Creating REALISTIC-ish Kethane SOON

[SkyRex94]

So i would define myself as a stock+ player. I like to keep it near stock, but extend it a little bit to make it more realistic(FAR) and/or immersive(EVE) or usefull stuff( like KAC, SCAN) but no big PartPacks(no B9, no Interstellar)(i tried them, didnt like the overload of parts in the VAB and the "far away from stock"-gameplay).

I thought about something to give extensive Surface missions more sense, but keeping it mostly stock, so i finally tried Kethane.

And i was surprised how few parts are included, which i liked But i think its making the game way too easy for my taste.

I like the mining ability and refining and it only adds one new ressource so its simple.

So i decided i will edit the configs of the Kethane parts, as soon as the updated 0.24 version is out. And when i'm finished i think i will share the configs with everyone who's interested here in the forums.

What i aim for:

i dont't want to be super-realistic with my game, but i want it to be somewhat believable and challenging.

So i don't aim Kethane to be Methane, that woul limit the possibilities pretty much.

I like to think of Kethane as a all-soil-gas/liquid-mixery containig a lot of usefull stuffs from the soil in one Ressource.

What i want to achieve is, that it should be not possible/usefull/economic to design single ships, that they can refuel themselves so easy on every planet, but that it can be usefull to actively build a big Mining-base to refuel ships far away in the system. So Mining gets usefull if done on a bigger scale, so its an bigger achievement to build a working base, but if only one mission is planned a stock normal ship is always better than a self-mining-ship.

to achieve that i think refining speed has to be drastically reduced and power usage of refinery and drills drastically increased.

you should have to run your base few ingame weeks before you have refined gazillions of fuel. And REAL refineries do need huge amounts of energy too.

So now for the efficiency. Pretending Liquid Fuel is some kind of Hydrogen, Kethane certanly contains Hydrogen(like Methane) which you can extract.But Hydrogen is a light Element compared to say Carbon so e.g. : 16 u Methane = 12 u Carbon + 4 u Hydrogen , and other gases and liquids contain even less hydrogen so i think 1 Unit Kethane should refine to 0.2 Units of Liquid Fuel.

There's even less Oxygen in the Soil-Mixery (like in Water or Alcohol) so i thought of 1 Unit Kethane should refine to 0.01 Oxidiser (Oxygen is rare).

But big and long running Mining bases would still be creating lots of fuel if you dont refuel an orange tank every minute. And that would actually give a big long running base a purpose economically.

Antother thing i don't like is the Kethane Jet Engine. It can run wherever is an atmosphere, so its pretending it uses 'any' kind of gas. But you can't burn Soil-Gases(Kethane) with any gas.

But you could pretend you can burn any gas with enough oxygen so i thought about switching the use of Kethane to only Oxidiser. So Oxidiser in Tank + Kintake-Air = Thrust. That could be more believable and also utilisizes all atmospheres. Do you have any other believable idea for that?

What do you think? Would you be interested in a more challenging and believable Kethane, but also have a Mining mechanism and a purpose for Bases other than RPG(unless you use Interstellar)?

[Umbrae]

What do you think? Would you be interested in a more challenging and believable Kethane, but also have a Mining mechanism and a purpose for Bases other than RPG(unless you use Interstellar)?

I think the RSS crowd would enjoy this a bit, but for me, no. I fully understand the point your trying to get to, but for my usage, I would not. I think the idea of a realistic mining an resource system would be nice, I think you will need to use more than one resource. You need a way to refine oxidizer too, even if it comes from a separate resource. Otherwise your are just going to end with refining stations with huge oxidizer stores instead of fuel stores. The huge power requirement, and time requirement I am all for but with time warp the amount of time that conversion takes is almost pointless.

I would suggest you try and go full realism (multiple sources of fuel), and use fuel types from the real fuels mod. Add different soil refinement rates per biome... some with large amounts of oxidizer, some with more fuel, although both can be rather rare. The problem I see is right now, I think kethane fills the nitch that I think you are looking to be in, the simple resource non hard core people. What nitch is not filled is the hardcore realism style. And for part mods, just delete the parts you don't like. for example I like Nova Punch Engines, and tanks, but the farings and near everything else I delete. Many of the larger part mods are well organized so you can simply remove parts you would not use or do not want.

That is my opinion, I hope it helps.

[regex]

Kethane is pretty easy to modify and you can write custom cell generators for it. For instance, my old 23.5 install had Dres as a proper Ceres analog where you could mine regolith and convert it into plausible fuels under RealFuels. My only problem with it is that the timeframe and scale of an average KSP mining operation makes pretty much any minable resource effectively infinite (IMO, obviously), and you can't really set Kethane to be infinite. ORS handles it that way, though, so if you're looking for an alternative, check it out.

[Streetwind]

Antother thing i don't like is the Kethane Jet Engine. It can run wherever is an atmosphere, so its pretending it uses 'any' kind of gas. But you can't burn Soil-Gases(Kethane) with any gas.

But you could pretend you can burn any gas with enough oxygen so i thought about switching the use of Kethane to only Oxidiser. So Oxidiser in Tank + Kintake-Air = Thrust. That could be more believable and also utilisizes all atmospheres. Do you have any other believable idea for that?

I've always thought of the kethane jet engine as a kind of high-bypass turbofan. Meaning, it produces pretty much all its thrust from shoveling whatever air/gas it finds, and hardly any from actually running its jet turbine. Said jet turbine is probably fueled by a bog standard LF/Oxidizer combustion, since kethane can be converted into both. It would just need a tiny internal converter handwaved into it that runs off of the electricity produced by the turbine. Yes yes, sketchy thermodynamics and all that jazz, but it is still consuming a resource while running. Also kethane is a highly abstracted approach anyway.

An engine like that could run in any environment, but it would (simplified) produce no actual thrust unless it had some form of gas to shovel with its fan. Which is exactly how the kethane jet engine behaves in gameplay.

Edited July 18, 2014 by Streetwind