[Idea Feasibility] Kethane Lite?

[Haze-Zero]

Disclaimer:

First, I am not a mod-maker or mod-dev in the slightest, but I have been giving some consideration to a Kethane Lite idea.

Second, Kethane is an awesome mod, I love it and I feel nothing but love for Majiir and the work he has done for this mod. I do not wish to make a replacement to his mod or even a mod that would compete with his. I post this only to ask one question really about the feasibility of my idea. If I did somehow manage to make this mod, which is highly unlikely, it is even more unlikely that I would release it to the public. I would keep it for personal use. I mostly use the term Kethane Lite as a reference and to give an idea of what I would like to accomplish

:End Disclaimer

The idea is basically you land your craft anywhere, deploy the drill and it will mine up whatever fuel the drill was made for. There would be no scanning, no hunting for deposits, and this would be a completely cheaty way to obtain free fuel for your craft. I realized I could do this by simply making the drill a fuel generator that takes electricity and generates fuel while the drill animates.

My question is, is there a way for my generator to know, without making a plug-in to tell it, that it is 'in flight' and thus NOT 'landed' and make it unable to generate fuel? The moment the craft is landed, it unlocks the drill and now the drill is free to generate all the fuel you have the time and electricity to make.

Edit:

I apologize, this should most likely be in plug-in development help and support.

Edited July 11, 2014 by Haze-Zero

[Majiir]

You could do this with Kethane by defining a custom resource generator that uniformly places your desired resource all over the planet. Then you can let Kethane's drill logic handle ground detection. There are a few features not yet implemented which could come in handy, like support for infinite resources in a deposit, but you could work around that by setting a very high starting quantity.

[Haze-Zero]

You could do this with Kethane by defining a custom resource generator that uniformly places your desired resource all over the planet. Then you can let Kethane's drill logic handle ground detection. There are a few features not yet implemented which could come in handy, like support for infinite resources in a deposit, but you could work around that by setting a very high starting quantity.

I was wondering if I could somehow use Kethane to accomplish this. I thought perhaps of combining the converter functions directly into the drill parts.

I also considered perhaps somehow making a Module-manager cfg that would somehow add mode-switching to (nearly?) all stock engines so they could Kethane directly as a fuel, but then I would need to redesign stock tanks to somehow hold Kethane as well, if I didn't want to replace my entire fleet of ships with Kethane tanks instead of stock tanks.

If you notice the theme here, the idea is to remove the scanning processes, and either streamline or remove the converting processes. By cutting out the converting processes you also wouldn't have the need for tanks as well.

If I may ask, can resource deposits in Kethane be linked to biomes? It might would be cool that only the (Great-)Flats of Minmus contain frozen Kethane (or pick your resource). The polar cap's of Duna contain water (if you're using a Life-support mod and Duna eventually gets Biomes as well).

Edited July 11, 2014 by Haze-Zero