[24.2] Karbonite Ongoing Dev and Discussion

[nli2work]

BWHAHAHA, MOAR POWAH! Look at that G-meter go! if that's just from 1.25m... the 2.5m gonna be a monster

[RoverDude]

BWHAHAHA, MOAR POWAH! Look at that G-meter go! if that's just from 1.25m... the 2.5m gonna be a monster

Oh.. they also tend to overheat and explode if you leave them cranked all the way up... I lost sooo many Kerbals testing it out.

My recipe is to grab an engine from the same tier, triple the thrust, halve the average ISP, and bump up the temperature.

[nli2work]

I'm starting to think maybe Kerbals are related to Orks.

[togfox]

Just s question, can ORS or this plugin grant science points on first discovery and crew sample transmitted/returned?

[Robotengineer]

Wow, 31 Karbonite per second? thats extremely inefficient, though I see it being used sort of as an engine used to jump from deposit to deposit, rather than a standard rocket.

[RoverDude]

Wow, 31 Karbonite per second? thats extremely inefficient, though I see it being used sort of as an engine used to jump from deposit to deposit, rather than a standard rocket.

Well, figure you're throwing in some really uncut stuff. Definitely not a mainstay, but would be a fantastic engine on, say, minmus where one puff would knock you into orbit. Working on the 2.5m version now which should be even more terrifyingly glorious.

Just s question, can ORS or this plugin grant science points on first discovery and crew sample transmitted/returned?

I'd say that's completely orthagonal to what this or ORS does, how would what you propose differ from what folks already get when they land in a biome?

That being said, nothing wrong with adding some science to the scanner (I did the same thing with MKS)

[togfox]

I agree it seems counter intuitive but think this way:

Stock game - land on biome, take surface sample, return to ksc, win.

Karbonite - land on biome, take surface sample IF THERE IS A DEPOSIT, return to ksc, win.

The biome is irrelevant. The deposit is relevant. Just something to think sbout.

[passinglurker]

I think what we are going for here is not a 1 stop shop be all end all fuel solution. Having a craft dive in and get your xenon could then dock and fill an orbital station that could then resupply xenon powered craft. This would save the xenon craft from needing to have the probably heavy conversion and storage for the resources anyway.

I support not having xenon from kerbonite. If you want something that mines xenon from the ground, simply request a dedicated xenon extraction unit and either a whole new model or a config for existing drills. That's the beauty of having this open.

I strongly disagree if the stock core version of this mod is truly supposed to simply be a licence friendly kethane then this should be a 1 stop shop be all end all fuel solution. This would mean that no stock fuel should be arbitrarily excluded for the sake of "realism" The only reason Xenon should be excluded from conversion is if it somehow had a negative affect on game balance.

[RoverDude]

I strongly disagree if the stock core version of this mod is truly supposed to simply be a licence friendly kethane then this should be a 1 stop shop be all end all fuel solution. This would mean that no stock fuel should be arbitrarily excluded for the sake of "realism" The only reason Xenon should be excluded from conversion is if it somehow had a negative affect on game balance.

I'd call it less a license friendly Kethane, and more a license friendly alternative to Kethane. There's a subtle difference. In any case, I'll toss a poll up since there seem to be a mix of opinions on both sides.

oh - and in bold text because I don't want to double post, and because folks might miss it...

Dev Release 0.0.4 - now with working monopropellant and both the 1.25 and 2.5m engines

[rabidninjawombat]

What that guy said.

Also - yes, two drills = twice as fast harvesting.

And for everyone else, here's some fun stuff

http://i.imgur.com/SNFCkTI.png

And in action....

And yes... that's a full tank of Karbonite being turned into smoke and noise.

Nice vid! And good looking engine

Just for giggles, im thinking maybe Karbonite should burn a little differently then LF-O, not sure how hard it would be to implement a different FX for the engine exhaust. Or what color would be good. Maybe a deeper red (like the color from the pallet )

[123nick]

you should also add a device that instantly turns karbonite into kethane and if needed turn kethane into karbonite, and it weight 0.0000001 units of weight, and it take no electric charge or anything. because that way, we can use karbonite drills and stuff for kethane mining, and vice versa. and it convert it with a ratio so they would still make the same ammount of LF and OX if converted with there mods converters.

[RoverDude]

Nice vid! And good looking engine

Just for giggles, im thinking maybe Karbonite should burn a little differently then LF-O, not sure how hard it would be to implement a different FX for the engine exhaust. Or what color would be good. Maybe a deeper red (like the color from the pallet )

HotRockets could help with that.

[RoverDude]

you should also add a device that instantly turns karbonite into kethane and if needed turn kethane into karbonite, and it weight 0.0000001 units of weight, and it take no electric charge or anything. because that way, we can use karbonite drills and stuff for kethane mining, and vice versa. and it convert it with a ratio so they would still make the same ammount of LF and OX if converted with there mods converters.

I personally would never make this (for several reasons), but given this is a license friendly project, if it's what the community wants, go for it.

[Targa]

RoverDude: Could you please put IFD (Instructions For Dummies) in the OP? I almost replied to this thread thinking something was broken, because the only part that had any Action Groups was the Converter. At the last minute I realized I had to right-click to get commands to show up. How do we scan for it or otherwise locate deposits? Does this Plugin rely on Scansat to locate deposits? How does the Detection Array (antenna) work? Is it a ground-deployed or orbit deployed part?

Can't wait to start using this! Started a new game (hard difficulty) with a custom Tech Tree and reduced Science points, and I really could use a way to refill my fuel tanks on other planetary bodies. Also will add that I totally agree with the point of Kethane deposits being drained too quickly (as I'm sure many others do). Most of us, I would think, would rather set up permanent or at least semi-permanent refineries.

[RoverDude]

RoverDude: Could you please put IFD (Instructions For Dummies) in the OP? I almost replied to this thread thinking something was broken, because the only part that had any Action Groups was the Converter. At the last minute I realized I had to right-click to get commands to show up. How do we scan for it or otherwise locate deposits? Does this Plugin rely on Scansat to locate deposits? How does the Detection Array (antenna) work? Is it a ground-deployed or orbit deployed part?

Can't wait to start using this! Started a new game (hard difficulty) with a custom Tech Tree and reduced Science points, and I really could use a way to refill my fuel tanks on other planetary bodies. Also will add that I totally agree with the point of Kethane deposits being drained too quickly (as I'm sure many others do). Most of us, I would think, would rather set up permanent or at least semi-permanent refineries.

Sure, sorry I forget that a lot of folks don't use ORS (which is a shame, it's a nice system.

SCANSat helps identify them, but you can also see densities with the antenna (I need to adjust all of the thresholds so you see hotspots on the map). Ping me if that does not make sense, or if you have other questions.

[BrutalRIP]

i take it you are using KSPI ors fix now?

[mkrco]

My counterpoint would be this... how tough is it for one person (or even, say, a thousand Kerbals) to totally deplete a planet's natural resources?

Since ORS does not have fields, two ways I can think of to do it. One is to actually modify the PNGs on the fly (which reduces density), and the other would be to allow the resourceconfig to change over time. I'd welcome pull requests for either one

I apologize ahead of time for my long-winded response.

Actually, the amount of "usable" resources on other planets is significantly lower than one would expect from simply scaling up terrestrial resource amounts. On Earth we have liquid water, plate tectonics, and most importantly life. All of these combine to create a plethora of useful, chemically active, and easy to access resources that simply won't be easily available on other planets. While other planets will also have materials, they will be less diverse, and in general less useful. I'm going to try to summarize below in overly simplified terms (any fellow astrophysicists, geologists, etc. please forgive me as I'm going to knowingly cut certain corners in the interest of brevity..I'm not going to delve into Chlorine isotope ratios in the Lunar regolith, and such!!)

- Liquid water allows for the dilution of various minerals which wouldn't otherwise mix, creating useful compounds and molecules in abundance which otherwise would be much rarer and more difficult to access. Mixing different elements often yields more useful materials than the base constituents. For an example everyone is familiar with, Iron is great! It's the primary constituent of all the rocky planets. It's easy to work with and plenty useful (that's why we have a whole "Age" named after it). But combine Iron with a touch of carbon and now you're got something truly impressive (Steel). Less water = less dilution and mixing = less useful materials. Another great example is salt. Without liquid water (primarily rain), all the salt would still be trapped in rock, and thus inaccessible to most forms of life. Dissolved in water, salt can interact with other materials to create a million and one useful compounds.

- Unlike Mars let's say, the Earth is still geologically active. Meaning that the crust is constantly being renewed, and mixed with the molten interior. This allows for not only continuous mixing (see previous point), but also for material to be brought up from big depths. For example, diamonds. They are very useful in industry. Mars, which was only briefly geologically active, is likely to have some diamonds, but the vast majority of it will be buried so deep that it's effectively inaccessible because there hasn't been any volcanoes, or tectonic plate motions to bring diamonds up to the surface in ~3.5 billion years. Earth has been churning up stuff from the depths for 4 billion years..Mars only did it for about an eighth of that time. Ditto for Gold, or silver. Highly useful industrially but so rare that without geological activity to concentrate them you'd never locate them in sufficient abundance to be useful. You'd probably have to dig up a city-sized crater on the moon to get a thimble of gold.

- And most importantly LIFE. The key requirement of life is that it must be able to store and transform energy in various forms (hurray for mitochondria!!). For all its complexity, life essentially takes energy from the environment (mostly the sun), uses some of it, and leaves the rest behind when it dies in chemically active compounds. No life=no oil, coal, or PLASTICS, etc. Rock is just rock, until life gets a hold of it.

So just because we have lots of useful materials on Earth, doesn't mean we should expect to find the same abundances easily accessible on other planets. It's not simply a matter of learning how to use native resources on other planets, we simply won't have the breadth of useful, easily accessible materials we have on Earth. This is one aspect of space exploration that is almost always overlooked.

So I think it is quite possible for a thousand human beings to exhaust one or more necessary resources on a planetary body to the point of inaccessibility. Especially if they're going to try building complex machines like rockets and Kerbitats.

A simple example is water on the Moon. On Earth, water is embedded in the rock. Even in the magma. It was volcanism which allowed it to escape into the atmosphere. Now the moon was most likely formed through a collision with another body. It is essentially earth rock. However that rock was molten, shattered into a billion pieces (with vast surface area) and exposed to vacuum which resulted in all the water "evaporating". As a result, the moon is bone dry. All the water has been lost to space. There's just tiny amounts leftover in crater walls at the poles (where sunlight never reaches it), and that is most likely just the condensation that is left over from the interaction between solar wind (which contains hydrogen) and the moon's surface regolith (which contains oxygen). In other words, it takes a very long time to produce even minute amounts of water that might actually stick to the surface and not simply be lost to space. The amount of water that we might eventually mine from the Moon's poles is quite paltry indeed. I really don't know the total numbers, I don't think anyone does. But it'd be pretty hard for me to imagine us sustaining a permanent colony of more than a thousand people or so on the Moon with the water available there, even assuming perfect homeostatis. Especially if you want to set up industry on the Moon, as that water will be pretty much the only room temperature liquid you'll find up there and you'll probably end up using 95% of it in industrial processes.

Or think about it another way. Let's take Neodymium..It's in everything from your head phones to your hard drive (both SSD, and the old-school spinners). On earth its abundance is only about 33 parts per million by weight, and it's actually one of the most common "Rare" earth metals. It's about 10,000 times more common than gold, or about 10 times more common than Tin..On Earth. Like other rare earth metals, it only occurs at sufficiently high abundances to be profitable in Carbonatites which generally form where tectonic plates separate (thank you plate tectonics!). By contrast, Neodymium's solar system abundance is only about 3 parts per BILLION. Or, about 10,000 times less common than it is on Earth. And you can sure bet that without plate tectonics to concentrate it in Carbonatites it'd be even more difficult to mine than on Earth.

So the real question we gotta ask, is just how much of the Moon's surface would a thousand Kerbals have to dig up just to make sure each of them had an "kphone"??? Not even talking about building spacecraft on the Mun.

In essence, I think that finite resources, and especially resources that are only available on certain planets is a perfectly reasonable state of affairs for KSP. A balance must be struck between fun and realism, but that balance is much further away from realism right now than most people realize with respect to mods like MKS, Kethane, or EL (all of which I use and love).

Anyways, I really appreciate all the effort you guys go through to make these mods. And I have a feeling that with ORS you'd have a hard time implementing finite resources because ORS is just not structured for it with those PNGs. But, if you happen to think of an easy way to implement something like that I know I would be very appreciative.

And I apologize again for my overly lengthy response.

P.S. I know that many people believe that the water on the Moon is from cometary impacts, but I think now-a-days most planetary scientists would agree that the solar wind theory fits the measurements better.

[Nowater]

i dont find the 1,25m in techtree

Do u ever sleep?

[mkrco]

Or maybe IN some cases as this mod is super modular , Just single type resources can be set for various planets. That is if you like challenge. For example mine water from Lythe for Oxidizer and Karbonite from Tylo for Liquid Fuel, and so on. You can play with the resources and locations and converters as you like. Set them once and forget it.

Yep, I like the idea of having certain resources be so rare on certain planets that it'd be more efficient to ship them in from other places.

[Wren]

I'm also a ORS and SCANSat newb.

Plan to update KSP and get this and start testing when I get home.

[Carcharhinidae]

I'm also a ORS and SCANSat newb.

Plan to update KSP and get this and start testing when I get home.

be sure to get the 7.1 (I think that's latest?) dev version of scansat, that's what i did wrong first few times.

as for people talking about making this compatible with EL, since it converts to fuel, isn't it inherently compatible? since fuel is what you need to fill up with EL?

Edited July 27, 2014 by Carcharhinidae

[erbmur]

How does one scan for deposits with scansat? I don't seem to be able to find an option to show resources on the maps?

[Carcharhinidae]

How does one scan for deposits with scansat? I don't seem to be able to find an option to show resources on the maps?

if you go to the settings of scansat, you can select 'ORS' resources, and then the resource you want to show on the big map. you will need a regular comms dish to do the scanning at this time.

note that this only works if you grabbed the dev release of scansat (7.1 ish?)

[protoz]

When i select scansat ORS overlay the big map doesn't show anything even though i can see some hotspots from the VAB launchpad.

[erbmur]

I don't see anything of anything.

And I take it this isn't normal?