Businfu

I present the latest (and best documented) foray into kolonization! Without much thought, I started posting this on the MKS page, but it keeps getting longer and now I want to give thing it's own thread! Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V If people like it, there will be more to come!

Nice! Seems to be working as intended. Just to confirm, the whole heat jumping up in other parts of the ship after a timewarp is a stock bug correct?

Ah I see. Just posted images testing all engines to demonstrate what I found. then saw that you posted about the .dll.

So I just took a small test ship into orbit with the Neptune. This is what happened: It looks like i now need to have the full amount of radiators installed to prevent overheating if the engine is at full throttle. I only had 400kW installed on the test ship because I expected that running the engine to dissipate more heat than it did. I was wrong, it doesn't dissipate much heat and the core quickly overheated and shut down. after it reached shutdown temp, the reactor shut off and the engine started to slowly cool. but too my surprise when I throttled up, I could still run the engine and it still throttled thrust based on the reactor power slider. Thus, I realized that I can simply turn on the reactor, heat it up to max temp, turn it off and then fire the engine for awhile (at optimum or near optimum) thrust and Isp. I don't think this is the intended behavior? EDIT: It seems that firing the engine doesn't have any cooling effect. With my reactor at optimum temp (and turned off) and all radiators shut off I can fire at full throttle and the heat decay isn't any faster than baseline. EDIT: It seems to be that it would be most interesting if the Isp & thrust were both scaled directly to temperature and not the power slider. However, firing the engine should dissipate much more heat, and thus when the reactor is shutdown core temp would drop and quickly render the engine usless. That way it would be important to have the reactor running and the power turned up high in order to keep the temperature hot. If i remember correctly, in a previous version it was more-or-less possible to use the NTR with almost no radiators, instead relying on the H2 to cool the engine? I liked this, and with the nifty new core shutdown temp slider, it could be even better.

I'm talking about the (very fun) NFE reactor mechanics, so yeah we are on the same page. The reactor mechanics on the Kerbal Atomics engines aren't 'out of the box' per-se, as you need NFE installed and you need to actually implement the MM patch, but I suppose there wouldn't be much of a patch to write for anything else... I put together the reactor compatibility patch with Streetwind for the USI mods with by laying out values and filling in the blanks according to gaps in progression all while balancing ratios of relevant statistics. If you feel confident with what's under the hood on Nertea's plugin, you could totally do a similar version of the same thing. This is the spreadsheet if you are interested, might give a decent starting point: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fhookzgp56m1g7j/reactors_new_businfu.xls?dl=0 There are some other issues though aside from just the raw numbers. For one... the really nifty thing about the Trimodal engines is the ability to generate EC, but it isn't by any means universal for NTRs. In Nertea's patch, the stock NTR doesn't, and many mod's implement NTRs which are essentially scaled up versions of the stock one, and thus my inkling is that these shouldn't be bi(tri?)modal, but figuring out which engines do and which don't is a complex can of worms. The other thing is the KANDL Radioisotope Rocket (maybe other mods besides Atomic Age have similar engines too). My inner stickler can't tolerate the idea that it has a throttle-able reactor that burns U235... it says Radioisotope Rocket right on the label! Anyways, i'm excited to see what you come up with. Let me know if you want to collaborate.

Are you talking about the NFE-compatibility version of these engines? Because if so, I worked most of it out awhile back and patched over Atomic Age. I can share some notes if you'd like. I've been wanting to do a more wide-scoped project (and mm patch PR) but.. you know... real life and stuff....

Haha! After looking at @panarchist's airplane I love the cockpit model even more. Perhaps some sort of malemute-stock form factor adapter plate is in order? I want Val to look over at Jeb and see this: Except there is no way Jeb would use the targeting computer!

I just had to say that I love this mod and I'm very very happy it's already ready for 1.1

Once you start dealing with interplanetary missions, the game takes on a whole new level of planning. For one, you'll want to get an efficient LS recycler on board (science lab!). In terms of actual planning, probably the best way is to use a combination of: Kerbal Alarm Clock AND Transfer Window Planner AND some scribbled notes on your desk that you hopefully don't recycle on accident! Oh and you'll also want to pick up Precise Node if you haven't already. So to be clear; to plan for your duna mission, you can use transfer window planner to calculate both the time of your departure and your return. That way you can get a good estimate of how much time Jeb and friends will be away from home. Then give yourself some wiggle room, because there is always the chance you'll have to play it as it lies... and it looks like transfer window planner isn't quite 1.1 compatible, but hopefully soon!

How immensely exciting!

Man is that exciting!! Congratulations on working out the NFE connversion so quickly as well. I'm very happy about where all of this is going. I spent some time over the weekend dinking around with it and I do have some feedback/observations. I feel like they aren't quite there and I want to do what I can to help. 1. I love that firing the engines cools them down! I was turning up the reactor to 100%, letting it go almost to critical and then injecting LH2. It's a lot of fun to see the temporary (and dangerous) boost in thrust and Isp. 2. After playing with the reactor in this way, I would turn it down to 1% and the temp kept stable at it's max. However, once I started to time warp out, the non-heat tolerant parts of the ship would explode! I guess I just didn't have enough radiators. The thing is.... If i put too many radiators on the ship, then I can't get the reactor to overheat and get that nifty thrust/Isp bonus... If i put WAY too many radiators, I couldn't get the reactors to heat up at all. 3. I noticed that once the reactor was heated up to capacity, I could throttle down really low and it made no difference in heat/thrust/Isp. i.e. I had the Poseidon at 6% and I had plenty of power for the burn. Is this by design? 4. The lifetimes of the reactors functioning as power generators are sort of impractically short. i.e. even turned down to 1% power they last around 400 days, not nearly enough supply for a round trip to Duna. Given that a moderate EC requirement is needed with the cryo tanks, it makes the power generation function sort of impractical outside the kerbin system. You are going to need to either bring extra nuclear fuel or a supplemental source of power. I'm curious to know if this is by design? It does encourage fun little EVA missions and whatnot. However, would the bimodal NTRs proposed in NASA's Mars design reference documents need to be re-fueled mid trip? something tells me not. After messing around it made me wonder how much of a coding wormhole it would be to make the engines have 2 distinct target temperatures or something like that. I.e. you want it at 3300K for engine mode, and 800K for generator mode. I don't know enough about how your plugins actually work to understand whether or not this is a feasible idea in practice, but I think it makes sense from a gameplay and realism standpoint. Finally, I would love to help try and write up NFE conversion configs for the Porkjet engines if I can find time, and I can figure out what exactly every part of all these plugins are all about....

Awesome news! I hope you get far. So talking about radiation: the lab I work at applied for a NASA grant awhile back to test the healing potential of banked bone marrow stem cells (specifically mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs) in jumpstarting the healing process in tissue damaged by radiation exposure. Bummer was we didn't win the grant. nonetheless, worth mentioning because these cells have the capability to transfer healthy mitochondria and vesicles of enzymes/nutrients into damaged cells to help them repair and may someday help with radiation exposure/poisoning. The work at this stage is all in vitro but a theoretical treatment might look like this: Patients (kerbonauts) have a bone marrow extraction while still on earth(kerbin). MSCs are isolated and frozen. Frozen MSCs can be protected from radiation much more easily than the entire crew (small volume so less shielding mass). When the patients tissues become damaged by radiation, the banked MSCs can be used to help jump start healing. Different administration methods can target different tissue types, but the MSCs are very good at playing the altruistic healer type no matter where they go. Additionally they are autologous (the patients own) so there is no risk of rejection and if you start running low you can expand them in culture first to resupply up to a limited number of divisions. Obviously, being obsessed with KSP, I immediately wanted a radiation mechanic and some sort of sick bay where the scientists have to sit around and culture stem cells and give Jeb an injection after he goes sailing through Jool's van Allen Belt. No time or coding chops to actually make it a reality though... Anyways. food for thought!

THIS IS AWESOME! The last time I spent serious effort on KSP I was messing around with adding ModuleFissionReactor to Atomic Age nukes... Never got it to work well though. I've been dreaming (and wanting) to have bimodal NTRs (especially with Nertea's epic modelling skills) in KSP for a long time. Also, I love the boil off mechanic! I remember bringing it up in the cryogenic engines thread a long time ago and someone told me to bug off and install real fuels... I gotta disagree. This mechanic is great. Not very difficult to overcome but it still requires planning and it gives a nice balance to the benefits of all that high-isp goodness. The sad news: Installed a clean 1.0.5 (along with most other NFE mods) but was quite sad to see the the NFE conversion cfg is very much WIP. I put it in (and replaced [ADummyPack] with [NearFutureElectric] but the reactor didn't work. I don't have very intense modding chops, but I was able to get it to produce power sort of like a typical NFE reactor when I added FissionGenerator module and some variables. However, with my pitiful understanding of working with plugins, the reactor isn't working to satisfaction. Also, I noticed a wierd bug when I put too many radiators on a ship. The reactor couldn't produce any heat and just stayed cool with no EC generation. Obviously the NFE integration is still WIP, so keep up the good work sir! I did want to add my two cents on development though. From a gameplay standpoint, I've always hoped NTRs could work in some version of this: Right click menu looks like an NFE reactor. You tweak the power slider to get the reactor up to high temperature. At its max operating temp the engine functions at max ISP. Lower temps, lower ISP. You can toggle the 'generator' through the right click menu. The generator isn't capable of running anywhere near the temp used for firing the engine. thus, after a burn, you power down the reactor (way way down) and once the core is at generator temp then the generator can be run at max efficiency. I'm sure I'll be wildly fond of whatever you end up using as a final mechanic, and after seeing a new "Radioactivity.cs" file on your Git, I'm even more excited. Keep up the good work!

I really like the way this mod fits in with EPL and MKS... It would be a shame to screw the plans for compatibility. As is, this is literally the perfect mod for those like myself who enjoy a difficult career mode experience that rewards recycling old stations/stages/whatever for parts. Although EPL is great for end game, there is something really satisfying/immersive about the way your mod rewards building things bit by bit with KIS. Moving away from compatibility with these other mods would be an immersion-breaking bummer. Don't get me wrong, I'm also a fan of the concept of resource requirements (especially EnrichedUranium) but maintaining cooperation with other great mods is more important IMHO.