shimmy00

In the stock program? I'd have to say Eve and Dres, Dres probably more than Eve. I remember that I originally wanted to explore the Kerbol system going in and then out again, and Eve was my first interplanetary target yet I could not get a ship to come off there. So I gave up at it for a while. during which I'd try other things, and discover mods - which led to me saying goodbye to stock KSP for good But as I was doing that, I saw one of those funny loading hints say "Never Visiting Dres..." and I thought, "why?!" Ship sent. Dres is very Mun-like but it has a different feel to it that I find I like better. The lighting is more subdued, the terrain is hillier. I just tend to like it overall better than the Mun. That said, it requires a fair bit of delta-vee to intercept and stop there, and haven't tried to see what a mission using solely chemical rockets would take, esp. given I overbuild my landers most times. Eve is beautiful though; with some very breathtaking views and a lovely purple color. However, you need a hell of a big ship to get off - when I finally got back to trying to crack it, I managed it with a 140 tonne lander. Again, I admittedly overbuilt it, and have studied others' designs and realize if you just want to "get off Eve" you can go much lighter esp. if you give up on wanting the launch capsule to be able to navigate back to the mothership (i.e. have the mothership come to you instead), and launch from a high spot. But I wanted to make a craft that I could confidently say I could set down at any place, take off, and maneuver back to the return vessel, esp. given how tricky it is to plot an accurate landing when descending through atmosphere due to the aerobraking, and I built it with 8000 meters in the ascent stages and used a monoprop tank to do the rendezvous and docking maneuvers.

It is when I hit the "RCS" button on the side of the nav ball. Doing that doesn't (always) seem to stop them from draining power, even if they don't visibly or audibly fire while the ship is turning, or even if it's not turning at all.

Ah, so that's why it sucks up so much power, then, isn't it? But why are they still draining power even while turned off? I've had inconsistent behavior in that regard, sometimes turning them off turns off the power drain, other times it doesn't, other times it only shuts off "gradually" (e.g. it drops by like 0.03 MW/s or something.)

I also found something else regarding the problems I mentioned earlier in the thread (page 200) on the strange Megajoule/Kilowatt Hour drain which I tracked down to being the result of firing the "Heavy 5-way RCS Block" RCS thrusters, and made a new discovery by looking through the part files to see what could cause this. I noticed that even though the Heavy 5-way RCS do not show up as an electric thruster, their part definition file references "ElectricRCSController" as a module. So are they supposed to draw electric power? But if that's so, then it seems they're bugged in other ways because for one, they don't show up as needing electric in the VAB part description window, and for another, they can still fire just fine even with Megajoule, etc. reserves at zero - the depletion of such makes no difference. Moreover, once started, the power drain doesn't always stop even when you turn RCS off with the toggle button on the nav ball. But on the other hand, it seems from some comments beside the module reference that the reason this is included is to presumably tweak thrust values for Hydrogen propellant. So is it supposed to work like that if Hydrogen is selected, then the port would draw power to use it as a propellant, but it shouldn't draw power for other propellants? If so, there's a bug there, too. In what way are these thrusters "supposed" to work viz. electric power?

Just want to say this is a downright gorgeous mod package. The planets in this are like ... wow! Seriously the stock system planets look like ... Meh compared to this ... Geez. Thanks a lot for this package.

(rm)

I figured out what was going on with my earlier question (on page 200) regarding the mysteriously high power drain from Lithium batteries and Megajoule capacitors. It is caused by using the "Heavy 5-Way RCS Block" RCS blocks. The stock RCS thrusters do not have this effect, but any amount (or at least 2) of heavy 5-way blocks always seems to draw exactly 5.00 MW (equiv. 1.4 kWh/s) of electric power while thrusting - even though they seem like they should be fuelled only by chemical fuel given the propellants and description. Is this intended or is this a bug? Moreover, I do not believe they stop working when no electric power is available. They just seem to drain it at that high rate as a side effect. (At least, that is, when you're using monopropellant as the propellant - I wonder if this has something to do with that they can consume other propellants - if intended, then the need for electric power should be indicated along with the amounts, and finally, the thruster should stop working when it receives no more electric power.)

I'm curious: does the problem appear to depend on speed? I.e. if you go slower, does it become less severe? Or does it happen simply by virtue of using the warp drive at all? As if it's floating point round off error in the game's movement code, it would seem logical to imagine the problem should decrease with reduced speed.

OK, so why then is it draining a lot of power when RCS is active and thrusting, even though it's chemical-driven RCS, not electric RCS? Again, this still smells like a bug to me. Also, I finally managed to assemble the craft by killing RCS every time the tank stage was lined up for an orbital maneuver, but now I note some other behavior that looks like bugs: during time warp, the fusion reactor (the "Spherical Tokamak" one, at least) ran down its internal store of Deuterium, but then instead of cutting out, seemed to stop depleting it with just a small positive fraction left and keep going, in effect providing "free" perpetual power. Fiddling with the time warp setting would cause it to drain a little more, then it'd go flat and I'd get more perpetual power. It also did not seem to dig into the larger holding tank of Deuterium that I had on the craft as well, like I would have expected it to.

So it's the docking ports, then? Then why would it be only when the RCS is engaged? (I also note that active RCS seems to heat up radiators quite a bit, too, for some reason.) There also seem to be issues involving time warp as well: power spiking during warp, or "persistent" power usage when dropping out that wasn't there when first going in.

I have an Orbital Assembly Docking Port - two, actually, which may be kind of redundant but was out of habit (I need a big 5 m port on the back to fit the final stage which is the Daedalus interstellar fusion engine) - and I presume those are what are providing the SAS. The parts are just the OADPs, the 7 cryo tanks, and chemical RCS thrusters (6 Heavy 5-way RCS Blocks) and a mono tank (and structural elements of course.). ADD: More experimentation reveals that SAS alone doesn't eat that much. But when RCS is turned on along with it, then we get 5 MW. But that doesn't make a lot of sense, RCS derives its power from chemical propellants, not massive quantities of electric power (I have no electric RCS thrusters.).

I want to add: I think I figured the culprit. The little window you get when you click the battery was reporting a 5 MW(!) power drain. It turns out that having SAS on was draining at least 5 MW of power. With it off, the window reports 0.04 MW, or 40 kW, as I'd expect from the cryo coolers, and the Lithium batteries deplete at something that feels like the expected rate. However, is it sensible that SAS should consume that much, especially when as I pointed out it doesn't drain stock batteries at a rate that feels like that (It should drain a single Z-4000 in under 1 second, then, and drain a stack of 10 in under 10 seconds, but seems to drain them at more modest rates than that)? And it drains this even if you're not actively turning.

Thanks. I did mention this as a possibility toward the end, that I realized the capacitors would likely sensibly run dry soon because of just that (a fast self discharge rate). However I also pointed out that stacks of proper batteries also seem to run out too fast. In particular, the Lithium battery packs you mention deplete their Kilowatt Hour at a rate only modestly less than the stock Z-4000 deplete their ElectricCharge when used on the same craft, as though each unit of kWh were barely a few units of EC, yet for the conversions and names to be consistent, we should have 1 kWh = 3.6 MJ = 3600 EC, means a single 750 kWh Lithium super battery should provide 2 700 000 EC worth, and/or at the very least, should power a cryo cooler drawing 6 kW for 125 h, or (as I had) 7 of them (=42 kW) for 18 h (3 Kerbin days). In other words, it still seems there are inconsistent conversions amongst the energies labelled in Kilowatt Hours, Megajoules, and Electric Charge units.

Hi. First of all I'd like to say I have used this set of mods for a while now and really like the concepts and the parts as they are on paper - a lot of very cool stuff and lots of ways to make some really cool craft. Love all the advanced nuclear engines, reactors, etc. But I've lately been a bit discouraged what look like bugs I've found, even in the newest versions, and thought I'd come here to ask about this. I'm not sure if this particular bug has been noted here before - my apologies if it has, but I don't know of any way to search this very long thread beyond checking every single page, which is quite a tall order at 200 pages. My mod version is 1.26.19 and I'm running on KSP 1.11; and it doesn't seem the changes in the newest versions have fixed this one yet. Namely, the problems I've encountered regard resource consumption, and wondering if anyone else has noticed this too or if there's a workaround or fix for it - particularly regarding the different forms of energy involved which, in addition to the stock "Electric Charge", include "Megajoules" and "Kilowatt Hour". Apparently, it seems that Megajoule energy is supposed to be such that 1 EC unit = 1 kJ, so 1 MJ = 1000 EC units, but it doesn't seem to go that way in the game and/or it doesn't seem things consistently follow that formula. I was trying to build a craft with a bunch of (7 large i.e. 5-meter) cryo tanks full of Fusion Pellets to try and cruise it to one of the star systems in the Galaxies Unbound pack, but cannot successfully even launch just the tank module separately (this craft is too big to launch in one launch, so it requires multiple launches and orbital assembly), because it rapidly runs out of power and the FusionPellets begin to similarly rapidly evaporate (11 pellets/s) into the void and with them, any hopes of an interstellar cruise. The thing is, the numbers don't add up: the stage literally only has the cryo tanks, an Orbital Assembly Docking Port for remote control and some RCS stuff for manuevering it to the waiting remainder of the craft, but it drains even a stack of 10 big Megajoule capacitors (I'm thinking like 900 MJ in there) in minutes, yet none of the parts seem to report a power consumption on their little right-click menus that high, e.g. the cryo coolers are reporting only like 6 kW, and with 7 tanks that's 42 kW so my 900 MJ should last 900/42 = 21 ks or almost a full Kerbin day, but it only lasts in-game minutes at most before it is gone - probably less than 1 ks in metric time units, so we're talking power usage at least some 21x beyond what it seems the components' reports in the windows can account for, unless those OADPs are HORRIBLY greedy when it comes to power usage, but then it'd seem that wouldn't make sense either (and alternatively, in other contexts they seem to be perpetual motion machines, because they never seem to run out of energy; though admittedly that was on an earlier version of the mod than the one I am using now. Given the description, I'd imagine they should sip EC at about the same rates as a Probodobodyne stock probe core [HECS/OKTO/etc.] and then when they run out, they should stop working, leaving the craft dead cold, so there the bug is bad in the other direction.). I've also had this problem with other crafts too where I wanted to stick a Megajoule capacitor to provide some start-up kicker energy for a reactor, but I'd launch it and find the thing dry as a bone by the time it reached orbit(!). In some cases, it seems even ordinary Z-4000 stock battery packs (measured with 4000 Electric Charge units each, so should be equivalent to 4 MJ) work better than the Megajoule stuff! Now I though that maybe that's because the MJ devices are "capacitors", not "batteries", so may have a fast self-discharge, but I tried it also with Lithium battery units with 750 Kilowatt Hour (so again - if these things were consistent/correct, should be an insane 2700 MJ in just one pack, hence just one should suffice to provide more than enough time to make the orbital rendezvous and dock the tanks with no boiloff), and the thing was sucked bone dry in hardly more time. Again, even spamming these units on top didn't help worth much - couldn't even complete one orbit around Kerbin without a stack of 10 of the best going dry. Any ideas? ADD: In the response below, @FreeThinker points out that the ultra capacitors should be expected to run dry fast because capacitors self-discharge fast. However, this doesn't explain the trouble with Lithium batteries which also seem to dry up very fast.

Thanks! yeah

Hi. New user to this site, but been playing Kerbal for over a year or more now, including with mods; I was first introduced to this game by my Astrophysics professor, who used it as part of teaching his course (!), and was hooked after that.