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[1.12.x] Cryogenic Engines: Liquid Hydrogen and Methane Rockets! (Jan 22, 2022)


Nertea

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On 3/7/2020 at 12:45 AM, Nertea said:

So there's this problem:

LF Tanks Dry Cost Fuel Amount( u) Ratio ($/u)
Mk0 Liquid Fuel Fuselage 160 50 3.2
Mk1 Liquid Fuel Fuselage 230 400 0.575
Mk2 Liquid Fuel Fuselage 810 800 1.0125
Mk3 Liquid Fuel Fuselage 4600 5000 0.92

If you do the math with the stock LF tanks, there is a close to order of magnitude difference between the various size classes in terms of dry cost ratio. That's crap to balance against (doesn't matter whether a tank switches or not) and it's Squad's idea of cost balance. Please note that this is by far not the worst cost balance issue in the game. LFO tanks are fairly consistent if they're rocket or spaceplane, with spaceplane costing more. 

LFO Tanks Dry Cost Fuel Amount( u) Ratio ($/u)
Rockomax-64 2812.4 6400 0.4394375
Mk3 Rocket Fuel Fuselage 2705 5000 0.541

Cryo Tanks takes a relatively universal approach, where the base cost of the tank is unchanged between all the variants. That works well in most cases but obviously not here. I do not want to make switching tanks more expensive, that defeats the purpose of the fuel switch. I can add an additional cost to liquid fuel tanks, because by the looks of the ratios above there will be a consistent underestimation of cost.

I think there's no need to change the cost of switching tanks, it can bring a lot of unnecessary difficulties. But to increase the cost of LF tanks (exactly empty tanks, no fuel) is simple and that should fix the economy.

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On 3/8/2020 at 9:49 AM, Husky777 said:

I think there's no need to change the cost of switching tanks, it can bring a lot of unnecessary difficulties. But to increase the cost of LF tanks (exactly empty tanks, no fuel) is simple and that should fix the economy.

I'll do this in the next update. Will target ~ 0.8 $/u, which is probably reasonable. 

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On 3/10/2020 at 10:32 AM, Nertea said:

I'll do this in the next update. Will target ~ 0.8 $/u, which is probably reasonable. 

I'm sorry. I wanted to talk about the increase in the value of LFO tanks as universal. Not LF. Thank you for your attention to the problem and your patient explanation! And of course for your mods.

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On 10/6/2017 at 11:40 PM, Stratickus said:

Does anyone have a Module Manager patch to remove Cryo cooling from individual fuel tanks? I tried this, but it did not work:


@PART[fuelTankSmallFlat]:AFTER[zzz_CryoTanks]
{
	@MODULE[ModuleCryoTank]
	{
		!CoolingCost{}
	}
}

Cheers,

 

On 10/9/2017 at 10:57 PM, Nertea said:

Setting the cooling cost to 0.0 still works. Must be something in your MM patch itself (I'd try @CoolingCost = 0.0 personally, your syntax looks off).

Back again. I know I quoted myself from 2 years ago, but I have the same question. With the update to MODULE[ModuleCryoTank], the above patch no longer works. I tried:

Spoiler

@PART[fuelTankSmallFlat]:AFTER[zzz_CryoTanks]
{
	@MODULE[ModuleCryoTank]
    {
		@BOILOFFCONFIG[LqdHydrogen]
		{
			@CoolingCost = 0.0
		}
		@BOILOFFCONFIG[LqdMethane]
		{
			@CoolingCost = 0.0
		}
    }
}

 

Syntax error again? Anyone have a patch that they are using?

Edited by Stratickus
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On 3/17/2020 at 11:49 PM, JadeOfMaar said:

@Stratickus What you want to do is remove the cryo tank module itself, not just the cooling cost.


!MODULE[ModuleCryoTank] {}

Wouldn't that delete the entire module including boil off? What I am trying to do is recreate the way the fuel tanks behaved several versions of Cryo Tanks ago. Nert selectively added (I'm trying to selectively delete it) the ability to prevent boil off to certain tanks. I believe at a certain point from his end it wasn't worth the hassle and just easier to add both boil off and the ability to prevent it to all tanks. So for example in the early game the FL-T tanks are capable of carrying LH2, but are not 'advanced' enough to prevent boil off. Basically they don't have the insulation and cooling capacity.

Cheers,

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49 minutes ago, Stratickus said:

Wouldn't that delete the entire module including boil off? What I am trying to do is recreate the way the fuel tanks behaved several versions of Cryo Tanks ago. Nert selectively added (I'm trying to selectively delete it) the ability to prevent boil off to certain tanks. I believe at a certain point from his end it wasn't worth the hassle and just easier to add both boil off and the ability to prevent it to all tanks. So for example in the early game the FL-T tanks are capable of carrying LH2, but are not 'advanced' enough to prevent boil off. Basically they don't have the insulation and cooling capacity.

Cheers,

IIRC, how it is now is that you can "enable cooling" with the rightclick menu for any tank to prevent boil-off, but the Cryo-tanks are still more efficient at cooling, so they do it better.

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1 hour ago, Stratickus said:

Wouldn't that delete the entire module including boil off? What I am trying to do is recreate the way the fuel tanks behaved several versions of Cryo Tanks ago. Nert selectively added (I'm trying to selectively delete it) the ability to prevent boil off to certain tanks. I believe at a certain point from his end it wasn't worth the hassle and just easier to add both boil off and the ability to prevent it to all tanks. So for example in the early game the FL-T tanks are capable of carrying LH2, but are not 'advanced' enough to prevent boil off. Basically they don't have the insulation and cooling capacity.

Cheers,

In an overall sense this may not be possible anymore due to major backend changes in the plugin, as mentioned you can now enable/disable cooling for any tank, they just don't do as good of a job (higher power cost). See documented features: https://github.com/ChrisAdderley/CryoTanks#config-documentation

If you want that feature back, it may be possible without too much work. If I'm understanding right you specifically want a way to mark tanks so that boiloff mitigation is not possible. Please make an issue on GitHub and next time I do work on CT I'll investigate it. 

Edited by Nertea
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2 hours ago, Nertea said:

In an overall sense this may not be possible anymore due to major backend changes in the plugin, as mentioned you can now enable/disable cooling for any tank, they just don't do as good of a job (higher power cost). See documented features: https://github.com/ChrisAdderley/CryoTanks#config-documentation

If you want that feature back, it may be possible without too much work. If I'm understanding right you specifically want a way to mark tanks so that boiloff mitigation is not possible. Please make an issue on GitHub and next time I do work on CT I'll investigate it. 

That makes sense. In all honestly, this is a very minor thing that I add (delete) to certain fuel tanks in order to make creating LH2 rockets slightly more challenging. I was hoping to do it myself via MM in order to not create any more work for you.

Cheers,

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Are the transform multipliers intentionally so low on the etna or is this a typo? The turbo exhaust doesn't really produce any effective roll. The engine imo can sometimes be very difficult to control and imo it would be good to increase the overall gimbel to 6 and buff the trf multipliers. 

transformMultipliers
  {
  trf0 = 0.998
  trf1 = 0.001 This seems oddly low
  trf2 = 0.001
  }
  }
  MODULE
  {
  name = ModuleGimbal
  gimbalTransformName = B_EtnaGimbal
  gimbalResponseSpeed = 2
  gimbalRange = 2.5
  }
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5 hours ago, dave1904 said:

Are the transform multipliers intentionally so low on the etna or is this a typo? The turbo exhaust doesn't really produce any effective roll. The engine imo can sometimes be very difficult to control and imo it would be good to increase the overall gimbel to 6 and buff the trf multipliers. 

transformMultipliers
  {
  trf0 = 0.998
  trf1 = 0.001 This seems oddly low
  trf2 = 0.001
  }
  }
  MODULE
  {
  name = ModuleGimbal
  gimbalTransformName = B_EtnaGimbal
  gimbalResponseSpeed = 2
  gimbalRange = 2.5
  }

No, it's not a typo. Testing on a Delta-IVish thing showed that this was sufficient. 

However, I'm currently tracking an issue in KSP 1.9 at least where these multipliers don't even work anymore. Are you using 1.9? If so, you might be having control issues because the numbers are high!

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37 minutes ago, Nertea said:

No, it's not a typo. Testing on a Delta-IVish thing showed that this was sufficient. 

However, I'm currently tracking an issue in KSP 1.9 at least where these multipliers don't even work anymore. Are you using 1.9? If so, you might be having control issues because the numbers are high!

Its 1.8.1 of KSP

I have tested both version 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 of cyroengines with KSP 1.8.1 and both seem to have the same issue of roll being to weak(basically none). 

For me I got effective roll with the trf mutlpliers at 0.9, 0.05, 0.05. The original values basically did nothing. 

 

My test craft. no torque other than engine. BTW rescale 2x5 and kopernicus are only mods installed. 

YLsI4e0.png

Edited by dave1904
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  • 2 weeks later...

Small typo in cryo tanks ISRU config file for methalox: StartActionName = #LOC_CryoTanks_isru_LCH42Ox_StartAction, the 2 shouldn't be there so the localisation fails and the button is labelled #LOC_CryoTanks_isru_LCH4Ox_StartAction rather than 'Start ISRU [LCH4+Ox]'.

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On 4/10/2020 at 10:22 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Small typo in cryo tanks ISRU config file for methalox: StartActionName = #LOC_CryoTanks_isru_LCH42Ox_StartAction, the 2 shouldn't be there so the localisation fails and the button is labelled #LOC_CryoTanks_isru_LCH4Ox_StartAction rather than 'Start ISRU [LCH4+Ox]'.

I'll try to remember but it's really best if these go as GH issues, then they're really in my face when i am about to do a release. 

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3 hours ago, sslaptnhablhat said:

Upon starting the game yesterday, I was greeted with a bunch of MM errors and the game got stuck loading. I narrowed it down to cryoengines. Here is the output log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cood9zrlp39szz7/output_log.txt?dl=0

This log contains no errors, and no sign of CryoEngines or any of its dependencies. 

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Am I safe in assuming that a future update of CryoEnginesRestock will patch engineLargeSkipper_v2 in the same way as engineLargeSkipper?  I'd been using the old Skipper while waiting for the Restock update supporting the new one; now I'm updating my craft files, but the old version of the engine is cryo and the new version isn't.  I can edit CryoEnginesRestock.cfg locally to fix that for now, but I want to check that I'm not diverging from official plans for the mod.

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Released 1.1.3 (and 1.1.2, due to an error):

  • Updated DynamicBatteryStorage to 2.1.6
  • Updated B9PartSwitch to 2.16.0
  • Updated CryoTanks to 1.5.0
  • Fixed a typo in large ISRU under methalox mode
  • Added ability to mark a tank in config as uncoolable (CoolingAllowed = false)
  • Added special handling to the MH/RS+ soyuz tanks to allow them to use the switcher even though they have an engine module
  • Tuned cost of LF-only tanks with the fuel switcher to be approximately $0.8/u (previously was 0.5)
  • Updated Spanish localization (fitiales)
  • Decreased Pavonis thrust to 160 from 180 kN
  • Decreased Tharsis thrust to 360 from 400 kN

 

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@Nertea I'm trying to make a patch that makes the cryo engines switchable between using liquid hydrogen and liquid methane but have run into a problem that I can't solve. Using the patch from Kerbal Atomics that adds fuel switching to the NERV as a template and combining that with the existing patches for Cryo Engines to run on LF/Ox and the NFLV methalox patch, I've made the following patch that *should* make the Stromboli engine switchable between the two fuels:

Spoiler

@PART[cryoengine-stromboli-1]:FOR[CryoTanksMethalox]:AFTER[CryoEngines]
{
    MODULE
    {
        name = MultiModeEngine
        primaryEngineID = LH2
        secondaryEngineID = LCH4
        primaryEngineModeDisplayName = Hydrolox
        secondaryEngineModeDisplayName = Methalox
    }
     @MODULE[ModuleAlternator]
      {
            preferMultiMode = true
      }
    @MODULE[ModuleEngines*]
    {
        @name = ModuleEnginesFX
        engineID = LH2
    }
    $MODULE[ModuleEnginesFX]:HAS[#engineID[LH2]]
    {
        @engineID = LCH4
        @PROPELLANT[LqdHydrogen]
        {
            @name = LqdMethane
            @ratio = 3
        }
        !atmosphereCurve {}
        atmosphereCurve
        {
            key = 0 330
            key = 1 285
            key = 4 220
        }
    }
}

It looks like it worked in the part description as both modes are listed correctly with the right stats, but when I actually try to use the Stromboli the toggle button doesn't do anything- it always says it's on "Primary" mode and doesn't seem to have any delta-V with hydrolox in the VAB. Strangely enough, it seems to be trying to burn both hydrogen and methane at the same time and actually does produce thrust from both modes independently in flight- shutting the engine down stops the methalox part with the sound effects and plume, but not the hydrolox part. Also strange is that the methalox engine burned liquid methane:oxidizer at a ratio of 30:1 rather than 3:1 as expected.

Is there something obvious that I'm doing wrong? Forcing them all to use methalox was easy enough to do but the mode switching is proving to be a real pain, any advice would be appreciated. 

Edited by jimmymcgoochie
In flight testing
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