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

[Eleven]

I noticed while scanning with the newest update that when it detects and beeps and shows the coordinates, it also shows the total amount of Kethane at that location. Is there a way to record this info? Is it logged in a file maybe?

The only thing I'm not liking 100% is that all the Kethane I'm finding is on slopes! Gimme some nice, big Kethane deposits on low, flat land

[HoY]

@Pontiac: this was never a question. It just makes sense that its faster. But the number you failed to monitor is how much kethane it took to fill all your tanks. That's where you lose out. It uses extra kethane, which will drain your deposit prematurely, which in turn will make you need to find a different deposit. And if you are bringing your fuel back to orbit that means after you've used up your 1-3 equatorial deposites you'll soon need to switch to a deposit that's farther away from the equator and thus cost more fuel to get to the fuel depot or ship in orbit

Run your numbers again but this time don't just measure time. Measure kethane used to fill your orange tank and monoprop tanks and give us those numbers. Remember, you CAN use timewarp while refining so time does not matter in the least!

[Climberfx]

Hey, Wanna a SSTO All in One?

MechJeb, land/take off vertically, and have all the modules to find and extract the Kethane you need to perpetuate its movement. It have 3 1000 Kethane Tanks, up in the jets.

This is an adaptation of my Star Series, now in Kethane model, but will improve to a high range, possibly changing the middle Nv to an Lv N. In the near future.

Star Kethane Mj

Edited June 8, 2013 by Climberfx

[Majiir]

Found out that this thing sucks back electricity like nobodies business, so redesigned the electrical system by adding I think 48 stock RTGs. STILL not enough

This made me chuckle. I like that Kethane uses a lot more electrical power than you'd normally equip on a design. Your analysis is interesting, and it makes me think I need to take a look at the heat sink math and do some tweaking.

This next teaser isn't much to look at, but I think it's a significant addition. This update is shaping up!

COMING SOON:

[HoY]

Looks like we might get to edit the volume of deposits?

Also hints on the stats of that new drill? An extra deep drill that gets kethane more efficiently would be cool ie 20% more kethane created than was removed from the deposit because it tapped into the material below the well that had settled deposits the older drill couldn't reach

[KhaosCorp]

Love the giant drill..maybe soon we can all stop putting 12 drills per mining platform lol

[Starklet]

Why is this not on KSP Space Port?

[mushroomman]

Kethane on Kerbol...?

How would it be possible to get at it?

[Pontiac]

@Pontiac: this was never a question. It just makes sense that its faster. But the number you failed to monitor is how much kethane it took to fill all your tanks. That's where you lose out. It uses extra kethane, which will drain your deposit prematurely, which in turn will make you need to find a different deposit. And if you are bringing your fuel back to orbit that means after you've used up your 1-3 equatorial deposites you'll soon need to switch to a deposit that's farther away from the equator and thus cost more fuel to get to the fuel depot or ship in orbit

Run your numbers again but this time don't just measure time. Measure kethane used to fill your orange tank and monoprop tanks and give us those numbers. Remember, you CAN use timewarp while refining so time does not matter in the least!

I reran the numbers and I found that running all three at the same time has ZERO bearing on consumption. I ran this at 1x speed just to eliminate the chance of numbers being skewed. I did use 10,000x to fill the Kethane tank though which doesn't affect anything. Drills were turned off during this check, of course.

Running a single conversion process used 8,881 units of Kethane. Running all three, started at the exact same time, with the assistance of ActionsOnTheFly, used 8,881 units as well.

Capacity Stats for the refining ship:

Liquid Fuel: 1400

Oxidizer: 1760

Monopropellent: 400

Kethane used to convert:

Liquid Fuel: 3495 (Ratio of ~2.5:1 Kethane to Fuel).

Oxidizer: 4445 (Ratio of ~2.53:1)

Monopropellent: 941 (Ratio of ~2.35:1)

Total: 8,881

When running all three at the same time, I was down to 44.2% efficiency on the converter. When Monopropellent was done, I got up to 82%, and the other two fuels were above 50% complete at this point. The Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer finished at just about the same time. One was ahead of the other by just a few seconds.

So what this tells me is that the efficiency factor affects individual processing processing time, but the net result is a shorter time to refine all the fuels when working at once.

This made me chuckle. I like that Kethane uses a lot more electrical power than you'd normally equip on a design. Your analysis is interesting, and it makes me think I need to take a look at the heat sink math and do some tweaking.

It was a learning process, for sure. :] I'm all for the extreme consumption of electricity. If you think of it, it takes a LOT of energy to convert one thing into another. If I would have done some simple math, I could have figured the consumption rate of the 4 drills when in use, plus the consumption rate of the refinery, put those together to get a value. Take that number, divide by the power a single stock RTG provides, and slap that many, plus 1, on the hull, and this particular machine is pretty much a stand alone unit that can do mining and refining at the exact same time.

Edited June 9, 2013 by Pontiac

[HoY]

Are you kidding me? Is that how it's supposed to work? All it does is slow it down? That sounds a little broken then like you mentioned in your first post! Although If its intentional and not going to be changed it will change how I do my refining. I generally have two processors on any of my refinerys that have at least one orange tank on them to be filled, so I can run Lf and Ox at 100% each, but if I run them both converting LFO and it Doesn't cost me extra kethane and actually does the job faster....

Regarding your second quote, the kethane hardware seems to actually draw more power than the descriptions. I do the same thing and calculate how many RTG's I need to run the drills and refine 1 fuel at a time, and I Always come up short. Always. Even with 6 extra RTG's. tho while docked with the tanker, the tankers own 6 RTG's make up the difference barely.

Edit; if the refiners are working as intended, the Effeciency should be re-titled to Productivity, to be more accurate.

Edited June 9, 2013 by HoY

[Pontiac]

I went back to the beginning of this thread to find the root of my investigation here.

Original thought: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/23979-Kethane-Pack-0-4-4-Compatible-with-0-20-2-plus-balancing-changes%21?p=334530&viewfull=1#post334530

From "the horses mouth": http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/23979-Kethane-Pack-0-4-4-Compatible-with-0-20-2-plus-balancing-changes%21?p=336635&viewfull=1#post336635

Not a bug, working as intended. I wanted to test the theory of time spent. Personally, I would have figured that getting the inefficiency factor involved would have EXTENDED the time to refine everything at once, instead of reducing. THAT would have made more sense to me, especially when I'm hit with a more than 50% reduction.

Now, what I have to do is study which is going to be more efficient. Haul the Kethane in large quantities to space, or, send the refined fuel up. Not exactly sure how I'm going to test the efficiency factor in that. I modified the gas tanks to have docking port jrs at each end of the tank, so I could setup a "train" of tanks, and ships can come by, dock (or I can throw a Lazor system at it as well).

[Majiir]

Also hints on the stats of that new drill? An extra deep drill that gets kethane more efficiently would be cool ie 20% more kethane created than was removed from the deposit because it tapped into the material below the well that had settled deposits the older drill couldn't reach

The stats will be fairly boring at first. A revision patch will probably add some more interesting balance behavior.

Why is this not on KSP Space Port?

Spaceport has an excessively restrictive legal agreement for uploaded projects which grants them exclusive distribution rights, among other things. Considering how flaky the Spaceport web service is, I prefer to self-host.

Personally, I would have figured that getting the inefficiency factor involved would have EXTENDED the time to refine everything at once, instead of reducing. THAT would have made more sense to me, especially when I'm hit with a more than 50% reduction.

Why is this not expected? In order for refining three fuels individually (at full speed each) to be faster than all at once, the reduction would have to go down below one-third. At 40-something percent, you'll still come out ahead.

The goal for the heavy converter was to restrict its total conversion rate mid-flight (and to give that awesome heat sink something to do). It could probably use some rebalancing, probably with a very large penalty to MonoPropellant heat production, and possibly some kind atmospheric efficiency bonus.

On the development end, I've been experimenting with particle effects. It'll get better, I promise! This is my first time playing with them. I think it'll look a lot nicer than applying the RCS thrust effect to the drill head.

[jfx]

Why is this not on KSP Space Port?

I think it is safe to say spaceport has failed at this point. Without a major relaunch, many added features and the exclusion of craft files (or a strict section for them) it is pretty much unusable.

[Pontiac]

What SpacePort needs is something that you can filter based on version numbers, show more than 9 items at a time, allow for revisions of files to indicate patches, and indicate when the last time the author was on and actively did something to ANY of the plugins they've posted. If the Author hasn't been on for a certain amount of time, any license agreement put into play regarding modifying and redistributing becomes null and void and an option for the public to submit bug fixes (With source code included somewhere) becomes an option, or, if the original Author wishes, allow for public fixes to be submitted at any time. If the original author does come back, they then would have the option to leave the public fixes in place, or, optionally put them in private mode so they can only look at them, then decide what to do from there.

I'd be dumb enough to take that kind of project on.

Why is this not on KSP Space Port?

The author specifically stated that the current version is a Dev Build and NOT to be put on SpacePort until he's decided that this version is a completed version.

Edited June 9, 2013 by Pontiac

[Pontiac]

I started to write a story about how the length of time should have been extended, but then I realized that I think you're right, its just hard to wrap my mind around after 10 hours doing a 12 hour shift at work.

I'm seriously struggling over the math on how its done, but it kinda-sorta makes sense. I also don't know the methods you're using to calculate the inefficiencies. But working on my theory and numbers, the converter can only do so much work in total, but, each conversion process "probably" doesn't chew 100% of the work load the converter is capable of handling, which means that only a certain volume of Kethane is going to get converted per work cycle. So if we say that converting Kethane to Liquid Fuel or Oxidizer individually uses 95% of the available work load, that 5% becomes idle and a loss for that cycle. In order to keep the converter from over heating running multiple jobs, you have to reduce the amount of work each conversion process outputs in order to maintain the 100% efficiency. So work done for each would be 50% output. Now you're using 100% of processing capabilities, which means that each process gets an additional 2.5% of work. (Taking that extra 5% idle time and splitting it between the two processes).

In other words you have 95% of the work load for a single job. When you introduce a second job, you half the 95% which becomes 47.5%. Since one full conversion cycle of Kethane can take more than 47.5% of the work load, we'd get an additional 2.5% work to bring that up to 50%, which means a net bonus to BOTH conversion jobs time wise. The converter is working now working at 100%, you're converting as much Kethane as possible running multiple jobs since now you're not idling the converter. You don't get more or less for your money, but, you do get it faster.

Does that make sense?

Edited June 9, 2013 by Pontiac

[Majiir]

The author specifically stated that the current version is a Dev Build and NOT to be put on SpacePort until he's decided that this version is a completed version.

You're thinking of a different author. I do not plan to use Spaceport.

[willow]

Spaceport has an excessively restrictive legal agreement for uploaded projects which grants them exclusive distribution rights, among other things. Considering how flaky the Spaceport web service is, I prefer to self-host.

This! We had a pretty good mod website started by a volunteer from the community. What was it? kerbal.net? It was up almost all of the time, and the search functions worked. It had no weird legal restrictions. Spaceport pretty much killed that site. And the community lost something good because of it. I applaud you for standing by your convictions.

[KhaosCorp]

Yea, spaceport is rubbish...I haven't even been able to log in there since 0.20 hit. Not to mention all the junk posted there, and silly people that reupload stuff every few days....

[kpu3uc]

nwmnwmnwmnwmnwmnwmnwmnwm

Edited June 10, 2013 by kpu3uc

[leopardenthusiast]

How much does a KE-TL80 weigh when it's full? I'm designing my lander, and I want to know how much thrust it needs.

[SkyRender]

Awesome, a new version of Kethane came out while I wasn't looking! No matter how great Squad's resource system at some point in the future turns out to be, Kethane will always have a place in my KSP installs.

[KhaosCorp]

How much does a KE-TL80 weigh when it's full? I'm designing my lander, and I want to know how much thrust it needs.

This is where the debug tool really comes in handy. You can spawn some kethane near the space center for testing. I actually have a small tank farm tucked behind the VAB I keep full of kethane for ship testing, took me like 20min to set it all up.

[warmadmax]

liking the new sneaky peeks Majiir

currently mapping the mun for muna kethane mining op.

did a debug "generate here" at the KSC first so i can test rovers locally before sending them on their way

[Jeep]

Hello downloaded kethane mod and been racking my brain on the best way to transfer kethane / or convert and transfer. Whats the best way?

My set up is I have my miner on the mun. And a refueling space station ready to be launched. So should I mine the kethane launch the miner and dock it at the space station? Or what? Give me some ideas or videos or pictures plz. THANKS

[Cuel]

I think it's been proven that converting on the ground is most efficient.