No more heat from drills ?

[Cassin]

Hello,

 

I tried today a simple mining probe for Minmus :

Just 4 drills, 1 ISRU and 2 Gigantors, no radiator or other heat dispositive. For testing purpose, I teleported it on Minmus via HyperEdit on a 80% ore spot et start the whole thing. I was surprise to see that there was no overheat at all !

 

KER indicated that the hottest parts where the Gigantors who where only à 52% of their critical heat. I let it run for 12-ish days (with small tanks for LFO and monopropellant), but no more heat than that. Was there a nerf of the temperature with 1.1 ?

[MiniMatt]

I believe temperature adversely affects their efficiency now, but they'll auto throttle back their operation to avoid overheating?

So it'll still work without radiators, but you'll mine quicker with.

edit: other thought - are your drills only working at reduced capacity due to insufficient power? 2 gigantors are at best going to be supplying ~50 electric-trickeries per second at minmus, yet four large drills will be sucking ~60

final edit: simple check - right click the drills and check their listed thermal efficiency, load, core temp. Anything other than 500k / 100% is having heat issues.

Edited May 5, 2016 by MiniMatt

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

I seem to recall that the Gigantors are supposed to double as radiators (at least from their descriptions in 1.05 I think)... Don't ask me how though... Seemed strange

[NikkyD]

i need about 1 small radiator for 2 drills on mun

[Renegrade]

41 minutes ago, Cassin said:

Just 4 drills, 1 ISRU and 2 Gigantors, no radiator or other heat dispositive. For testing purpose, I teleported it on Minmus via HyperEdit on a 80% ore spot et start the whole thing. I was surprise to see that there was no overheat at all !

Is that enough power to run all of that?

[Kerbart]

If it doesn't hurt, I'd pack large radiators anyway. That prevents teeth gnashing if this turns out to be a problem that is then “fixed” in 1.1.3, leaving you with overheating drilling rigs all over the Kerbal system.

Of course, I'm biased—I’ve always played with a “just because the game allows it doesn’t mean I should build designs that exploit it” attitude that has served me very well over the various upgrades.

[MiniMatt]

21 minutes ago, EpicSpaceTroll139 said:

I seem to recall that the Gigantors are supposed to double as radiators (at least from their descriptions in 1.05 I think)... Don't ask me how though... Seemed strange

I believe they'll work reasonably well as passive radiators when out of the sun - ie. heat passed to them via conduction from their attached part will likely dissipate fairly well but they won't actively pull heat from distant parts like with a pumped coolant system that's kind of implied with the active radiators.

If you think about it, the same properties required to absorb radiated energy (sunlight) are the exact properties best employed to radiate energy (heat) - high surface area either pointed at the sun, or away from it.

[Clubbavich]

The drills definitely heat up and become less efficient now, so cooling is necessary.

On the Mun with about 8.2% ore concentrations, I found that two edge radiators on either side of each drill kept things at the right temp: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Radiator_Panel_%28edge%29

I made the radiators toggle using the same activation group as the drill toggle, so they both toggle on and off at the same time.

Though, it would be nice to have a tool to calculate how much heat you need to handle. I'm not sure how all that stuff is calculated...

Edited May 5, 2016 by Clubbavich

[EpicSpaceTroll139]

2 hours ago, MiniMatt said:

I believe they'll work reasonably well as passive radiators when out of the sun

That's what I thought, it's just that the description seemed to imply it worked well either in both light or dark, so I was like "how is a big honking sun-facing panel supposed to act as a good radiator?" lol

[Cassin]

I didn't think to check the efficiency, I'll test that tomorrow

 

For the power, it's seems good with only 2 Gigantors, but I wonder if there is something with that too : EC is not depleting from the battery, even at night. So yes maybe the efficiency of the drills are such low that they barely use power ?

[Pecan]

4 hours ago, Kerbart said:

If it doesn't hurt, I'd pack large radiators anyway. That prevents teeth gnashing if this turns out to be a problem that is then “fixed” in 1.1.3, leaving you with overheating drilling rigs all over the Kerbal system.

Of course, I'm biased—I’ve always played with a “just because the game allows it doesn’t mean I should build designs that exploit it” attitude that has served me very well over the various upgrades.

Ah yes, I remember it well, ...

We had a solar panel
It wouldn't retract
And a nuclear engine
It was too weak to relaunch
We started a new game
Ah yes, I remember that well.

ETA: No sort of complaint, by the way - just that the various rebalancing acts can catch you out however well you try to plan ahead.

Edited May 5, 2016 by Pecan

[Jarin]

The glowing-red radiators on my mining rig suggest that they'll still take advantage of heat for greater efficiency, anyway.

[Cassin]

So, I tested again and yes the efficiency is dropping when the core temperature is too high

It's juste weird that the drills do not have any "visual heat" like the reentry effects (parts glowing redder with temp. )

[Plusck]

3 minutes ago, Cassin said:

So, I tested again and yes the efficiency is dropping when the core temperature is too high

It's juste weird that the drills do not have any "visual heat" like the reentry effects (parts glowing redder with temp. )

As long as they're not in any danger of exploding, they won't show heat. The drills and ISRU have three heat variables, skin, internal and core. It's only the core which has to heat up to be efficient, and as long as bleed from the core to the rest of the part is not too great, it's not in any danger. 

On 05/05/2016 at 7:42 PM, Kerbart said:

If it doesn't hurt, I'd pack large radiators anyway. That prevents teeth gnashing if this turns out to be a problem that is then “fixed” in 1.1.3, leaving you with overheating drilling rigs all over the Kerbal system.

Of course, I'm biased—I’ve always played with a “just because the game allows it doesn’t mean I should build designs that exploit it” attitude that has served me very well over the various upgrades.

In early career in 1.0.x I didn't add radiators to my first mining craft since I believed the blurb about the rear side of solar panels radiating heat.

My miners managed fine (albeit not entirely efficiently) with 8x standard 6-segment solar panels. So I don't think that this has fundamentally changed in 1.1.x

[FancyMouse]

Aren't they reflected in a new measure "Core temp" that isn't either skin/internal temp that KER would have examined?

[Cassin]

11 minutes ago, FancyMouse said:

Aren't they reflected in a new measure "Core temp" that isn't either skin/internal temp that KER would have examined?

There's option for core temp in KER, but I usually don't display it so I didn't notice ^^ (EDIT : no there aren't, I messed up)

 

With some medium thermal control (radiators seems to not work, I can't place them ON the drills) it's working, core temp reach 100% and don not drop any more

But there's another problem : on time warp x1, the mining probe consume EC at night (by day the 4 Gigantors -I added 2 more- provide enough power), but if I push the time warp on x10 ore more, it didn't use EC anymore (and the batteries even recharge !). When reverting to x1 (still at night), EC is still not consumed :/

Edited May 7, 2016 by Cassin

[Plusck]

44 minutes ago, Cassin said:

There's option for core temp in KER, but I usually don't display it so I didn't notice ^^ (EDIT : no there aren't, I messed up)

 

With some medium thermal control (radiators seems to not work, I can't place them ON the drills) it's working, core temp reach 100% and don not drop any more

But there's another problem : on time warp x1, the mining probe consume EC at night (by day the 4 Gigantors -I added 2 more- provide enough power), but if I push the time warp on x10 ore more, it didn't use EC anymore (and the batteries even recharge !). When reverting to x1 (still at night), EC is still not consumed :/

You just need to place the radiator (fixed) on the part that the drill is attached to, and it will work properly to keep one drill at 100% efficiency.

I did some tests on this yesterday:

And I still haven't worked out how electricity is actually managed on warp. It baffles me.

Edited May 7, 2016 by Plusck