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


Nertea

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1 hour ago, wasmic said:

I'm having some problems with the LqdHydrogen IS Fuel Switch config when used alongside AtomicAge. Both include configs for IS Fuel Switch, but they don't work together. If I install both, only one of them will function. Can anyone explain how to fix this problem to me?

Probably delete the Atomic Age patches since they don't include hydrogen.

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This is a MAJOR update. I don't expect everything you build to be fully compatible (though no part names have changed so your stuff will be safe). 

The biggest change is the implementation of a soft boiloff mechanic. Liquid Hydrogen will now slowly evaporate from most tanks. This is slowish, but will cut into your fuel reserves on long trips. Plan accordingly, or... use the new insulated tanks (gold foil tanks). These tanks use a stream of ElectricCharge to stop the boiloff. As a penalty they are a bit more costly and have a slightly worse mass ratio. However, the non-insulated lifter tanks have better mass ratios than they used to.

CryoEngines 0.2.0

  • Deprecated BDAnimationModules
  • Bundled a new plugin, DeployableEngines, which does the things that BDAnimationModules did
  • Added situation masks to contract parameters
  • Fuel tanks containing LiquidHydrogen are now split into lifting tanks and insulated tanks
  • Lifting tanks are all standard stock fuel tanks
  • Lifting tanks have good mass ratios, but LiquidHydrogen contained in them boils away over time
  • Insulated tanks are the large gold foil tanks that used to be in NF Propulsion
  • Insulated tanks have poor mass ratios, but consume ElectricCharge to stop the LiquidHydrogen from evaporating
  • Changes to the base masses, mix ratios and capacities of LiquidHydrogen tanks
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I haven't kept up too well with all the debate over boiloff. Does this take the tank temperature into account? Or is the electric charge the only factor for the insulated tanks? Either way, it sounds great! These have been some of my favorite engines for some time.

Edited by White Owl
spelling typo
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19 minutes ago, White Owl said:

I haven't kept up to well with all the debate over boiloff. Does this take the tank temperature into account? Or is the electric charge the only factor for the insulated tanks? Either way, it sounds great! These have been some of my favorite engines for some time.

Temperature does not play a role. Its something we may get Nert to consider in the future, but right now he's sufficiently done with the stock heat system right now after the NF Electrical rework.

Edited by Captain Sierra
Sierra needs to pay attention to the mod thread he's in ....
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Just a heads-up: upgrading via CKAN leads to a wildly incomplete install (the DeployableEngines and CryoTanks folders aren't included).

EDIT: Also, procedural tanks still have the old ratio.

Edited by leops1984
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Regarding the procedural tanks: I figured out that placing

MODULE
	{
		name =  ModuleCryoTank
		FuelName = LqdHydrogen
		// in % per hr
		BoiloffRate = 0.05
	}

into the MM config will solve the boiloff issue. It should be possible to make a separate procedural tank part for insulated tanks. But right now I'm trying to wrap my head around correcting the quantities and masses to match Nertea's parts...

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Congrats on the release :D

I think the KS-01 'Odin' might be a little under-powered at the moment.  Compared to the Mainsail, and with the same liftoff mass, it gives you similar delta-v numbers (for a craft which is almost entirely fuel), but costs considerably more, while having less thrust (and is unlocked later in the tech tree).  Of course, the Mainsail has one of the highest TWRs in the game, but still.

Edited by blowfish
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30 minutes ago, White Owl said:

But right now I'm trying to wrap my head around correcting the quantities and masses to match Nertea's parts...

I've been trying to figure that out myself. The quantities are easy enough, it's the dry masses I can't figure out...

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// Cryo configuration for Procedural tanks

@PART[procedural*Liquid]:NEEDS[CryoEngines]
{
	MODULE
	{
		name =  ModuleCryoTank
		FuelName = LqdHydrogen
		// in % per hr
		BoiloffRate = 0.05
	}


	@MODULE[TankContentSwitcher]
	{
		TANK_TYPE_OPTION
		{
			name = LqdHydrogen
			dryDensity = 0.04346
			costMultiplier = 0.035
			RESOURCE 
			{
				name = LqdHydrogen
				unitsPerT = 40000
			}
		}
		TANK_TYPE_OPTION
		{
			name = LqdHydrogen+Oxidizer
			dryDensity = 0.069535
			costMultiplier = 0.785
			RESOURCE 
			{
				name = LqdHydrogen
				unitsPerT = 15000
			}
			RESOURCE 
			{
				name = Oxidizer
				unitsPerT = 1000
			}
		}
	}
}

Here's a configuration file for people to tryout and see how it works. I've adjusted the masses and volume so it should be close, but I have NOT adjusted the costs at all.

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8 hours ago, leops1984 said:

Just a heads-up: upgrading via CKAN leads to a wildly incomplete install (the DeployableEngines and CryoTanks folders aren't included).

EDIT: Also, procedural tanks still have the old ratio.

i just checked CryoEngines-1-0.2.0.zip (the latest from CKAN). it seems to consist of:

vSW45nu.png

shouldn't IFS and CRP be metadata dependencies, not actual inclusions in the zip?

however, for some reason best known to itself (metadata perhaps?) CKAN is only installing CryoEngines and ignoring the rest of the folders. it may be that in the absence of the correct metadata, CKAN defaults to only installing folders which match the actual mod name. *shrug*

for the moment, i've installed them manually.

EDIT: CryoTanks/plugins has a bunch of cruft in it that should probably be removed:

4yPjFE4.png

 

Edited by speedwaystar
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1 hour ago, Nightside said:

You will probably want to keep the SimpleBoiloff.dll, unless you are trying to disable the boiloff feature. Not sure about that other stuff.

they're support files from the Unity development suite. the only one which should be there is SimpleBoiloff.dll. 

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19 hours ago, White Owl said:

I haven't kept up too well with all the debate over boiloff. Does this take the tank temperature into account? Or is the electric charge the only factor for the insulated tanks? Either way, it sounds great! These have been some of my favorite engines for some time.

Yes, no temperature dependence at all. Just supply EC and you're good... thermal system is a pain to work with sometimes. With something as mission critical as fuel evaporation, I wanted a clear and deterministic system.

16 hours ago, blowfish said:

Congrats on the release :D

I think the KS-01 'Odin' might be a little under-powered at the moment.  Compared to the Mainsail, and with the same liftoff mass, it gives you similar delta-v numbers (for a craft which is almost entirely fuel), but costs considerably more, while having less thrust (and is unlocked later in the tech tree).  Of course, the Mainsail has one of the highest TWRs in the game, but still.

I'll think about that. Now that we have boiloff to moderate the power of the hydrolox engines, some of them could use a bit of a bump up.

 

RE: CKAN:

I say this about a million times every update.  If you download anything I make from CKAN and you have problems, that's not my problem. I try my best to maintain clean, efficient zips containing all the dependencies that are needed in the three download locations, and that's enough work. I do not wish to work on splitting out things every time I update stuff and fragmenting stuff even more. 

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3 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

*Sigh* Right, I'll try to fix the CKAN stuff, but due to asset sharing with KerbalAtomics this will take some work.

I don't see a way to do this without splitting out the dependencies.  Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing.

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Yeah, that's what I ended up with. Pull request with four new files and one big file change sent. Let's watch it get rejected over an undocumented style technicality in the latest metadata spec update, even though it has no actual impact on the functioning of the affected file.

(You can tell this has happened before, can you...?)

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2 hours ago, blowfish said:

I don't see a way to do this without splitting out the dependencies.  Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing.

As someone with 192 mods installed, 190 of them via CKAN, proper dependency management is critical. This is just KSP's version of good ol' DLL Hell. I can't have 10 mods all trying to use IFS when they bundle 3 different versions of it, and so on. Which one to choose? KSPAPIExtensions is another example of such a timebomb. The real solution is for API/library modders to version their interfaces and package with the version number appended. All major Linux distributions do this with software like Python or Automake, so you can actually have 5 different versions installed and things still work fine.

And, no, I'm not manually updating and managing dependencies for 190 more mods. I also don't manually download all my Linux source and manually manage my software stack, for the same reason. A package manager is a necessity and I would give up on KSP without CKAN.

 

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On 1/22/2016 at 3:17 PM, Nertea said:

This is a MAJOR update. 

The biggest change is the implementation of a soft boiloff mechanic. Liquid Hydrogen will now slowly evaporate from most tanks.

Glad to see this got updated along with Kerbal Atomics release. I don't have the ability to test anything out right now, how do these two mods avoid adding duplicate tanks? 

Also, how are third-party tanks dealt with by the ISF patch now, does it just assume anything that isn't one of the gold ones is a lifting tank?

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10 minutes ago, Starbuckminsterfullerton said:

Glad to see this got updated along with Kerbal Atomics release. I don't have the ability to test anything out right now, how do these two mods avoid adding duplicate tanks? 

Also, how are third-party tanks dealt with by the ISF patch now, does it just assume anything that isn't one of the gold ones is a lifting tank?

The orbital tanks and boiloff plugin are in a second directory. Installing both mods will result in one overwriting the other (though its the exact same files) so no duplicates.

 

And yes you're correct. Any third party tank is assumed a lifting tank. Its a pretty simple addition to the boiloff partmodule to enable refrigeration (documentation not handy, sorry) so a quick MM patch can do it for tanks you may want as orbital for whatever reason.

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