parts [1.12.x] Karbonite/Karbonite Plus (K+)

[RoverDude]

0.3.0 IS UP!

For CTT stuff you need to install CTT - get it here

• KSP 0.90 Compatability
  
• Moved 0.625m Karbonite engine and Karbonite SRBs to the core Karbonite mod.
  
• Moved the Karry Kans, mini drill and mini-generator to the core Karbonite mod.
  
• Added MM config to add Karborundum back to mini drill for K+
  
• Swapped all generators and converters to Regolith
  
• Removed the Liquid Hydrogen requirement from the torch drive, increased ISP, reduced thrust (so they are more... you know... torch drive like).
  
• Added in CTT support.
  
• All K+ harvesting parts are under Resource Exploitation.
  
• Fusion drives are under Fusion Rockets.
  
• Torch Drives are under Exotic Reactions.
  

[Saint-Stanislas]

First here though!!!!

Thanks!

Maybe I'm mixed up, but I think you just released the source

*look* oh, it's on dropbox, and the source on github, nice

[RoverDude]

Oh it's going to be a crazy day Odds are I will mess up at least three releases.

[Admac]

Hey Willow!

K+ Extraction is the toughest thing in KSP I’ve done to date, and for that exact reason I love it! All three locations have challenges but the good news is all three have ways to get it done. My favorite of the lot is Eve mining, but this was all done in 0.25, so who knows what fresh horrors await in 0.90.

General tips: Karborandum is super heavy, each radial bottle is over 10 tons, and the big sphere is about 800 tons. Figure out beforehand if you have lifting capacity to get off whatever you are landing on. Once you have K+, transfer windows and Hohmann transfers in general are optional, pick your own flight paths, having 300 000+ M/s of DV is pretty normal.

Solar harvesting

Challenge: Getting into a 2km high circular solar orbit without burning up (At about 1.1km or so) while going absurdly fast (20-30km/s IIRC) this will require over 30 000 M/s of DV from the Kerbin Launchpad.

Tips: You can aero+ gravity brake on Eve to slough off 2000- 3000+ M/s of DV(clever piloting required!) Since you are moving so fast, and solar harvesting is slow, do not count on getting even a single unit of K+ until you are almost perfectly circular. The other option is a shipyard and colony on Moho, which obviously has its own challenges. The real struggle for this is it will take a very lean/huge ship to get you there, and it’ll take months to fill a 40k unit K+ Sphere.

Eeloo Havesting

Challenge: It’s crazy far, it’s got no Karbonite remotely close, and the transfer windows are terrible.

Tips: the surface gravity is very low, meaning that it’s the easiest actual landing /extraction. I have too many stations to maintain to want to deal with a 10+ year journey, so I over built my rocket and overthrusted by about 8000m/s. Plotting a course that isn’t a standard minimum energy transfer is really hard, and after reading a few whitepapers and trying to code up a calculator, I gave up and let Mechjeb do it. (Porkchop selection in the latest version is very useful for high impulse transfers!) This reduced it to about 2 years there and much less on the way back with a full tank of K+ and a torch drive. Also by overthrusting (not a real word) your transfer window matters a lot less and you can get a pretty good one in under 60 days most times.

Eve Harvesting

Challenge: It is the hardest planet to take off from, and landing using FAR is very dangerous for non-aerodynamic craft.

Tips: You absolutely need USI Freight Transport Tech to do anything approaching real mining on Eve. I typically build a Gilly shipyard colony to simplify operations, but there is no reason you couldn't lug everything from Kerbin.

Ships I use;

-OKS Shipyard station (15+ Kerbals)

-MKS Gilly surface mine

-Eve orbital karbonite skimmer (With Logistics hub)

-Micro fan prospecting lander

-2 stage 2000 unit K+ mining ship (LFO there, chutes down,mine my fuel, Fans to 15 km, drop lower stage, Fusion to orbit) to get initial load of K+

-SSTO 40,000 unit ducted fans / Fusion miner

-(Much later)SSTO 200,000 unit K+ torch drive miner

-A few 80,000 unit transporters to the trip back to Kerbin, or where ever fuel is needed.

Basically the ducted fans are how you will negate the worst of the Eve atmosphere, the kick on your fusion drives once you are at about 14km altitude so you get tolerable ISP. You will need a ton of power, so make use of starlifter/honey badger nukes and some NFT capacitors banks to get everything up to speed. Eve mining is VERY difficult, and even after 2000+ hours of KSP each of my ships listed went through 5-10 iterations before they became easy to fly and reliable.

Good luck!

[Dire_Squid]

Ok, gonna ask an obvious question:

You've made Distillers able to produce LiquidHydrogen... and you've made Torch Drives no longer requiring LiquidHydrogen, so...

... WHAT'S the point of having LiquidHydrogen, now (unless there's yet another mod that uses this resource)?

[Railgunner2160]

There is, Near Future Technologies!!! Several of it's engines use it as fuel!!

[RoverDude]

Both NFT and FTT use LiquidHydrogen and there were no harvesting methods before.

That let me keep the torch drive here and not have it so weird (being one fuel off) and it also got transformed into a very high ISP fusion drive (though it lost some thrust).

Once we have our 3.75/5m warp drive in, that will fill the end game spot better IMO.

[Dire_Squid]

Both NFT and FTT use LiquidHydrogen and there were no harvesting methods before.

That let me keep the torch drive here and not have it so weird (being one fuel off) and it also got transformed into a very high ISP fusion drive (though it lost some thrust).

Once we have our 3.75/5m warp drive in, that will fill the end game spot better IMO.

I can dig it.

[willow]

Hey Willow!

Thanks for your really detailed information. I'm going to try this out tonight...

I do have some additional questions regarding the eve mining process.

* Just to clarify, you produce ships and parts on your shipyard?

* Your SSTO solutions are rockets with propellors for the first league? not space planes?

* You solve the intense power requirements of karborundum rockets with capacitators and nuclear reactors?

* How much karbonite do you typically need? I was pretty impressed with only 70 units. You're speaking about 200.000 unit haulers. Is that an infinite supply? Or do you regularly need to get more?

From your explanations I think I'd best try for a chute landing rocket, which takes of via propellors and then switches to karborundum at 15km. In combination with a kind of mother ship which gathers karbonite either from gilly or from eve's upper atmosphere? That initial haul can then help me drag other equipment from kerbin to eve to make the operation simpler.

I would love to see some screenshots of your ships, especially the early ones. If it's not an inconvenience.

Thanks again!

[Admac]

Glad to help!

I’m mainly glad other people are trying this, since it’s the most fun and challenging of the USI packs and also the least played as far as I can tell.

I play with FAR and so I design entry craft to be kind of aerodynamic and ascent craft to be as smooth as possible. I’ll throw up a bunch of screen shots when I get home tonight. I built a surface base on Gilly that had lots of drills and storage, refining and a logistics hub. I had a two Kerbals down there working the refinery, but I had all their LS supplies just shipped down from the much larger orbital base.

Then I just periodically logistics hubbed up a load of metals and mono prop + whatever else I was low on, and built everything in Gilly orbit. Mainly because taking off from Gilly is THE WORST. So slow.

Lift requirements;

For my initial miner I used fairly light LFO engines (acceleration of about 7 m/s^2) with enough fuel to get me into a very low Eve orbit, and then to do about 500M/s brake. A bigger braking burn makes for a lot more vertical descent, which makes it a lot easier to get within 5km of my survey flag where I found the high concentrations of K+. Before I had my ratios exactly figured out I would mine in real time until mechjeb told me my max acceleration got to about 18 m/s^2, which is the minimum for an Eve ascent.

Also I notice you are using the word propellers not fans, the USI FTT pack has 3 sizes of ducted fans that run off EC and have really weird scaling for atmospheric density. They are only good when the atmosphere is 0.5 Kerbin sea level density or thicker, and falls off super-fast after that. Making them ideal on Eve.

Electric Charge requirements

Both the ducted fans and the 2.5M fusion drives use copious amounts of power, but I found with about 12000 units of battery and 30000 units of capacitors I could ascend at full power until the atmo got thin enough that the Fusion ISP improved to be sustainable. For this lighter craft I used just one honeybadger generator (2000ec/s) the bigger crafts I used 2 Starlifter nukes (10000 ec/s x 2) plus 1-3 honeybadger generators depending on config. (I got a lot lighter and faster by making it a more aerodynamic which allowed me to rise faster and further on fans with later designs) A good rule of thumb for batteries was enough storage for 8 seconds of reactor output, and anything past that is better served by capacitors.

None of these crafts are planes, since I lack the patience to balance them, and they don’t tend to scale as well. For example, I imagine it would be challenging to fly a 4500 ton plane off Eve even with fancy drives. Vertical rockets are easier to land and easier to ascend and scale out a lot better. As far as the increased efficiency of lift, ducted fans run on just EC so there is no risk of running out of that if you have enough reactors.

Once I had a full K+ economy, I like to build out my ships with 100 000- 300,000 M/s of DV, so that is between 24-1000 units depending on the ship and the drive. A single 40,000 sphere is enough for 20 colony ships and 70+ utility ships. The giant 200,000 unit lifters were more an experiment in how far I could take a fun concept, rather than something that I needed. However, I imagine that 200 000 karborundum would solve a lot of the money problems now facing my new 0.90 hardmode career…

[RoverDude]

@Admac - I'd be curious to hear your take on some of the changes in 0.90 WRT K+ as Regolith changed the game up a bit.

[Admac]

For sure!

Right now I am trapped on Kerbin trying to scrounge up another few grand for a Mun mission in my early career, So it might be a few days before I have much meaningful feedback on large scale torch drive deployments. Just looking over the notes though a few things stood out;

-Not needing hydrogen simplifies logistics and design hugely. It being distill-able also helps. Getting LH2 to Gilly was a major difficulty.

-Cutting thrust should be no big deal. I made a grand tour science vessel that had everything I wanted on it and used the smaller Torch, and still had about a kilometer/s^2 acceleration. That being lower would make it safer, if less hilarious.

-Boosting ISP is also a bit of a non-issue, since they already have such high Isp I've never had to refuel a torchdrive powered ship, and fuel is already a very small part of the craft (less than 10% by weight for the most part).

If the gap between the 2.5m drives and the 3.75m drives were narrower that would ensure the 2.5m parts are still useful after unlocking the 3.75m. As it was in 0.25 the small torch was 3ish tons heavier, but had 3x the isp and 10x the thrust. There was not a single time that the 2.5 m drive would be a better choice. In fact a lot of very light craft (under 50 tons) had torch drives in them, and thrust limited to 5-10% to keep acceleration from tearing them apart. Super high ISP let me run those with solar panels, since most in-system work only needed 1000 or fewer m/s of DV, which is easy to store in a battery, and trickle charge before the next burn, hours or days later. Making a Torch + solar lighter than a 2.5m Fusion + reactor too.

[FeliusKerNes]

Question on Solar collecting: Been doing some testing on it with hyper edit, and found a few issues:

First and more importantly, it doesn't seem to be working at all. Set orbit somewhere between 1500-2000m, open the advanced collecting dish, tell it to start collecting Karbodurum, it says the load is 100%, but the amount acquired per second is 0. Even letting it on while warping from the space center some 30 days or so doesn't seem an increase of even 0.01 in how much my vessel has stored. Before you ask, yes, I do have empty storage space and my power generation is perfectly stable with a good surplus, with both solar panels and the stock permanent generator.

Second thing: Time and time warp; How you guys handle it other than going back to the space center to time warp?

[RoverDude]

@Admac - I am very interested in your thoughts on mass, thrust, etc. once you get things sorted. BTW - I believe the new ones should scale more lineally, and I am ok with them being fusion drive replacements.

@FeliusKerNes - we probably lost the solar stuff with this update, I'll have to check (90% chance I did that tho). Load just means the equipment is at full throttle. So it's likely there is no Karborundum there and I need to tweak CRP for that.

[Chyort]

The large spherical Karborundum tank lists 0 cost in the vab, but when i add it to a ship it gives me -60,000,000 cost.

[RoverDude]

I expect you're not on the latest release. This was fixed last night.

[Chyort]

I expect you're not on the latest release. This was fixed last night.

Heh, i checked AVC before posting and K+ was still green. And K+ was last updated 9 days ago. It didn't occur to me the problem was in CRP.

Thanks for the heads up however, i did manage to get it working.

[Chyort]

New problem.

Using hyper edit to place a test ship into low orbit of the sun(1500-2500meters). Collectors are getting 0 Karborundum.

Test ship is simply 2 collectors, 1 reactor, 1 star lifter command, 5m sas, torch drive, and a Karborundum tank.

Also, when i move the test ship to orbit around Jool, the collector peaks karbonite collection at around 300km. Which seems far too high(isn't it supposed to be atmo height +10%ish or so?), and also somewhat odd that it goes down the closer i get to the atmo.

[RoverDude]

Only a 20% chance of stuff being there now, so the solar Karborundum may no longer be present. The whole atmo+10% bit is long gone, it's now a chance of there being an interplanetary band within the SOI.

[Chyort]

Only a 20% chance of stuff being there now, so the solar Karborundum may no longer be present. The whole atmo+10% bit is long gone, it's now a chance of there being an interplanetary band within the SOI.

I find myself with even more questions...

REGOLITH_PLANETARY_RESOURCE
{
    ResourceName = Karborundum
    ResourceType = 2
    PlanetName = Sun

    Distribution
    {
        PresenceChance = 100
        MinAbundance = 1
        MaxAbundance = 5
        Variance = 50
    }
}

Assuming i am following the bouncing ball... Solar Karborundum should be 100%, but it is set as ResourceType = 2 meaning Atmo instead of Interplanetary. Which seems odd because the sun has no atmo.

In fact i don't see any IntPl Karborundum.

Next, are the interplanetary bands at fixed altitudes, or is that random as well?

Trying to find a bands altitude when you don't even know if the band exists could be rather annoying. In the Jool SoI looking for karbonite could be bad enough, trying to find Karborundum in the Suns SoI could be insanity provoking.

[Vajco]

Hi guys, I know, that I shouldn´t ask here, but could anyone of you tell me what is the name ot the mod in top left corner of the screen? Sorry for bothering...

[RoverDude]

@Chyort - Looks like you found a typo on the Sun one I'll take a look and see what I can fiddle with to get it where it needs to be.

[falco1010]

You said that Karborundum Samples were only here for tests ? PWNED IT !

[RoverDude]

I expect that's one mighty expensive rocket

[kilfour]

@Chyort - Looks like you found a typo on the Sun one I'll take a look and see what I can fiddle with to get it where it needs to be.

<!-- Insert favourite swearword here -->, kind of playing a career based on establishing a mining base around the sun, almost got there. Would it be enough to change the regolith config entry 'ResourceType = 2' to 'ResourceType = 3' in order to find some stuff somewhere or do I need to start anew ?

Edited January 2, 2015 by kilfour
removed all caps in ironic html comment for reasons of trying not to be misunderstood