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[1.12.x] Heat Control - More radiators! (August 22, 2021)


Nertea

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I've finished my near sun (999.99 Mm) mission. but I had to retract the radiators because they overheated if not. Should they not work better when deployed?

I'm still wondering how the heat stuff exactly works in KSP. Most of the time it makes no sense to me or consufes me completely.

And never warp faster than 100x when you get lower than 2Gm or the radiators (and other parts, even if they get no direct sun light) will explode.

And the heat pipes tendend to overheat anyways. I had to be very carefull to get this mission done, including some quicksave loads.

http://i.imgur.com/MshrRwf.png

I honestly haven't confirmed whether part occlusion works at all to stop solar heating. I thought it didn't at all actually. Operating near the sun is quite risky in general and you need to take exposed cross sectional area into account. To get close you'll need to minimize the amount of area that can receive radiation (ship like a long thin needle maybe and use the rotating radiators to dissipate the heat that's still hitting the cross section.

a) Do both heat pipe endings need heat exchangers or just the heat destination?

For example if there's an asparagus cluster of engines and I want to divert all heat to the central one where the main exchanger with radiators is - can I just use the pipes to transfer heat from lateral tanks holding the engines (because engines don't have mesh to attach stuff to) or do I need exchangers for them, too?

B) Is the larger exchanger "sucking" heat faster or just has more heat capacity because it has more mass?

The point of the exchangers is to provide convenient places for you to move heat to and from using pipes, kinda like a road intersection. They don't do anything else. The larger one transfers heat faster because it has a larger cross section.

Anyone else notice that the thermal physics kinda breaks down above 100x time warp? I had a reactor going, and my whole ship spiked to over 700 Kelvin the moment I exceeded 100x time warp.

You can try increasing thermalMaxIntegrationWarp = 100 in Physics.cfg if you're brave.

Any plans for adding some spaceplane heat solutions? My Mach 5 plane would definitely benefit from such things.

Not really at the moment. Would rather finish space solutions first.

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I think you forgot to add the new parts to the Community Tech Tree patch. The curved radiators are stuck in Specialized Electronics and the heat exchangers are stuck in High-Powered Electronics. While I'm at it, can I suggest you put some parts in the last CTT tech node (Specialized Radiators)? The number of parts has kind of doubled, so spreading them out might be a good idea.

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Tech tree nodes seem to be my new achilles heel... urgh. I'd rather stay out of specialized radiators now, have advanced plans for there.

I updated the OP with some better info about how the parts work. I can also say that I would love to see some nice screenshots of ships using the parts... I'd like to put some in the OP album ;).

Edited by Nertea
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The point of the exchangers is to provide convenient places for you to move heat to and from using pipes, kinda like a road intersection. They don't do anything else. The larger one transfers heat faster because it has a larger cross section.

So I don't need a heat exchanger below every nuclear engine? I could just use the pipes to pump the heat which they dump into their tanks and divert it to the central heat exchanger? It makes a big difference because those things are heavy.

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Yes, use an exchanger ionly if you need it. If you're engines aren't getting heat to the fuel tank fast enough, for example. The exchanger will help increase the rate the heat moves out of the engine.

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Anyone else notice that the thermal physics kinda breaks down above 100x time warp? I had a reactor going, and my whole ship spiked to over 700 Kelvin the moment I exceeded 100x time warp.

Yes, it really kind of sucks when you have a carefully thought out design with hot parts that are supposed to be hot (like nuclear reactors), cool parts that are supposed to be cool, insulators between them, radiators to take the heat away from the hot parts -- and then when you warp at 1000 all your parts average out in temperature. Now your radiators are sucking heat away from your hot parts, so those are cool, but your cool parts are thermally insulated from your radiators, so those are hot.

The game NEEDS high warp, so heat transfer at high warp needs to be fixed.

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Yes, it really kind of sucks when you have a carefully thought out design with hot parts that are supposed to be hot (like nuclear reactors), cool parts that are supposed to be cool, insulators between them, radiators to take the heat away from the hot parts -- and then when you warp at 1000 all your parts average out in temperature. Now your radiators are sucking heat away from your hot parts, so those are cool, but your cool parts are thermally insulated from your radiators, so those are hot.

The game NEEDS high warp, so heat transfer at high warp needs to be fixed.

Complain to SQUAD....

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Hmmm... The long spool-up time makes it hard to do maneuvers, though.

Just as a teeny-tiny aside...

You don't have to do a full shutdown of the reactor. You can instead just modify the power output throttle in the rightclick menu at the top. This lets you decrease the power and heat production all the way to zero, with no spooldown time... and with no spoolup time afterwards when you raise it again, either.

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Just as a teeny-tiny aside...

You don't have to do a full shutdown of the reactor. You can instead just modify the power output throttle in the rightclick menu at the top. This lets you decrease the power and heat production all the way to zero, with no spooldown time... and with no spoolup time afterwards when you raise it again, either.

I... did not know that. I will make a point of using that from this point on.

EDIT: OH. MY. GOD. I will NEVER use solar power for anything other than cruise again. That is an AWESOME trick!

Edited by MaverickSawyer
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will convection pumps be introducing a new resource? how will they differ from the current heat pipes?

also, is it possible to write a patch such that the ISRU and drill utilize a context menu similar to the nuclear reactors? or are those facets of this mod specific to the nuclear power module? I would check, but I can't look at the cfgs right now. I don't think it'd be incredibly difficult to modify their heat output with operation, but having the heat statistics readily visible, and being able to modify operation would be great.

Edited by KAO
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Anyone else notice that the thermal physics kinda breaks down above 100x time warp? I had a reactor going, and my whole ship spiked to over 700 Kelvin the moment I exceeded 100x time warp.

yep, I can confirm that.

I honestly haven't confirmed whether part occlusion works at all to stop solar heating. I thought it didn't at all actually. Operating near the sun is quite risky in general and you need to take exposed cross sectional area into account. To get close you'll need to minimize the amount of area that can receive radiation (ship like a long thin needle maybe and use the rotating radiators to dissipate the heat that's still hitting the cross section.

That helps me to get a better understanding how it works.

Edited by acc
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Has anyone playtested this with Porkjet's Nuclear engines? I'm about to add this beautiful looking baby to my main career install and I figured I'd check if the two play nicely. If no one has then I'll make a duplicate install and mess with it a bit myself.

EDIT: Works like a charm and comes highly recommended.

Edited by Businfu
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So, I turned on the thermal data display using the debugging menu. Do I understand this correctly:

1) positive heat fluxes are heat coming in, negative fluxes are heat going out

2) "int" heat fluxes are heat being generated in the part itself

3) radiators attached to a part add a "int" heat sink to that part, and simultaneously add an equal "int" heat generation to the radiator

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Pretty much, yes.

With the stock heat system, you only have conductive flux passively moving heat from one part to another. Even if a part has great conductivity, that still means that you can never have a radiator that is able to cool a part below its own temperature. To facilitate that, Nertea's active radiators actually have rather poor conductivity and instead steal heat by means of the internal flux value.

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Why should they? Do they explode for you? That's not supposed to happen outside of one very specific circumstance (playing cuddles with the sun).

You can get damn close (about 275 million meters) before the large deployables go bang. If you're that close to the sun, you may want to rethink what you're doing.

- - - Updated - - -

anyone willing to make a "how to video" on this mod?? I sorta get the basics, but I think video tutorial is the way to go, especially advanced concepts and design tips. Thanks in advance!!!

If I could record, yea. Best I could do is a written walkthrough right now. If you can give specific questions, Streetwind and I can probably explain it to you pretty well.

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