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KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread


FreeThinker

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One more update. I like the curve tool. :D

QUHAliQ.jpg

I'm starting to think @FreeThinker doesn't read messages fully. I asked like three questions not one of them got a reply. :D

Whats the feasibility of a particle accelerator as a space thruster? I saw a fusion based one with a standard toroid shape and thought a similar principle could be applied to speed up a particle, and then have it gain thrust by pushing it through a reaction mass, like Hydrogen.

Edited by SpaceMouse
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14 hours ago, SpaceMouse said:

One more update. I like the curve tool. :D

QUHAliQ.jpg

I'm starting to think @FreeThinker doesn't read messages fully. I asked like three questions not one of them got a reply. :D

Whats the feasibility of a particle accelerator as a space thruster? I saw a fusion based one with a standard toroid shape and thought a similar principle could be applied to speed up a particle, and then have it gain thrust by pushing it through a reaction mass, like Hydrogen.

 

Sorry for not answering your question, I was busy making content. We already have a kind particle accelerator electric engine, it's called the PlasmaWakefieldAccelerator, which is a linear accelerator which accelerates ionised propellant up to 1.000.000 m/s

But I have also considered making the FEL a charged particle source, which could be connected directly to your Magnetic nozzle for very high Isp. Combined with a QSR this should give very good performance. Another idea would be to use charged particle as a form of beamed power which would accelerate probes to very high velocities.

Regarding replacing Hydrogen by other resources, I left it alone because of balance (its already very good) but also because its a bit difficult to implement. But your are right it should be possible and even desirable. I wanted to implement it when I was going to overhaul the charged particle engine to make it able to run merely on the charged particles emitted by a reactor and mix it with other resources than Hydrogen.

Edited by FreeThinker
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9 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Sorry for not answering your question, I was busy making content. We already have a kind particle accelerator electric engine, it's called the PlasmaWakefieldAccelerator, which is a linear accelerator which accelerates ionised propellant up to 1.000.000 m/s

But I have also considered making the FEL a charged particle source, which could be connected directly to your Magnetic nozzle for very high Isp. Combined with a QSR this should give very good performance. Another idea would be to use charged particle as a form of beamed power which would accelerate probes to very high velocities.

Regarding replacing Hydrogen by other resources, I left it alone because of balance (its already very good) but also because its a bit difficult to implement. But your are right it should be possible and even desirable. I wanted to implement it when I was going to overhaul the charged particle engine to make it able to run merely on the charged particles emitted by a reactor and mix it with other resources than Hydrogen.

Tried changing the resource manually, since it looks like ISP is calculated elsewhere and it was exactly the same. Discovered a while ago the VASIMR and heavier resources are a rather potent mix.

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So i have taken it upon myself to create a chart for all the IRSU ISRU processes in interstellar. 

 

This magnificent subway plan is the result: 

7rvV02o.png

 

I created this on https://www.draw.io/ - you can load this XML file to edit the chart - in case anyone feels like cleaning that up. 

Water gas shift and reverse water gas shift are missing, solar wind and regolith process dont have input resources on the chart (forgot). Theres only so many hours of playing around with a chart before you'll go insane, and i'm afraid i've reached that point for today. :confused:

Maybe i'll create a cleaner version over the next couple of days.. 

Edited by Hacki
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14 hours ago, Hacki said:

So i have taken it upon myself to create a chart for all the IRSU ISRU processes in interstellar. 

 

This magnificent subway plan is the result: 

7rvV02o.png

 

I created this on https://www.draw.io/ - you can load this XML file to edit the chart - in case anyone feels like cleaning that up. 

Water gas shift and reverse water gas shift are missing, solar wind and regolith process dont have input resources on the chart (forgot). Theres only so many hours of playing around with a chart before you'll go insane, and i'm afraid i've reached that point for today. :confused:

Maybe i'll create a cleaner version over the next couple of days.. 

Real nice overview which will be very usefull for anyone confused about KSPI ISRU. I have put in the ISRU  section on the OP

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Not sure who's maintaining PersistentThrust but, it still appears to have some rather big bugs, particularly when reducing to normal time.... It seems like they might be fixed by briefly switching thrust off when changing time compression levels.

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On 8/18/2017 at 3:34 AM, FreeThinker said:

We already have a kind particle accelerator electric engine, it's called the PlasmaWakefieldAccelerator, which is a linear accelerator which accelerates ionised propellant up to 1.000.000 m/s

But I have also considered making the FEL a charged particle source, which could be connected directly to your Magnetic nozzle for very high Isp. Combined with a QSR this should give very good performance. Another idea would be to use charged particle as a form of beamed power which would accelerate probes to very high velocities.

Hmmm, I wonder how much faster you could accelerate something in a torus from linearly. Kinda designed it all as one unit, meh, knew that wasn't gonna work. :D

ercIlix.jpg

Last picture before I hack the top off for KSPi. :( Actually got it in game but forgot to take a picture so, heres a pretty render. Lighting kinda sucks...

Edited by SpaceMouse
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1 hour ago, SpaceMouse said:

Hmmm, I wonder how much faster you could accelerate something in a torus from linearly. Kinda designed it all as one unit, meh, knew that wasn't gonna work. :D

ercIlix.jpg

Last picture before I hack the top off for KSPi. :( Actually got it in game but forgot to take a picture so, heres a pretty render. Lighting kinda sucks...

Could you please keep a copy, it might be useful as a replacement for the plasma nozzle.

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10 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Could you please keep a copy, it might be useful as a replacement for the plasma nozzle.

I've put too much effort into it to just throw the top away, It was definitely getting kept for other uses.
I'm ever so slowly building my own ultralight KSPI :D

Plasma nozzle is a pretty nice mesh though, kinda don't wanna upstage anyone.

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1 hour ago, SpaceMouse said:

rBtxWA5.jpg

So, at @FreeThinker's request, here's a mock-up of a SSTO deploy-able Anti-matter collector. There would be doors and textures and other things, obviously.

Opinions please. :)

I'm not sure, but wouldn't the diameter of the rings be limited by the diameter of the cargo hold? The general idea it to create a very high diameter magnetic trap and somehow able to store it compactly.

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@FreeThinker .. couple of things.. 

 

I'm currently working on fixing some stuff with the direct cycle nuclear turbojet, candle engine, molten salt reactor and the open cycle gas core reactor.

Namely: Swapping fuel is broken. From the way the code is written i can only assume it worked in earlier versions of KSP and is now broken in 1.3

I wrote a fix that works for me, you can check it out on my github

I'M not 100% satisfied with it though, whenever you click "swap fuel" the old fuel indicator  travels to the top of the context menu, and any time you click it again it adds a new fuel indicator to the context menu, making it ever longer. 
This seems to be a display bug since everything looks OK when you reopen the context menu.

Now.... I'm thinking that could be fixed if there's some way to force-redraw the context menu. Do you have any idea how that could be accomplished? 

Oh, while i was at it i also implemented a little bit of code that'll hide the "switch mode" button in the context menu if there is only one mode available. 

 

Some other unrelated stuff... :

- Using "swap fuel" as an Engineer on EVA works on the candle, turbojet and molten salt reactor, but fills up the new fuel type to full, essentially creating resource out of nothing. 

Should we keep it that way?
Should we empty the new resource after a fuel swap? That would run the risk of people accidentally dumping their fuel. 
OR remove the EVA fuel swap option altogether; i dont see much use for it anways.
(Also i just noticed that clicking "swap fuel" on EVA when the fuel is empty you get a nulref exception.) 
 

- There does not seem to be a way to create Plutonium-238 in situ. Plan on adding one? (This was the reason why i started fixing the fuel swap bug... I really like the candle engine, and found it a shame that i couldnt built it with extraplanetary launchpads) 


- Interstellar adds a huge amount of clutter to the context menus. I'd like to simply remove some of the lines. Some of this stuff looks like it was built in for debugging purposes? 

 

- There are a lot of resources that arent used or arent obtainable outside the VAB/SPH
- Spodumene isnt used at all, even though you can mine it. Its chemical composition in real life is LiAl(SiO3)2; so it should be processable into lithium, aluminium and oxygen? 

- Sodium, Carbon, Caesium, and Boron can be produced, but seem useless after that. At least i didnt find anything you could do with them. 

- Decaborane, Hexaborane, Lithium Hydride and Lithium deuteride are used in some fusion engines/ reactors, but there dont seem to be any ways to obtain it with some ISRU process either. 

Do you plan on doing anything with them in the future? 
I dont think we should be able to produce any materials that dont have any use, that only adds complexity and confusion.
If there is no use for a resource, we should remove it. And i think it should be possible to produce all usable resources off-world in one way or the other. 


On that note, community resource pack adds a whole bunch of useless stuff. I'm aware that is partly for compatibility with other mods, but couldnt we write a module manager patch that removes the stuff it if isnt used? I dont need gypsum, dirt, exotic minerals, karbonite, karborundum, minerals, raremetals, substrate, ... etc. It only clutters up the UI and makes the already complex ISRU chain more confusing. 

 

Soo... what do you think? 

 

 



 

 

Edited by Hacki
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6 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

I'm not sure, but wouldn't the diameter of the rings be limited by the diameter of the cargo hold? The general idea it to create a very high diameter magnetic trap and somehow able to store it compactly.

Yes, it definitely would. That would be a awfully complex animation for something that will only slightly more than double its size. We DO have tweakscale...

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14 minutes ago, SpaceMouse said:

Yes, it definitely would. That would be a awfully complex animation for something that will only slightly more than double its size. We DO have tweakscale...

It realy doesn't have to be fancy. Just pretend you can inflate the magnetic trap by a factor of 10

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4 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

It realy doesn't have to be fancy. Just pretend you can inflate the magnetic trap by a factor of 10

"Inflating" metal would annoy the heck out of me but it would be much less complex, works off of the cartoon pocket- dimension. :D i suppose it could be done behind a "curtain" by a Kerbal on EVA.

I was thinking this design would allow you to transfer your antimatter to internal inventory easier. Wouldn't you loose everything the second you started disassembling italso liked this design because i thought it would pop into peoples preexisting designs nicely.

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The latest  new beta of KSPI 1.15.0.7 can be dowmloaded from here

Changelog

* Added X-Ray Free Electron Laser Turret

* Added ability of Diode Laser Turret  to transmit in Soft X-Rays

* Added Diamagnetic Antihydrogen storage container

* Added improved convection for submerged radiators

* Added Plasma Jet Magneto Inertial Fusion Reactor

* Added Added Blanket Rectenna Receiver

* Added automated alternative fuel type selection for fusion reactors

* Added Science Dril * Unerversal Auger

* Added Drilling animation

* Added improved GUI Univerdal Drill Extractor

* Added Improve Interface Regolith Processing

* Added exit Apoapsis and exit Periapsis to Warp Control Interface

* Added resource switchers ISRU Processor

* Added IntakeLqd pump capacity to universal drill

* Added Infratable Gas Tank

* Added Mean Anomaly and DeltaV or Orbit to Alcubiere Control Window

* Added Inflatable Crashpad Gas Tank

* Added Double Pivot Photostatic X-Ray Receiver

* Added Ability to connected to beam generator indirectly

* Re balanced cost thermal radiators

* Re-balanced beamed power

* Balance: Reduced minimum Nuclear Engines my 50%, this will also reduce Thermal Electric Power Output by 50%

* Fixed Regolith processing ability to function offscreen

* Fixed Antimatter Electric Power generation

* Fixed Reactor resource output, implicitly fixing premature actinides poisoning

* Fixed Deuterium refining from Regolith

* Fixed loss of power after docking

* Fixed spamming Universal Drill Gui

* Fixed Mass growth for Tweakaled Radiators

* Fixed Exploit staged Thermal Reactor

* Fixed active ad offline fuel usage nuclear engines

* Fixed thrust unbalance with multiple nuclear engines

* Fixed Issue where vessels with antimatter would explode when being unloaded

* Fixed issue build In thermal electric generator not functioning properly, like Timerwind

* Fixed exception log spamming on Timberwind

* Fixed Interstellar Tanks Methalox container amounts

* Fixed Power buffer  beamed power receivers

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wVJQLPV.jpg

Slightly more polished mesh. Around 3x larger than the first. Getting those 6 segments so I could rotate them nicely was a big pain.

*edit* So I MAY have gotten carried away and mostly finished the mesh tonight. Oops. :D

Textures next. Might be in game by the end of tomorrow.....

 

Antimatter-harvesting-satellite.png

Would anyone happen to know what the details at the base of the rings at the top and bottom might be? I'd like to add some greebles, but this pic is rather low res. and it's about my only reference.

*forgot to tag @FreeThinker

Edited by SpaceMouse
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18 hours ago, Hacki said:

- There does not seem to be a way to create Plutonium-238 in situ. Plan on adding one? (This was the reason why i started fixing the fuel swap bug... I really like the candle engine, and found it a shame that i couldnt built it with extraplanetary launchpads)

3

Yes I have some conceptual plans. to overhaul the nuclear fuel cycle system which would include giving Plutonium-238 a bigger role.

Edited by FreeThinker
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20 hours ago, Hacki said:

I'm currently working on fixing some stuff with the direct cycle nuclear turbojet, candle engine, molten salt reactor and the open cycle gas core reactor.

Namely: Swapping fuel is broken. From the way the code is written i can only assume it worked in earlier versions of KSP and is now broken in 1.3

I wrote a fix that works for me, you can check it out on my github

I'M not 100% satisfied with it though, whenever you click "swap fuel" the old fuel indicator  travels to the top of the context menu, and any time you click it again it adds a new fuel indicator to the context menu, making it ever longer. 
This seems to be a display bug since everything looks OK when you reopen the context menu.

Now.... I'm thinking that could be fixed if there's some way to force-redraw the context menu. Do you have any idea how that could be accomplished? 

7

Yes. Please check out how resource switching is accomplished in the Interstellar Fuel Switch. I had the same problems there

Edited by FreeThinker
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20 hours ago, Hacki said:

Some other unrelated stuff... :

- Using "swap fuel" as an Engineer on EVA works on the candle, turbojet and molten salt reactor, but fills up the new fuel type to full, unrealistic creating resource out of nothing. 

Should we keep it that way?
Should we empty the new resource after a fuel swap? That would run the risk of people accidentally dumping their fuel. 
OR remove the EVA fuel swap option altogether; i dont see much use for it anways.
(Also i just noticed that clicking "swap fuel" on EVA when the fuel is empty you get a nulref exception.) 

5

Personally, I think the current fuel swap concept for a nuclear reactor is confusing and unrealistic. I agree we might have to prevent people for doing silly stuff on reactors that it does not apply to. I think a simple config boolean should prevent the button from appearing in the first place

20 hours ago, Hacki said:

 Interstellar adds a huge amount of clutter to the context menus. I'd like to simply remove some of the lines. Some of this stuff looks like it was built in for debugging purposes?

1

Indeed many fields were used for debugging purposes, many of them can be made hidden. you can hide them if you want.

Edited by FreeThinker
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19 hours ago, Hacki said:

- Sodium, Carbon, Caesium, and Boron can be produced, but seem useless after that. At least i didnt find anything you could do with them.

2

Caesium and Sodium are similarly to Lithium suitable as an electric propellant (they are easy to ionize), Carbon can be burned or uses to mixed with Hydrogen for improved thermal propulsion in Gas Core reactors. Boron is used in aneutronic p-B11 fusion, it can also be used to convert to borates, which are either useful propellant or fuels. But I admit I haven't implemented all yet

19 hours ago, Hacki said:

- Decaborane, Hexaborane, Lithium Hydride and Lithium deuteride are used in some fusion engines/ reactors, but there dont seem to be any ways to obtain it with some ISRU process either. 

Do you plan on doing anything with them in the future? 
I dont think we should be able to produce any materials that dont have any use, that only adds complexity and confusion.

4

I agree there should be a least some process to create these resources, I just haven't got around to adding them yet

Edited by FreeThinker
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