Gildarrious

For sure, he and I have been having discussions above about the last patched version and getting it working! I appreciate the willingness to listen @FreeThinker.

To add to what these guys were saying. Here is my Thermal Turbojet with 20 tons of additional radiators to what it originally had. You can see that at 1% thrust, 1% reception = 270MW it casually explodes on the runway. It is producing 1.2Kn of thrust while it explodes, which is pretty depressing. This same design last patch produced 2000Kn from 8GW of power, using only 4 normal sized radiators. Previously this craft went to Minimus and back with no heating trouble. One thing to note about the picture, is that there is no wasteheat at all. Turning down heatProductionMultiplier = .05 didn't even help at all. 1/20th the heating still explodes the craft engine in 1 second at full power. https://www.dropbox.com/s/h88pn4vl9qfcj0n/KSP.png?dl=0. Additionally, as a test. I ran the engine full power full reception with cheats to not explode. This was the result after 1:25. Temperature gauges read 4.96 million degrees kelvin and climbing at 52,000 kelvin or so per second. This is gargantuanly hotter than the sun itself. Finally got my 4794.8 Kn though! https://www.dropbox.com/s/ka7ldijtlrhwvbh/KSP2.jpg?dl=0. Running another test with 77 radiators, 162.9GW of radiation capability, 19,143 M^2 or radiator surface area. Here is the engine overheating and exploding at one notch of throttle. All the radiators on the middle are in atmosphere specialized, but I wanted to go all out and added the graphene as well. https://www.dropbox.com/s/sd0cnclm4rx3gem/KSP3.jpg?dl=0.

So a glib reading of the above code would be the following, starting at the question mark: /* so if the above wasn't null. 50% of throttle * radius^.8 * .3 * ?? / fuelflow / ISP / partmass (error here with the whitespace?) Then take that portion, and min it against 9999. Using airflowheatmodifier which is calculted by coolers and atmosphere. All of that leads to positive heat production under all circumstances, with greater or lessor dependant on fuels/atmospheric speed. Would it be better to have a thermal nozzle at a given operational temperature, determined by connected heat, and then any usage reduces temperature? This would give you a balanced equation where more time thrusting reduces thrust. Effectively this would flip the equations on their head and work closer to real world mechanics? I know that isn't how it is modeled, but my question is, would that be an improvement albeit a difficult one to implement? An illustrative example. Your thermal nozzle idles at 2600K when attached to sufficient power. This gives you an ISP of X and a thrust of Y. You takeoff from the runway, using that heat to generate thrust/lift As you are using the thermal resource, temperatures drop and reduce X and Y. Switching fuels from atmospheric to something that decomposes ie: methane, you generate some heat back and thus reduce temperature by a smaller amount than atmospheric air. X and Y would be higher. You stop thrusting upon reaching orbit, and your temperature recovers to 2600K. X and Y return to max amounts.

The more I dig into this, the more I realize that the code is way more complex than I am familiar with. Sorry for my ignorant attempt to parse it. I still think that heatProduction = 100 likely has something to do with it, but reading through ThermalNozzleController.cs, it is clear that there are many equations leading to temperature outcomes. Something involving "soot" seems to make a ton of difference? EIther way, I'll wait for reply before I go too crazy. Relevant code here: if (controlHeatProduction) { engineHeatProduction = (currentEngineFuelFlow >= engineHeatFuelThreshold && _maxISP > 100 && part.mass > 0.0001 && myAttachedEngine.currentThrottle > 0) ? 0.5 * myAttachedEngine.currentThrottle * Math.Pow(radius, heatProductionExponent) * heatProductionMult * PluginHelper.EngineHeatProduction / currentEngineFuelFlow / _maxISP / part.mass : 1; engineHeatProduction = Math.Min(engineHeatProduction * (1 + airflowHeatModifier * PluginHelper.AirflowHeatMult), 9999); myAttachedEngine.heatProduction = (float)engineHeatProduction; }

I mean that's fine and all, but it should likely treat in game heat the same way as it treats waste heat, no? If it's a limitation of the game engine, that would suck, but I presume (ignorantly) that it could just generate negative heat, right? EDIT** I went digging into code for this part, and found this: // --- standard part parameters --- mass = 2 dragModelType = default maximum_drag = 0.2 minimum_drag = 0.2 angularDrag = 2 crashTolerance = 12 breakingForce = 800 breakingTorque = 800 maxTemp = 2750 emissiveConstant = 0.85 heatConductivity = 0.01 which looks great and completely normal. The conductivity is really low, but hey, whatever it's an acceptable value. That explains why the heat isn't moving to the radiators very quickly. Furthermore: MODULE { name = ModuleEngines thrustVectorTransformName = TT exhaustDamage = True ignitionThreshold = 0.1 minThrust = 0 maxThrust = 500 heatProduction = 100 fxOffset = 0, 0, 1.5 So I bolded this component. I haven't made a mod or anything, but I would expect it is acting like any other engine. Heating up as it is active. Turning this down or off would likely yield expected behavior, but I would love to hear what you think @FreeThinker.

So I can definitely branch into different kinds of radiators in order to solve this, but I really don't understand the underlying mechanics. To illustrate my understanding: A heat source, be it thermal receiver or reactor is receiving/producing heat for this system. This heat is then piped into the thermal nozzle, where it meets the cooler propellant. This propellant is colder than the hot cycle, and is thus heated to the point of expansion. This expansion is vectored out of the nozzle and produces thrust for the ship. This seems to me, that the propellant would function as removing heat from the system, as a heat sink. I would then presume that an active thermal nozzle would be cooling the ship, while the receiver is adding heat to the system. This understanding does not seem to be what is happening in actuality, as the active thermal nozzle is producing heat and explodes rapidly unless radiators are used. I believe my understanding is supported by the wiki: "If you are running thermal rockets, your reactor's waste heat will be dumped out the back along with the propellant, so you never need to worry about it as long as your engine is on.". am really just asking why the thermal ramjet is so keen to produce heat and explode? My understanding is that an "off" thermal engine would be heating up rapidly, while one producing thrust would be removing heat from the system. I get that the receiver only receives as much thermal power as it is using, so this system wouldn't be entirely realistic to model.

See that's the strange thing, more power is more cold. The air is already cool at sea level, although compressed air is cooler to start with, it still overheats rapidly. Cooler --> Hotter: Compressed air --> Intake air --> Methane. Mostly I'm just curious to see the mechanics, ie math, behind the engine heating to overheating depending on energy.

Thank you for the response @FreeThinker I am now wondering what I am doing wrong with the thermal turbojet. It seems impossible to get this thing off the ground without an irresponsible number of radiators. The wiki references that as long as it is active, it should be expelling waste heat. Instead of that, however, it seems that this part will explode in atmosphere, with radiators, while at partial throttle. I have it hooked to a thermal receiver and just throttling up at the runway will generate a ton of heat. This part explodes well before the radiator give out. Strangely, with more power input into the receiver, the cooler the thermal turbojet operates? Could you explain this mechanic? Is there something that I am missing, perhaps, or some mechanism that is generating heat from the thermal turbojet activating? Picture of craft here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sdr1shirbpyh0yb/Screenshot 2018-09-20 20.18.03.png?dl=0

Thank you both so much for having this conversation, it answered many of the beamed power questions I had. I just wanted to double check if there was a difference in relying with mirrors versus relays. Naively I would assume that relays absorb and send the signal again which would "reduce" the distance between the source and ultimate destination. This would be opposed to the mirrors that would change the angles but keep the same distance between the source and ultimate receiver? Do i have this right, or is there another intended scenario for mirrors versus relays? Also I totally biffed it and upvoted the conversation, without realizing that this forum format is not used in that way. Now they have disappeared from the timeline. Sorry about that.

Thanks so much! You're a rockstar @FreeThinker!

2 MHD generators? Technically, a reactor can only be connected to a single power generator. You receive a 50% power reduction you get when not connected to a (single) MHD generator/plasma nozzle. Have you tried connecting it to a single MHD generator/plasma Nozzle? Hey again, @FreeThinker. I have put together two ships per your instructions. Still pegged at 50% for the single (1) MHD and reactor combo: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8dgd53dj2vyr65i/Screenshot 2018-09-07 14.13.23.png?dl=0. For the single MHD plazma nozzle, I tried a few configurations but was unable to get the reactor working with it. Reactor displayed 0% active with all the plasma thrusters I tried. Example here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/b077vny23frin64/Screenshot 2018-09-07 14.36.26.png?dl=0. Engine fired and was usable, but did not appear to draw energy from the reactor. Neither did the magneto plasma truster, although that drew no power and had no thrust? I presume this is just my ignorance and I'm not too concerned, but I still want to get OCGC reactor working above 50% to upgrade my beamed power network. Regarding cost, it is much harder to gather funds than stock, with many times the tourist mission between real missions, but that is the price of fancy tech I suppose so I'm ok with it.

Thank you @FreeThinker for your quick response, unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. Please see here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wlitetbz3jmk8be/Screenshot 2018-09-07 03.27.11.png?dl=0 with the exact same vessel using two MHD generators instead of one MHD and one thermal. As you can see, the reactor is still pegged at 50% output in the reactor control window. Waste heat is under control, energy is sufficient, there is no G force or even an engine to push it. Could this be a bug? One MHD alone is also not changing it, but I didn't grab an image of that.

Hey @FreeThinker, first off, I want to thank you for this awesome mod. I've put in like 50 hours in just interstellar hard mode career. Trying to get funds with the cost of these parts is nightmarish! I have a small concern that I cannot seem to figure out using all of the wikis/questions available. It would seem that the component Open Gas Core Reactor is not working properly. I have seen that it has buoyancy as a component in the CFG and older wikis which is related to gravity. Using Hyperedit I have placed this in various gravitational situations, and it never achieves more than 50% power. At first on the ground it has .005% power generation, then adding more MJ of power allows it to reach 50% once placed in orbit. It never goes higher than this in spite of placement in high/low orbits and around other SOIs. Is this intended to never broach 50%, or is this working as intended? I can supply images if requested, but it is really just the power output that is suffering. I have disabled NF interaction and have drastically oversupplied energy storage and power transmission capabilities to test as well. Image here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wonbw5q3ucebls5/Screenshot 2018-09-07 02.29.13.png?dl=0 Description to follow: Open Cycle Gas Core reactor excel a generating high amount of thermal power at double the core temperatures the Closed Cycle predecessor with less mass. This is achieved my removing the walls that separate the propellant and the nuclear fuel. Although this allows much higher core temperatures, the disadvantage is the reactor cannot operate while under the influence of acceleration, which happens when it is either on he surface or when accelerating at high speed.