[1.02] BioMass - Renewable Bio Fuel and Supplemental Life Support Modules

[therealcrow999]

Everyone wants bigger and better, lol. I know size amount could go overboard.

I would say slightly large not much. What are scale or rescale numbers you have in cfg?

Wow you guys are doing some cool stuff!

Hard to say for sure right now, but I'm thinking it will be around 30-50MB. Depends on how much we end up needing/including this time around. I've been experimenting with things like this for example...

I've been told i should go bigger. You can see a comparison to Jeb in the last shot.

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If we make all our dreams come true, it will get pretty big i think. 0.0

[USS_Cuttlefish]

As long as its smaller than the B9 mod it's good to go. On my computer Kerbal refuses to load when I have a mod that large running along with a few other addons.

[XanderTek]

As long as its smaller than the B9 mod it's good to go. On my computer Kerbal refuses to load when I have a mod that large running along with a few other addons.

Just in case you haven't tried it already, the texture reduction packs (B9 comes with one) make a big difference. The new memory reduction mod also seems to help significantly.

[USS_Cuttlefish]

May you and your Kerbal minions have good fortune for eternity.LoL. This will save me from tons of headaches!

[Xentoe]

Hmmm looks all real loveley, but know anyhow when there will come an update with these nice gimmics?

[Roboto]

Hmmm looks all real loveley, but know anyhow when there will come an update with these nice gimmics?

Sean and I are going to try to bust out as much as we can over the next couple days, still aiming for this weekend.

[seanth]

Update:

Over the weekend I worked on how the various parts work alone and with one another. While very biological, I am not sure it is _fun_

So here I am asking your opinion on two fronts. BioMass can work to do two things: recycle gasses for use with things like IonCross life support, or make fuel

1.) How many greenhouse modules should be necessary to maintain a crew capsule (you pick the crew number). It shouldn't be 1 greenhouse module supports 10 kerbals. That just makes it too easy. Alternately, 10 greenhouses to support 1 kerbal sounds like an exercise in tedium

2.) How much LiquidFuel should a single greenhouse be able to provide in 24hrs? It is unreasonable, I think, to think you can get 150 units of LiquidFuel(fills a MK1 Fuselage) in 24hrs, for example. But a year is also unreasonable. If the conversion would remain active when you changed focus to different craft, I would be inclined to slow-boat things. As things stand, how long would you be willing to wait to get 150 units of liquidfuel.

2a.) How many greenhouses would you will willing to have on a craft to generate fuel?

Answers to these questions (especially 2 and 2a) will allow me to back calculate from the outputs to figure out the input values and still keep the rates within biologically meaningful ranges.

[Dante80]

1. One greenhouse per Kerbal, and that greenhouse cannot produce fuel when used for life support.

2. 1-2 LF per day per greenhouse.

3. depends on the mass and effectiveness those greenhouses have.

[therealcrow999]

I have to agree a lot with 1 and 2 on this.

1. One green house should be enough for one or two Kerbals at the most. Judging by the size of it. At the green house worst it would be able to maintain 1 kerbal and at its best to have some O2 left over to skim some for an extra kerbal.

2. 2 LF a day, you would only have to wait 75 days until 150 tnak would be full. Which seems a good amount of time to wait. Assuming that in the imaginative eye they are efficient. 2LF a day would be two months and a little over. 3LF a day would be be slightly less then 2 months. 4LF per day seems like a lot to me. I would go more for 3LF per day, 2 also sounds good. But 3 seems a little more game friendly.

2a. This depends on the craft and what size capsule. I would say 1 or 2 depending on the mission. I think deeper outer solar system missions, I would take more then 1 or 2.

1. One greenhouse per Kerbal, and that greenhouse cannot produce fuel when used for life support.

2. 1-2 LF per day per greenhouse.

3. depends on the mass and effectiveness those greenhouses have.

Edited November 25, 2013 by therealcrow999

[Jivaii]

I'd like to see BioMass support life support mods. That said, one greenhouse per kerbal is a little steep. One green house supporting 2 is more understandable, and you can make your stations have a little symmetry. This way, you have two greenhouses per hitchhiker module.

No fuel made while in life support mode, and filling an orange tank every 2 weeks (meaning one week if you're using two) sounds reasonable. There's Kethane for large quantities.

[seanth]

I'd like to see BioMass support life support mods. That said, one greenhouse per kerbal is a little steep. One green house supporting 2 is more understandable, and you can make your stations have a little symmetry. This way, you have two greenhouses per hitchhiker module.

No fuel made while in life support mode, and filling an orange tank every 2 weeks (meaning one week if you're using two) sounds reasonable. There's Kethane for large quantities.

I can guarantee BioMass will work with IonCross, even if we have it provide a slightly modified resource cfg for IonCross. My hope is that the compatibility will increase down the road. Right now the life support functions and fuel generation functions are linked in that making fuel necessarily reduces the life support capacity. So it's up to the player. In am overnight test, unmonitored biomass growth and fuel production eventually led to the consumption of all CO2, which stopped growth. Biomass harvesting continued, though, so eventually there was no more biomass. Tend you gardens well is the lesson, I guess.

[sidfu]

most ls modules have went with the names oxygen,co2 or carbon dioxode. also tac has been updated and removed all tac form resorces

so now only differnce in ls modules is funtionality and weight of oxy and such.

ive already modified the old zz greenhouse to work with tac ls so wont be hard to change them towork with any.

1 green house should beable to support 3 kerbins imo. reason is most use the 3 person capsule for most missions. as for fuel i use modular fuels so no matter what i would have to mess with the.cfg file to add the conversion for more fuels.

heres what i think u should do make the green houses then afterwards make .cfg files for the other ls modules and fuel systems. me i would be happy to provide .cfgs for to work with other ls modules. others would be happy also imo.

for me i wont use any ls mod that dont atlest have the 3 basic elements needed and thats food,water and oxygen.

u could always put out a dev version and others can report bugs and post opinions on how its already working.

Edited November 25, 2013 by sidfu
more mumojumo added

[Jivaii]

I personally prefer TAC, since it doesn't stop working in timewarp.

[seanth]

heres what i think u should do make the green houses then afterwards make .cfg files for the other ls modules and fuel systems. me i would be happy to provide .cfgs for to work with other ls modules. others would be happy also imo.

My object in working with Roboto has been to make what happens in the parts (through the cfg files) biologically balanced. I'm using real (gasp) chemical reaction equations, so the amounts going in result in similar amounts coming out. So, you are welcome to modify the things once we release them, but I guarantee I will never make a biological part that makes Xenon. Altering the densities in the Resource.cfg file that will come with BioMass will result in things behaving in crazy ways.

To give people an idea of what is currently in place:

-O2 can be compressed into Oxidizer

-Biomass can be converted into Liquidfuel through a series of steps (biomass->oil and ethanol which combined make liquid fuel. I.e. similar to how real biofuels are made)

-Several processes produce H2 which can be compressed into Monopropellant

More soon.

[JeffreyCor]

1) I think 1 per Kerbal seems good, since they are fairly large modules but plants don't put out huge amounts of O2 quickly, but sedately and continuously over time.

2) How quickly would depend on if it will continue to produce when not actively selected. at 2 per day it would take a year to fill a large tank which seems unreasonable to have the ship actively selected during this time.

2a) The really depends on application. Personally I put these on space stations to generate fuel for refilling ships that dock on the way to and from missions which would allow far greater number than a traveling ship.

[seanth]

Update:

I tested the greenhouse module with the IonCross mod. Using the MK1-2 command pod, 1 greenhouse is enough to keep the 3 Kerbals alive. In fact, there isn't enough CO2 production for optimal plant growth. Interestingly, the O2 is not increasing as the greenhouse runs, so IonCross's default O2 consumption for 3 Kerbals looks like it's basically the same as O2 output from 1 greenhouse. Since I modeled the plant growth rate on bamboo, and the gas exchanges seem realistic (as far as I have tested thus far), things are coming up Milhouse.

As for fuel production, a quick test planetside showed 0.13 units of liquid fuel in 10 min. So in a single Kerbin day (6hrs), you'd get 4.68 units of LiquidFuel.

[USS_Cuttlefish]

1. I think that 1 per 2 Kerbals would be good because I don't think that Kerbals would consume O2 that fast considering that they are smaller than humans.

2. I would like to see it produce 3.14 Lf per day one because it would be very Kerbal and two 2 Lf would take way too long but three feels just right.

2a. This depends on the type of craft if it was a space station or planet base I would have quite a few but if it is to do say a grand tour I may have two to four.

[therealcrow999]

Yeah the hardest part is the cfg tweaks, one can get OCD trying to find right setting and may go mad in the process. lol

Update:

I tested the greenhouse module with the IonCross mod. Using the MK1-2 command pod, 1 greenhouse is enough to keep the 3 Kerbals alive. In fact, there isn't enough CO2 production for optimal plant growth. Interestingly, the O2 is not increasing as the greenhouse runs, so IonCross's default O2 consumption for 3 Kerbals looks like it's basically the same as O2 output from 1 greenhouse. Since I modeled the plant growth rate on bamboo, and the gas exchanges seem realistic (as far as I have tested thus far), things are coming up Milhouse.

As for fuel production, a quick test planetside showed 0.13 units of liquid fuel in 10 min. So in a single Kerbin day (6hrs), you'd get 4.68 units of LiquidFuel.

[seanth]

Yeah the hardest part is the cfg tweaks, one can get OCD trying to find right setting and may go mad in the process. lol

I'm pretty happy with the settings from the get go actually. This is one of those situations where sitting down with paper and pencil and working through the biology, chemistry and math paid off...at least in my eyes.

It seems like we'll have a sneak-peek dev release very soon. Probably not until after thx giving though because, you know. Thx giving.

Edited November 26, 2013 by seanth

[therealcrow999]

I took engineering math in college, but I was English major. So since I don't use math a lot in what I do, I pretty much lost it. I'm going to have to go and dig out my math book I had for that class and go over some stuff.

I'm pretty happy with the settings from the get go actually. This is one of those situations where sitting down with paper and pencil and working through the biology, chemistry and math paid off...at least in my eyes.

It seems like we'll have a sneak-peek dev release very soon. Probably not until after thx giving though because, you know. Thx giving.

[Roboto]

The original branch of BioMass has been updated on the SpacePort! I have updated the link in the original post. We are also open testing the more juiced up Biology+ version of BioMass, you can find the link to it in the in the top post as well! Please give us feed back on both branches of the mod, as development will be continuing!

[therealcrow999]

So with the more science one, do I use download and run the Biomass Master zip by itself or do I combine both?

[Roboto]

So with the more science one, do I use download and run the Biomass Master zip by itself or do I combine both?

Just the master from github for now.

For anyone that needs it, here is a skin that shows which direction the inflatable greenhouse extends outward. I forgot to add it before uploading. I have since updated the zipfile. Just add it to the Parts>Greenhouses>BaseGreenHouse/ and overwrite the other.

[Xentoe]

Had been nice if you had direct addded it into the research Tree

Ah ok *do it myselfe*

[Roboto]

Had been nice if you had direct addded it into the research Tree

Ah ok *do it myselfe*

I thought it was. Shows up there or me.