Hi Mr. Monochrome

First of all, my English is rather poor, so I'm using a translator tool. I started a discussion here because a comment is only allowed to be 1000 characters, and I'm a bit over the limit here. ^^

I bought TKOM at the beginning of August and completed the Manned Mission campaign. I was disappointed that that was all there was to it. So I looked around for suitable scenarios, tried a small selection, and finally settled on "Victoria Crater Survival."

At some point, I reached the point where refining certain substances, such as hydrogen, became far too cumbersome because it required a lot of micromanagement (constantly changing canisters). Then I discovered "Resource Cables," and that was a huge improvement, as I can now significantly simplify certain refining processes. However, I was missing one element to truly automate the whole thing: a drain valve.

So I took a look under the hood of your mod and, with a lot of trial and error, managed to add such a valve myself. The general functionality was already there by the second evening, but the details took me a lot of additional time:

1. Prevent resource cables from being connected. I first expanded the programming of the cables myself until I realized it was much easier to do by simply preventing a connection point from being created at all. LOL.

2. The particle effect should be created when the valve is operating, but in the opposite direction to make it believable. This took me several evenings until I figured out which data I needed to change at runtime and how exactly.

3. Instead of changing "resource cables" directly, create an extension for it. This also required a lot of trial and error.

There are many other details that kept me busy until everything worked the way I wanted it to, but hey, the journey is the destination. :-)

Now to my concern: Can I adopt the socket model and some of your programming for my mod? I would, of course, credit all authors; I'm used to doing that from other projects. I would then define "Resource Cables" as a dependency.

And a bug report: While developing the drain valve, I noticed a problem with the resource socket. If you run the refinery program "Split Mars Atmosphere II" and forward carbon dioxide to a resource tank via a resource socket, the refinery aborts the process after the first cycle. The problem is the capacity of the socket; at 10 units, it's far too low, because 16 units of carbon dioxide are generated in each cycle. After a few attempts, I found that the capacity must be at least 31 for this to work reliably. Why this particular number is unclear to me, though. I would have understood if it had to be 32, because that would be twice the amount of one cycle and therefore reasonable.

I fixed this in my drain valve mod and defined RESSTORAGE as 35. I also changed MASS to 2, because in the original, it has the same mass (15) as the regular-sized canister, and that's unbelievable.

Do you even have the time or inclination to fix this? If so, I'll remove my fixes from my mod. If not, I'll just leave them in.

And: thank you for your TKOM mods, very helpful! In addition to Resource Cables, I also use "Barrel Storage Racks."