Jump to content

KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread


FreeThinker

Recommended Posts

Finally got KSPI to work with the latest version of the game. XD I'm very impressed that this mod has been kept up to date for this long. That's rare. I wish they'd just made you the official expansion. You contribute MORE to the game than the expansion did by miles.

Couple little issues:

1. Biggest issue, fuel tanks have gone flaky. I loaded a save from a previous version--it's very impressive that I was actually able to do that--and a ship that I know I launched with only liquid Helium 3, Hydrogen and Deuterium wound up with half its tanks full of decaborane and fusion pellets, neither of which was it ever intended to use. I've also had to be careful when building ships that they don't switch around on me before launch, I had to revert once because half the helium 3 supply of one ship turned into decaborane. And then I couldn't convince them to quit switching around on me, I had to swap the tanks out for new, and then they goofed up again... Finally I gave up on using radial fuel tanks, anything from KSPI placed radially has a good chance of winding up full of something that's not supposed to be on that ship.

2. The vanilla ion engine seems to want 17,000 units of electric charge per second?! I'm pretty sure it's supposed to take 8. That is 008, not 8000. What I'm not sure about is that that's your mod's fault, but I thought I'd mention it because you have megajoules and kilowatt-hours tied into the electric charge system and I have to wonder if maybe that tweaked something. I used a lithium-air battery and IFS electric capacitor on that ship when the first attempt failed, trying to see if one of those would help a bunch of Giganator XL solar arrays power the ion engine, and it went through the megajoules in seconds. The lithium-air battery lasted a few minutes, and recharging the thing has taken... I don't even know how long. I'll find out in a few minutes when I go back to that ship, now that I've left it to charge for several game-weeks.

3. The solar sail is a beautiful thing to behold, but it really needs to keep working even when I'm not actively controlling that ship, what with how slow it is. If the game engine doesn't allow that, you might consider calling the solar sails "decorative only and putting in a warning.

4. No matter what I do with the Quantum Singularity Reactor, it just overheats everything and shuts down. Which stinks, because it's about the only thing that can power the warp drives without spending like half an hour charging them. How do you use that monster?

5. A question, not a bug: How do you make antimatter these days? You've gone seriously complicated with it.

6. Another question: Do you have an up to date chart on neutron embrittlement rates for the different fusion modes? I'm not having any fun trying to figure it out by trial and error. Lol

Edited by Dave1234
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

The fundamental problem appears to be that the base Isp of the Wakefield is too high, limiting it maximum thrust which is required to get out of a gravity hole. I will lower minimum Isp by 50% while maintaining maximum Isp.

For the construction of your space-vessel, I recommend replacing those tail nose cones by thermal turbo jets and make it double symmetric. THaks to a fix, they now produce perfectly equal thrust.

ERfxH3X.jpg

Also mirror your flat graphene radiators on both sides maximize performance of your electric engine.

Together they  will make the vessel much better balanced and more effective to get in orbit. Once in orbit refill the liquid nitrogen tanks from the thermosphere and start your interplanetary mission.

 

Ah so wakefield isn't for lower atmosphere.

Basically I have to climb out to 25 - 30 km for graphene radiators to be effective.

Wakefield for full thrust needs 30 GW, but my setup provides only 16 GW of power or so - Antimatter Fusion is most energy dense reactor not counting antimatter ones.

I added two thermal turbojets with thermal fusion engines on wing tips and moved atmospheric collector to bottom - I used procedual parts for connecting things.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Finally I gave up on using radial fuel tanks, anything from KSPI placed radially has a good chance of winding up full of something that's not supposed to be on that ship.

1

This is a known problem for IFS for some tanks. So exactly which fueltanks did you use?

5 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

2. The vanilla ion engine seems to want 17,000 units of electric charge per second?! I'm pretty sure it's supposed to take 8. That is 008, not 8000. What I'm not sure about is that that's your mod's fault, but I thought I'd mention it because you have megajoules and kilowatt-hours tied into the electric charge system and I have to wonder if maybe that tweaked something.

 

Yes, it is modified by KSPIE for balance, but I never fully integrated into KSPIE. I intend to make work of it now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

3. The solar sail is a beautiful thing to behold, but it really needs to keep working even when I'm not actively controlling that ship, what with how slow it is. If the game engine doesn't allow that, you might consider calling the solar sails "decorative only and putting in a warning.

 

What you are asking is offline acceleration. I have done some experimentation and it works but it is difficult. Because I like an evolutionary approach  I was planning to first add it as a feature to interstellar engines which needed to accelerate for years to achieve a decent portion of the speed of light. After getting some experience with offline persistent acceleration, I plan to add it to solar sail simulation as well, possibly in combination with solar navigator

5 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

4. No matter what I do with the Quantum Singularity Reactor, it just overheats everything and shuts down. How do you use that monster?

 

The QSR produce an extraordinary amount of energy but requires a lot of radiators to operate and can only operate well in a log gravity environment. You can use it for either power production to power the Warp Drive, electric engines, direct magnetic nozzle propulsion or use it as orbital antimatter factory.

Edited by FreeThinker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

because it's about the only thing that can power the warp drives without spending like half an hour charging them.

 

Have you tried connecting a beamcore antimatter reactor to a charged particle power generator? It is capable of generating huge amounts of power at very high efficiencies.

5 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

5. A question, not a bug: How do you make antimatter these days? You've gone seriously complicated with it.

 

Well, I like to call making it more realistic.

To start with antimatter, (aka anti protons) can be made by several methods.

  • Method 1: produced with KSPI Science Lab or Cyclotron Antiproton Factory
  • Method 2: collected with Fixed/Deployable Antimatter Collector
  • Method 3: generated from Hawking Radiator from Quantum Singularity Reactor

To produce positron antimatter used a Free Electron Laser

To produce antihydrogen, You can combine antiprotons (antimatter) and positrons (anti-electrons)  in a Diamagnetic Antimatter Container

Edited by FreeThinker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, ChrisSpace said:

is there a submod or something that replaces Megajoules with Electric Charge?

1

No, because Megajoules is more than just a resource, it's an entire power management system that self regulates demand with supply with prioritization.

9 hours ago, ChrisSpace said:

why isn't there a large Lithium Hydride tank?

 

There is no dedicated tank, but there is an IFS storage tank which can contain Lithium Hydride.

9 hours ago, ChrisSpace said:

why does the Epstein Drive require so much power, or any power for that matter?

1

It mainly has to do with balance.  high power demand can be met by a multitude of reactors.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A new version of KSPIE 1.19.10 for Kerbal Space Program 1.4.5 can be download from here

Released on 2018-09-10

  • Compiled against KSP 1.4.5
  • Added Radial Atmospheric Scoop (Credits zzz)
  • Added additional tweak-scale sizes
  • Balance: Reduced minimum isp Plasma Wakefield Accelerator Engine
  • Balance: increased tech requirement Antimatter Initiated Fusion Reactor
  • Fixed 50% reduction in effective isp in thermal and magnetic nozzle
Edited by FreeThinker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, FreeThinker said:

Version 1.19.10 for Kerbal Space Program 1.4.5

Released on 2018-09-10

  • Compiled against KSP 1.4.5
  • Added Radial Atmospheric Scoop (Credits zzz)
  • Added additional tweak-scale sizes
  • Balance: Reduced minimum isp Plasma Wakefield Accelerator Engine
  • Balance: increased tech requirement Antimatter Initiated Fusion Reactor
  • Fixed 50% reduction in effective isp in thermal and magnetic nozzle

You forgot to upload version for 1.4.5 :p

Unless Curseforge is THAT slow.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

This is a known problem for IFS for some tanks. So exactly which fueltanks did you use?

The problem has occurred on all of the tanks that have names starting with "IFS", both for solid cargo and cryogenics, across every ship I have that uses them, even ships that had no problems before the latest download. That's not to say it might not occur with other KSPI tanks, but it does occur, as you say, with all IFS tanks. I can also tell you that the problem definitely does not occur with vanilla fuels in vanilla tanks. It also looks like in IFS tanks, there are two of each type of fuel; two Liquid Hydrogens, two Liquid Heliums, and so forth. This problem does not always occur but it seems to me that it may be related. Did somebody copy and paste something and then forget to delete the original?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Have you tried connecting a beamcore antimatter reactor to a charged particle power generator? It is capable of generating huge amounts of power at very high efficiencies.

Well, I like to call making it more realistic.

To start with antimatter, (aka anti protons) can be made by several methods.

  • Method 1: produced with KSPI Science Lab or Cyclotron Antiproton Factory
  • Method 2: collected with Fixed/Deployable Antimatter Collector
  • Method 3: generated from Hawking Radiator from Quantum Singularity Reactor

To produce positron antimatter used a Free Electron Laser

To produce antihydrogen, You can combine antiprotons (antimatter) and positrons (anti-electrons)  in a Diamagnetic Antimatter Container

Yes, the beam core antimatter generator is the first reactor that can power a warp drive at all. It takes forever to charge, and can only run it at the lowest warp speeds. The only way I can get a ship to go faster than that at all right now is to tweak the quantum singularity generator so that it is scalable down to smaller hulls and produces less heat. Or, to put it another way, to hack your mod and cheat. :P So I'm trying to find a way to not do that.

Realistic? I guess.

Free electron laser? Isn't that a beamed-power system? How do you get it to produce positrons, and does the dimagnetic container combine them automatically or is there another system I have to use as the combiner?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Yes, the beam core antimatter generator is the first reactor that can power a warp drive at all. It takes forever to charge, and can only run it at the lowest warp speeds. The only way I can get a ship to go faster than that at all right now is to tweak the quantum singularity generator so that it is scalable down to smaller hulls and produces less heat. Or, to put it another way, to hack your mod and cheat. :P So I'm trying to find a way to not do that.

 

No you should be able to use lower tech reactors as well, it will just be slower and less effective getting close to a planet. Notice that in contrast to other KSP Warp engines, there are several other parameters which determine the ability to travel fast than light. The most important one is the amount of gravity experienced. Which means warp power cost becomes lower the further away you are from a gravity hole like Kerbin/Earth. Another important factor is the mass to warp power ratio. The ratio it comparable to the power to mass to power ratio for cars/tanks. In game terms, you can simply stack warp drives. notice that due to mass scaling it is better to have one big warp drives than 2 smaller ones with the same warp power.

10 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Free electron laser? Isn't that a beamed-power system?

 

Yes, it has dual usage, both as positron power source to refuel positron powered vessels and its beam can be used to provide power over medium distance

10 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

 How do you get it to produce positrons, and does the dimagnetic container combine them automatically or is there another system I have to use as the combiner?

1

It contains a button which should allow you to active production. The diamagnetic container contains a product to convert positron and antiprotons (antimatter) into anti hydrogen, which is much denser storage method at the expense being more dangerous to handle.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, raxo2222 said:

@FreeThinker I broke physics - radiators are hotter than reactor core.

1

Just like the radiator of your refrigerator.  By using a compressor it heat up the temperature of fluid flowing through a radiator to much higher temperatures. Granthed this would require quite a lot of power which isn't taken into account currently.

1 hour ago, Maelstrom Vortex said:

As of the last patch my thermal rockets seem suddenly broken and one keeps constantly firing and giving a missing asset / null reference message.

Can anyone confirm?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

38 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Just like the radiator of your refrigerator.  By using a compressor it heat up the temperature of fluid flowing through a radiator to much higher temperatures. Granthed this would require quite a lot of power which isn't taken into account currently.

Ah so fluid traveling between generator and radiator is compressed when entering radiator and decompressed when entering back to generator.

This means huge pressures and temperature variations if fluid can have 4400 K just before entering radiator.

How pipes don't crack and burst from those temperatures and pressures?

There is thermal expansion if stuff gets hot.

Is graphene that heat resistant?

I think pipes carrying fluids, that are 1000 - 4400 K hot would have to be made with graphene and ceramics.

Pipes in current powerplants even don't get to see 1000 K hot fluids.

Edited by raxo2222
Link to comment
Share on other sites

56 minutes ago, raxo2222 said:

Ah so fluid traveling between generator and radiator is compressed when entering radiator and decompressed when entering back togenerator.

2

Not the radiator fluid itself is compressed, but a gas (helium) that is used between 2 heat exchangers, one that receives fluid loop from the reactor and one after the gas is compressed and heat exchanged into the radiator liquid

So effectively you have 3 loops:

  1. liquid: reactor - generator - heat exchanger A
  2. gas: heat exchanger A - compressor - heat exchanger B - decompressor
  3. liquid: heat exchanger B - radiators
56 minutes ago, raxo2222 said:

Is grapheme that heat resistant?

Pipes in current powerplants even don't get to see 1000 K hot fluids.

1

It's true that our current technology is limited to 1000K but there is no law in physics that prevent much higher temperatures.  Graphene is very strong and very heat resistant. It would allow the creation of high-pressure high-temperature tubes, allowing feats of engineering that are unimaginable right now.

Edited by FreeThinker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

What liquids would be best in first and third loop?

And what could stay liquid from 0 K to 4400 K as this is operating range of fully upgraded radiator?

That thing should be highly conductive and easily meltable when solid, as reactor and working gas between heat exchangers heats it up.

That is reactor would be at low power, when it melts working liquid in third loop.

Also pressure would rapidly increase when it starts to boil at very high temperatures - that is when heated up by compressed gas, that is at 4400 K (running as hot as possible).

I guess compressor doesn't have to do anything if incoming gas is already at max radiator temp.

 

By the way is it possible to use magnetic fields to deflect reentry plasma or to coat spaceship with graphene, so parts would easily resist even harsh reentry into gas giant?

Or that you could put your solar wind collector within 10 solar radius (effectively 9 solar radius when it comes to heat flux in KSP from stars).

 

How fission reactors can set their output to 0 if normally they have minimum power output?

This happens if cold bath temperature gets too close to hot bath temperature.

Edited by raxo2222
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, raxo2222 said:

What liquids would be best in first and third loop?

And what could stay liquid from 0 K to 4400 K as this is operating range of fully upgraded radiator?

1
1

We don't need a full range, just big enough so it become useful for a hot temperature loop so being a liquid between 2000 - 4400 K - Perhaps Thorium  or Zirconium

?

Edited by FreeThinker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, raxo2222 said:

I guess compressor doesn't have to do anything if incoming gas is already at max radiator temp.

 

Well the higher we can increase the gas temperature, the fewer radiators we need, and this is achieved if we can compress the gas to higher densities.

1 hour ago, raxo2222 said:

By the way is it possible to use magnetic fields to deflect reentry plasma or to coat spaceship with graphene, so parts would easily resist even harsh reentry into gas giant?

1

Well we can't deflect, but we can make it create a lot of drag without heating up.that's what the magnetic scoop is currently doing, creating a lot of drag. I have some plans to make a more primitive version which cannot scoop but it can generate drag, which is very useful when attempting to land on any planet or mun with an atmosphere.

1 hour ago, raxo2222 said:

Or that you could put your solar wind collector within 10 solar radius (effectively 9 solar radius when it comes to heat flux in KSP from stars).

2

I haven't tried but I guess if you combine it with some large radiators, I'm sure you can keep it cool enough not to melt.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Well the higher we can increase the gas temperature, the fewer radiators we need, and this is achieved if we can compress the gas to higher densities.

 

I meant that if gas after contact with reactor side heat exchanger is as hot as radiators can handle, then further temperature increase might melt compressor.

25 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

I haven't tried but I guess if you combine it with some large radiators, I'm sure you can keep it cool enough not to melt.

I was saying, that spacecraft could be coated with graphene or other high temperature resistant materials - that was example for use of graphene.

36 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

We don't need a full range, just big enough so it become useful for a hot temperature loop so being a liquid between 2000 - 4400 K - Perhaps Thorium?

Hmm thats why radiators can heat up so fast if you don't put enough of them.

That is much faster they heat up to 2000K than they heat up to 4400 K as max :p

Edited by raxo2222
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, raxo2222 said:

I meant that if gas after contact with reactor side heat exchanger is as hot as radiators can handle, then further temperature increase might melt compressor.

1

I was assuming gas was below 4400K. allowing it to compress to a temperature of 4400K with a graphene compressor

8 minutes ago, raxo2222 said:

I was saying, that spacecraft could be coated with graphene or other high temperature resistant materials - that was example for use of graphene.

2

I have a plan to increase the maximum skin temperature of all compatible parts (like fuel tanks) but I'm not sure if it enough from melting the underlying part temperature

Edited by FreeThinker
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...