SymbolicFrank

It looks great, but when I switch to launch, everything above the heat shield pops off. It jumps into the air and crashes on the landing pad. I also have only three stages. When I remove the heat shield I can launch it, but that defeats the purpose. I checked everything multiple times and watched the video, to make sure I assembled it correctly. Edit: and it breaks MechJeb. Autowarp doesn't work anymore, and nodes aren't executed. That makes it unusable. Too bad.

And how are you going to ionize the interstellar hydrogen atoms, so the electromagnetic field works on them?

After you are able to create the required electromagnetic field and ionize the interstellar hydrogen? Yes, in that case I suppose you could use it for deceleration. But wouldn't a solar sail be far simpler for that? For starters, it would actually work.

Ok, I understand that nobody really cares and everyone wants cool and shiny toys, but I do have a good example to show how things work: the Bussard ramjet. Forty years ago, space travel was a bit in decline, because the only potentially interstellar ship, Orion, was banned. Which was a big bummer. And, Orion is great because it has an exceptional thrust-to-weight ratio: it can lift very heavy stuff into orbit. But the delta-V is not great. They're called torchships: spaceships that can go everywhere, fast. They don't need to wait for a Hohmann transfer window. But, without Orion, we couldn't lift, say, 1000 metric ton of stuff into orbit. So, we didn't have enough fuel to do anything interesting. Just boring and slow stuff. Enter the Bussard ramjet: it gathers hydrogen atoms from interstellar space, which it uses for fuel as well as reaction mass. Problem solved! So, everyone wanted one. Every SciFi author used them. NASA wanted them. Everyone expected them to solve the problem. Everyone believed in them. Ok, there were (and still are) a few questions about it. Like, if there are enough hydrogen atoms in interstellar space (no), and if the gathering and channeling of those particles doesn't slow the craft down too much (yes), or if you needed to boost it to a preposterous high speed before it starts working (yes, about 0.12c), or if you can get p+p+p+p fusion working, but problems can be solved! Just take the fuel with you, use the captured hydrogen only as reaction mass, and all is well! (Nope. But nobody cared.) Then again, how do you capture those hydrogen atoms? With a huge, electromagnetic field (a few hundred kilometer in diameter). Eh, hmm. Ok. You need massive amounts of power and superconductors. It sounds quite unfeasible. But, whatever . "But, how do you get those hydrogen atoms to react to that electromagnetic field? " "Oh, that's simple: you ionize them with a high-powered laser." "Really? You want to shine a powerful laser on every bit of a volume that is hundreds of kilometers across, all the time? To hit all the hydrogen atoms? That's your plan?" "Yes. Why? You're the first one to complain about that part! Nobody else even asks about that or mentions it! Don't you want it to succeed?"

Another issue is, like with VASIMIR, that while you really want to be able to use a massive power plant and something like microwave heating of the propellant, those electromagnetic waves interfere with the electromagnetic confinement or acceleration you need to keep that extremely hot plasma from vaporizing your space ship.

To explain it a bit more: you can have two kinds of electromagnetic force: polarized and dielectric. Polarized is your normal magnet: it has two poles and either attracts matter that is the opposite charge, or repels matter with the same charge. Dielectric only works on magnetic insulators, or neutral matter at very high energy levels. Normal matter exists in multiple forms: solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma. The main difference between plasma and the others is, that when it becomes a plasma, some or all of the electrons are forcibly stripped off the atoms. For light atoms, that means that it consists of both positively charged nuclei, as well as negatively charged electrons. All together in a hot cloud. Ions are atoms that have less or more electrons than protons, which gives them an electric charge and allows magnets to move them. But when you heat them up enough, they turn into a plasma as well. The problem is, that for a power plant or rocket engine, you want highly energetic atoms. Which means: separate particles or a plasma. Single protons (or anti-protons), or alpha particles (helium nuclei) are perfect for that. And when you remove all the electrons, you can manipulate them by electromagnetic force. Or, can you? Because, while a mostly one-dimensional movement (acceleration) is easy and a two-dimensional movement is really hard, a three-dimensional movement (or, containment) would require a computer that monitors all particles and changes the containment field constantly and at extremely high speed to keep them in. Which quantum mechanics says is impossible. So, essentially, when I read "magnetic containment" or "magnetic nozzle" and they're not talking two of them, one for stripped nuclei and another for the electrons, I read it like "impregnable force field" and my bullshit detector is triggered. An exception is a magnetic mirror or bottle, where the nuclei are kept frozen.

The first part, creating the plasma, is being tested. Which could be used as a rocket engine by itself. But all the other stages require a massive power plant, superconductors and magnetic fields of multiple Tesla's, while the third stage also uses a kind of microwave oven to flash-heat the plasma to 1 MK, and hopefully have some fusion occur. And all of that in at most a few seconds, depending on the size of the design. But yes, the funding and marketing are top-notch.

Well, both magnetic containment and nozzle for plasma, with both protons and electrons and a temperature of 1 million K. And depending on which design you take, fusion. It's designed like an open-cycle tokamak.

I like it a lot overall, it is reasonably complete and consistent and just what KSP needs (especially with RSS), but it is a bit too focused. And I do have some general suggestions. 1. Magnetic nozzles / containment is an iffy concept. It requires protons (or anti-protons), and won't really work with plasma (positive and negative particles together). And it is problematic if you only expel the protons, while keeping the electrons aboard (or the other way around). Then again, it's the throwing away of mass that provides the thrust, not the bouncing against the nozzle walls. So magnetic nozzles don't actually have to be nozzle-shaped. They should be like a short magnetic accelerator. Or actually: two, one for the positive stream and one for the negative. Mixing those at the end is optional. Superconductors are mandatory. Things like NERVA / DOMBO / pebble bed / salt water / Orion / plasma drive / ion drive / inertial fusion / VISTA certainly could work, but most of the others require magnetic containment (and often impossible materials as well, like with a nuclear lightbulb). VASIMIR is certainly one of the worst in that respect. And the main problem (after getting rid of the waste heat) is of course how to extract thrust and/or electricity from neutrons and gamma rays. If someone can think of some sexy drive or reactor, doesn't mean that it is actually build-able. Publishing a design doesn't magically make it work. They might say they're just unobtainium instead of handwavium, but requiring magnetic containment isn't helping their case, IMO. But anti-matter drives could certainly work if you use magnetic bottles with anti-protons as Orion charges. Just turn off the power and it blows. You wouldn't have a storage ring, but a storage facility filled with small anti-matter bombs, all hooked up to an electric power source. Essentially, that leaves three types: heaters (NERVA), bomb-powered (VISTA) and accelerators (ion / magnetic). 2. There is a gap between chemical and nuclear propulsion (mostly for liftoff), and chemical can still be improved quite a bit as well. And the easiest way to do that is to detonate the fuel / oxidizer mixture, instead of simply burning it. The best example is a pulse detonation engine, but a SCRAM variant would work as well. Both have been done in the laboratory and they actually work. They just make a whole lot of noise and have a tendency to blow up. They're about as mature as NERVA. 3. For any space industry, we would want to capture asteroids with a lot of water. Most of the rest of the mass is not very usable without heavy processing, but could be used to move the asteroid around: pellet guns / linear accelerators. Especially because most of them probably consist of gravel, optionally glued together with water. 4. And it's probably outside the scope of the mod to use that water as the hull as well. Because the easiest way to store it is inside a plastic bag, as ice. Reinforced ice is a great building material / micro-meteorite shield. And it's far easier to launch some plastic and composites into orbit than a hull and fuel tanks. But overall, this mod, MechJeb and Joint Reinforcer are the only essential mods for me. And you're doing it great. I'll think about it. I want to rewrite your introduction in the first post as well, because it's full of spelling errors.

Well, great kudos to you! But how smart are you? If you are REALLY smart, everything becomes very simple. Except, that nobody around understands anything about it. First they laugh at you, until you prove you were right. Then they call you arrogant. After that, they get angry and want you GONE! That is, in a nutshell, my experience with other people. Edit: Yes, there is even a science that peels apart the people who mostly think they are very smart (the grand majority) and the ones that really are that smart. The not-so-smart ones tend to arrogance, while the very-smart ones tend to question everything, especially themselves. So, on average, the not-so-smart think they are smarter than how the very-smart think about themselves.

Hevak, if your KSP suddenly slows down to seconds-per-frame and takes many minutes switching between the VAB and launchpad, you have to investigate. The first thing to do is press Alt-F2. And when you see mostly red, flashing along very swiftly, you gather something is wrong. The next thing to do is look at the log, and especially the exceptions. And all of them had something to do with USI. A warning is something to improve, an error requires attention, and an exception is something that should be fixed ASAP! So, after investigating that it wasn't a one-time occurrence, and that it was definitely related to USI, I wanted to give feedback to the developer. By posting the errors, with all the relevant information needed. But a moderator disagreed. And, you might ask, how do you know what information is relevant? Because I'm a software developer myself. When I'm not a project manager. But why should that matter? Then again, I know some modders here require you to follow their exact rules for you to be allowed to post a bug report. Because they expect nobody understands anything about programming or modding, and do everything wrong that can be done wrong. And they might have a point, in many cases. Or perhaps simply because it's easier to treat everyone as a moron: at least you don't discriminate that way But it's perhaps easiest to say that the modders are God, know exactly what they are doing, and anyone who objects to anything is a heretic and should be punished. Then again, without feedback there will be no improvements, either. So think about it for a while before you get emotional about it

How do you restart reactors? If you use time compression, your reactors will shut down because they (think) they're overheating. Even while they would be fine without time compression. But I cannot find a way to get a reactor that say it's offline in its Control Window to restart even if waste heat is 0. How do I do that? In this case it's a Large Fission, so there are no dependencies.

Ok, replying to you is a waste of time. But anyway: My initial post was a friendly heads-up. If you feel that was a rant, you haven't encountered me taking something apart. Be glad

Which one? How do I activate it? Is there a manual?

Bah. I did post an error message of a missing part, just below a moderator complaining about someone posting the exact same error message. In the general USI thread, because I had no idea which specific mod it belonged to. So, to recap: 1. Posting error message in general USI thread is frowned upon by moderator. 2. Posting error message in specific USI thread is frowned upon by some random fanboy. What to do next?