Kethane Pack 0.9.2 - New cinematic trailer! - 1.0 compatibility update

[apoch1999]

He's in the testing phase of the micro-Kethane drilling unit I devised, so it's not surprising it still has a few technical issues to be engineered out. Speaking of testing phases, my 4-in-1 Mun Kethane mission was a smashing success:

Only problem with it: no RCS fuel tanks on the miner unit. D'oh! Oh well, I can bring along one via my upcoming reusable Mun lander.

im really starting to see the promise of multiple modular ships instead of an all in one...if we could stack them in a payload and launch them all at once as well i would think that would be best..1 ship with minimal kethane holding and drills with a transfer system, 1 ship with small kethane holding converter and a small fuel holding tank, and then another fuel transport ship that could take it back into orbit...

[firegeek83]

I don't get how the lower stage can work, it has no solar panels and the four SP-A panels on the top stage can barely keep one drill running if they have perfect illumination...

Am i missing something ? (cool setup, btw)

Thanks. The lower stage is the mining rig that has four RTGs that have been placed out of view (trick I found). The panels on the fuel tug are just there as a supplemental power source for the moment. I'm thinking of using bigger panels to take advantage of when its "daytime" at the mining site. Both units are designed to work together, but can function independently on their own.

[firegeek83]

He's in the testing phase of the micro-Kethane drilling unit I devised, so it's not surprising it still has a few technical issues to be engineered out. Speaking of testing phases, my 4-in-1 Mun Kethane mission was a smashing success:

Only problem with it: no RCS fuel tanks on the miner unit. D'oh! Oh well, I can bring along one via my upcoming reusable Mun lander.

That's great to hear! I hear you on the RCS though. I so wanted to put that on my mining rig, but you have to make sacrifices to keep weight down. Have you tried testing your 4-in-1 mining on Minmus yet? I just cleared 5000km on my setup, so next stop is the testing field on Minmus!

[SkyRender]

That's great to hear! I hear you on the RCS though. I so wanted to put that on my mining rig, but you have to make sacrifices to keep weight down. Have you tried testing your 4-in-1 mining on Minmus yet? I just cleared 5000km on my setup, so next stop is the testing field on Minmus!

As a general rule of thumb, anything that works with the Mun works with Minmus as well or better. On a related note, my reusable lander brought up my Kerbin station into orbit and delivered the RCS tank add-on to the Munar Kethane rig, so now I have managed in 3 launches total to set up a fully functional mining setup on both the Mun and Minmus, as well as a 5-Kerbal lander that can ferry Kerbs between the LKO station and either the Mun or Minmus, then back again. The only launch-specific overhead I should have for future visits to these two bodies is the cost of sending up the arrival-and-return pod that brings them up to the LKO station. Good times.

[a.g.]

I made them so that they have dockingports on their roof and bottom, so you could stack them in orbit to ship them off to anywhere with a Tugship - unfortunately - they tend to get all wobbly an create phantomforces ... probably because of the legs sticking over the Docking port

It looks like you have a docking port connected to octagonal struts. That is a known source of problems and I wouldn't recommend using those parts anywhere between a docking port and another docking port or command module.

[firegeek83]

My mining rig +fuel tug on the Mun. Decided to try the test on one of my earlier sites.

Here's a test running both drills while converting to LF (not the most efficient, I know), but look at the power....not a dent.

[SkyRender]

Glad the mini-miner's working so far! Oh, and a note on fuel tugs: the more fuel they carry, the better. You want your TWR as low as feasible and your non-fuel content on the tug also as minimal as possible. Any weight that is not fuel on a fuel tug is wasteful, which runs 100% counter to the usual design model of a ship. My own fuel tug design gets 1.16 TWR on the Mun, and can bring back around 3600 liquid fuel and 4400 oxidizer each trip back to the Mun station (out of 4320 fuel and 5280 oxidizer total on the vessel; around 83% efficiency).

[nikkri]

i love this mod. finaly i can get fule to my emty rocets

[firegeek83]

Glad the mini-miner's working so far! Oh, and a note on fuel tugs: the more fuel they carry, the better. You want your TWR as low as feasible and your non-fuel content on the tug also as minimal as possible. Any weight that is not fuel on a fuel tug is wasteful, which runs 100% counter to the usual design model of a ship. My own fuel tug design gets 1.16 TWR on the Mun, and can bring back around 3600 liquid fuel and 4400 oxidizer each trip back to the Mun station (out of 4320 fuel and 5280 oxidizer total on the vessel; around 83% efficiency).

Will remember that when I bring up the next tug version. I've planned on using bigger tanks, but needed to test out a few things off planet to see what works and what doesn't. I couldn't believe the power generation (which I can now eliminate two panels), I had the drills on all the time while converting. The Kethane extraction was the bottleneck....never expected that.

[MaHuJa]

You want your TWR as low as feasible ... My own fuel tug design gets 1.16 TWR on the Mun

And here's me chiming in on that "feasible" which requires so much emphasis the above is almost pointless to say.

All the time you spend from starting your burn till getting the orbit* you're paying 1.63m/s for each additional second (Mun gravity is 1.63m/s²) you spend on this compared to what a more powerful twr ship does.

To extrapolate, a ship with a twr of 1.01 is going to spend all that fuel basically just hovering.

A more powerful engine (or more engines) could do that burn in less time, so you spend less time fighting gravity, and thus pay fewer 1.62m/s penalties. (Twice as efficient as 1.16 is 1.32, not 2.32. Each additional "unit" of twr is less worth the more you have but costs the same.) But then the added mass and/or decreased impulse would itself reduce the dV of the ship, so that's a balancing act, like everything else. This also doesn't account for how much maneuvering you need to do once you are in orbit, where low twr is usually less of a problem.

TL;DR:

If you plan the launch well so you don't need to do lots of maneuvering, more engines or stronger but less efficient engines, can be cheaper on the fuel. Up to a point. That depends on your piloting AND planning skills, however.

(Did I say mathemathics is part of that planning?)

* An orbit is a state where you get back as much dV as you lose in a period. If you'd get a sudden injection of dV from the ground pushing you up from your orbit path, they call it sub-orbital.

Edited May 21, 2013 by MaHuJa

[JeBuSBrian]

MaHuJa, does Isp play any role in your calculation?

[Mihara]

...I want a stack-mounted drill.

Why? Because if one existed and would be otherwise equivalent to the radially-mounted one, the smallest practical self-contained kethane mining probe would be reduced to about 4 tons and I'd be able to litter the surface of every planetoid with tiny gas stations.

Right now, the smallest I got that's useful for the purpose is 6 tons. It's possible to get it down to 4.5 but at the cost of making it much harder to correctly balance and land.

[firegeek83]

...I want a stack-mounted drill.

Why? Because if one existed and would be otherwise equivalent to the radially-mounted one, the smallest practical self-contained kethane mining probe would be reduced to about 4 tons and I'd be able to litter the surface of every planetoid with tiny gas stations.

Right now, the smallest I got that's useful for the purpose is 6 tons. It's possible to get it down to 4.5 but at the cost of making it much harder to correctly balance and land.

I hear you there. I'm hoping the stock resources includes a stack mounted driller as well. The radial is nice, but going back to keeping light (and balanced) is difficult with that. I barely got my mining rig down to 5.5 tons

[MaHuJa]

MaHuJa, does Isp play any role in your calculation?

But then the added mass and/or decreased impulse would itself reduce the dV of the ship,

(oops, I had written increased)

or stronger less efficient engines

Skyrender's post basically said that by designing for a lower TWR (less thrust), you can get lighter engines (less mass to drag around -> more dV) and/or more efficient engines (higher isp -> more dV). Thus you'll be spending less of the fuel you've just mined and refined to get the fuel where it'll do something useful.

I am simply saying there's a point where reducing the thrust further to get less mass or higher ISP will actually increase the total fuel portion consumed in transit, and giving people some idea of how to discover when they followed his advice too far.

[SkyRender]

You do eventually start to hit a point where you're losing more fuel per delta-V than gaining on raw fuel efficiency on the way up, it's true. In fact, probably the most fuel-efficient setup is actually one that barely carries any fuel at all up but also barely spends any fuel at all to get to orbit. When it comes to the processes involved, you're basically trading between time and scale. Either you get fantastic economies of time but extremely low per-trip returns, or fantastic economies of scale but it takes an eternity. Deciding which matter more to you is all part of the fun...

[HGGundamReviews]

@Majiir given what was in KSP weekly today how long do you think it will take you to update the existing mod to use the 0.20 file structure?

[Majiir]

@Majiir given what was in KSP weekly today how long do you think it will take you to update the existing mod to use the 0.20 file structure?

I haven't given it a hard look, but it sounds fairly straightforward. Kethane doesn't do anything crazy with part definitions.

[SkyRender]

So I went and did the math on the economies of scale for fuel tugs. My findings were pretty interesting. The most feasible fuel tug for two nuclear engines, assuming minimum payload mass, is a pair of Rockomax X200-32s plus a Rockomax X200-16. The fuel efficiency curve peaks there at around 88-89% on the Mun. Fortunately, you can hit pretty close to the same equilibrium for quite a ways on the curve (an X200-8 or X200-32 to replace the X200-16 will have around the same efficiency, 85-87% or so).

Edited May 22, 2013 by SkyRender

[bigpapabearxx]

I need Help!!! The small converter will only convert into mono. My liquid tank is not empty so what is going on?!

[SkyRender]

I need Help!!! The small converter will only convert into mono. My liquid tank is not empty so what is going on?!

Converters must be placed directly in connection with the fuel tank you wish to convert to. If you cannot connect directly, you will have to supply a fuel line feeding from the fuel tank into the converter instead.

On a related note, the Kethane Wiki link needs to be put back up on the first post.

[bigpapabearxx]

Well ****. Thanks!

[HGGundamReviews]

You can also use the Tac Fuel Balancer mod to fill all your tanks evenly and automatically.

[andisheht3]

Anyone know if Kethane is compatible with .20 yet?

[HGGundamReviews]

So far I haven't had a issue with it. detectors still detect Drills Still Drill, and the tanks still seem to work, haven't landed on a deposit yet to actually test extraction. Been looking at my Metric Crap Ton of mods and trying to figure out which ones work which are broke and which I can tweak because of missing mesh's and the like.

[WedgeJAntilles]

The clipping meshes on the Kethane fuel tanks are a little messed up. Things seem to be sunk down a ways if you connect them on top/bottom. Otherwise everything seems to work fine.

Edited May 22, 2013 by WedgeJAntilles