxy, only falsely shows it on the planner:

a) create Mk1 capsule with 1 kerbal

b) turn converter to 100% and enable converter 

c) now add an additional Mk1 capsule

d) enable 2nd converter - you will see water/oxy duration increase

e) turn converter efficiency to 100% on 2nd capsule - you will see water/oxy duration go to infinite

 

3) While testing issue #2 in space, I noticed that if water/oxy runs out, the Kerbal doesn't seem to die.  However, this may be all working out, as I then did an EVA with the Kerbal and discovered issue #4.  I did retest again, and the Kerbal did die some time after it ran out resources, like 1-2 hours??  Is this intended?  Funny how they dont die right away, but if they just EVA, poof, they have 7 days of life left.

 

4) Kerbals on EVA carry 7 DAYS worth of oxy, food, and water - Whaaaaa??  That's insane - maybe 2 hours worth (Astronauts on ISS can carry 1/3day of oxygen) - this would mean light rovers should carry some life support as well, if they plan for long range excursions away from the base.  Now I suggest as well, that the resources be actually subtracted from those in the craft, else someone can just EVA, go back in, EVA, go back in, etc.  Not sure how many decimals of accuracy you have available on the food tonnage, which of course would be incredibly small for 2 hours of food, but considering you can count down to minutes of food remaining, I assume it viable to add/subtract very small amounts of food.  *** NOTE - while writing all of this up, the Kerbal that EVAed with 7 days of resources, actually died on me, within several minutes.  It still showed they had 7 days of resources.  So, I did the test yet again, near exhaustion of all resources, do an EVA to try to cheese 7 days of survival.  The resources on the craft continued to decline (and if zero, then the Kerbal would die shortly after) - however the EVA resources on the Kerbal started at 7 days and began to reduce in quantity. So, this all needs to be cleaned up to be accurate - the resources need to work properly - what if a Kerbal nearly out of resources does an EVA, and then tries to get inside a rescue craft that has no time to properly dock - who knows what will happen (maybe Kerbal still dies because original craft was controlling and slowly reducing lifesupport).  Not sure what can be done, but it certainly doesnt appear correctly working.

5) In all space tests, with converters on, I NEVER saw wastewaterand CO2 being reduced, i.e. converted back to water - the water duration was extended and water consumption did indeed slow...however the wastewaster was fully present - basically if you have the converter on, and stay in space until you die, you will have 0 water and 0 oxygen, however your storage tanks are FULL of wastewater and CO2. 

Edited November 9, 2023 by dansiegel30

[Safarte]

9 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

while experimenting with the greenhouse, I discovered an issue where the planner goes haywire in the VAB.  First of all, I have all of the major QoL mods, and Even Better Timewarp.  To reproduce it everytime, follow these exact steps:

Thanks for this report, I'll investigate asap.

9 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

I recalled seeing infinite oxy/water - which if I understand you correctly, you never want to happen

Okay there seem to be a misunderstanding of my design goals for this first release, infinite values for all resources should be possible right now.

Let me try to synthesize a bit my vision for this mod in terms of gameplay:

The plan is to have 3 difficulty presets: Hard, Normal, Easy. Here is how I see those presets (this is only for "normal vessels" not colonies, I'll get to designing around those when we have more info on them):

Hard:

• Kerbals die when out of a LS resource for a pre-determined amount of time.
• Oxygen can be self-sufficient without external input but the recyclers present in a crewable part can only cover the needs of a fraction of its Kerbals capacity (for example: the M-size command pod can fit 3 Kerbals but cover the recycling of the Oxygen of 2)
  • As an aside, I agree with you I think I'll add some CO2->O2 conversion to greenhouses (not sure how much yet)
• Water cannot be fully self-sufficient without external input: this may only be implemented once we have mining in place as it would just be annoying before then.
• Food can be made self-sufficient using greenhouses but you need quite a lot of them.

Normal:

• Kerbals go unconscious when out of a LS resource for a pre-determined amount of time.
• Oxygen & Water can be self-sufficient, but recyclers still cannot cover the needs of a fully crewed vessel.
• Food: same as Hard mode but need less greenhouses

Easy:

• Same as normal but instead of going unconscious the Kerbals just become "less efficient" (cannot sprint, slower science collection, stuff like that)
• More forgiving balancing of recyclers

Right now we are closest to Hard mode, with the exception being that all resources can be made self-sufficient with enough crew capacity and greenhouses.

 

10 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

Kerbals on EVA carry 7 DAYS worth of oxy, food, and water

Huh that's an error on my part, I wanted them to carry 1 day at most.

10 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

while writing all of this up, the Kerbal that EVAed with 7 days of resources, actually died on me, within several minutes.  It still showed they had 7 days of resources.  So, I did the test yet again, near exhaustion of all resources, do an EVA to try to cheese 7 days of survival.  The resources on the craft continued to decline (and if zero, then the Kerbal would die shortly after) - however the EVA resources on the Kerbal started at 7 days and began to reduce in quantity. So, this all needs to be cleaned up to be accurate - the resources need to work properly - what if a Kerbal nearly out of resources does an EVA, and then tries to get inside a rescue craft that has no time to properly dock - who knows what will happen (maybe Kerbal still dies because original craft was controlling and slowly reducing lifesupport).  Not sure what can be done, but it certainly doesnt appear correctly working.

Yeah a lot of stuff seems to be broken around EVA, I'll add it to my priority list of fixes.

10 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

Now I suggest as well, that the resources be actually subtracted from those in the craft, else someone can just EVA, go back in, EVA, go back in, etc

This is planned, I just didn't have the time to get around to it yet.

10 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

In all space tests, with converters on, I NEVER saw wastewaterand CO2 being reduced, i.e. converted back to water

As mentioned above, O2 & Water recyclers on crewable parts can only "cover the needs" of 2/3 of the total crew capacity. This also means they can only absorb the waste products of 2/3 Kerbals, if you have more Kerbals than that the excess waste products will not be absorbed by the recyclers.

[dansiegel30]

Thanks!  I didn't even think to try different difficulty levels.  Is this bound to your campaign's difficulty, or will you be able to set Life-Support difficulty stand alone?  I recommend the later, as it appears difficulty of a campaign cannot be changed once started(like the P.A.I.G.E info).  As far as your goals, it all sounds excellent to me.  I Fully understand that people like different setups and this is a great roadmap. 

 

Lol, I am rewriting my thread because after an hour on this (reading and researching realworld LSS stuff), I read your LAST sentence on this topic, "Right now we are closest to Hard mode, with the exception being that all resources can be made self-sufficient with enough crew capacity and greenhouses". This makes perfect sense if you are modelling "capacity", I thought you were modelling "efficiency".

 

I am confused because realworld efficiency of LSS recycling is never due to the fact that they dont have enough "capacity" or can't "cover the needs" of the crew.  Its because the technology being used literally is unable to convert all of the waste, and the waste that can't be converted is useless and is dumped.  For CO->02, it was originally 50% efficiency because the CH4 methane from the reaction was unusable(due to dust, bound to the CH4), and dumped.  Now they can use that methane which can get the reclamation near 100%, with the leftover replenished by plants (this will be used for the Mars Mission and Lunar Bases in the south pole). For WasteWater, showers, humidity from sweat, its always been due to filtration - 10 years ago, it was up to 74% efficiency - the other 26% had to be dumped, it was useless because of calcium and other minerals that they could not separate from the water.  5 years ago it was 90%.  In June 2023, an article on Nasa.gov stated they are now able to perform 98% efficiency in the filtration.   The bigger problem with realistically representing all of this is that the near 100% CO2 and WasteWater reclamation relies also on filters which are not recyclable.  Anways, I'm not suggesting to model filters, lol.  I just want to be clear that you are modeling "capacity" (your conversion rate parameter can throttle this from 0 to 100%) and in the realworld, it's always been at efficiency, 

 

BTW, for 8 Kerbals to be fully self-sufficient, I assume I am correct now in saying it takes a crewcapacity of 12 with all recylcers turned on, and 1 single greenhouse using fertilizer from the 8 Kerbals, running 100% of the time, even when in shadow.  For Low Kerbin Orbit, that requires only  32 Ec/sec of power generation and 14.4k of Ec capacity.  For hard difficulty, I feel this should be much harder to do. This sounds more like easy to medium. While landed craft and ground bases would require either RTG/Reactors or an insane amount of batteries to maintain 100% runtime, this can be avoided by doubling crew, greenhouse, and Ec-Generation capacity (not batteries fortunately) which is quite trivial to do.  For people doing "48 crew SSTO voyage to Laythe!", I doubt they would ever run this mod anyways, lol.

 

Also, do you have plans with 0.2 science to perhaps have different levels of efficiency, rather than having it always 100%?  It would be cool if it wasn't 100% efficiency in early tech but only reaching 100% efficiency by upper tech levels?   0.2 has 4 pages of tech - maybe page 1 provides 50% efficiency, page 2 has 75% efficiency, and page 3 has 100% efficiency.  

[dansiegel30]

Also, I thought of another mod that perhaps you could do, as you seem to have your hooks into the relevant code (already being able to provide LSS planners in the VAB and in flight, and dealing with resources).  An Ec Planner!  However comms and science seem to be the big elusive mystery to long term KSP2 Ec usage.  Not really needed until until 0.2 when we know how long experiments/comms need to run and how much Ec they can take.  At this point, it might even be cool to start having craft require to spend Ec for heating, with different values in and out of shadow...an Ec planner would definitely be needed then. 

 

I've often wanted to get into KSP modding - I'm a retired engineer and have done plenty enough coding/scripting in dozens of languages over the years to understand the logic - I just never had the resources to dig into the KSP modding scene (plus when I got into KSP1, most things I wanted were already modded).  I think I'll begin by trying to fully understand your code (except for the Part Meshes, as I've never been interested in creating parts and have zero experience with graphical modding/coding), and maybe even start the Ec Planner on my own.

 

Oh, in final, I suppose I will put any new bugs I see on your GitHub, keeping this thread reserved for feedback/suggestions.

[Safarte]

8 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

This makes perfect sense if you are modelling "capacity", I thought you were modelling "efficiency".

Yeah I opted for "capacity" even though in real life stuff is limited by "efficiency" because it was easier for me to make interesting and not too annoying gameplay with this. With <100% efficiency it is impossible to have a fully water & O2 self-sufficient station for example. This wasn't something that seemed desirable to me (at least until we have automated supply routes). The limited recycler capacity still imposes a challenge for the road to self-sufficiency without completely blocking it, and it also provides a gameplay incentive to building larger space stations & bases which I find interesting.

8 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

For Low Kerbin Orbit, that requires only  32 Ec/sec of power generation and 14.4k of Ec capacity.  For hard difficulty, I feel this should be much harder to do.

The balance in terms of LS resources consumption / recycling and also in terms of EC consumption is very much still Work in Progress, I'll try to slowly converge to default difficulty presets that are pretty nice for this.

8 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

Also, do you have plans with 0.2 science to perhaps have different levels of efficiency, rather than having it always 100%?  It would be cool if it wasn't 100% efficiency in early tech but only reaching 100% efficiency by upper tech levels?   0.2 has 4 pages of tech - maybe page 1 provides 50% efficiency, page 2 has 75% efficiency, and page 3 has 100% efficiency.  

That's a very cool idea indeed, I was thinking about doing something like this but it will require some amount of refactoring of the recyclers code (right now I use the stock resource converters for this and for now they cannot have a dynamic efficiency).

7 hours ago, dansiegel30 said:

Also, I thought of another mod that perhaps you could do, as you seem to have your hooks into the relevant code (already being able to provide LSS planners in the VAB and in flight, and dealing with resources).  An Ec Planner!  However comms and science seem to be the big elusive mystery to long term KSP2 Ec usage.  Not really needed until until 0.2 when we know how long experiments/comms need to run and how much Ec they can take.  At this point, it might even be cool to start having craft require to spend Ec for heating, with different values in and out of shadow...an Ec planner would definitely be needed then. 

 

I've often wanted to get into KSP modding - I'm a retired engineer and have done plenty enough coding/scripting in dozens of languages over the years to understand the logic - I just never had the resources to dig into the KSP modding scene (plus when I got into KSP1, most things I wanted were already modded).  I think I'll begin by trying to fully understand your code (except for the Part Meshes, as I've never been interested in creating parts and have zero experience with graphical modding/coding), and maybe even start the Ec Planner on my own.

The KSP2 modding community would be very happy to welcome a new member, if you have any question don't hesitate to hop on the KSP2 Modding Society Discord server, it's full of people willing to help any newcomers when it comes to modding the game!

[dansiegel30]

4 hours ago, Safarte said:

That's a very cool idea indeed, I was thinking about doing something like this but it will require some amount of refactoring of the recyclers code (right now I use the stock resource converters for this and for now they cannot have a dynamic efficiency).

Or basically MkI parts have 50% efficiency, MkII parts have 75% efficiency, and MkIII parts have 100% efficiency.  This would be better than converters automatically upgrading efficiency through research, and perhaps even more reasons to tear down and de-orbit old space stations and send up new ones.