[0.23]asmi's ECLSS Mod (current version - 1.0.15) - Life Support Mod

[Synthesis]

In the meantime, I think we definitely need smaller tanks, and generally speaking, we need tanks to carry more gas under pressure. It seems odd you can carry a regenerator and oxygen tank assembly much larger in volume than your command module, but three kerbonauts will use it up in a matter of a week or two (even with enough electricity to operate everything).

I'm going to be modifying values to carry more gas, but in the meantime, small tanks that we can fit into, say, the 6S service module or the like would be appreciated. Basically something smaller than a 1.25 meter tank.

Still enjoying the mod though.

[Frostiken]

In the meantime, I think we definitely need smaller tanks, and generally speaking, we need tanks to carry more gas under pressure. It seems odd you can carry a regenerator and oxygen tank assembly much larger in volume than your command module, but three kerbonauts will use it up in a matter of a week or two (even with enough electricity to operate everything).

I'm going to be modifying values to carry more gas, but in the meantime, small tanks that we can fit into, say, the 6S service module or the like would be appreciated. Basically something smaller than a 1.25 meter tank.

Still enjoying the mod though.

Agreed. The biggest turnoff to me from life support mods - going back even as far as the ZO2 mod - has been the requirement to stack a bunch of crap and cover your rocket with things. I'd prefer to see parts that are extremely dense - small but heavy. And effective. Why does a regenerator need to be so big anyway? Weren't the scrubbers in the Apollo program - good for three men for well over a week - just a few cartons the size of shoeboxes?

Weight is the only thing that really matters - making things take up a bunch of space is just inconvenient. I should be able to jam a regenerator and a few extra tanks good for several weeks inside one of those service compartments.

[boberts314]

But I´ve got a problem here when using this mod. I can´t recover or terminate flights ... after restart of KSP it works and then after the next landing it won´t.

Other mods I´ve installed: mechjeb (latest dev build), deadly reenter and dockingportallignment.

I tried it with the new 1.5 modulmanager and the included modulmanager.dll same problem as above.

Maybe someone can help me.

Could you describe what happens when you attempt to use the recovery or terminate function? I'm having problems here as well. Also, are those the only mods you are using?

[Guest]

Agreed. The biggest turnoff to me from life support mods - going back even as far as the ZO2 mod - has been the requirement to stack a bunch of crap and cover your rocket with things. I'd prefer to see parts that are extremely dense - small but heavy. And effective. Why does a regenerator need to be so big anyway? Weren't the scrubbers in the Apollo program - good for three men for well over a week - just a few cartons the size of shoeboxes?

Weight is the only thing that really matters - making things take up a bunch of space is just inconvenient. I should be able to jam a regenerator and a few extra tanks good for several weeks inside one of those service compartments.

A regenerator is not a CO2 scrubber! No, it's actually a CO2 recycling system that turns CO2 into O2. An Apollo "regenerator" just got rid of excess CO2. In fact, such element is included, by default, into each crewed pod, and always on, to boot. Also known as "crew death from CO2 poisoning is not implemented".

[brooklyn666]

Agreed. The biggest turnoff to me from life support mods - going back even as far as the ZO2 mod - has been the requirement to stack a bunch of crap and cover your rocket with things. I'd prefer to see parts that are extremely dense - small but heavy. And effective. Why does a regenerator need to be so big anyway? Weren't the scrubbers in the Apollo program - good for three men for well over a week - just a few cartons the size of shoeboxes?

Weight is the only thing that really matters - making things take up a bunch of space is just inconvenient. I should be able to jam a regenerator and a few extra tanks good for several weeks inside one of those service compartments.

I'd love to see something like this implemented. If you look at the Apollo SM, it's volume was only 6.17 cubic meters, yet it contained 2 weeks of life support (H2 and O2 tanks, fuel cells,) avionics, plus all of the fuel and RCS tanks, and the necessary plumbing/wiring.

The O2 tanks themselves were only about .66 meters in diameter, but held something like 128 kgs of LOX.

[Moach]

go in the LifeSupport folder inside GameData, edit Lifesupport.cfg and set the following:

LifeSupportConfig

{

Consumption = 0.00032 // 0.006366

CO2Production = 0.73

WarningThreshold = 0.25

FinalWarningThreshold = 0.05

CandleO2Amount = 137.5

EVAOxygenAmount = 50.0

ThreadingDebug = 0

EVAPropellantAmount = 20

}

UnityGUIFrameworkConfig

{

DebugMode = 0

}

This are the settings I've been using to my uttermost enjoyment - I find the consumption value altered like this gives you the perfect balance for prompting you to design vehicles that look and perform "authentically" in this sense...

You'll still need to care a lot about your supplies - you're not gonna make it much past a couple of orbits without some serious hardware aboard - but at least you don't need more mass for that than for fuel anymore

feel free to tweak the values above as you find best - these I developed between trips to Duna and then Jool, I was happy with the results - look at some examples:

Duna-Rated craft:

Jool-Rated Craft:

You can clearly see how the need for life support affects the design choices one has to make - I find the results are much better looking craft, but well I'm biased to say, since those are my own not-completely-failed designs

cheers!

[Starwaster]

A regenerator is not a CO2 scrubber! No, it's actually a CO2 recycling system that turns CO2 into O2. An Apollo "regenerator" just got rid of excess CO2. In fact, such element is included, by default, into each crewed pod, and always on, to boot. Also known as "crew death from CO2 poisoning is not implemented".

Just some FYI, to date, IRL, nobody uses any sort of CO2 -> O2 regenerator / recycler. The best we've actually done so far is regenerative CO2 scrubbers that can rid themselves of CO2 by a combination of heat and vacuum exposure. More than one is required because regenerating one requires another to take its place while it's offline.

[Synthesis]

I'd love to see something like this implemented. If you look at the Apollo SM, it's volume was only 6.17 cubic meters, yet it contained 2 weeks of life support (H2 and O2 tanks, fuel cells,) avionics, plus all of the fuel and RCS tanks, and the necessary plumbing/wiring.

The O2 tanks themselves were only about .66 meters in diameter, but held something like 128 kgs of LOX.

Indeed--the current models, while very sharp looking, are clearly the sort of things that would exist on a massive ISS-size space station--and should probably carry enough oxygen for a mere 3 passengers for months, not weeks, before factoring in recovery. We're dealing with a recycling and tank system each as large, or larger, in volume than a three man command module!

I hate questioning a modder like this, since I've got zero experience in the matter, but it really does seem like the current systems are really inefficient, compared to the 1960s technology.

Look: the Soyuz's nitrogen/oxygen life support system seems to tank up the volume of ~3 cylindrical tanks, each half the size of a passenger or so (I'm guessing here, it's hard to get a good picture of them), and has enough capacity for 30 days with a crew of 3. Obviously, this doesn't include things like food and so forth, but it's still very small.

Edited January 1, 2014 by Synthesis

[Guest]

Just some FYI, to date, IRL, nobody uses any sort of CO2 -> O2 regenerator / recycler. The best we've actually done so far is regenerative CO2 scrubbers that can rid themselves of CO2 by a combination of heat and vacuum exposure. More than one is required because regenerating one requires another to take its place while it's offline.

Yes, but Asmi's mod included an CO2 recycling system for gameplay reasons. Such a device is physically possible, though only plants (even then, not all of them) managed this so far. The main problem with this process is that it's incredibly power-hungry. An artificial system of this kind would probably be nuclear-powered.

I assume pods have regenerative scrubbers fitted as standard. A future expansion may include water to allow re-creating ECLSS used on ISS. Perhaps we'll even get proper, toggleable scrubbers then, but the only thing that could be done to "regenerator" part is bumping the power consumption to the point it'd require a nuke reactor to run.

[SyrusDrake]

Very nice mod, the first live support mod I've seen so far that doesn't require me to stack dull-looking tanks on top of each other...

I'd really love to use it but...I can't. If I have it installed, KSP uses 69% CPU power if I just have a rocket on the launch pad. Normally, it uses 19%.

Apparently, the performance got better with the last updates so I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong? Or do you think it may clash with one of my (many) other mods?

[Synthesis]

Very nice mod, the first live support mod I've seen so far that doesn't require me to stack dull-looking tanks on top of each other...

I'd really love to use it but...I can't. If I have it installed, KSP uses 69% CPU power if I just have a rocket on the launch pad. Normally, it uses 19%.

Apparently, the performance got better with the last updates so I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong? Or do you think it may clash with one of my (many) other mods?

Fascinating observation! I've noticed my CPU performance has gone downhill as well, I'll need to investigate if ECLSS is the cause too. I also thought it was because I had too many mods as well, but this wasn't so bad in 0.22.

[NathanKell]

The O2 tanks (and CO2 tanks) should have roughly 1000x the resources they do now. Simple cfg edit.

[Frostiken]

go in the LifeSupport folder inside GameData, edit Lifesupport.cfg and set the following:

LifeSupportConfig

{

Consumption = 0.00032 // 0.006366

CO2Production = 0.73

WarningThreshold = 0.25

FinalWarningThreshold = 0.05

CandleO2Amount = 137.5

EVAOxygenAmount = 50.0

ThreadingDebug = 0

EVAPropellantAmount = 20

}

UnityGUIFrameworkConfig

{

DebugMode = 0

}

Thank you for this. The only thing that I think should be changed beyond this is reducing the amount of O2 in EVA. Carrying a week's worth of O2 in the capsule is fine, carrying over 24 hours worth in your little suit is a bit of a stretch ~6-8 hours would be far more reasonable.

The O2 tanks (and CO2 tanks) should have roughly 1000x the resources they do now. Simple cfg edit.

More like 500x the resources and half the size. They're too big to fit inside the service module fairings... hell they're too big to 'hide' inside stock decouplers and such.

I guess it wouldn't really be half the size because of the maths involved, but you get the point.

I'd love to see something like this implemented. If you look at the Apollo SM, it's volume was only 6.17 cubic meters, yet it contained 2 weeks of life support (H2 and O2 tanks, fuel cells,) avionics, plus all of the fuel and RCS tanks, and the necessary plumbing/wiring.

The O2 tanks themselves were only about .66 meters in diameter, but held something like 128 kgs of LOX.

2 weeks for three people, to boot. That figure doesn't even include the life support on the LEM which was a further week's worth for two, and correct me if I'm wrong, but was successfully used during in Apollo 13 to support three for much of the trip.

With the new engine JPL has coming out, trips to Mars could conceivably be reduced to about 45 days, which means if it were successfully able to be scaled up (it can't), the Apollo LEM / SM could get three people halfway to Mars.

Edited January 1, 2014 by Frostiken

[dlrk]

How much O2 does a Kerbal consume per day?

[Paul Kingtiger]

So I did some research on O2 tanks, using medical tanks rather than space tanks, simply because that data was easier to find.

I collected size, weight and capacity information for a range of different sizes noticing the trends you would assume (larger tanks hold more O2 for weight of the cylinder). Anyway, then I estimated the size of the small O2 tank in the mod and used that information to estimate what the O2 capacity would be.

So the ECLSS Oxygen Small Tank would hold about 27077 liters of gas O2 (of course it's compressed in the cylinder), which is a massive difference from the 400 it currently has.

That much O2 weighs about 36kg and a cylinder strong enough should weigh 86kg (that's assuming the technology used in current medical use cylinders, not fancy space tech)

A human consumes about 550 liters of O2 every day (24 hours) so that Small Tank has enough O2 (assuming Kerbals have the same needs as Humans) for 1182 hours!

The large tank, which at minimum is 12 small tanks, gives enough for over 14000 hours!

So there is our problem, the tanks are large and hold so much O2 as to make resource management pointless at realistic rates.

My suggested fix for this would be to rescale all the parts so the large tanks and reprocessor were 1.25m giving smaller tanks, which when filled with realistic amount of O2 give a good challenge for resource management.

I'm going to play around with some number and knock up a module manager file.

[andqui]

I've look and failed to see it mentioned...maybe I didn't look hard enough. I think I found a bug. A kerbal pulls MonoPropellant out of the vessel when he goes on EVA, instead of just however much he needs (default 20U), the entire tank is emptied. The kerbals EVA tank is put back, whatever he didn't use, but still considerably less than what it's supposed to be.

Ex. If I have 60U of MonoP in the tank, a Kerbal then takes 20U with him, well he is full at 20U. Going back to the vessel he came from...that 60U tank is now completely empty, so when the Kerbal comes back...whatever he didn't use does go back, but the tank is 40U short after it was emptied. Not good!

I'm using .23KSP, This (v 1.0.15), with a bunch of other mods, I'm going to go back and test with JUST KSP and verify if it's this ECLSS or if it's this in combination with something else.

Confirmed...with JUST KSP, ECLSS, & MM 1.5 a 60U MonoP tank empties when a Kerbal goes EVA, even though the Kerbal only has 20U on him.

I'm having this problem as well- is there a known fix?

[brooklyn666]

So I did some research on O2 tanks, using medical tanks rather than space tanks, simply because that data was easier to find.

I collected size, weight and capacity information for a range of different sizes noticing the trends you would assume (larger tanks hold more O2 for weight of the cylinder). Anyway, then I estimated the size of the small O2 tank in the mod and used that information to estimate what the O2 capacity would be.

So the ECLSS Oxygen Small Tank would hold about 27077 liters of gas O2 (of course it's compressed in the cylinder), which is a massive difference from the 400 it currently has.

That much O2 weighs about 36kg and a cylinder strong enough should weigh 86kg (that's assuming the technology used in current medical use cylinders, not fancy space tech)

A human consumes about 550 liters of O2 every day (24 hours) so that Small Tank has enough O2 (assuming Kerbals have the same needs as Humans) for 1182 hours!

The large tank, which at minimum is 12 small tanks, gives enough for over 14000 hours!

So there is our problem, the tanks are large and hold so much O2 as to make resource management pointless at realistic rates.

My suggested fix for this would be to rescale all the parts so the large tanks and reprocessor were 1.25m giving smaller tanks, which when filled with realistic amount of O2 give a good challenge for resource management.

I'm going to play around with some number and knock up a module manager file.

Is that assuming gaseous O2 storage? O2 has an expansion ratio of 1:861, so cryo tanks contain the same volume of gas while being much smaller.

And we could reasonably assume that Kerbals use less oxygen than humans, since they are only half the size.

[Frostiken]

So there is our problem, the tanks are large and hold so much O2 as to make resource management pointless at realistic rates.

I don't really understand this though. There isn't really 'resource management' here. You either have O2 and your kerbals all die or you don't. There's nothing else to do with the O2 that would require 'management', nor is there really any other in-game ways of acquiring some on any long trip. If you plan a trip to Minmus and back, you either bring enough O2 for the whole trip, or you don't and your mission fails. Let's assume you always bring enough O2 and ignore the aspect of Kerbal death entirely. At this point, effectively all the life support *actually does* is add dead weight to any ship.

Truth be told, I can't think of a single moment where O2 was a 'resource management' problem at any time in the history of manned spaceflight. The only close-call that comes to mind was Apollo 13, and it was a buildup of CO2 that was the biggest threat there, not running out of O2.

Even if we just approach this from a 'dead weight' perspective, I don't really mind, I just hate that the parts and tanks are so big. Like I said, that's always been my biggest turnoff from these kinds of mods.

Edited January 1, 2014 by Frostiken

[brooklyn666]

There's the Apollo SM. It's 11m high and 4m in diameter. And look at all of that stuff that fit in there!

[brooklyn666]

I don't really understand this though. There isn't really 'resource management' here. You either have O2 and your kerbals all die or you don't. There's nothing else to do with the O2 that would require 'management', nor is there really any other in-game ways of acquiring some on any long trip. If you plan a trip to Minmus and back, you either bring enough O2 for the whole trip, or you don't and your mission fails. Let's assume you always bring enough O2 and ignore the aspect of Kerbal death entirely. At this point, effectively all the life support *actually does* is add dead weight to any ship.

Truth be told, I can't think of a single moment where O2 was a 'resource management' problem at any time in the history of manned spaceflight. The only close-call that comes to mind was Apollo 13, and it was a buildup of CO2 that was the biggest threat there, not running out of O2.

It's not so much a resource management problem as it is a "we don't need the giant tanks for this short trip, so let's save mass and space" problem.

[Frostiken]

It's not so much a resource management problem as it is a "we don't need the giant tanks for this short trip, so let's save mass and space" problem.

To be fair, I didn't really understand what he was saying. It sounded half like he was saying 'realistic values would make it too easy so we shouldn't do it' and half like we should.

[tygoo7]

I love this mod because of the fantastic models and also because I don't like having to worry about food and water just oxygen and carbon dioxide. I found a way to make 1.25m stack oxygen and dioxide tanks. You can easily fit a radial tank inside one of these.

[Paul Kingtiger]

Brooklyn, I'm assuming the O2 is stored as a liquid, but the volumes I've quoted are as a gas because that's what we want to breathe.

I did think about reducing the amount Kerbals require per hour but figured I'd keep it at human rates (23lph) you can easily change that in the LifeSupportConfig.cfg file if you want.

Frostiken, the problem at the moment is the tanks in the stock mod hold a very low amount of O2 for their size so you need loads of them for any long duration flight. But when you add more realistic amount of O2 capacity for their size they hold so much that having more than 1 tank becomes very rare for most flights. The solution I think, is to use smaller tanks with realistic capacity so you have to plan for O2 usage without having a rocket full of O2.

I guess if you're going to assume O2 is never going to be a problem, then don't use the mod. Or if you want to focus more on CO2 buildup being the problem then there are other mods that take that approach (IonCross focuses more on CO2 build up)

[Paul Kingtiger]

To be fair, I didn't really understand what he was saying. It sounded half like he was saying 'realistic values would make it too easy so we shouldn't do it' and half like we should.

I'm with you! I'm saying the tanks in the mod don't hold a realistic amount of O2, but when you add a realistic amount then they hold so much (because the tanks are so big) that it becomes too easy / pointless.

My solution is to use realistic O2 per volume of tank figures, but have smaller tank parts.

EDIT:

You can see the spreadsheet I used to work all this out on skydrive

http://sdrv.ms/1a1Sn2p

Edited January 1, 2014 by Paul Kingtiger

[brooklyn666]

I'm with you! I'm saying the tanks in the mod don't hold a realistic amount of O2, but when you add a realistic amount then they hold so much (because the tanks are so big) that it becomes too easy / pointless.

My solution is to use realistic O2 per volume of tank figures, but have smaller tank parts.

That's it. Right there. That's what I was trying to say but was too hungover to properly elucidate.