ISRU Refinery - sswelm/KSP-Interstellar-Extended GitHub Wiki

The In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) ( wikipedia ) refinery is wonder of compact technology. The main difference between refineries are that the small one does not have the resource extraction ability of the ISRU Refinery. They have many uses:

Summary of Part Options

Anthraquinone Process

  • Power Consumption: 1 MW

The Anthraquinone Process is the mechanism for the production of Hydrogen Peroxide (H202) from water.

Begin Sabatier ISRU

  • Power Consumption: 40 MW

Discovered by Paul Sabatier in 1910, this chemical reaction combines hydrogen and carbon dioxide gas at high temperature and in the presence of a nickel or ruthenium catalyst to produce methane and water. As the atmosphere of Duna consists almost entirely of carbon dioxide gas, you can refill a methane/oxidizer tank on Duna, provided you've brought along a suitable supply of hydrogen gas.

At present the water is not available separately. It is instead electrolyzed, allowing the oxygen to be used as oxidizer and the hydrogen to be run automatically through the Sabatier process again to produce methane.

Electrolyse Aluminium

  • Power Consumption: 40 MW

Aluminium electrolysis requires Alumina (Aluminium Oxide) and allows the production of Aluminium and Oxidiser.

Electrolyse Water

  • Power Consumption: 40 MW

Water electrolysis naturally requires the LqdWater resource and allows the production of LiquidFuel and Oxidiser. Since water is mostly oxygen by mass, far more Oxidiser than LiquidFuel is produced.

Produce Monopropellant

  • Power Consumption: 5 MW

Uses the Pechiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann process to produce Monopropellant (Hydrazine) from Hydrogen Peroxide and Ammonia.

Reprocess Nuclear Fuel

  • Power Consumption: 5 MW

You can use an ISRU Refinery to turn your Actinide waste back into nuclear fuel. 80% of the Actinide waste becomes new fuel, either UF4 or ThF4 and the remaining 20% becomes DepletedFuels. You must have somewhere to store the DepletedFuels in order to conduct fuel reprocessing.

Uranium Ammonolysis

  • Power Consumption: 12 MW

You can use an ISRU Refinery to convert [UF4](Uranium tetraflouride) and Ammonia into Uranium Nitride. The Fluorine is not stored during the process and is presumably vented.

Stop Current Activity

Stops whatever the refinery is currently doing so you can select a different option.

Resource Extraction

The ISRU Refinery (but not the Inline Refinery) can also extract a number of resources from a planets surface or ocean. The rate at which the resources are extracted depends on the abundance of the resource in the area.

Nuclear resource abundances can measured with a [Gamma Ray Spectrometer](Gamma Ray Spectrometer). Similarly, oceanic resource abundance may be measured with a Liquid Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer.

The power consumption depends on the resource being extracted:

Resource Power Consumption (Land) (MW) Power Consumption (Ocean) (MW)
Water 40 0.001
Ammonia 30 0.1
Lithium 40 40
Aluminia 10 N/A
UF4 10 100
ThF4 10 0.001

Flowchart of available reactions

Full size