Solar panels stop collecting sometimes during warp?

[Nephrahim]

Dumb question that I'm not sure anyone can help me with, but it's annoying and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with it.

I've been launching some Duna missions recently.  I use a few mods for my game, and one of them are the liquid hydrogen engines with burnoff when they're not being cooled by EC.  Normally this is no problem, as I design the craft to have more then enough solar panels to compensate for this, but sometimes, when accelerating at the highest and second highest speeds, the EC seems to randomly shut off, quickly draining my batteries, and causing my fuel to burn off (As well as losing control, albeit temporarily, if probe controlled.

Is this a common problem?  Is there any way to track down what could be causing this?  (I don't THINK it's a mod, but of course, I have no way to be sure.)

[Streetwind]

There is a potential problem where this can happen under a specific set of circumstances. Namely, your vessel must have very little battery buffer, and you must be running at very high timewarp, and you must have constant Ec drain.

What happens is that energy production and drain are multiplied by the time warp factor. If you are draining 1 Ec/s, that means you're draining 0.05 Ec per physics step. If you go to 10x timewarp, you're draining 0.5 Ec per physics step. If you go to 1,000x timewarp, you're draining 50 Ec per physics step. If you do the maximum of 100,000x, you're draining 5,000 Ec per physics step.

So what happens when you want to draw 5,000 Ec in a single step, but your ship only stores 800 Ec? The storage is set to zero, and the consumer notes that its request could not be fulfilled, and so it reports itself as "out of power". Then your solar panels come along, and perhaps generate 120,000 Ec in a single step. They puts 800 of that into the storage, and discard the rest because it won't fit. Then your consumer comes and requests another 5,000 for the next physics step. Again there is only 800 available, so the consumer notes itself "out of power" again.

And so on and so forth.

This is a limitation within KSP itself and has nothing to do with mods. it doesn't manifest much in the stock game because there are very few things that have a passive energy drain. You have two solutions available to you that I know of:
1.) Build each spacecraft so that it has a minimum battery storage of (passive drain / 20) x (highest timewarp factor)
2.) Install the mod Near Future Electrical. It includes a small experimental plugin, called DynamicBatteryStorage, which tricks the game into thinking that your spacecraft's battery capacity scales with the timewarp factor in order to circumvent this problem. (I don't know if you can use DynamicBatteryStorage without the rest of NF Electrical present. You'd have to ask Nertea.)

[The Aziz]

2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

 

2.) Install the mod Near Future Electrical. It includes a small experimental plugin, called DynamicBatteryStorage, which tricks the game into thinking that your spacecraft's battery capacity scales with the timewarp factor in order to circumvent this problem. 

Tell me how to use it, please. Because since I started playing with ScanSat, I had two or three dead probes, only because of said drain, caused probably by active scanner. But even after getting out of timewarp, and after the scan reached 100%, EC didn't come back.

[Streetwind]

3 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Tell me how to use it, please.

It's bundled with the regular mod download. You install it just like the rest of the bundled folders, and that's all. It works passively in the background. The user should not see much of it in action, with the exception that high time warps no longer result in ships with constant Ec drain running out of juice. Theoretically.

Do note that this is a relatively experimental thing. We tested this, and it's been part of the mod since 1.3.0 without any reports of weird behavior, but do be on the lookout for strange bugs.

(Again, it may or may not work without the rest of NF Electrical. I don't know. But it is a dependency for NF Electrical now.)

[The Aziz]

18 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

it's been part of the mod since 1.3.0 without any reports of weird behavior, but do be on the lookout for strange bugs.

Damn. Still going on 1.2.2.

I didn't want to use NF Electrical because I already have nuclear reactors from other mod, but I could just delete parts or something..

Or can I just get the plugin separately?

[Streetwind]

9 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Or can I just get the plugin separately?

I answered this in literally every post I made in this thread so far...  

[Nephrahim]

I believe I have Near Future electrical already, so sadly that must not be quite doing it.  Still, it had very low storage (A single battery for a ton of cooled tanks) so I'll try again with more and hopefully it'll fix it.  Thanks!

[Streetwind]

3 hours ago, Nephrahim said:

I believe I have Near Future electrical already, so sadly that must not be quite doing it.  Still, it had very low storage (A single battery for a ton of cooled tanks) so I'll try again with more and hopefully it'll fix it.  Thanks!

If you continue having such problems despite DynamicBatteryStorage being present, Nertea would probably love to hear all about it.

[linuxgurugamer]

38 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

If you continue having such problems despite DynamicBatteryStorage being present, Nertea would probably love to hear all about it.

He said he was running 1.2.2

And you said it was added in 1.3.0

so no way he can have it

[Nephrahim]

3 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

He said he was running 1.2.2

And you said it was added in 1.3.0

so no way he can have it

No, The Aziz said he had 1.2.2.  I'm running 1.3.0

I'll try with more batteries first.  Hopefully that'll fix it.  If I keep having problems I'll post something on the NFE topic.  Thanks for the help!

[Nephrahim]

Increased my EC from 1000 to 15000 and it MOSTLY fixed the problem.  I still get an odd drain on my battery the more I warp, once I hit max my battery hits 6000 and stays there, but it mostly seems to work.  As time passes the solar panels get out of position though, causing it to randomly drop to 0 again (stopping time warp causes it to shoot back up, and once I re-align is goes back to glued to 6000)

I guess I'll just have to play around with nuclear engines!

Edited October 24, 2017 by Nephrahim

[Helmetman]

@Nephrahim the EC penalty still applies. You just don't drain out because you increased the EC to counter the full drainage caused by this anomaly.

By the way, how is this a actual problem?

The time you leave timewarp your batteries should fill again, mind you that you have a rtg and/or that the solar panels are in sunlight.

It's something buggy nonetheless so if it's fixable it should be.

[invision]

try turning off SAS

point ship vector normal so panels are always in sunlight

i seem to have this issue if using batteries with super capacitors, using normal stock battery seems to solve the issue if the first 2 above dont.