[1.12.x] Kerbal Atomics: fancy nuclear engines! (January 22, 2022)

[toric5]

12 hours ago, Wyzard said:

I was thinking about that while working on the recent LV-N multimode fixes, and it's probably sufficient to just add a :HAS stanza that filters out engines that already  have LH2-burning engine modules.  Something like this:

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleEnginesFX]:HAS[@PROPELLANT[LiquidFuel],!PROPELLANT[Oxidizer],!PROPELLANT[IntakeAir]],!MODULE[ModuleEnginesFX]:HAS[@PROPELLANT[LqdHydrogen]]]:NEEDS[!NTRsUseLF]:FOR[zzLH2NTR]

But this will only work correctly if the engine is already multimode when the patch is applied.  The :FOR[zzLH2NTR] clause should put it pretty late in the load order, but there's a possibility that some other mod's "zz" patch might run later and add multimode to a nuclear engine that's already been touched by this one.

(BTW, you can avoid needing duplicate copies of the patch for ModuleEngines vs. ModuleEnginesFX by using a wildcard, i.e. @MODULE[ModuleEngines*].)

I know I could use the wildcard, but I wnated to avoid changing the module name if i didnt have to...

I havnt gotten around to playing ksp mutch, dont even have a modded install ATM, but If this works in your game, feel free to PR it. If  the patch order is an issue, add more Zs. I dont think it would be good to make this a [FINAL] patch...

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

On 11/15/2017 at 4:21 PM, toric5 said:

I know I could use the wildcard, but I wnated to avoid changing the module name if i didnt have to...

I havnt gotten around to playing ksp mutch, dont even have a modded install ATM, but If this works in your game, feel free to PR it. If  the patch order is an issue, add more Zs. I dont think it would be good to make this a [FINAL] patch...

Is the tempfix downloadable anywhere?

[Niccolo]

I'm sorta having a little trouble with applying this mod (and the Cryogenic engines sister mod)

(Not a technical issue! The mod functions technically perfectly).

Basically, I'm not really sure of the situation in which to use these engines. Chemical vs. Nuclear vs. cryo, it seems that chemical wins every time - For the same amount of dV, a chemical fuel tank + chemical engine costs far less and takes up way less room. An equivalent cryo setup costs more than the chemical setup and takes up more room, but it provides pretty damn nice thrust... Still makes for rather huge rockets, though. I'm not sure if I'm using them in the right niche, but oh well.

The nuclear setup, though, I'm not sure. I haven't quite worked out their niche. Can you guys offer a little guidance?

 

 

[westamastaflash]

16 minutes ago, Niccolo said:

I'm sorta having a little trouble with applying this mod (and the Cryogenic engines sister mod)

(Not a technical issue! The mod functions technically perfectly).

Basically, I'm not really sure of the situation in which to use these engines. Chemical vs. Nuclear vs. cryo, it seems that chemical wins every time - For the same amount of dV, a chemical fuel tank + chemical engine costs far less and takes up way less room. An equivalent cryo setup costs more than the chemical setup and takes up more room, but it provides pretty damn nice thrust... Still makes for rather huge rockets, though. I'm not sure if I'm using them in the right niche, but oh well.

The nuclear setup, though, I'm not sure. I haven't quite worked out their niche. Can you guys offer a little guidance?

 

 

High ISP for moving heavy equipment on long trips. You'll move more mass with a nuke than with chemical engines. You need to have a pretty big ship to start with though, the engines are heavy... I find them useful for sending colony modules to Duna.

Edited November 20, 2017 by westamastaflash

[Wyzard]

14 hours ago, RobinVerhulstZ said:

Is the tempfix downloadable anywhere?

To avoid changing multimode engines?  I don't think a fix has been submitted yet.

I've been meaning to submit the fix that I suggested, but I'd want to test it first, and I don't have any other multi-mode nuclear engines in the mods that I normally use.  I'll need to do a test install with SXT or something, but haven't gotten around to it yet.  I'll try to do that in the next few days, though, and then you'll be able to download the modified version of the patch from GitHub.

[Niccolo]

3 hours ago, westamastaflash said:

High ISP for moving heavy equipment on long trips. You'll move more mass with a nuke than with chemical engines. You need to have a pretty big ship to start with though, the engines are heavy... I find them useful for sending colony modules to Duna.

Ah, thanks. It's what I suspected - they're best when applied to really high mass ships.

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

4 hours ago, Niccolo said:

Ah, thanks. It's what I suspected - they're best when applied to really high mass ships.

i'd lean more towards ships where a size increase doesn't matter as you REALLY need a LOT of hydrogen tanks (preferably spherical)

[Wyzard]

On 11/13/2017 at 5:20 PM, hemeac said:

I took a look at the LH2NTRsDynamic.cfg in the patches folder and that was what was converting the SXT nuclear engines to Liquid Hydrogen and giving them a 10% increase in ISP.  Went a step further and used the MM patch for hydrogenNTRsSQUAD.cfg as a basis to create my own patch to create a dual fuel option for the SXT engines as it was giving the stock "Nerv" engine a 50% increase in ISP when converting from Liquid Fuel to Liquid Hydrogen.

On 11/14/2017 at 1:12 AM, hemeac said:

I meant relative to the Liquid Fuel ISP going from 600 to Liquid Hydrogen 900 as found in hydrogenNTRsSQUAD.cfg.

Just for clarity: the stock Nerv's I_sp is 800, burning LiquidFuel.  KerbalAtomics reduces its LiquidFuel I_sp from 800 to 600, but also adds a LqdHydrogen mode with 900 I_sp.

On 11/14/2017 at 1:12 AM, hemeac said:

But as an aside, leaving LH2NTRsDynamic.cfg in increases the ISP of the Liquid Hydrogen in the stock Nerv engine (as well as the SXT engines) a further 10% to 990 in space.

Did you actually see that happen in your game?  For me it's 900, not 990.  ModuleManager applies the two patches in lexical order, where capital letters are sorted before lowercase, so:

• LH2NTRsDynamic.cfg runs first, and changes the Nerv from LF to LH2, and increases its I_sp by 10%.  This brings its vacuum I_sp from 800 to 880.
• hydrogenNTRsSQUAD.cfg runs afterward, and it replaces the LH2 engine's whole atmosphereCurve with a new one whose vacuum I_sp is 900; this overrides the 880 from the earlier patch.  Then it adds a multi-mode switcher and an LF mode with 600 vacuum I_sp.

If you've made your own custom multi-mode patch for the SXT engines, though, that will probably get the extra 10% from LH2NTRsDynamic.cfg, because your patch most likely runs before the :FOR[zzLH2NTR] phase of ModuleManager's processing.  To avoid that, I've submitted PR #45, which changes the patch to leave multi-mode engines untouched.

(Instead of my earlier suggestion of having the patch exclude NTRs that already have LH2-burning engine modules, I made it check for MultiModeEngine modules.  Any multi-mode LF/LH2 engine should have both, so either way works, but this way seems a little more straightforward.)

@RobinVerhulstZ and anyone else, if you want to try out the modified patch before it's been merged and released, you can download the file manually from GitHub.

Edited November 21, 2017 by Wyzard

[Arrewar]

Hiya! Potentially dumb question, but I recently updated my mods via ckan, and now all my cryotanks lack oxidizer... 

It's been a while since I updated my GameData folder, but I could've sworn that these tanks used to hold both hydrogen as well as oxidizer. Is this by design?

Moreover, digging into the .cfg files in CryoTanks\Parts\ parts\HydrogenTanks, I noticed that the tanks only list LqdHydrogen as resource, e.g.;

    RESOURCE
    {
        name = LqdHydrogen
        amount = 17600
        maxAmount = 17600
    }

Was this a conscientious change (couldn't find any dead giveaways in the change log)? Or does this sound like something that would be caused by a botched ckan installation of another dependency (B9PartSwitch?)?

https://imgur.com/a/ojIcx

[Nertea]

6 hours ago, Arrewar said:

Hiya! Potentially dumb question, but I recently updated my mods via ckan, and now all my cryotanks lack oxidizer... 

It's been a while since I updated my GameData folder, but I could've sworn that these tanks used to hold both hydrogen as well as oxidizer. Is this by design?

Moreover, digging into the .cfg files in CryoTanks\Parts\ parts\HydrogenTanks, I noticed that the tanks only list LqdHydrogen as resource, e.g.;

    RESOURCE
    {
        name = LqdHydrogen
        amount = 17600
        maxAmount = 17600
    }

Was this a conscientious change (couldn't find any dead giveaways in the change log)? Or does this sound like something that would be caused by a botched ckan installation of another dependency (B9PartSwitch?)?

https://imgur.com/a/ojIcx

You have something interfering with the mod. Looks like it might be MFT, I disable my switchers if you have that installed as I assume you prefer the more complex implementation.

[kerbalfreak]

If I use this mod with the patch to use the stock L-OX, instead of H2, is possible to not include the "CryoTanks" folder in GameData?

Thanks!

[Nertea]

 

Kerbal Atomics 0.5.10

•  Fixed LH2/LF multimode patch for the LV-N (thanks Wyzard)
•  Updated DynamicBatteryStorage to 1.2.0
  • Fixed a bug that caused the buffer to be destroyed every second time it was created
  • Fixed solar panel handling when Kopernicus is installed

[kerbalfreak]

I'm trying to use the small nuclear aerospike to launch and circularize, could be a SSTO or assisted with tanks and SRBs. Is possible to keep it cool all the way up? I'm using radiators from "heat control", but seems almost impossible to cool it down with radiators that work in atmosphere. I'm not complaining, it would be very overpowered without the need for cooling.

[Nertea]

9 hours ago, kerbalfreak said:

I'm trying to use the small nuclear aerospike to launch and circularize, could be a SSTO or assisted with tanks and SRBs. Is possible to keep it cool all the way up? I'm using radiators from "heat control", but seems almost impossible to cool it down with radiators that work in atmosphere. I'm not complaining, it would be very overpowered without the need for cooling.

Yeah there's a few decent ways to do it:

1) Split the burn into two parts, moreso than other engines. Fly up first so you have a longer coast to circularization.
2) Carefully adjust throttle to run the engine at lowest possible power
3) Exploit many fixed HC radiators
4) My favorite: add a service bay or cargo bay midships on the first stage, deploy large radiators out of the bay about when you would deploy fairings

[AmpCat]

 

2 hours ago, Nertea said:

Yeah there's a few decent ways to do it:

1) Split the burn into two parts, moreso than other engines. Fly up first so you have a longer coast to circularization.
2) Carefully adjust throttle to run the engine at lowest possible power
3) Exploit many fixed HC radiators
4) My favorite: add a service bay or cargo bay midships on the first stage, deploy large radiators out of the bay about when you would deploy fairings

I was playing with this as well, (though it might have been a Far Future Tech engine), and ran into an engine that needed 100MW of cooling. I thought about something like this, but the most I could reasonably fit on an SSTO was in the order of maybe around 10MW. How much cooling do you aim for in a situation like this? I didn't have the best radiators or the best nuke engines researched yet, so some of the better tech might help.

[vossiewulf]

2 hours ago, Nertea said:

Yeah there's a few decent ways to do it:

1) Split the burn into two parts, moreso than other engines. Fly up first so you have a longer coast to circularization.
2) Carefully adjust throttle to run the engine at lowest possible power
3) Exploit many fixed HC radiators
4) My favorite: add a service bay or cargo bay midships on the first stage, deploy large radiators out of the bay about when you would deploy fairings

Shorter version: go straight up and turn right at the 70km sign.

[jinks]

I have a small feature request.

 

The mod already dynamically modifies LF/Ox tanks to support LH2 and LH2/Ox. Could you do the same for LF-only -> LH2? I have some mods that add pure LF tanks for use with the LV-N. Given that I play with about all of your mods, LF for nuclear rockets is pretty much useless.

[blowfish]

5 hours ago, jinks said:

I have a small feature request.

 

The mod already dynamically modifies LF/Ox tanks to support LH2 and LH2/Ox. Could you do the same for LF-only -> LH2? I have some mods that add pure LF tanks for use with the LV-N. Given that I play with about all of your mods, LF for nuclear rockets is pretty much useless.

I could’ve sworn the patches did that already...

[Nertea]

Small update to fix WBI conflict and bump some bundled dependencies

KA 0.4.11

• Updated MM to 3.0.1
• Updated B9PartSwitch to 2.1.0
• Updated CryoTanks to 0.4.9
  • Deconflict new WBI fuel switcher

[AmpCat]

37 minutes ago, Nertea said:

Small update to fix WBI conflict and bump some bundled dependencies

KA 0.4.11

• Updated MM to 3.0.1
• Updated B9PartSwitch to 2.1.0
• Updated CryoTanks to 0.4.9
  • Deconflict new WBI fuel switcher

Because I've been looking for a good fuel switcher and most don't work well with your mods.. what's the WBI fuel switcher you speak of?

[Nertea]

Uh, one in @Angel-125's suite of mods. I would wonder though, what problems exist with fuel switchers and my mods?

[linuxgurugamer]

5 hours ago, Nertea said:

Small update to fix WBI conflict and bump some bundled dependencies

KA 0.4.11

• Updated MM to 3.0.1
• Updated B9PartSwitch to 2.1.0
• Updated CryoTanks to 0.4.9
  • Deconflict new WBI fuel switcher

Can someone explain what this WBI fuel switcher is?  I don't use this mod, and the "Deconflict new WBI fuel switcher" was referenced by someone in one of my threads

Thanks

[AmpCat]

3 hours ago, Nertea said:

Uh, one in @Angel-125's suite of mods. I would wonder though, what problems exist with fuel switchers and my mods?

I'll have to try them out again to be sure. But one 'swap any fuel with any other' sort of mod didn't work well with your parts. The one I'm currently using works with your parts, but not several other part packs. Just can't seem to win.

Edit: Sorry, I know that's not very helpful, but I run across mod incompatibilities so often that if a mod doesn't work with a few of my core mods (Nertea mods, MechJeb, etc.) I just delete them and move on. I should probably take notes, but I figured you didn't want to be bombarded with 'Hey, random mod Icanhazcheeseburgerrocket doesn't work with LH2 tanks!'.

Edited December 16, 2017 by AmpCat

[DStaal]

11 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Can someone explain what this WBI fuel switcher is?  I don't use this mod, and the "Deconflict new WBI fuel switcher" was referenced by someone in one of my threads

Thanks

Wild Blue Industries - Angel-125's group of mods: MOLE, Pathfinder, DSEV.  I think DSEV is the primary place for the new fuel switch.

[linuxgurugamer]

1 minute ago, DStaal said:

Wild Blue Industries - Angel-125's group of mods: MOLE, Pathfinder, DSEV.  I think DSEV is the primary place for the new fuel switch.

And what sort of conflicts are there, or, I suppose I should say, were there?