Psitticine

Sorry for the lag in reporting this (work got crazy this week) but the latest also fixed the issues I was reporting with the DUMBO + thermal generator. Very smooth and lag-free now!

What exactly do you need there? New model? Or the configuration/performance info?

Hey, sorry to bombard with questions this weekend, but is there a difference I'm missing between the Thermal Rocket Nozzle and the Advanced Thermal Nozzle? While I'm posting so much, let me also say thanks for all the work you're doing on this project! It is obviously quite a handful and your hard work is appreciated!

There isn't anything on the ground or within 80 km, which is the lowest I have anything orbiting Kerbin at the moment. There are 22 active flights in total, including 2 space stations, a few probes on their way to various destinations, a returned Duna mission hanging in orbit while its data decays into science, and a bunch of comm sats here and there. No debris at the moment. I tend to clean it up ASAP. In terms of actually being loaded in, I think the slow-down vehicle would have been the only one. Things also run fine with any other combo I've tried so far, or if I forget the radiators and the generator shuts off. It seems to be something in that connection. Another question while I'm at it - what kind of thrust should I expect from a magnetic nozzle attached to a dusty plasma reactor? I'm getting about 10kN in vacuum, which might be accurate considering the really high ISP it is producing, but I'm also getting a wildly higher reported thrust from KER while in the VAB, more in line with what I would expect from a thermal nozzle but with better ISP. I suspect that's just KER's issue but I thought I would check. I should mention my generator on that vessel is a charged particle generator, but it appears from the nozzle's right-click stats that it is getting all the particles it can consume.

I was rather expecting it to be a mod conflict of some sort as well. What surprised me was being able to start a new game with all the same mods and not having any performance hit. Very odd, but hopefully something that will not reappear in any future games.

A bit of additional info on the DUMBO/Thermal Generator issue I've been seeing: I started a fresh sandbox game with the same KSP installation and am seeing no problems. It is apparently something to do with my game-in-progress (a career game, if it matters) that is causing the issue. I also tried a fresh install, copied over my mod list via CKAN to keep things otherwise equal and got the same results: no problem with a new game but copying over my save folder and launching the old career manifests the game-killing slowdown and CPU spike. I even trying starting a new career game, editing the science and funds in the new save so I could get back to the same place in the science tree, and tried it again, still with no slowdown. So, seems like anybody starting a fresh game won't see it but I think I'm out of luck for further DUMBO testing unless I can find some other element that's causing the issue.

Yeah, I had a chance to go back to it and the slowdown I was having is definitely from adding a Thermal Electric Generator to the DUMBO.

I tried it this morning in a spaceplane I eventually hope to get Eve round-trip worthy. I experienced severe lags as soon as it hits the runway however. The actual framerate as far as the GPU is concerned is normal but I saw a spike in CPU usage and the simulation slowed down to unplayable. The same vehicle was working with a magnetic-containment fusion reactor. I was trying swapping out for the DUMBO to see if I could run the multiple thermal turbojets I had on there at max since they were draining the fusion reactor to the point it auto-shutdown if I cranked them all the way up. I tried yanking some things like the turbojets and various radiators to see if they might be causing it but didn't found anything that seems to be alleviating it when removed. Unfortunately, it was then time to go to work so I haven't had time yet to test other configurations/usages to see what may or may not trigger the lag. I'll let you know if I spot anything that might be useful for debugging when I can get back to it.

I'm having a problem where the deltaV remaining for the current stage disappears when the engine(s) are firing. I'm using Real Fuels with the stockalike configs. Is anybody else seeing anything like this?

I believe the problem is the angle the harpoon is dangling from the winch housing. It can't pull all the way back in if it isn't coming back into the housing fairly straight-on. In other words, if you have a kink in your cable of more than a few degrees, the attached bits are at the wrong angle to slide back in. Even if you turn the base, it still can't quite line up right, especially given the way it is banging against the ground. In this case, you can eject the harpoon, retract the cable 100%, and have a Kerbal on EVA gather up the harpoon and reattach it. Think of it as manual reloading. When designing craft with winches, I've often mounted them on infernal robotics pieces so I can rotate them to an optimal retraction angle (and have a wider angle of potential deployment as well) but I think in this case, you would still need more ground clearance even if you could point your winch straight down.

Got a little bit of a buglet to report: if you launch a refinery and reactor set-up but neglect the generator or other actual electrical source, you'll get a status of "Out of water" for the refinery when you attempt electrolysis instead of a message about the lack of power. This is with tanks properly set-up with water and storage for the results of the process; add a generator and it kicks right into action. I haven't tested with all the other processes yet but the Haber process at least gives the proper "Insufficient Power" status message. Not a big deal by any stretch of the imagination but it could be confusing to people who haven't figured out what's really wrong with their set-up.

That certainly works for me - thanks for the quick response!

OK, apparently, I'm a bit of a pinhead because I can't figure out how to store the hydrogen peroxide coming out of the anthraquinone process. My end goal, probably fairly obviously, is running the results through the peroxide process to get some hydrazine to potentially refuel RCS thrusters once I'm actually doing more than testing this on the launch pad. I can't seem to find a tank to contain it though. What am I missing here? I did some searching but didn't come up with any hits aside from run-throughs of the processes involved.

The bars and pulsing are the indications of parts heating up. They'll pop up long before there's any danger so the radiated heat from the fuel cell isn't melting anything, just heating the place up. (If they are bothersome, F10 will remove the overlay.) A tweakable to cut the output would be a sweet addition. Most times, I really haven't needed the full output potential and it doesn't seem to auto-throttle when the batteries are full (which can be a good thing for it not to do, as I used it under just such circumstances to produce some emergency water on the way home from Minmus the other day.)