Starwaster

Except realizing that you were sitting there the whole time, mesmerized....

Yes. Oh, sorry that's less than 10 characters. Yes, it does work with Kerbal Space Program version 0.21.1 Happy now, Kerbal Space Program forum software?

Well, to be fair (I hate being fair, especially when the Daleks are firing me at a planet...) the ion drive, as I mentioned above and has been mentioned elsewhere has a lot higher thrust than its real life counterpart so we can have burn times that are a half hour instead of a week long. I have no doubt that this has increased its power consumption as well as its fuel consumption. The problem with the RTG can be helped by increasing the rate that it produces power at. As you said though, balance. How much does it need to be bumped up by? I think I gave mine a value of 48 and that DOES feel overpowered to me. But there's no real baseline to lock onto to calibrate thing. Though some of the numbers for the ion drive seem familiar, as though someone looked at the specs for the NEXT drive and said, "ok that's how much electricity the PB-ION should use. Except that it consumes that every time the drive consumes fuel instead of... hmmm can't think right now, my cat Melificent is crying at me right when I'm trying to wrap my head around numbers. And lying on my iPad so I can't do calculations on it... sigh.

You missed a step. You placed your bases properly as far as I can tell but you didn't attach any fairing PIECES. There are three different kinds. Grab one and attach it to one of the attachment nodes on the fairing base. It will automagically shape itself to the payload. Be sure to activate symmetry to close the fairing. The differences between pieces are: Conical has sharp angles. 'egg shaped' is more rounded. Fuselage is like egg shaped but it has NO decouplers and it cannot be jettisoned from your craft. Like the name says it makes a fuselage and you can put stuff inside it or attach things on the outside. (see my picture I posted above. That giant thing between the rockets used the fuselage fairing. It has RCS and solar panels attached directly to the outside. Can you mount things on the inside? I'm not sure... have to try that. I think you can... Also press 'R' when on top of the fairing base and drag the mouse to resize it. You can get different shapes by resizing the top or the bottom and attaching the fairing piece to the ring you resized on. (works best if the fairing is on so you can see the changes in real time) If the fairing base is between an engine and a fuel tank be sure to put the mouse over the base and press 'G' to allow fuel to pass through the fairing base. Otherwise you will have an ignition failure event during launch. And you will not go to space.

You mean as long as we assume that everything is the same voltage. Ok. :SHRUG: RTGs in this game aren't capable of sustaining the levels of activity that IRL they should be. IRL All of Curiosity's power needs are met by one RTG. One RTG can handle the sustained power requirements of a real life ion drive indefinitely. Even for days and days of continuous operation. Granted the ion drive in the game is a bit overpowered so we don't all die of boredom while it finishes one burn and maybe that's why it sucks so much electricity, but the RTG should at least be able to handle that. Even if I have to use several of them. Well, when I first started, I DID use several of them. I had a very nice ion driven probe that I built and I sent it out to explore the Kerbol system. I knew from trying the stock ion probe that it was very power hungry and I stuck 3 ion drives on my probe. I gave it lots of batteries so that I thought would be enough to last through a typical burn and it still wasn't enough. I stuck a bunch of RTGs on it and it STILL couldn't get through one burn. (literally, I had the KAS system installed so I went out into space to the already launched probe and started pasting batteries all over the place). The way an RTG in this game works is nothing like the way they work IRL. The game pulse's its output... I forget the rate, I think it's less than one unit every second. Or maybe it was one unit over a period of several seconds. I ended up patching my RTG. Maybe NOW it's overpowered, on my end, because I wasn't sure what a good value to put was. But it's better than what I was experiencing with the stock part

When SAS is on and in locking mode it all inputs are ignored. Only when it is in damping mode will it allow inputs. That's a KSP thing not a MJ thing. What MJ should be doing is turning SAS off and it seems like it is not. That's probably an MJ thing. What you can do is *NOT* put your craft on SAS manually. Instead, enable Auto SAS in MechJeb. That might not be in the official release though. Get Sarbian's fixes, he's starting his own thread for a temporary MJ2 branch until he hears from the MJ2 dev who seems to be incommunicado at the moment. Now, the blue marker wandering is a KSP thing, not an MJ thing. It probably has to do with math errors and my personal observation is that it is MORE likely to happen the closer your orbit is to circular. (hey, guess what kinds of orbits we like to make?). Ok, so looking at the rest of your procedure, I'm not sure why you're running into problems. Flight Computer is a little flaky to use but I do find that it works. Mostly. And I have mine open all the time when I'm setting up my maneuver. It's like this, I have it open. I *might* pre-align with something in the general direction of my anticipated node. I use MJ to set up my maneuver node. I click Maneuver on the flight computer Setup DV Setup Delay Now, this last.... what delay to use?? The most use I've had out of the Flight Computer is when setting up my relay network. I haven't needed it much otherwise. And my sats are using ion drive. All of them. So I start my delay early. This holds try for any low powered thruster. I set my delay so that it's performing anywhere from 66%-100% of the burn before it ever gets to the maneuver node. If you're using ion drive, set your delay to start the burn early. That might well make the difference. Edit: Realized I missed the duration of the burn you're trying to do. Definitely still do an early burn but not to the extent that I suggested. If it's a low powered thruster maybe 40%-50% early

They're on their way as we speak with: MODULE { name = riotArmor } MODULE { name = baton } MODULE { name = lotsAndLotsOfTearGas }

Apologies for the necroposting but I just had an idea.... if multiple docking ports cause lag then it has to be because of the module code in the part. How about a docking port that stops being a docking port after it's docked? It would require a custom plugin and a custom part. (the part code would be identical except for the addition of a parameter in the MODULE code for the port which signifies that this is going to be fused later) The way it would work is that in the VAB, nothing happens, the part is treated normally and ignored by the plugin. When an actual craft is spawned that has two of these ports connected OR if a craft is docked and results in two of these ports connecting, the MODULE{} code that identifies the part as a docking port is removed. The two parts would just like any other static part. The only real downside I can see is that 'you better mean it' if you use these because they're probably not coming apart again. (technically I suppose it's possible, it's trivial enough to identify that these two parts WERE docking ports using their names but then a mechanism needs to be put in place to not only identify the parts, determine that you want to separate them, reinsert the docking port module code and then separate the craft, all of which adds complexity that might not be wanted)

Hey great! I didn't even mean to. Yeah, you can abuse the hell out of this mod. If I ever get around to trying out Deadly Re-Entry I'm going to use it to make heat shields with too..... be nice if I can do it by making a part that I can retexture. I forget if you can specify new textures just in a part config file or not... anyone know if that's possible? betaking, see my previous post / image. That giant tank in the middle has 21 2.5m tanks, a bunch of struts and girder, control stuff, + solar panels on the outside. During launch I would definitely say that it is laggy. Once in orbit I don't *THINK* that performance is being impacted very greatly but I'll take another look at that next time I get in the game and tell you what I think. That said, there is a spherical fuel tank mod out there filled with all sizes of spherical tanks....

+1 this The fairing base rings need to be slimmer. Especially if we're going to use them as interstages and they're forming the base for some engines. Also, I'm still noticing some situations where fairings get broken when reloading the craft, or when returning from the launchpad. It seems like it happens when you have mismatched bottom/top parts. Either different sized parts or the versions I made with builtin decouplers. If I stick one of those in the bottom and a normal one on the top, it works ONCE. Then if I have to reload the craft I then have to replace all the fairings that are broken. Also, I made an absolutely GIMUNGOUS fairing... On the bottom we have ring fairing that has a quad adapter attached and four nuclear engines. The top is a ring fairing facing down and a clamp Sr. on top because this is supposed to be a drive section for a Duna mission. Next I attached the procedural fuselage because I didn't want this being jettisoned. That's it for the inside. Everything else is attached to the fairing. Four lift units - 3.5m KW tanks, Griffon XX. I think I filled them with LH2 + LO2 to keep them light. Or it might be Liquid Fuel + LO2. Two feed into the others and I jettison those after about 1 minute, 5km up. This was built in a single session with no testing and made it all the way to apoapsis (80km) on the first try. There were however issues with control up in space and I was not able to orient it for its first orbital burn. Ultimately I ended up abandoning the giant fairing idea. I may revisit it however as Duna Voyager drive section mk2 is being a colossal PITA to get into orbit right now. Now that I think I have a handle on the control issues I might just come back to this... Oh, right, so inside this is just a stack of 3x2.5m tanks filled with pure H2 (for the Modular Fuel Tanks Real Fuels mod) then six identical stacks attached radially to the center tank. Other goodies like control units, antennas (for Remote Tech 1) In fact it's carrying a LOT less fuel than you'd think looking at that giant thing in the middle.

@ialdabaoth, is it possible for Hybrid engines to accept more than two propellant configs? I was trying to reconfigure the big KSPX nuclear engine to accept some new nuclear fuels I'm making (see prev.) but I'm finding the hybrid module seems to be conflicting. It only accepts its hybrid configs (LH2 or LH2+LOX) and ignores anything else I try to add with CONFIG{} Also, would it be possible to do propellants as an alias? Such liquid H2 & slush H2? Performance would be identical so it should be possible for a single engine to accept either one in the field. Failing that, using CONFIG{} is it possible to add other modules like if I did something like CONFIG { MODULE { name = ModuleGenerator isAlwaysActive = true INPUT_RESOURCE { name = ElectricCharge rate = 0.5 } INPUT_RESOURCE { name = SlushH2 rate = 1 } OUTPUT_RESOURCE { name = LiquidH2 rate = 1 } } } Would that work do you think? (ignoring for the moment where the LH2 is actually going to go... assume another tank is waiting to accept it, or maybe it would go right to the engines? I'm not sure about that part. Also, another question about ModuleGenerator, what happens if one INPUT_RESOURCE is unavailable? Do the ones that are available get consumed regardless of whether all are available? And what if there ISN'T a place for the output to go? Are inputs consumed anyway?

I'm going to release my fuels here once I figure out how I screwed up the KSPX nuclear engine. It'll be slush H2 (slush SHOULD totally be usable without requiring a reconfig of the engine but I'm not sure how to go about that or if it can be done... maybe create a separate tank for liquid H2 and then a generatorModule to turn the slush into liquid? Too complex? Even doable using only the Real Fuels configs?) and ammonia. Slush is marginally denser so it'll provide a little extra deltaV. Ammonia provides a lot more but lowers overall isp and if you want to get a lot of it into orbit, it's a bit of a pain. Probably a lot more than it needed to be because of poor rocket design on my part. According to Project Rho, NERVA style engines can use a very wide range of fuels with varying performance hits. Methane was actually the second best performer but decomposes in the chamber to some nasty compounds that would render the engine unusable unless the fuel rods could be purged of all the gunk. Ammonia was third in raw performance but is second in desirability because it has a much slower boil-off rate and decomposes into hydrogen and nitrogen in the chamber. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Nuclear_Thermal--Solid_Core. I might do them all eventually but only if I can figure out how to implement the harmful side effects of some of them. Water would be plain dumb, it doesn't make a good propellant and it's too heavy. Unless it were an emergency and you could get some from an ocean. That would be interesting actually. "Lost on Laythe!". Not sure what other mods you'd need for that but you could hypothetically with the right mods set it up so you could totally do wilderness refueling. FYI, it was mentioned in 2010: Odyssey 2 (or both?) that Discovery used ammonia as a propellant. This was a good thing as Discovery had been in orbit around Jupiter for so long that hydrogen would have boiled off, especially under the environmental conditions that Jupiter imposed.

No, that's what you're supposed to do. Or to be more precise, the zip file (I see no rar file anywhere) contains a gamedata folder. Drop that into your KSP folder. If you are asked if you want to merge folder or if you are asked if you want to overwrite any files or folders then the answer is YES. Otherwise important files/folders will be skipped.

Electricity already isn't well scaled. And it feels like this mod sucks up too much of it as it is. And what aggravates it further is that it's not even really possible to say with a reasonable degree of certainty 'X amount of electricity = Y amount of real life electrical unit of measurement'. Are we talking about watts or amp hours? And at how many volts? Most applications we should be ok just throwing a single RTG into the mission. Maybe a second one for manned missions with extra requirements but the stock RTG pulses its power output rendering it useless for situations where IRL it would excel. (referring mostly to ion engines here, one RTG is more than enough) finally, I'm not really THAT cranky.. I just forgot this is teh intarwebz and that I need to do some kind of emote or something cause you can't see my face or hear my voice... here ya go. [/RANT]

Please make a Karmony end cap that looks like the ring but without the recess

Why would you use soil when you can use hydroponics? Or is this about artificially introducing some arbitrary level of difficulty in the name of 'balance'?

@Sarbian I just downloaded your latest dll file. Looks ok so far, seems like even less oscillation than before. I'm not sure what you changed so I don't know what I should be looking for regarding testing. Sorry if you said and I missed it, I looked over the last few pages. One thing though: Landings. I just initiated autolanding procedures for KSC. The good news is that it put me right back on the launch pad. So if you did anything to the landing code, good for you. However, it left me hovering at 500m above the pad. I had to abort + 'land anywhere' to get it to touch down... It was almost as if I had used the hold vertical option to hover. I've not seen anything quite like that when landing....

It starts its turn at 5km because not everyone agrees about where is best to start the turn. The people who made the mod thought that was a good value (and it often is) so that's what they put in there. But they also know that not everyone agrees on where is best to start the gravity turn which is why they put in the ability to edit your ascent path. Your ascent path has always been your responsibility to determine before each and every launch and you should get in the habit of checking your ascent path before each and every launch because in addition to everyone not agreeing what's best here: Not all rockets will do well on a given ascent path. As for loss of control and blown up engines, that's also not a bug. As others have stated, damage could have resulted in your inability to control your craft. Another possibility is that one of the GUI windows had focus. That's not specific to MJ, that's common to most GUI interfaces. As for your engine blowing up, all MJ does is lower the throttle so that you're not incurring heat buildup past a certain point due to excessive throttling. But there are other sources of heat besides the throttle. Just today I was launching a difficult payload and the ullage retro rockets on two spent stages played their exhaust plumes over two of my engines as they were jettisoned. The engines were already hot and they exploded. That wasn't a problem with MechJeb, that was a PEBCAK issue and you better believe Starwaster went back to the drawing board and got his **** together and fixed his rocket so he could go to space today.

Bottom line is that turning it off is exactly what you're trying to do but you're trying to impose a realistic penalty for doing so. So turn the thing off and add module to the tank part that eats electricity. MODULE { name = ModuleGenerator isAlwaysActive = true INPUT_RESOURCE { name = ElectricCharge rate = 1 } } Change rate to whatever you think it should be and call it a day.

The 60s you say? That's funny, I think that's about where Kerbal technology is at right now. Thanks for the information provided (I saw the same at Project Rho, I recommend it to all KSP players and modders) but I'm more interested in whether the values for the relevant parts in the game and in this mod are accurate, since I shared a concern that others have voiced that there was something wrong in the mod that was robbing the LVN of the performance it should be achieving in-game. I no longer have that concern; liquid H2 performs close to what it should IRL. The problem is that people just aren't carrying enough of it with them because they don't realize that while efficient as a fuel that it's not very dense. So I think the correct answer to those concerned about LVNs and how they perform with Real Fuels in this mod is it's performing as it should and they need to carry a lot more H2 with them. The isp could be bumped up to 1,000 without straying very far from the engine the LVN is supposed to represent. That will net you a 17% increase in the ÃŽâ€v of a given spacecraft. Another solution would be the addition of more fuel types appropriate to the LVN. To that end I've been experimenting with adding liquid ammonia as a fuel type. Ammonia can be used in nuclear thermal rockets (NTR) like the LVN. The downside is a substantial reduction in ISP, down to 520 from 850. (IRL ammonia's greater molecular mass translates to lower exhaust velocity) The upside is that you can carry more fuel with you in a given tank. I don't have the exact numbers right now but my fuel lasted about 5 times longer and (more importantly deltav was substantially increased as well) Unfortunately ammonia being so much more denser than H2 made it a lot harder getting my ship into orbit. Probably it would be better to send it up with empty tanks and then fuel it in orbit. I also was toying with adding solid ammonia which would allow carrying even MORE fuel but to be realistic, the tank mass overhead needs to be much higher to take into account the necessity for heating and thawing the fuel so it can be pumped. Something else I want to try is slush hydrogen and metallic hydrogen. That would get performance back to H2 levels (for slush) but you can carry more of it without dealing with the weight issues that ammonia has. I saw mention that metallic hydrogen also offers increased efficiency as a fuel type but I need to track down some actual data on that.

Unless tanks are grossly overweight then it's probably not that big a deal. Look at how massive some of the Saturn stages were. I haven't seen anything in that neighborhood yet but then the largest tanks I've used were 3.75 (from the KW Rocketry pack) Rocket tanks are really massive. And I'm leaning back towards something I said in my earlier post which is that we just need to get used to carry massive amounts of H2. I mean really, NERVA has to be considered our entry-level nuclear rocket... that's all it ever was IRL with better rockets down the pipeline. Or research different nukes using different propellants like ammonia. I have no idea what the performance characteristics of that would be though.... Probably some information about it to be found at ProjectRho...

Hmmm. I always do that anyway to keep mechjeb from collapsing my parachutes.... (sometimes I have to do that because I'm low on fuel or I'm landing something so heavy that I'm using chutes and retros) I start from 50 all the time. However, I give MJ2 a head start by going to each craft and controlling from the docking port that's doing the docking, targeting the opposing docking port and using the Smart A.S.S. (Engage the Smart A.S.S.!!!! sorry, had to say it...) to manually point towards the target. Do that on each craft. It worked better on versions of MJ2 prior to KSP .21.x but lately it tends to immediately drift while switching craft whereas before MJ2 would still be active on the inactive craft keeping its port pointed at you. Not sure why it's not doing it anymore I can still make it work if I turn on SAS afterwards and let it stabilize a bit.

I had it put me on an escape trajectory out into the Kerbol system proper.... thankfully I usually F5 before doing things like autolanding

Only in a vacuum are they correct so make sure that your final orbital payload is the only one being tested. (for the nuclear testing I assume that is the case...) LOX is lighter and counts less towards thrust than the chemical oxidizer, therefore more of it has to be burned per second to attain the thrust rating specified. When I first started playing I thought some propellants were too heavy so I tried decreasing their resource densities and found that they got burned through even faster. I think that's been discussed previously elsewhere.... Also, I suggest the following for the nuclear engine. This won't affect any of its performance issues being discussed currently but is more canonically correct for ModuleManager: (replaces everything up to the line that starts with @atmosphereCurve) And code tags have to be in caps (CODE) @maxTemp = 2200 @MODULE[ModuleEngines] { @maxThrust = 333.6 @heatProduction = 300 !PROPELLANT[LiquidFuel] !PROPELLANT[Oxidizer] PROPELLANT { name = LiquidH2 ratio = 0.99999999999 } PROPELLANT { name = nuclearFuel ratio = 0.00000000001 } Finally, some thoughts on the LV-N issue. I've been researching everything I can on NERVA but it's a bit hard because some of the specs I've found on NERVA rockets were for proposed future versions. So I tried to focus on the actual engines that were tested and versions of which would have ended up on Saturn rockets until the project was defunded. The following pages I'm finding most interesting. So far discussion is focusing on things like fuel tank mass and fuel-tank mass ratios, but none of that really affects anything but your final TWR So I was curious as to just how the fuel consumption of the LVN (especially the modified one in this mod) actually would stack up against real life counterparts. It's hard to find information about that because there's so MUCH of it available and for things like wiki entries I'd LIKE to be able to trace down sources so it's taking me a while There is wiki page that lists specs for a NERVA-2 engine very close to what we have in KSP except that it had a thrust rating of 333.6 kN. Information is provided not just for the engine but for the entire Saturn third stage it would have driven. I had to make some assumptions on how much of the consumables were H2. For simplicity's sake I went with 100%. The result is that it consumes 120kg of H2 per second. I changed the thrust for the LVN (for this mod) to match and it burns through 1,831 kg of H2 in 1 min, 23 sec. That's about 22 kg/s so it's consuming quite a bit less. The stock/modded version with 60 kN of thrust (the equivalent of NERVA1) consumes about 5x less. Quite a big discrepancy but it's a discrepancy in our favor since it means the engine is much more fuel efficient than we're giving it credit for. We're just not carrying enough H2 around. Given how light it is we can carry quite a lot of it. My test ship had 6 drop tanks that it jettisons in pairs as they empty. (using fuel hoses to route fuel as appropriate) I do question though whether or not H2 should maybe be made denser, but then we start getting into volumes, so how much do we actually know about fuel tank volumes? I've seen the term 'kerbos' bandied about as a hypothetical unit of volume as opposed to just using liters, kL or m3. But I never really understood why that was. Is it because we don't really know what these tank volumes represent? Or are there other reasons? Edit: Linking to referenced pages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA Another interesting page; this one talks about the engines that were part of the von Braun Mars proposal. In performance they seem close to NERVA1 and KSP's LVN and list a fuel consumption rate of 8.5 kg/s http://www.astronautix.com/engines/neralpha.htm

Do tracked vehicles work underwater?