[0.23] [Beta] KESA Resource Integration v0.1 (TACLS & KSPI Water)

[Eadrom]

The Kerbin Engineering and Science Administration is proud to present the KESA Resource Integration addon.

This addon integrates resources from one plugin into a different plugin. Currently, it integrates the water resource from TAC Life Support into KSP Interstellar. It does this by removing the KSPI LqdWater resource and replacing it with the TACLS Water resource. This allows more advanced forward supply depots to be built. More integration between TACLS and KSPI, as well as resources from other mods, to come!

The problems:

In stock TACLS, the only resource that can be obtained off-world is oxygen and only from Laythe and only if your vessel has an air intake. You can can also make oxygen by using electrolysis, but this process requires you haul along TACLS Water with you. It makes no sense from a TWR point of view to bring extra TACLS Water and a TACLS Water Splitter part just to make oxygen.

In stock KSPI, the water collected by the KSPI Refinery is not drinkable by the crew. Nor is the TACLS Water Splitter able to produce breathable oxygen with KSPI Water.

My solution:

However, my addon removes those restrictions and logistical problems. You can now obtain breathable oxygen and drinkable water in four locations outside of Kerbin! With TACLS's Water Splitter and KSPI's Refinery, you can set up supply bases that can produce different life support and fuel supplies. Additional resources may be attainable depending on where you are landed. In addition, if you want to use water to fuel your nuclear thermal rockets, you have access to the smaller water tanks from TACLS instead of just the single very large one available from KSPI. You could also siphon off some water from life support to serve as emergency fuel for nuclear thermal rockets!

Tips:

TACLS Water can be obtained on celestial bodies other than Kerbin in KSPI. Eve and Laythe have oceans that the Refinery can suck in water from. Vall and Duna have ice in their soil that the Refinery can cook water out of.

Because of its low gravity (0.235g's), no atmosphere, and distant location, Vall makes an excellant location for a supply base to support missions in the Jool system or at Eeloo. Refinery ships can bring up water extracted from Vall's surface to a station in orbit where it can be processed into breathable oxygen, drinkable water, liquid fuel, and oxidizer. Vall also has supplies of Uranium and Thorium which can be used to refuel fission reactors.

Download:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nhjs46eruv1801m/KESA%20v0.1.zip

Installation:

Place the "KESA" folder into your "GameData" folder, just like you would when installing any other mod. Be sure you have the required dependencies installed, as noted below.

Dependencies:

This addon requires both TAC Life Support v0.7 and KSP Interstellar v0.9.1 to be installed. This addon also requires the Module Manager v1.5 plugin, however KSPI includes this in its distribution, so you should not need to download MM as well.

Please note: higher versions of dependencies currently should not break this addon. I am on holiday until the end of the year. When I get home, I will test with the newest versions of dependencies and release an update if needed. I have read the documentation of the dependencies' updates and nothing should break this addon's functionality.

Change Log:

v0.1 - 12/27/2013

- Changed nuclear thermal rockets to use TACLS Water instead of KSPI LqdWater.

- Changed the base water resource for Interstellar's plugin to use TACLS Water instead of KSPI LqdWater.

- Changed the oceans on Eve, Kerbin, and Laythe to contain TACLS Water instead of KSPI LqdWater.

- Changed the composition of the soil on Duna and Vall to contain ice that melts into TACLS Water instead of KSPI LqdWater.

- Changed the KSPI Water Storage Tank part to store TACLS Water instead of KSPI LqdWater. Reduced the amount of water stored to account for using the higher density of water defined by TACLS.

- Changed the KSPI Refinery to extract TACLS Water when splashed down on Eve, Kerbin, and Laythe or landed on Duna and Vall. Changed the small internal water tank to store TACLS Water instead of KSPI LqdWater.

[Eadrom]

Future Plans and ideas:

Future versions of this addon will bring tighter integration for the oxygen and hydrogen type resources used by TACLS and KSPI. An example of this would be combining liquid fuel and oxidizer to make drinkable water*. Another example would be to have the TACLS Water Splitter produce liquid fuel when performing electrolysis to make breathable oxygen.

I am considering retasking the Water Splitter to become more of a phase converter. The Refinery can already perform water electrolysis to make oxidizer and liquid fuel. Having the Water Splitter make breathable oxygen and liquid fuel is semi-redundant. It may be better to have the Refinery performing electrolysis and the Water Splitter able to phase shift the oxidizer into breathable oxygen. This is just an idea at the moment and not something I've given a great deal of thought to.

One change I am considering to make first is to have the Refinery collect WasteWater. Basically unpurified water that needs to be cleaned up before being drinkable or useable as fuel for nuclear thermal rockets.

I also would like to balance the energy consumption of the TACLS recycler parts with the standard units of KSPI's electrical system. In KSPI, one EC is one kW. With that known, I may be able to better approximate and balance the energy requirements for the Carbon Extractor and the Water Purifier.

Also on the list of things to be considered is integration with Kethane.

*KSPI considers liquid fuel to be liquid hydrogen and oxidizer to be liquid oxygen.

[rottielover]

This is awesome. Downloading immediately.

Edit: for the love of... Add a license please before the license police tear this down!

Edited December 28, 2013 by rottielover

[Shad0wCatcher]

Looks fairly solid so far Eadrom; loving that you're looking to integrate (with more depth anyhow) TACLS and Interstellar. The future changes definitely look promising. I personally am on the fence with regards to WasteWater collection as opposed to purified water, I can see one side talking about basically vacuuming up water (or drilling / melting etc) with the other talking about the power usage of the refinery equating to a purification process along with the vacuuming / drilling / mining etc. Have you by chance tried working this with TACLS 0.8 / KSPI 0.9.2 at all? No biggie either way, was more curiosity's sake than anything.

[panarchist]

Nicely done. Downloaded and trying out.

[Patupi]

Another useful addon would be to allow extraction of CO2 from Duna's atmosphere, which could then be converted into Oxygen with the carbon extractor. I suspect Eve would also have large concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, if it is anything like Venus. Probably either Potassium or Iodine as well... given the color Not that either of those would be useful for anything.

[Fractal_UK]

Another useful addon would be to allow extraction of CO2 from Duna's atmosphere, which could then be converted into Oxygen with the carbon extractor. I suspect Eve would also have large concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, if it is anything like Venus. Probably either Potassium or Iodine as well... given the color Not that either of those would be useful for anything.

To be totally honest I haven't played with TAC before so you may wish to confirm this but it sounds like water electrolysis is capable of producing breathable oxygen with this installed, so you should similarly be able to use the sabatier process on the refinery to convert a tiny amount of LiquidFuel into Methane (which you don't neccessarily need to use) and Oxygen. This will indeed work on both Eve and Duna.

[Eadrom]

Another useful addon would be to allow extraction of CO2 from Duna's atmosphere, which could then be converted into Oxygen with the carbon extractor. I suspect Eve would also have large concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, if it is anything like Venus. Probably either Potassium or Iodine as well... given the color Not that either of those would be useful for anything.

I think the CO2 extraction is something that can be done. TACLS has a module that allows for extraction of breathable oxygen using air intakes on Laythe and KSPI has atmospheric scoops for extracting several different resources from various atmospheres as well. I should be hook into those systems and KSPI's atmospheric resource mapping to allow for collection of straight CO2 that can can be used by TACLS's Carbon Extractor to produce oxygen.

As that shouldn't be too difficult to do, I've added that to the top of my dev to do list when I get home from holiday.

[Patupi]

To be totally honest I haven't played with TAC before so you may wish to confirm this but it sounds like water electrolysis is capable of producing breathable oxygen with this installed, so you should similarly be able to use the sabatier process on the refinery to convert a tiny amount of LiquidFuel into Methane (which you don't neccessarily need to use) and Oxygen. This will indeed work on both Eve and Duna.

I've heard of this with the Mars Direct system, but didn't think of it directly in getting material from Eve and Duna's air curiously. Nice touch, especially as you've got utilization of Methane in KSPI now. ISRU indeed I think for TAC LS for the moment a direct extraction and storage of CO2 would be simpler and more useful, but I'd like to see the Sabatier process eventually. Would make a useful addition to systems on offworld lifesupport needs.

[TaranisElsu]

I also would like to balance the energy consumption of the TACLS recycler parts with the standard units of KSPI's electrical system. In KSPI, one EC is one kW. With that known, I may be able to better approximate and balance the energy requirements for the Carbon Extractor and the Water Purifier.

Look at the work that eggrobin did on this. Also, he implemented a Sabatier Reactor. Both are in the TACLS thread. I will be integrating his work when I get a chance, but right now I am focused on finishing a Greenhouse module.

Some of your work here overlaps with my plans for TACLS, but you are free to beat me to it. And if you don't mind, I will draw from your work when I get there .

[Eadrom]

Look at the work that eggrobin did on this. Also, he implemented a Sabatier Reactor. Both are in the TACLS thread. I will be integrating his work when I get a chance, but right now I am focused on finishing a Greenhouse module.

Some of your work here overlaps with my plans for TACLS, but you are free to beat me to it. And if you don't mind, I will draw from your work when I get there .

KSPI's refinery does electrolysis and sabatier reactions already, so I was thinking of retasking your water splitter to instead phase shift oxidizer into breathable oxygen. My goal is to reduce redundancy as much as I can between the mods I support. So it one mod does something already or better, I would look at retasking a part from a different mod that does the same thing.

I imagine I will be able to accomplish the vast majority of my vision with module manager configs. If you would like to use some configs I've already written, be my guest. As long as someone gives me a shoutout for configs I've written that they want to use, I'd be happy.

[Eadrom]

I return home from holiday tomorrow. Has anyone been having issues with my addon? Any suggestions? Any requests for resources you'd like to see integrated?

[Fractal_UK]

I return home from holiday tomorrow. Has anyone been having issues with my addon? Any suggestions? Any requests for resources you'd like to see integrated?

You could look at adding a part that uses Pyrolysis to seperate methane into hydrogen and pyrolytic carbon. The hydrogen could be reused for the sabatier reaction and then you have a realistic closed-cycle life support system that only requires power to sustain.

I can add support in Interstellar for using internal supplies of carbon dioxide as a source for the sabatier reaction.

[Shad0wCatcher]

That'd be fairly amazing Fractal far as carbon dioxide usage. Everything works well so far Eadrom.

[Eadrom]

You could look at adding a part that uses Pyrolysis to seperate methane into hydrogen and pyrolytic carbon. The hydrogen could be reused for the sabatier reaction and then you have a realistic closed-cycle life support system that only requires power to sustain.

I can add support in Interstellar for using internal supplies of carbon dioxide as a source for the sabatier reaction.

There's been a few posts about methane and CO2, so I'll focus my next efforts on those two resources.

Looks fairly solid so far Eadrom; loving that you're looking to integrate (with more depth anyhow) TACLS and Interstellar. The future changes definitely look promising. I personally am on the fence with regards to WasteWater collection as opposed to purified water, I can see one side talking about basically vacuuming up water (or drilling / melting etc) with the other talking about the power usage of the refinery equating to a purification process along with the vacuuming / drilling / mining etc. Have you by chance tried working this with TACLS 0.8 / KSPI 0.9.2 at all? No biggie either way, was more curiosity's sake than anything.

I don't know how I missed this post. Sorry! I too am on the fence about starting with waste water and requiring processing to be used.

I have been out of town for the past week and so have been away from my desktop since the 22nd. I go home tomorrow morning. I have been reading up on the KSPI, TACLS, and MM patch notes, and there's nothing in them that should break my addon. I can't say for certain it should work with the most recent versions of the dependencies, but they should and no one has commented that they aren't. I will test comparability with the new versions tomorrow.

That'd be fairly amazing Fractal far as carbon dioxide usage. Everything works well so far Eadrom.

Thank you, that's good to hear.

[Ackander]

This is a great beginning to what I had in mind in a thread I made in the add-on request forum. Do not mind the 'guidelines', they are really a farce, though I do not think anyone has got it yet.

Anyway, it really bothered me that the life support mods and a few parts mods were using the 'same' resources, but their usage and properties were not coincident, so I made a request for someone to come up with a way to somehow unify the usage of resources between incompatible mods, or mods that use the same resources in different ways, such as life support and KSPI with water.

So, I am glad to see you tackling this particular problem. Good work, so far.

[Eadrom]

This is a great beginning to what I had in mind in a thread I made in the add-on request forum. Do not mind the 'guidelines', they are really a farce, though I do not think anyone has got it yet.

Anyway, it really bothered me that the life support mods and a few parts mods were using the 'same' resources, but their usage and properties were not coincident, so I made a request for someone to come up with a way to somehow unify the usage of resources between incompatible mods, or mods that use the same resources in different ways, such as life support and KSPI with water.

So, I am glad to see you tackling this particular problem. Good work, so far.

Come to think of it, I remember reading a few pages of your thread a couple weeks ago. Oddly enough, the idea for this addon stemmed from me using TACLS and KSPI and wanting the water resource to be the same. After chatting with Fractal a bit, he suggested I use module manager configs so that other people could make use of my changes. Then I started thinking about other resources I could integrate, looked at the Kethane API, and it all sorta snowballed from there. I don't imagine that I will be able to unify all resources used by all mods, but I'm hoping to include at least a few of the big ones like KSPI, TACLS, and Kethane then look at adding maybe stuff like the near future propulsion stuff and similar. A lot of mods are getting on the API and hook-ins bandwagon and just need something to tie them together. Hopefully I can do that, at least to some extent.

[Ackander]

Come to think of it, I remember reading a few pages of your thread a couple weeks ago. Oddly enough, the idea for this addon stemmed from me using TACLS and KSPI and wanting the water resource to be the same. After chatting with Fractal a bit, he suggested I use module manager configs so that other people could make use of my changes. Then I started thinking about other resources I could integrate, looked at the Kethane API, and it all sorta snowballed from there. I don't imagine that I will be able to unify all resources used by all mods, but I'm hoping to include at least a few of the big ones like KSPI, TACLS, and Kethane then look at adding maybe stuff like the near future propulsion stuff and similar. A lot of mods are getting on the API and hook-ins bandwagon and just need something to tie them together. Hopefully I can do that, at least to some extent.

Those are the four mods that got me started on resources too those weeks back. You are doing what I would be doing, had I more time right now. I really hope your work catches on so resources can be the same resources across all mods.

[Eadrom]

Looking through the KSPI configs, it looks like CO2 is already mapped out as an atmospheric resource on Eve, Kerbin, Duna, and Laythe. It also looks like the refinery resource collection module can be used to extract CO2 and store it. I have a few options where I can add this module: TACLS Air Filter, KSPI Refinery, and KSPI Atmospheric Scoops. It's applicable for all three parts, but I'm not sure where it would make most sense, both from a mechanics angle as well as a quality of life / gameplay angle.

I could add the CO2 collection to KSPI atmo scoops. The air filter is almost obsolete as it is from the fact that whilst below a certain altitude in an oxygen containing atmosphere, your kerbals breathe oxygen siphoned from ports on the vessel, and thus do not consume onboard oxygen supplies. If this feature were to be combined with the functionality of the air filter, it would remove the need for the TACLS air filter. So just being below a modest altitude on Laythe and Kerbin would allow your vessel to slowly recharge oxygen supplies. That though, is something that probably requires a TACLS API change as opposed to me being able to implement via config changes. As would the ability to use onboard supplies of CO2 for production of methane (sabatier).

Anywho, it's very late and I just wanted to provide an update on what I worked on today. It was writing down my thoughts and planning out a bit of the CO2 integration. I will go ahead and say that v0.2 will focus on CO2 integration. If anyone has some feedback on what part(s) you would like CO2 collection to be implemented on or you have an argument for what part you feel makes the most sense, I would love to hear your thoughts. I also would like to encourage people to let me know if a resource I'm working on is being used in or has something very similar in a different mod. I'm also open to suggestions on what people would like to see integrated next.

[Shad0wCatcher]

My vote is the atmospheric scoop; it's already balanced as a large turbine requiring multiple megawatts of power to gather atmospheric resources. It's radially attachable as opposed to the other two (I suppose you could make a case for the refinery but honestly its stack attach node is painful to work around, and its size is also rather unwieldy; not to mention the number of functions it already has).

[Eadrom]

I was leaning towards the scoop as well. In regards to breathable oxygen, I run into the issue that the scoop collects oxidizer and not beathable oxygen, so I suppose that makes a stronger case for a phase shift function. As a side note, I'm also looking at the small TACLS hexcans and the two small radiators for hooking into the KAS storage system. KAS won't be made a dependency, but if you have it installed you'll have a few extra options. You can store extra life support supplies and radiators in canisters. That way you can augment radiator capability or strap on some extra life support supplies as needed.

I will need to wait for Fractal_UK to change the way the refinery module code works in order to use internal supplies of CO2. In the meantime, I'm working on an efficient conversion for KSPI CO2. TACLS CO2 is "CarbonDioxide". KSPI's CO2 appears to be "PlanetCarbonDioxide" where planet is like Kerbin or Eve or Duna. So CO2 on Kerbin is "KerbinCarbonDioxide". I'm not sure if it's done this way so that each planet can have a different abundance of CO2, but I think it is. I'm also not sure if the refinery is actually consuming a universal CO2 resource type or if it's just testing to see if CO2 is available in the atmosphere via the guiName field value.I'll see if Fractal can implement the needed changes in the refinery code to make my changes work when the next version of KSPI comes out.

There's also the issue of how/where to store CO2. I was also thinking that if TACLS has tweakables implemented for its life support containers, you could use the oxygen containers, tweakable all the oxygen out. Then either tweakable CO2 in the tank (might be unbalancing to do so since you can recycle CO2, giving oxygen tanks something like 190% storage capacity) or rig up something on launch clamps with a scoop. Another option is that since only the refinery part can perform the sabatier process, I could add a small amount of CO2 capacity there. I could also try to clone a part that just stores CO2. I was thinking maybe one of the two stock radial monopropellant tanks.

I hope to have a version with the KAS and CO2 changes (minus the refinery using internal CO2 feature) available sometime this weekend.

[KeithStone]

I know that Ironcross life support had some information on extracting carbon dioxide from duna's atmosphere as well. Not sure the code he was using. Even though I dont lean toward the interstellar pack much, I'd get it again just to get more use out of TAC. I'm also hoping that the new biofuels+science pack will make a little more progress, so I can build a truly self-sustaining colony with life support. Love the progress here, and eagerly awaiting pulling CO2 out of atmospheres!

[Kaa253]

Oh... here it is! I was reading Eadrom's conversations with Fractal on the KSPI forum last year and didn't realise you started a new thread for it. Alrighty, I got to try this out. I assume the latest updates to KSPI and TACLS will not be a problem? It makes so much sense to have only one kind of H2O in KSP. Great to see you talking about integrating the various CO2's. I really believe that Kethane and Methane are essentially the same stuff as well. Perhaps Methane could be converted to Kethane by the addition of a green dye concentrate (or St Patrick's Day spirit?). Actually it should be fairly easy to do, even I could probably pull that one off. Anyway, here goes KESA Resource Integration testing 1, 2 ...

[TomatoSoup]

KSPI updated to 0.10! As best as I can tell the only change that need be made to this mod is to duplicate the last block and change the target name from FNRefinery to FNInlineRefinery.

[Seeker89]

Does this also a line with the biofuels mod?