[1.0.5] Snacks! Kerbal simplified life support v0.3.5

[Liowen]

Mun and Back can be a 10 hour trip. Try going to Minmus and back or better yet fast forwarding in orbit for a few minutes. Get up to about 300km and just orbit at full speed, letting say 10 days go by.

I accepted your challenge of going to Minmus but took the long way home, by going to Mun after getting a slingshot around Minmus. So after 20 days here is what I had....

No snack usage during the whole trip. Here it is around Mun to show what the craft looks like, nothing overly special just a 48-7, a FL-T200 tank, 2 of the small square batteries, two static solar panels, a mk16 chute, and the MK1 pod.

Mods I am using, other than Snacks, are:

Near

Navyfish docking adapter

EVE

Astronomers pack

distance oject

DE

Chatter

Toolbar

KE

KAS

Hotrockets

MKS

Procedural Fairings

ORSX

Texture Replacer

MM 2.5.1

So with that I am not sure what is causing Jeb to go on a hunger strike, it is funny though

A Snacks Refridgerator for those long trips

Hmm I may have to grab this and see

Edit: Hmmm looking back at the pics, both here and ones I took, I notice that in the snacks window it says Kerbin in all of them, I wonder if maybe it is thinking it is still on Kerbin rather than in space/other location? Other than the Snacks not being eaten this is the only thing hat stands out, I may do some more testing in the AM with the debug menu open to see if any errors occur on launch (ect).

Edited October 12, 2014 by Liowen

[Paul Kingtiger]

Just a head's up, Universal Storage now has a complete Snacks pack, providing a snacks wedge.

Download and more info at ksp.kingtiger.co.uk

[Vorg]

Was just poking around while my computer is in the shop and found this. I like the idea of requirements for basic supplies, air, food, water, etc.. But I like a more laid back game. So this is nice. On the matter of long time in space, Sometime ago there was a green house module posted that was I think about the size of the lab and opened like a Jr.. It was ment more for providing air I think, but it would be perfect for space station, long haul ships and bases for producing snacks. It was partly solar powered, but also use electric. Just make it use more electric the less solar there is. Maybe allow in flight adjusting of the production rate to save power when not as much snacks is needed.

Maybe kerbals just hybernate if they run low on air or water....

Edited October 12, 2014 by Vorg

[Liowen]

This is the error that Snacks is throwing when, I assume, Jeb is trying to eat one, I still have no explanation for my lack of power draining while not in charge mode (I checked to make sure alt+F12 did not have a cheat enabled and there was none turned on). Hopefully it helps some what, the only other messages I seen were from timewarping and pausing the game.

Snacks - FixedUpdate: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at Planetarium.GetUniversalTime () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at Snacks.SnackController.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

This was taken from a career mode save, but it was the same error that was seen in sandbox as well.

[tgruetzm]

Sorry guys. This was definitely broken for .25. I have a fixed release out now. Enjoy.

https://github.com/tgruetzm/Snacks/releases/tag/v0.3.2alpha

Edited October 12, 2014 by tgruetzm

[Liowen]

Jeb finally ended his hunger strike......and I found out why I was not losing power......I am not running TAC so there is no draw on the battery system

[Geschosskopf]

Sorry guys. This was definitely broken for .25. I have a fixed release out now. Enjoy

I'm coming late to the table here (I hope there are a few Snacks still left ). Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for making this mod. While I've enjoyed playing with varous other life support mods, they've never struck me as "realistic" because they're modeled on humans and Kerbals ain't humans. We can't begin to guess what their metabolic needs are. But they must have some, so it's (very) occasionally bothered me (just a little) to send them in 1-seat cans on ion-powered grand tours lasting a decade or 3. This mod the perfect sop what little conscience I have.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a new draft of pressganged Kerbals to flog .

[tgruetzm]

Edit: Hmmm looking back at the pics, both here and ones I took, I notice that in the snacks window it says Kerbin in all of them, I wonder if maybe it is thinking it is still on Kerbin rather than in space/other location? Other than the Snacks not being eaten this is the only thing hat stands out, I may do some more testing in the AM with the debug menu open to see if any errors occur on launch (ect).

I think this part is actually a bug that has gone unnoticed. The snack supply window is a cache of the current snack levels across the solar system. It's rebuilt based on certain events happening that could affect the levels. Right now it's not being told to rebuild when the sphere of influence changes. It would get updated eventually and show that you're at Mun or Minmus, but it's still a bug that I'll try and get fixed.

[Liowen]

I think this part is actually a bug that has gone unnoticed. The snack supply window is a cache of the current snack levels across the solar system. It's rebuilt based on certain events happening that could affect the levels. Right now it's not being told to rebuild when the sphere of influence changes. It would get updated eventually and show that you're at Mun or Minmus, but it's still a bug that I'll try and get fixed.

Oh ok I didn't figure it was anything major but it was one small item I noticed, granted I didn't notice it until after the fact though LOL.

[Stratoroc]

How does the death mechanic work? specifically, how does it work with rescue contracts where the kerbal is spawned with only monoprop

[Superfluous J]

How does the death mechanic work? specifically, how does it work with rescue contracts where the kerbal is spawned with only monoprop

Those Kerbals aren't actually Kerbals until you get within 2.3km of them and they "wake up." So you don't have to worry about them running out of food.

[tgruetzm]

Mike (Mu): I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the new Kerbal career logging system and building the new experience system. Kerbals will each be assigned an experience trait when they’re generated and, as they gain experience levels, their trait will boost a vessel’s performance in a variety of areas.

I'm really excited to see what this turns out to be. This might make for an excellent snack deprivation mechanic.

[bigbadben]

hey, with the word out about kerbals gaining experience and different boosts to their stats, that could be an excellent segway for an additional penalty for running out of snacks, in addition to the reputation hit. You could just deprive the kerbals of all their bonuses, or maybe include penalties if they starve long enough.

Seems like it would be something keeping in-line with your vision for Snacks, which btw I enjoy very much

[Geschosskopf]

Some feedback after playing with this mod a bit....

You might really want to significantly decrease the rate of snack consumption. 1 Kerbal eating (on average) 2 Snacks per 24-hour day gets into a cripplingly huge number of Snacks for even a short interplanetary trip like to Duna. In 24-hour days, it's usually about 70 to get there, 90 waiting there for the window home, and about 50 for the return trip, or about 210x 24-hour days, which means 420 Snacks per Kerbal, and you'll need some extras so call it an even 500. As there are no separate Snack parts in this mod, the only Snacks are those in pods/cans and a Hitchhiker only holds 800, enough for 1 but not enough for 2. Essentially, just for a round trip to Duna, you need a ratio of 2 Hitchhikers per 3 Kerbals on the crew, and it gets worse for longer trips. This quickly turns any major expedition into a ridiculous ship of dozens of Hitchhikers just for the supplies, without any mission equipment.

OTOH, you can use TAC Life Support instead and do extremely long-duration missions with large crews with way less mass/volume of supplies, allowing the ship to actually do something besides carry Kerbals and their food. TAC-LS is complex and IMHO utterly unrealistic in applying human biology to alien Kerbals, but at least it lets you go to Jool and stay there a while. I like Snacks because 1) it's simple and 2) I consider it more realistic than TAC-LS, but it seems geared to going no further away than Minmus.

I note that there are other mods that have Snack storage boxes and even the ability to make your own Snacks, but these haven't been updated to 0.25 and their threads seem rather dead so no telling when/if they'll get updated. Thus for the time being, we're stuck with just what the mod itself puts into crew cans.

Fortunately, it seems I can edit the config files to alter the rate of consumption, the mass of 1 unit of Snacks, how many Snacks go in can/pod, etc. But figuring out something workable on interplanetary trips will require time I'd rather spend playing. So I guess I'm going back to TAC-LS despite my problems with it. Which is too bad because I really like the overall concept of this mod.

[Night Lone]

I note that there are other mods that have Snack storage boxes and even the ability to make your own Snacks, but these haven't been updated to 0.25 and their threads seem rather dead so no telling when/if they'll get updated. Thus for the time being, we're stuck with just what the mod itself puts into crew cans.

Not to be rude but, have you tried Universal Storage? They provide a nice Core package usable with KAS (and a KAS package which makes that mod much more awesome) Oh, and as a bonus, they have a SNACKS! package that can be used with, you guessed it, SNACKS! You might want to see if they have more things in store...

To the mod author, I'm waiting for the Snacks oven, as soon as that comes, this will be on my top 10; right now it's just #1 on my most wanted list

[Geschosskopf]

Not to be rude but, have you tried Universal Storage? They provide a nice Core package usable with KAS (and a KAS package which makes that mod much more awesome) Oh, and as a bonus, they have a SNACKS! package that can be used with, you guessed it, SNACKS! You might want to see if they have more things in store...

Yeah, I should have mentioned it and it alone of Snacks-related mods has been updated. Still, it's not particularly practical because the rate of Snacks are so heavy and consumption is so high and the US system is expensive on parts. Consider:

US Octo Core: 0.5 tons, $500

8x Snacks Wedges with 42 Snacks each: (8 * 0.03) + (8 * (42 * 0.001)) = 0.576 tons, 8 * ($350/wedge + $1/Snack) = $3136

--------------------------------------

Total: 1.076 tons, 9 parts, 336 Snacks (ratio 312.26 Snacks/ton), $3636

A single Kerbal will require 2 such assemblies for a round-trip to Duna, so that's 2.152 tons and 18 parts for 672 Snacks, costing $7272.

Now consider a Hitchhiker: 3.3 tons (including Snacks), 1 part, 800 Snacks (ratio 242.42 Snacks/ton), $4800.

Both require a 2.5m rocket. In terms of Snacks/ton, the US system is about 30% more efficient but costs 50% more, although ultimately the Hitchhiker's greater mass has to be paid for in a bigger rocket. The main problem with US therefore is the sheer number of parts. 18 parts per Kerbal just for a short trip to Duna quickly adds up with both increased crew and increased mission duration, to the point of being prohibitive. And the root cause of all this is the high consumption rate of Snacks.

To put the mass of Snacks and their rate of consumption in perspective, 1 Snack weighs 1 kg and a Kerbal eats 2 per (Earth) day. That's about 5 pounds of food per Kerbal per (Earth) day! Egad. Kerbals are about 1/2 human size and spend most of their lives sitting in chairs not getting any exercise at all. With that much food going in, you'd think they'd get so fat just going to Minmus they wouldn't be able to get out the crew hatch on arrival. And I shudder at how much Kerbal poo there must be sloshing around in the bilges or spewed into space .

Bottom line, when compared to the resources of other life support mods, Snacks are very massive and are consumed at astronomical rates. These features make Snacks impractical for any large-scale interplanetary ventures, and this problem is compounded by the current lack of any good means of carrying more Snacks than you have by default in cans/pods, and the current inability to grow your own Snacks in space.

[Superfluous J]

Bottom line, when compared to the resources of other life support mods, Snacks are very massive and are consumed at astronomical rates. These features make Snacks impractical for any large-scale interplanetary ventures, and this problem is compounded by the current lack of any good means of carrying more Snacks than you have by default in cans/pods, and the current inability to grow your own Snacks in space.

You make valid points. I never thought to compare the numbers.

You can modify most any aspect of snacking in the config file. In particular, the density = .001 and the unitCost = 1 in the resources.cfg. In the patch.cfg you can edit the number of snacks per module. And finally if you dig you'll find snacks.cfg that has how many snacks are consumed per meal and how many meals there are per day.

[Geschosskopf]

You can modify most any aspect of snacking in the config file. In particular, the density = .001 and the unitCost = 1 in the resources.cfg. In the patch.cfg you can edit the number of snacks per module. And finally if you dig you'll find snacks.cfg that has how many snacks are consumed per meal and how many meals there are per day.

Yeah, I saw that and considered tweaking the values. But that's work what with lots of tests and experiments so I decided I just go back to TAC-LS despite my objections to it using humanocentric biology.

BTW, RoverDude said that the Easy Bake Snack Oven will be updated and bundled with the next release of MKS.

[RoverDude]

Yeah, I saw that and considered tweaking the values. But that's work what with lots of tests and experiments so I decided I just go back to TAC-LS despite my objections to it using humanocentric biology.

BTW, RoverDude said that the Easy Bake Snack Oven will be updated and bundled with the next release of MKS.

Correct. Only caveat is that snacks can never be closed loop because there is loss of mass when snacks are consumed, and no waste product that I can toss into a converter that leads back to more snacks.

[LitaAlto]

I note that there are other mods that have Snack storage boxes and even the ability to make your own Snacks, but these haven't been updated to 0.25 and their threads seem rather dead so no telling when/if they'll get updated. Thus for the time being, we're stuck with just what the mod itself puts into crew cans.

I'm running Whyren's Shacks greenhouses in 0.25 and they work exactly as expected, generating snacks on the fly. It'd be nice to update the textures on those parts but there's nothing stopping you from sending up a greenhouse. The only issue I'd see is that, as is, each of the 2.5m greenhouses generate enough Snacks to support three Kerbals, and weigh 10 tons if you use the lighted version (which you would for interplanetary missions) so if you're flying a massively-crewed mission you'd need quite a few greenhouses. And of course you'd need a power source that can handle the low light levels of deep space missions. But it's doable.

[tgruetzm]

Some feedback after playing with this mod a bit....

You might really want to significantly decrease the rate of snack consumption. 1 Kerbal eating (on average) 2 Snacks per 24-hour day gets into a cripplingly huge number of Snacks for even a short interplanetary trip like to Duna. In 24-hour days, it's usually about 70 to get there, 90 waiting there for the window home, and about 50 for the return trip, or about 210x 24-hour days, which means 420 Snacks per Kerbal, and you'll need some extras so call it an even 500. As there are no separate Snack parts in this mod, the only Snacks are those in pods/cans and a Hitchhiker only holds 800, enough for 1 but not enough for 2. Essentially, just for a round trip to Duna, you need a ratio of 2 Hitchhikers per 3 Kerbals on the crew, and it gets worse for longer trips. This quickly turns any major expedition into a ridiculous ship of dozens of Hitchhikers just for the supplies, without any mission equipment.

OTOH, you can use TAC Life Support instead and do extremely long-duration missions with large crews with way less mass/volume of supplies, allowing the ship to actually do something besides carry Kerbals and their food. TAC-LS is complex and IMHO utterly unrealistic in applying human biology to alien Kerbals, but at least it lets you go to Jool and stay there a while. I like Snacks because 1) it's simple and 2) I consider it more realistic than TAC-LS, but it seems geared to going no further away than Minmus.

I note that there are other mods that have Snack storage boxes and even the ability to make your own Snacks, but these haven't been updated to 0.25 and their threads seem rather dead so no telling when/if they'll get updated. Thus for the time being, we're stuck with just what the mod itself puts into crew cans.

Fortunately, it seems I can edit the config files to alter the rate of consumption, the mass of 1 unit of Snacks, how many Snacks go in can/pod, etc. But figuring out something workable on interplanetary trips will require time I'd rather spend playing. So I guess I'm going back to TAC-LS despite my problems with it. Which is too bad because I really like the overall concept of this mod.

You do make a lot of good points. I was aware of the fact that anything beyond Duna would be pretty much impossible currently. When I decided on snack quantities and consumption I wanted it to be possible to get to Duna and back with one Hitchhiker per Kerbal. It should be possible, but I only tried it with infinite fuel during development once so your numbers may be more accurate.

My intention was/is to build a snack oven that uses soil samples to create snacks, thereby making long missions possible by making snacks at the destination.

I've played around with several iterations of converting soil into snacks, but I'm not terribly fond of the current state of it. I don't like the idea of snacks being too easy to make. So I've been struggling with a mechanic that's simple, yet complex enough to add interest and most importantly fun. What's the point of the mod if you can extremely easily manufacture infinite snacks?

In the time being all I can recommend is modify the configuration to fit your tastes. You can easily make snacks mass-less and double or triple the stored capacities.

[C.A.Sizemore]

I installed the plugin and love the idea, it is not working for me. Their are no snacks in any of my command modules and no slider to change that, 0.25 with the following mods

ToolBar

Asteroids Resources

Better Science Labs

Ambient Light

Chatterer

CIT

Community Resource Pack

Engineer

Enhanced Nav Ball

Fine Print

Fire Spitter

Fuel Wings

Hooligan Labs (Air Ships)

KAS

Kerbal Alarm Clock

RCS FX

Nano Gauges

Precise Node

SCANSat

Science Alert

Select Root

Science Collector

Tac Fuel

Umbra Explorer Pack

VNG

I am going to try a new instal with only snacks to see what happens. if that works I will add in the mods I like until it breaks again.

Tested: No Joy unable to add snacks in VAB and Jeb was hungry and had no snacks.

Edited October 21, 2014 by C.A.Sizemore
update

[tater]

As a reality check, NASA talks about 1.83kg/day of food, leaving 28.77kg of water and air. The latter 2 are to be mostly recovered and reused. The total food/water/air is 30.6kg/day, BTW.

So the total number of Snacks per day carried by a given hab is really a measure of how good at scrubbing CO2, and recovering water it is, plus the amount of food actually carried. Scaled to kerbals. it's then way, like 20kg/day total, where ~6% is actual food, and the habitat recycles almost all the remaining mass of air/water. A hitchhiker is supposed to be 2500kg, so 1.2kg/day per verbal would be a lot of that mass, actually. If the tab was 500kg empty, then cubed out with food it would have a little over 400 days per each of the 4 kerbals… that assumes the CO2 scrubbing and water reclamation are basically perfect. So with 4 kerbals, using 25% of each Hitchhiker for food, you should have maybe 400 days total duration. That's not really unreasonable.

For 200-something days, you'd only need to use maybe 15% of each of 4 hitchhikers with some margin of error for 4 crew. Maybe TAC is overly optimistic?

[tater]

Double post.

Here, have a cool link:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110008543.pdf

5-14 metric tons per astronaut in equivalent system mass for 100-900 day missions respectively. I'm assuming that is a combination of consumable mass, plus the hardware for reclamation, etc.

Edited October 21, 2014 by tater

[C.A.Sizemore]

On the reality of life support for humans, the truth is that outside of earth orbit the only viable way to support human life would be a closed loop system, food/water/02 are consumed, the used food/water/02 are fed into a habitat that recycles them into food/water/02, repeat.