DGerry

Is Deuterium-Lithium6 fusion not implemented? The right-click context menu in the parts list shows it, but I can't select it on any of the fusion reactors even if I have a Lithium Deuteride container on the craft. I'm pretty sure I have all the requisite technologies unlocked - Fusion reactors are "tech 3". I don't know if it's maybe because the reactor needs its own "buffer" of the fuel? If so, that would explain why only the Tri-Alpha reactor can use proton-Lithium7 fusion, but the Tri-Alpha reactor does have a "buffer" for Lithium Deuteride and yet it still can't switch to Deuterium-Lithium6 fusion.

Thermal engines appear to be pretty broken in the latest release - they're not consuming wasteheat at rates anywhere near what they ought to, and they're not consuming/"requesting" reactor power at the rates they ought to. A simple engine test rig looking like - Engine set to intakeAtm(turbojet or ramjet, doesn't matter)>AM Reactor>InlineRadiator>AMTank>Pod>Intake will result in the wasteheat steadily climbing at full throttle. At full throttle at sea level with plenty of IntakeAtm to spare, thermal engines used to consume all the reactor power they could and also all the wasteheat they could. They now produce FAR less thrust and the craft heats up rapidly. Is this intended? Edit: This may not happen with all reactors, but it definitely does with Antimatter reactors. Edit2: Appears to be related to Charged Particles. Thermal engines used to be able to consume these for thrust, but they can't anymore?

Going to try this release out now, but I'm wondering if you could add something to the KSPI heat management window regarding radiator performance @1atm pressure?

It looks like your refinery interface window has...nothing inside of it? I'm not sure if that's a bug with your current version of KSPI-E or something caused by the other mods you may be running along-side it. I'm not on the most current version of KSPI-E just yet, so I can't comment on it specifically. That being said, it *should* be in the "toggle refinery window" interface.

Run it through an ISRU(the All-in-One ISRU can do it).

You can use the Magnetometer to see what the flux is at whatever your current altitude. There was a set of graphs showing the ideal altitudes at each planet from a while back but I don't have it anymore. IIRC on Kerbin it's 900km at 0 inclination, but the way to test it would be to get a spacecraft you can put on a highly-elliptical orbit and then pop open the magnetometer and just...watch it as you fly through the orbit and see where it peaks. As far as I know, other than looking at the config files or maybe the code(can't remember where that's defined) there isn't a better way to determine it on your own.

I honestly wouldn't bother regardless of your tech level - A full standard-size gas tank of Solar Wind will net you about 14grams of He-3 and a whole bunch of mostly-worthless junk(carbon monoxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a small amount of neon and deuterium and normal helium). I cheated a fairly large(7.5M part size, 450m^2 collector area) collector into an orbit inside moho(the lowest orbit the game will let you cheat to around the sun) and was getting ~.06units of solar wind per second. At that rate it would take over 1200 Kerbin-days of time to fill up that tank(1.6M units worth of Solar Wind). I'm not sure if there's some hidden value to both this(the Solar Wind "system") and the Regolith parts, but if there is it seems to be pretty well hidden.

I'm pretty sure the "All in One" ISRU has it - you have to click on "toggle refinery window", some of the processes are in there and not on the normal right-click context menu.

I believe the KSPI ISRU part has a Solar Wind Process, that being said I was never able to get a Solar Wind harvester to actually...harvest solar wind.

The lithium-6 was in the reactor, that's what caused the power output to drop to next to nothing.

Right, but what's the exploit? It's still using up the small tritium reservoir it starts with, but if you actually provide it with lithium-6 it becomes useless. Not a very useful exploit? Are you saying that in the next release it will make the proper amount of power when stocked with lithium-6 for breeding into tritium?

So what would cause a magnetized target fusion reactor to put out only ~5% of its total power output? Embrittlement is basically zero, it's running the Deuterium-Tritium fuel cycle, and has plenty of both. Reactor control window shows max power of ~1000MW and Thermal power at 53MW/53MW when the reactor is at 100% - VAB showed this reactor as having ~1000MW as well, it's a 1.875M reactor and I have all the fusion power upgrades. I found out with MSR's that actinide poisoning is an issue...but I can't figure out what could be the problem with this reactor? Not sure if it's a bug or again another mechanic I've not accounted for. Edit: Solved it. If Lithium 6 is present, whether Lithium Breeding is on or not, the reactor's output drops to nearly nothing. If this is a bug, it's super easy to reproduce - just launch a magnetized target fusion reactor with lithium-6 and you'll see the output is super low. Remove the Lithium-6(dump it via TAC or just re-launch with no Lithium-6) and the output is where it should be. If this is NOT a bug, what's the reason for this? The reactor is running on D-T fusion mode either way.

So I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding how to mine and reprocess regolith, or if the whole system is just worthless? 4 drills and one ISRU produces less than 1g of He-3 per day on the Mun in the highlands(concentration 240% or something), that's with a 2-star engineer. Is there a way to mine/reprocess regolith that actually makes it worthwhile?

Is it possible to have radiators consume a resource via just editing a config? If not, how difficult would it be to make that possible? I'm thinking about the possibility of "active" radiators that require IntakeAtm to run - very effective, but will only work on planets with an atmosphere(and won't work well with thin atmospheres or high altitudes, etc), or "evaporative" radiators that require water(mostly make-up water, as in real life, so small-ish amounts) again for atmospheric use.

I don't mean to give that impression at all, and FreeThinker or perhaps Nertea could answer this better than I can. My understanding is that when you have both NF and KSPI-E installed, KSPI-E's power values are all "normalized" to levels that integrate well with NF. If you look at juanml82's screenshot above you'll see his Stellarator reactor producing 15MW - in KSPI-E terms that's tiny, but I imagine that in NF terms that's fairly substantial. I would further assume that the power *requirements* of KSPI-E parts are reduced in the same way. My understanding is that this is all intentional and that the goal is to make it so that the NF stuff is worth using, because otherwise it would all be completely outclassed by KSPI-E reactors/parts. My disclaimer on this post is that I'm not involved in the development of either mod and I could be completely wrong on this. If either FreeThinker or Nertea say differently, assume they're correct and I'm not.

I don't think that's a bug, I think it's due to the fact that you're running with the Near Future mod installed. I believe NF "squishes" all the numbers from KSPI-E. You should be able to run it with one of the early fission reactors no problem. The real issue with running it is the cost and cost of fuel but, as you said, you're on Science career so funds aren't an issue.

It would be good if the Daedalus specified the MW required to sustain its operation in the right-click context menu or something, that way you could view that info in the VAB. That being said, I think you're using the Near Future stuff which afaik changes all the power requirements. What I can tell you is that on "stock" KSPI-E, it requires about 200MW. I don't know what that means for you in Near Future. I've also noticed what may be another issue - Tritium Breeding. I know that an MSR shouldn't breed Tritium very quickly, but I've got a 500GW MSR that I'm using to power a ground-based beamed power network and it produces NO tritium. On the reactor control panel it shows 0's across the board for Lithium use and Tritium production. It shows the Tritium breeding rate is "94%" but I don't know what that means. Tritium amounts never go up by even .01, even after time-warping for a few in-game days. Not sure if this is a bug or if MSR's were at some point changed to not breed any Tritium at all.

I'm also noticing what looks to be like another bug - Thermal receivers are providing far less power than they ought to be in at least some circumstances. I have vessels powered by thermal in-line receivers and nozzles that launched perfectly fine before, more thrust than they needed really, but now they can't even get off the pad. "Effective Input Power" starts out equal to "Input Power" and "Max Input Power" but rapidly drops to zero and then the nozzles just don't produce any thrust. The KSPI info windows show the "Theoretical Supply" Thermal power at the right amount(in this case, 61GW), but the "Current Supply" and "Power Demand" are anywhere from zero to, at this point in time, 16GW. I *believe* what's happening is that as the waste heat goes up the "effective" power goes down, but this should reverse when waste heat goes back down and it does not. I could be wrong on the mechanism behind this, but regardless I don't think I should be seeing 61GW of thermal power coming into a receiver and only 16GW going into the nozzle(everything properly size-matched, and like I said this setup was working perfectly fine previously). Edit: I should clarify, it's not Waste Heat per se - Waste Heat doesn't build up, which I think was intended by the 1.12.23 release. What happens is if you start the receiver and don't start the nozzle, the "Effective Input Power" starts to drop. If you then start the nozzle the "Effective Input Power" will stabilize, but not go back up. If you lower the throttle from 100%, "Effective Input Power" again will start to drop but raising the throttle back to 100% doesn't cause "Effective Input Power" to go back up. Not sure if this is related to the handling of throttle input, or related to the changes to wasteheat/power use on beamed power from 1.12.23.

Here's a screenshot of what I'm experiencing with the Regolith Process. Having "enable overflow" turned on doesn't make a difference, but I did try it. You can see I've got a full tank of regolith and more than enough power available. The ISRU seems to be drawing 20MW but "needs" 40MW, so it thinks it doesn't have enough power to run? I'm not sure, but regardless it doesn't work.

So the reason the "wall to beam power" is going down is because of the temperature of your radiators going up - the output of the reactor is staying the same, but the efficiency of the thermal generator is going down. The only thing you can do about this is add more radiators, but that has diminishing returns past a certain point. Your charged particles generator wouldn't be affected by this but the D-T fusion reaction only produces about 20% of its power as charged particles, the other 80% requires the thermal generator whose efficiency depends on the difference between the "hot bath" and the "cold bath". You can use liquid deuterium I believe if you set the slider on the tank to the "deuterium" side(the right side) - this will convert lqd deuterium to gas as needed I think. You can also use the pressurized gas tank and fill it with deuterium(same goes for tritium). As for the helium, if you really wanna save it you can but when the helium storage fills up I think the reactor just keeps running and it's assuming that the reactor is venting the excess. The Daedalus requires about 200MW of power to run, so you can run it with a wide variety of reactors. The main thing is that it requires the fusion pellets for fuel which are expensive. You can make the fusion pellets out of He-3 and Deuterium, which I believe works out to be cheaper, but He-3 is expensive as well. The Daedalus engine itself costs IIRC 6million funds. It's extremely efficient, and for an interplanetary ship the main advantage would be that you can run really inefficient transfers and not have to wait for transfer windows and have shorter transit times. You'll use a huge amount more delta-v than is typically necessary for an interplanetary transfer, but you can do it. I think the Daedalus is mainly "intended" for inter*stellar* journeys, where you accelerate for long enough to reach significant fractions of the speed of light. I haven't used the Daedalus yet(don't have the funds to support it just yet) but I'm thinking about it, just depends on how easily I can get He-3 without buying it(because buying it is expensive and the Daedalus is expensive as it is).

I can get a screenshot in a couple minutes - I was using the ISRU All-in-One processor at the standard size, and it was the "Regolith Process" reporting "insufficient power". It was saying 0/40MW despite there being far more than enough power available(and other processes requiring 20MW ran just fine). I also tried the ISRU "large" processor, also at the standard size, and had the same result.

ISRU Regolith Process reports "insufficient power" regardless of how much power is available - the refinery window shows 0/40MW despite there being a maximum potential of over 700MW available on the craft. Tested this with multiple varieties of ISRU to make sure it wasn't one specific part. This is when using the Magnetized Target reactor with a thermal generator.

The Daedalus engine should work during timewarp right? I've been able to use the MPD and other electric engines under timewarp, but when I try to timewarp with the Daedalus or Vista engines the game gives me the "Can't timewarp under acceleration" message. Is there some setting or some add-on I'm missing?

So I think the latest update has messed up receivers somehow? I've tested with a couple but for reference, a dual-mode thermal/rectenna receiver operating in electric mode receiving power in the long infrared from my beamed power network is exhibiting super strange behavior. When I activate the receiver it shows the available power in the network properly, but the "power produced" just goes up and up, and the KSPI info windows show the "theoretical maximum" megajoules continuing to go up. The network can provide about 175GW but the number immediately shot up above 1000GW and continued to climb, I reverted the scene when it hit 10,000GW. I figure it definitely shouldn't be doing that, lol.

It sounds for almost all of these like your main problem is that you're using the default reactor sizes. Tweakscale them up if you need more power. The Tri-Alpha colliding beam reactor is meant to provide electric(megajoules) power. It would put out less when you run the Plasma nozzle because the nozzle is sucking up all the charged particles. I believe the nozzle does not need to be directly attached to the charged particle source but you may suffer a penalty if that's the case. For running a plasma nozzle you really want to use something like the Antimatter-Initiated Microfusion reactor or the Antimatter reactor. You could use the Fission Fragment reactor or one of the fusion reactors running one of the more advanced fuels as well, but you want a lot of charged particles and a high core temp. The Vasimr can also be scaled up, but generally you're not going to see huge amounts of thrust to weight ratios out of it without using a beamed power network. Something like, again, the antimatter reactor(with a very high power:weight ratio) could get you some usable thrust out of a Vasimr. The Vista requires 2GW *if* you have all of the fusion upgrade research nodes unlocked. That is, again, at the base size. Your best bet there, again, is to use a high power:weight ratio reactor, ideally one that puts out a lot of charged particles so you can run a charged particle generator. Not only are they more efficient at turning reactor power into MegaJoules, but you can run a much higher temp on your radiators without losing efficiency. You need some fairly advanced reactors to get a high(1:1 or higher) TWR out of a Vista if you've got much of a payload to push(even if you don't, the engine and reactor/generators are heavy). You also need to bring along more deuterium and tritium than the engine comes with. As to boiloff I think you're okay as long as you keep the tanks powered but it probably depends on the specific cryogenic fuels you're putting in them. I'm not sure why your Stellarator reactor shut down except maybe it didn't have enough fuel? It doesn't come with much by default, you probably need an extra supply.