mbaryu
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Posts posted by mbaryu
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2 hours ago, davidle said:
I have a vessel with 4 reactors onboard. When I try to refuel them from a tank of UF4, each reactor takes the fuel from the previous reactor so that when I'm done the 4th reactor is full and the others are empty. I've had this problem with multiple vessels. Is it possible to avoid this sort of reactor cannibalism?
Perhaps you could block fuel usage I'm afraid not. I'm afraid the refuelling mechanic never took into account for more than one reactor. It's one aspect I want to address when I overhaul the nuclear salt reactor. In general, I would recommend using one nuclear reactor per vessel to prevent issues and it also offers mass bonuses as a single big reactor has a lower mass than multiple smaller reactors with the cumulative same capacity.
The first time I encountered this was on a station I built to breed Tritium and beam power using four MSRs. The second time was on a spaceplane using 4 Lanter Engines. Since they were running on enriched Uranium, the onboard ISRU drained them while making UF4 and I was unable to refuel them. The second instance is more of a problem because using multiple nuclear engines on a vessel is pretty standard. I agree that in most circumstances using a single reactor is a better use of mass.
I've noticed that the UF4 in tanks can't be used to refuel reactors. I've never figured out what's going on or if that's even intentional. At least for one of the other reactors you can only refuel it when it's fully shut down.
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On 5/6/2019 at 11:01 AM, Rudolf Meier said:
... yeah, ok... detaching it with KAS/KIS and reattach it... that's something I didn't plan for, but it's not hard to add this capability... let's say it is about... 5 to 8 lines of code... maybe one 'if' and some value resets or something like that
I guess you can always find a way to destroy it... but, it's a good point and I'm sure I will fix this in a future version
Hahah! Indeed. I wouldn't worry too much. If I'm reattaching IR parts in flight, I'm pretty much expecting explosions
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On 5/5/2019 at 5:32 AM, Rudolf Meier said:
currently the only "bug" I know is, that a joint that is root (which can only happen when you decouple it somehow) does not work anymore... but since nothing is attached to it, it doesn't matter wheter or not it moves this "nothing"... so, the only negative effect of this is having entries in the log
This could happen quite easily with KAS/KIS. I'm curious how much IR would freak out if you completely detached something, then built it into some other vessel (but not enough to give it a try just at the moment :) ).
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4 hours ago, FreeThinker said:
it suppose to be working with a magnetic nozzle but appears to be broken right now. I'm looking in it
Oh cool, I thought I was doing something wrong and moved on to positrons + plasma.
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22 hours ago, Rudolf Meier said:
use uninitialized variable ...
Very Kerbal of you!
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16 hours ago, FreeThinker said:
Shut down why? Do you experience any overheat issues of GeForce spikes ?
I haven't been able to reproduce this on a simpler craft and the one that had the failure was ridiculously complex, so I suspect something else was going on. It still points to a strange power distribution problem.
I didn't see any evidence of geforce spiking (though who knows when exiting warp) and I'm pretty sure the heat sinks were much more than necessary. Certainly wasteheat wasn't near max.
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On 4/14/2019 at 3:39 PM, mbaryu said:
Interesting. I see the rationale, though I think there are three problems with it:
1st, even a PBH wouldn't have a lot of impact on the atmosphere and PBHs are many orders of magnitude larger than what I suspect the Quantum Singularity Reactor is supposed to use (I assume based on the fact that it feeds in Hydrogen or Helium that it is an unstable size, which means fairly small).
2nd, if that were the reason, why could I then power it up inside the atmosphere?
3rd, The ship has a bunch of MHDs, one for each positron reactor, which haven't been turned off (this is how the ship was originally launched, after all). So something is wrong with the power feed to the plasma nozzles if that's the case.
But it's definitely a weird problem.
@FreeThinker I was able to reproduce the problem with a similar ship in a totally different situation. The ship has 2 plasma nozzles with positron reactors and MHDs, and a QSR. The plasma nozzles worked fine until the ship crossed from Kerbin SoI to Kerbol SoI. After that I had to shut down the QSR to get the plasma nozzles to work.
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1 hour ago, FreeThinker said:
If I'm not mistaken this is a automated safety feature to prevent the black-hole from uncontrollably sucking up the atmosphere and the planet in the process. It similar how the NSWR stops producing thrust when aiming the exhaust to your homeworld.
Interesting. I see the rationale, though I think there are three problems with it:
1st, even a PBH wouldn't have a lot of impact on the atmosphere and PBHs are many orders of magnitude larger than what I suspect the Quantum Singularity Reactor is supposed to use (I assume based on the fact that it feeds in Hydrogen or Helium that it is an unstable size, which means fairly small).
2nd, if that were the reason, why could I then power it up inside the atmosphere?
3rd, The ship has a bunch of MHDs, one for each positron reactor, which haven't been turned off (this is how the ship was originally launched, after all). So something is wrong with the power feed to the plasma nozzles if that's the case.
But it's definitely a weird problem.
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2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:
@mbaryu Silly me, I forgot that the Plasma nozzle requires a MJ power source to operate as it requires power to magnetize the plasma nozzle, a specialized kind of magnetic nozzle, Notice that the Crusader has taken over this role of unpowered high isp, at the expense of a maximum isp. I will add a field to make it clear the plasma nozzle is lacking power when unpowered
Great, that makes sense, thanks! However there's still the problem of the example 3 which causes the plasma nozzle(s) to fail after entering the atmosphere. The bizarre workaround is to turn off the singularity reactor, then power it back up after entering the atmosphere (although at high altitude so there's still near 0-g acceleration).
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3 hours ago, FreeThinker said:
Currently, the only way to produce positrons is with the Free Electron Laser. This part is rather large so I will add a positron production version of the Cyclotron Antiproton Factory.
Also the Quantum Singularity Reactor produces positrons. The rate of production of the free electron laser is so low that in career mode it took me less time to develop the more advanced tech (and faster production) than it took to recharge a single ship using the free electron laser. However the quantum singularity reactor is also massive and seems unable to connect to any nozzle to provide thrust (it says it can be hooked up to a magnetic nozzle, but the thrust produced is minuscule).
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I'm currently puzzled by something I've been experiencing for a while. This seems to apply to plasma nozzles (when I replace the plasma nozzle with a krusader, the problem seems to go away). KSP 1.6.1, and the previous 2-3 releases of kspi, situation is vacuum. Game is career with the positron reactor fully upgraded.
Ship design is a simple stack: mini molten salt reactor and thermal power plant, positron storage, probe core, large Lh2 tank with graphene radiators wrapped around it, positron rector, nozzle.
With the plasma nozzle, the ship sometimes will operate properly, and I get a reasonable expected amount of thrust. However more often I get 0 thrust. The engine seems to pulse a tiny bit of thrust when I throttle up, but then immediately goes back to 0. Occasionally on more complex vessels I also get a small percentage of expected thrust (like 1%) which seems to very slowly ramp up (though not to 100%). As stated above, if I replace the plasma nozzle with the krusader, the craft works perfectly (albeit with lower ISP and higher anticipated and actual thrust).
What is going on? What am I doing wrong?
Edit: Craft file: https://gist.github.com/chris9871/c0648ff8c48e4cfc700cad2d76ab340c
Edit 2: This design appears to work: https://gist.github.com/chris9871/a7445410fdc09bb042f4cea05da0fe8b
Note that in the working design, I've removed the molten salt+ therm and replaced them with an mhd on top of the positron reactor.
Edit 3: This design works except in a weird case: https://gist.github.com/chris9871/52934705a37fd646583ea7ab30a01e0f
In this design, power up the black hole reactor, then quicksave and reload. _then_ enter the atmosphere (of kerbin). After entering the atmosphere, the nozzle stops producing thrust.
Edit 4: PS On a side note, the triangle radiators on testr3 seem to have a noticeably lower weight to heat dissipation ratio than other head radiators. This doesn't seem like it was intentional, though I can't tell for sure.
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1 hour ago, taniwha said:
if KAS 1.2 is working well without EL, then the problem will be in EL as it does poke around in KAS's innards a little (build cost, resource pipe connections, etc).
I figured it was something like that. Not to worry, I've downgraded for now
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15 hours ago, Tonka Crash said:
Have you posted in the EL thread? I have EL installed, but haven't gotten to the point of using it in my current game, so I'm not seeing problems yet.
Yes:
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There's an interaction between KAS 1.2 and Extraplanetary Launchpads 6.5.1 that causes EL to break when selecting a craft in the UI (definitely including a craft that does not have KAS parts). I'm guessing it has to do with one or more of the deprecated parts. Reverting to KAS 1.1 solves the problem.
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I just ran into a strange bug after upgrading KAS to 1.2 with EL 6.5.1 installed. I don't think I changed anything else and I don't see any (other?) corruption so far.
When I 'Select Craft' and select any of my craft that worked in EL before, the EL UI goes out to lunch. I actually had it overlaying all the mechjeb windows over the EL UI at one point, but for the most part it's just blank with a green selectable dot.. The only thing I've been able to do to clear it up is to go back to an old save. Effectively this means that EL is busted.
I'm going to try to downgrade from KAS 1.2 back to the previous version to see what happens.
Edit: Reverting to KAS 1.1 solves the problem. KSP version 1.6.1. One of the tested craft had no EL or KAS parts.
BTW, thanks for the great mod!
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On 4/7/2019 at 4:20 AM, wkwied said:
Is there a reason why some parts are not able to be scaled down? Is it possible for me to tweak my install to allow them to be scaled down? Namely, I am referring to the z-pitch engines - they can not be scaled downwards
The one I always want to miniaturize is the black hole reactor. But I figure that's not miniaturizable due to our current view of the distant future tech's possibilities (since at that end of the tech tree, play balance isn't really much of an issue anymore).
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14 minutes ago, pp3d said:
Umm.. i've been scratching my head on the following thinking that i am doing something wrong but I think there is a bug unless something on the gameplay is not explained (definitely changed from previous versions). This is in regards to the Alcubierre Heavy Warp drive. It puts the ship in a solar retrograde motion once it exits Kerbin's SOI. It doesn't matter how you do it... 2k prograde kerbin orbit, fire the warp retrograde or prograde in respect to kerbin's orbit ... and you get 7k or 11k respectively --- as you should -- but retrograde once you exit the SOI. Version 1.20.18
ps: I have not tested any of the other KSPIE engines yet...
I've seen this happen randomly from time to time. At first I thought it was my questionable piloting skills, or my questionable vector skills, but I've seen definite reversal of velocity vector in a few cases after crossing an SOI boundary. But getting this consistently is interesting. Has anyone else seen this?
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42 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:
Now, why would you want to store water as hydrogen + oxygen which are much more difficult to store than simply store it liquid water which is much denser, lighter and cheaper?
It seems like since water is not compressible, but hydrogen and oxygen are, wouldn't liquid O2 and liquid H2 compress to a more dense fuel than water? Math (maybe my math is right and maybe not - this isn't an area of expertise for me): Oxygen is 16g/mole, hydrogen is 2g/mole = 16g + 2*2g = 20g / mole. Water is 18g/mole. I guess water is more dense, though if you could cool the liquid oxygen/hydrogen further, perhaps the density would go up? On the other hand, if the system could also use the energy produced by the O2 H2 -> H2O conversion (thermal generator for a hall effect engine?) there might be an advantage.
While looking this up it occurred to me that I don't remember seeing a Metallic Hydrogen engine in KSPI. Definitely Science Fiction at this point, but conceivable. Does it belong?
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1 hour ago, davidle said:
I have space station producing positrons powered by a Open Cycle Gas Core reactor. As it begin to run out of fuel, I flew up a container full of UF4, powered it off and sent up a Kerbal engineer to refuel and restore power. However, the reactor isn't responding to commands, it won't refuel or power up. This has persisted across the current version of KSPI and the one before it, so I can't tell if this is a bug or a feature.
I've noticed that several of the reactors (not that one in particular, but I haven't tested it) get corrupted in the save file if they run out of fuel. For example, I created a ship with a molten salt reactor using Extraplanetary Launchpads. I didn't have fuel for it (oops), so I had to ship some from Kerbin (oops). When I fueled the reactor it wouldn't do anything. I looked at it in the save file and noticed that its KSPI reactor info was full of NaNs. I assumed that was a bug (was it?) so I copied values from a similar sized reactor and it worked fine.
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9 hours ago, FreeThinker said:
Alternative you can go to the moon to collect regolith which can be converted into hydrogen. For higher concentration find a crater on the polar muns to collect water which can be converted to hydrogen using ISRU electrolizers.
I tried this a while back (not recently) and had problems with it because the non-basic ISRU's would not work when the craft was not in focus. On Laythe that was not a big deal, but on Mun and Minmus hydrogen separation took a really long time, so focus would need to remain on the outpost for extended durations.
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Regarding the Thermal Turbojet, I think there's a couple ways kspi playability could improve playability.
1) I understand that the design of the turbojet is unsuited to reducing fuels like LiquidFuel, however there are a few components that are often used in the same craft as a thermal turbojet which can't support a variety of thermal turbojet fuels. In particular mk2 and mk3 (and Nertea's mk4) spaceplane hulls and the precooler. The only thermal turbojet fuel I seem to be able to select is CO2. To help gameplay could these be added to IFS for helium?
2) <pie in the sky feature request> When building spaceplanes attaching some of the reactors to the back to make a single-engine craft results in excessively long (and heavy) tail sections. To solve this, I usually clip the reactor into the spaceplane hull and leave the fuel tank empty, but it would be really cool if some of the spaceplane tail-section-hull pieces could have a reactor version.
Thanks for a great mod and for teaching us a little about rocketry!
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3 hours ago, Mcglin250 said:
First I understand the warp drives remember your current velocity when entering warp and reapplying it when you exit warp but unless I'm missing a variable here this is greatly bugged such as warping just outside the influence of a planet you were orbiting to just to be flying off into space in the complete opposite direction of the planets orbit.
I've also noticed that sometimes the warp drive results in inconsistent velocity vectors when you exit warp. I haven't been able to figure out the characteristics of the failure, and it seems to be rare. Usually the velocity vectors after leaving warp are appropriate to the source velocity vectors.
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2 hours ago, TackleMcClean said:
I might've seen this explained on the github repo, not sure and can't find it anymore.
Basically I had similar issue with setting up a drilling base where my very hefty cooling just wasn't enough for my small nuclear reactor.The explanation was that the drills reserve a lot of cooling even if they're not using it, so you will need an abnormal amount of cooling to suffice.
Oh! Yes that makes a lot of sense. That explains why KSP interstellar did what they did with wasteheat as well. Thanks!
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43 minutes ago, Das_Sheep said:
So here's a question that I'm fairly sure is just me misunderstanding something: I have a small preliminary base (read, cobbled together pile of bits) now, I've taken into account the cooling required of the various reactors and drills etc and put various versions of radiators (from Heat Control) around the base with what I thought was a generous margin.
The problem is that after a while heat keeps building up, especially after time warp. Adding more radiators only slows not eliminates the positive heat.
Am I best just sticking on a couple of ranger thermal control systems?
I've noticed this as well. With larger reactors it seems to happen less, though perhaps that's because they aren't anywhere near their (heat) maximum.
... yeah, ok... detaching it with KAS/KIS and reattach it... that's something I didn't plan for, but it's not hard to add this capability... let's say it is about... 5 to 8 lines of code... maybe one 'if' and some value resets or something lik
KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread
in KSP1 Mods Discussions
Posted
I've had success with a non-plane SSTO (though it could be converted to a plane easily enough): plasma nozzle + positron reactor + lots of positrons. I didn't bother with refueling, but the basic structure has enough lift to take all the hardware needed to refine fuel. To make it easier to handle in atmospheres I gave it some small LF tanks. For everything else, a giant H2 tank. I can see if I can dig up a craft file for it later.
This is, however, fairly high tech, so not suitable to an early career build (I used it in mid career).