Drill radiators

[Zaccy200]

I'm trying to move a class E asteroid so I.m drilling it out to make fuel and get rid of excess weight but the radiators don't seem to be cooling the drills making them overheat. Can anyone offer an explanation?

.

[michal.don]

Hi,

it depends on the type of radiators you are using. If you are using the fixed ones, they only cool the part they are attached to and the parts adjacent to it.

If you are using the foldable ones, they should cool the whole vessel, and you either don't have enough of them, or you encountered a bug of some sort.

Michal.don

[Dafni]

I noticed a weird bug lately, in that drills would not cool down on unmanned craft no matter what I try. Add an engineer to the craft and suddenly it works as expected. I dont know if this applies to you, but for me this is a reproducible behavior now. 

[Dafni]

See my reply in your other thread. Mods might merge them or delete one of the duplicates.

[bewing]

Known bug:

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/13403

The devs are researching the problem.

 

[bobcook]

I applied the suggested workaround to edit the part configuration file, worked perfectly (as expected).

[Jarin]

On a related note, is there any recommended amount of radiators per drill or ISRU unit to work at ideal temp (I know you can just add them to the point of overkill, but I'm looking at efficiency here)? I recently had my drilling outpost explode a thermometer as I came into physics range, and all the radiators were at almost max saturation. I've since gone "overkill" to avoid further trouble, but it made me curious.

[renhanxue]

11 hours ago, Jarin said:

On a related note, is there any recommended amount of radiators per drill or ISRU unit to work at ideal temp (I know you can just add them to the point of overkill, but I'm looking at efficiency here)? I recently had my drilling outpost explode a thermometer as I came into physics range, and all the radiators were at almost max saturation. I've since gone "overkill" to avoid further trouble, but it made me curious.

The "core heating" system of the ISRU's and drills is kinda separate from the regular skin/internal heating mechanic, and it took me a while to understand what was going on. If you look at the stats of the radiators in the VAB/SPH, there's a number called "max core xfer", expressed in kW. This is how much "core heat" (which, again, is a different thing than "regular" heat) the radiator can extract from things which produce core heat. It has nothing to do with how much heat (any kind of heat) the radiator can dissipate into space; that's a completely different thing and it's usually (always?) much greater than the heat it can extract via core transfer, so actually getting rid of the heat once you've gotten it into the radiator is almost never a problem.

Now, if you look at the stats of the drills/ISRU's, there's one "required cooling" and one "max cooling" number, also expressed in kW. Required cooling is how much core heat you need to remove from it with radiators to keep it at optimal temperature, while max cooling is how much core heat it is actually possible to remove from it with radiators. On drills, these two numbers are the same, so you just need to match radiator core transfer to drill cooling 1:1. The converters on the other hand are more complex. First off, they use the number stated as required cooling multiplied by the number of processes running, so you can max out at four times that number if you run all four processes (LF+OX, LF, OX and monoprop) at the same time. The small converter is designed to always overheat since it requires 100 kW of core cooling but has a max cooling of only 50 kW, while the big converter has 200/500 so you can run two processes indefinitely, but not three.

There used to be some weird things going on with foldable radiators, drills and converters, which led to fixed radiators being the preferred way of cooling (you wanted to separate the core transfer "circuits" so the drills and the converters didn't interact), but I don't know if that's been fixed or not. Either way though, I like using one large radial mounted radiator (the fixed, non-folding one) to cool two drills, or two to cool one big converter. I tend to do my mining on bases where there's truss or girders parallel to the ground, so I just put the radiators on the underside of the piece(s) the drills/converter is mounted to - discreet, takes no useful space, stays in the shade.

Open questions:

- I'm not sure how engineers interact with this - they reduce heating, don't they, but by how much?

- Can the core transfer stat be reduced by the radiator getting too hot?

- Does core heating actually cause regular internal heating these days? If it does it's gotta be a pretty small effect, but I haven't really tested it - I don't have any mining bases at the moment in my current save.

- Is there anything in the stock game other than mining equipment that produces core heat? RTG's?

Edited February 1, 2017 by renhanxue

[Jarin]

14 minutes ago, renhanxue said:

so you can run two processes indefinitely, but not three

- and this was the first time I'd had four running for any length of time, so the heat built up in the background until it exploded the lowest-tolerance item on the base as soon as physics loaded. I didn't realize there was a limit there, I just figured "more radiators" solved everything. Granted, I had something like 10 drills running, so I could have just overloaded it in general. I need to crunch some numbers...

Edited February 1, 2017 by Jarin