pina_coladas

I love the methane idea, but lets not get too crazy here. MFS (real fuels version) considers LiquidFuel to be kerosine, KSP Interstellar considers LiquidFuel to be Liquid Hydrogen, and now another mod is going to assume it's methane? Things are getting out of hand with LiquidFuel!

Might be a good idea to change that now... People use LF only tanks for KSP Interstellar thermal rockets all the time, and mass ratios are important.

This is pretty much the worst right here. I'm not sure what you could do without disrupting the normal fuel flow logic of the game but the reverse fuel lines thing is the bane of every ISRU mod and gets everybody at one point or another. Would it be possible to make everything the refinery outputs flow like monopropellant without changing the way fuel flows to engines?

Direct conversion is for fusion reactors only. Fusion reactors give off a fraction of their energy output as charged particles instead of thermal power (100% charged particles when in He3-He3 mode). Fractal made a detailed post about fusion reactors and direct conversion at one point but it's buried in the thread...

The current dev build of mechjeb does support this pack's thermal engines. I think I saw somewhere that it still doesn't know how to handle plasma engines but that's another story. Get it here: http://jenkins.mumech.com/job/MechJeb2/ Fractal says he's looking to replace the ISRU part with one that attaches properly and isn't so unwieldly. As for how to use it, I don't know. I have a feeling there's all sorts of crazy business going on with different resources having different fuel flow logics and stuff like that complicating everything. I wouldn't even try to play with ISRU stuff without TAC fuel balancer installed, honestly. I blame squad for neglecting to develop their resource system beyond a clunky placeholder state, forcing modmakers to hack around it. Hope they clean that up someday...

I'm still a little confused about the thermodynamics simulation. Upgraded radiators really do have identical emissivity to unupgraded radiators? So they behave exactly the same way, only they have a higher maximum temperature, which you need when you start upgrading reactors. Okay, clear enough. But at one point you said that it was somehow a bad idea to use upgraded radiators on unupgraded reactors, and this is where the confusion started. Yeah, they won't reach their full potential when stuck at low temperatures but they shouldn't be any worse than the lower tier radiators, assuming you use the same number of them (maybe this is what you were trying to convey - you'd have to use just as many). If that's the case then there's been a lot of arguing in here over nothing. Just out of curiosity, how does waste heat work exactly? Does each part get a waste heat capacity based on an assumed specific heat capacity and mass of the part? Are waste heat units Joules or something arbitrary? Also, to the people complaining about the huge mass of radiators you need for the basic nuclear reactors... I haven't done the math or anything but my understanding is that that's one of the key problems of in-space nuclear electric propulsion - the power to weight ratio is crap when you account for the radiators. Which is why higher-temperature technologies are better (your radiator temperatures can get higher while still maintaining a healthy delta T between the reactor and radiators, and higher radiator temperature means less mass of radiator is required). This is why that Kirk Sorenson guy has such a huge space nerd boner over molten salt thorium reactors - they can operate at higher temperatures than some of the other nuclear technologies that have been explored, which is good for space stuff. So anyway, I think it's fine and cool that the first tier nuclear reactors in this mod are kinda crappy and only have niche uses, and that things start to get good once you can reach higher temperatures. It's sci-fi in a realistic way.

Serious Bug report: your link to the first page links back to your post instead! Thanks for the update. I hope someone who knows what they're doing offers to help do some textures for you so we can get our hands on those new models...

I like the realistic mechanics of the radiators but I agree with others that it's very unclear in the VAB about how much radiator capacity you need for a given reactor. Also, the magnetometer instrument needs to have "rerunnable = True" in its cfg. Trying to transmit the data makes the instrument "inoperable" as if it were a goo canister. And having a penalty for transmitting doesn't make any sense imo, not for something like a basic sensor reading (looking at you, squad).

Oh well that answers my question I think. My precoolers were "offline" and I couldn't figure out why, but I guess it's because I had a pair of intakes/precoolers and a single reactor+turbojet on a separate stack in between. Sounds like they all have to be directly connected to each other. It didn't stop me from getting to orbit but it was tense watching those heat bars fill up!

FYI I was getting weird effects like this on a pure stock 0.23. It might not be FAR at all.

Oh so there will be one fusion reactor that can change fuel modes on the fly? And you need a different type of generator depending on which fuel mode you're using at any one time, and thermal rockets will stop working when you switch to He3... I really like how you're fleshing out fusion but I hope for your sake that you make some really detailed patch notes, because there will probably be a lot of confused people in here next week! Or am I misunderstanding and the different fusion reactions have dedicated reactor parts?

So how much tritium would you have to haul around to refuel a fusion reactor in any reasonable amount of time? I'm guessing a lot. So we may see people mining lithium, breeding it into huge amounts of tritium to refill on helium3 without waiting years, and then dumping most of the tritium tanks before taking off again. Is there no way to speed up the radioactive decay process?

Whatever it is you're trying to do with fuel lines, forget it and get TAC fuel balancer instead. I learned this the hard way too!

Wow, this flurry of progress is super cool. I still have an older version on my desktop, just sitting there teasing me while I waited for an update like this. Gonna be great with RSS. Glad you came back.

Request: make this more clear in the op please Nathan. That one got me too at one point.

The whole point of modeling a sabatier reactor is for methane-fueled mars missions imo. So no you don't always have to dump it!

Thanks for doing this you guys. It's so good to see deeper integration/synergy between all these must-have mods.

It looks like you've solved all the technical challenges that have held the other mods back, nice. If you add food, water, and heat requirements it will be perfect! I hear you about keeping it simple though, so whatever you think is best.

I could swear that someone already made a fork and posted about it in one of these threads but now I can't find it. Was I imagining things

I'm pretty sure the latest build of mechjeb does: http://jenkins.mumech.com/job/MechJeb2/ (this is newer than what's in the official thread/spaceport) I was messing around earlier with an older mechjeb build and yes it's very confusing when your thrust keeps changing when you launch!

Really cool! But yeah might as well just make Dres Ceres and not worry about extra gas giants until it's possible to add them in (more) properly. Although seeing all the orbits in the map screen is nice.

This may or may not be relevant to your problem but it sounds like you're enabling part clipping in the settings cfg file. If you use the editor extensions mod you can toggle part clipping at will inside the game, so you can use it for a few finnicky parts and then shut it back off right away before it does something crazy on you. I pretty much can't play without that mod now.

So it looks like you're making it so you have to manually orient the whole spacecraft to aim the dishes at targets... I think that approach will end in tears. It's very hard to get a PID controller that works for everything, so whether you're using the stock sas module or mechjeb's PID it's gonna be wonky a lot of the time. And rotating a geosynch sat is usually a good way to throw its orbit off a bit too... I think animated dishes that can pivot and aim themselves are what is needed. I don't know how hard that might be to implement, but I see nothing but issues with the current approach unfortunately. Tell me if I'm totally wrong! Love the mod by the way. e: nevermind I can't read

Nobody else has mentioned it so I will: that's just mechjeb's PID controller. It's a little wonky sometimes. There's some option in mechjeb to adjust the PID values that can make things much smoother if its misbehaving with a particular ship. Play with those a bit (sorry can't help you with specifics) and see what happens. The new stock SAS code seems to be pretty smooth now, even with large gimbal ranges. It's too bad mechjeb uses its own currently inferior controller.

The next version of KSP is supposed to have part modules exposed in the VAB scene, meaning the first iteration of "tweakables" should be on its way. This was mentioned in the first daily kerbal. So don't you guys go too nuts making a plugin just yet!