KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[danielboro]

 

Since updating to the newest release my first tier Solid Core Nuclear reactors have gone from generating loads of EC/MJ to being a net consumer of power. Interestingly, if I shut them down they actually use more energy, draining the batteries quicker. It also is happening across several craft simultaneously, with no relation to their wasteheat or actinide buildup. Also, doesn't matter if they are currently thrusting or not.

Did something change or did I mess up my update somehow?

EDIT: Well, on further examination it looks like on one ship the efficiency has just dropped across the board -- wasteheat buildup I suppose. Moar radiators I guess.

But on another craft one of my engines has just quit producing EC altogether, even though it is on and the generator is operating and the rocket produces thrust. The rest of the reactors on the vessel are running fine.

At this point I'm thinking user error, although I wouldn't mind any help. Running 1.3 KSP, and 1.15.2 KSPIE, and a lot of other mods.

i cant help. just wanted to add me to the list of thos that see this problem
something very weird is happening in the last update
i have ships in orbit from the days of KSP 1.1 that cant operate corctly
or ships that lose all trust wile still going up during lunch
ship that i used bifur and know thy work

[Mandella]

Okay, I rolled back to 14 just to see, and yes the power output was back to "normal."

Now the question is is version 15 bugged, or is this the balance Freethinker wants? Honestly, I could go either way. I kinda thought the old Solid Cores were a little OP, but even so I don't necessarily want to redesign everything until I know for sure.

As an interesting aside, I still have one disfunctional engine on one ship, but I'm thinking I may just have a construction or damage issue.

[Dave1234]

Hey! The refrigerators don't freeze-frame me anymore! Thanks! Now I can use them!

Unfortunately, I've restarted my game with less cheating, and as a result am no longer at a point where all I need is milligrams of hydrogen to keep a reactor going. I'm still using Tory ramjet spaceplanes to hop around and do atmosphere test contracts, in fact. For that, I sometimes want to make suborbital hops to get those annoying around-the-world contracts done more quickly. Back when I was on my more cheaty game, I used to make spaceplanes that could make that hop, refill their tanks with liquid nitrogen from atmosphere scoops, and hop back.

Now I can't do that--I didn't need to cheat to do it, even then; now I can't do it at all--because while refrigerators work and don't drive me insane, they're glacially slow. By the time they fill me up with liquid nitrogen, I've flown back to base the long way. I could get into the files again and put the atmosphere scoops back in the game. But I'm trying to do this without hacking your mod this time. So... what are my alternatives? Water comes to mind. Not the best multipliers, but it's all over the place right? All I should need is a lake. Right?

Standard drills won't pump liquid. I've tried. Even when I gently slide my spaceplane into the ocean, they're still trying to dig up ore. Which I can't use, because while there are things available to me that could process hydrates, the items that could store hydrates are a headache-inducing distance along the tech tree from where I am. The green universal drill also won't pump liquid. Looking at it in the editor, I think it's designed to. But, when I'm on land, it digs ore, and when I'm on the water it says I'm not landed properly. The regolith drill obviously won't do anything on Kerbin. Or Laythe, or probably Eve, which are the other planets I'd like to have a refillable space-hop plane for. I have these huge water tanks in my cargo bays, but I just can't seem to get water into them. There is no option to just open a tank. I've checked.

So... I think right now, I've just got nothing. I'll either have to hack something after all, or just use this as a one-hop plane and either recover it from across Kerbin or fly it back using the short-hops it can do without a closed-cycle propellant. Or rig it for compressed air again, although I get about four seconds of burn from that, since there's no way to store more than a couple of tons of it on the whole plane. In the future though, can I have a water intake? Kinda like a downward facing radial air intake that'll just pump water in whenever I slide the plane into the drink and turn it on? So I can use water as a refillable propellant? Or since the Tory has those nice, downward-facing intakes already built in, maybe it could have a water-suction mode in the control screen?

 

[ss8913]

So... @FreeThinker in addition to my previous query about the gravity drag issue from a few pages back.. since the latest update, I've observed the following changes:

1. Any thermal turbojet or thermal ramjet attached directly to an antimatter reactor will overheat in seconds, whereas heat management was fine prior to the patch (exact same craft).  This is literally a 2 or 3 order-of-magnitude increase in wasteheat generation for thermal propulsion.
2. Any such engine attached to a reactor indirectly (ie, Mk4 spaceplane, reactor inside a cargo bay, one tail structural piece separating reactor and engine) barely generates any wasteheat, but produces less thrust than before the patch.  However the wasteheat generation is a tiny fraction of what I get when the engine is attached directly to the reactor.

How much of this is intentional and how much of it is a bug?  I can reproduce this on multiple different craft, as most of my designs are somewhat similar.  The changes have, however, rendered most of them useless/unflyable due to the extreme wasteheat production, so I await your verdict on this before I go try and redesign everything...

 

EDIT: in the meantime, where are previous KSPIE builds archived?  I may roll back to the previous version until this is addressed one way or the other.  My entire space program is based around thermal antimatter propulsion, so I'm kinda stuck at the moment

Edited October 5, 2017 by ss8913

[tmbomber]

Hi Everybody,

I *finally* figured out beamed power enough to get something that's at least usable.
Pics can be seen Here.

I've included my tech tree to show what I had available at the time. I selected long IR in an attempt to maximize the range I could broadcast to from a ground base. 
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I wanna make things as good as possible before expanding the system beyond Kerbin/Mun/Minmus.

@Maelstrom Vortex, I'd lake to thank you in particular. Your video showed me the way

Tags: thermal infrared microwave beamed power phased array relay 

[Maelstrom Vortex]

@tmbomber I really need to make a much cleaner version of my SR relays. They're very clunky. SR actually stands for short range. I have a new X-ray sat that you place in high orbit and can collect any wavelength, (so all your ir works) and thermally converts it then fires it into deep space. Takes a lot of radiators, but I had 300+ MW of power well outside 1.5x the radial diameter of the kerbal solar system on the X-ray band. (Started with around 37 gw received from ground).

Edited October 6, 2017 by Maelstrom Vortex

[Dave1234]

--ignore this post-- after I posted, I realized my problem wasn't your mod, it was the way I reversed my 32-bit and 64-bit folders to run in 64-bit mode that's causing the problem. No doubt the 1.3.1 update jacked everything up by downloading the wrong parts of the game into the wrong directories. I probably have to do a clean install. Dammit.

 

Edited October 6, 2017 by Dave1234
mostly deleted the post lol

[ss8913]

4 minutes ago, Dave1234 said:

AAAAARGH! The 1.3.1 update released... and every single part of your mod told me they weren't going to work anymore... Hangar extender, community resource, fuel switch, Interstellar itself, everything. It all asked me to use 1.3... and I play through Steam and it won't let me DO that! AND THEN THE GAME CRASHED. I can't even play! This is ridiculous. Can we please have the mods be just a little more flexible, and actually TRY to work instead of screwing everything up the instant a new version comes out?

 

go to the betas thing for the game.. you can roll back to 1.3.0 or even earlier now.. they have multiple versions you can pick from.  I locked mine at 1.3.0 until things settle out on 1.3.1.  Right now I just need to rollback KSPIE itself to the previous version to fix the thermal propulsion issue.. still trying to find that.

[RobertJPowell]

3 minutes ago, Dave1234 said:

AAAAARGH! The 1.3.1 update released... and every single part of your mod told me they weren't going to work anymore... Hangar extender, community resource, fuel switch, Interstellar itself, everything. It all asked me to use 1.3... and I play through Steam and it won't let me DO that! AND THEN THE GAME CRASHED. I can't even play! This is ridiculous. Can we please have the mods be just a little more flexible, and actually TRY to work instead of screwing everything up the instant a new version comes out?

 

Hey, its not the mod makers fault if a new version messes everything up. Sometimes patches break things. Squad are under no obligation to ensure mods don't break (though they do release betas of the big updates for modders to work with.

 

Be patient. The broken mods will be fixed as and when the modders have time to get to them. Hopefully in most cases it will just be a recompile against the new version, for those that aren't, it will take as long as it takes. Patience is a virtue.

 

Protip: once you have your modded game in a happy place, backup the entire KSP folder on a new drive and play from that.

[Dave1234]

2 minutes ago, RobertJPowell said:

Hey, its not the mod makers fault if a new version messes everything up. Sometimes patches break things. Squad are under no obligation to ensure mods don't break (though they do release betas of the big updates for modders to work with.

 

Be patient. The broken mods will be fixed as and when the modders have time to get to them. Hopefully in most cases it will just be a recompile against the new version, for those that aren't, it will take as long as it takes. Patience is a virtue.

 

Protip: once you have your modded game in a happy place, backup the entire KSP folder on a new drive and play from that.

Hey, you guys replied before I had a chance to re-think my post. The problem wasn't mods at all, it was the fact that I reversed my .exe files and data directories to force the game into 64-bit mode. Which means that when the update hit, it put everything in flat backwards. I'm doing a reinstall, and I bet that fixes it. Unless of course doing the reinstall happens to erase any of the mod data or savegames. But Steam is good about that, usually it only deletes what it put there so I should be ok.

Edited October 6, 2017 by Dave1234
correction--reinstall, not clean install.

[Dave1234]

1 hour ago, ss8913 said:

go to the betas thing for the game.. you can roll back to 1.3.0 or even earlier now.. they have multiple versions you can pick from.  I locked mine at 1.3.0 until things settle out on 1.3.1.  Right now I just need to rollback KSPIE itself to the previous version to fix the thermal propulsion issue.. still trying to find that.

Thanks for that. I thought the betas thing wasn't working--it said I needed an access code. But I guess that was for something more special than a simple rollback.

Unfortunately, I was right the first time after all; it WAS a mod compatibility issue and a reinstall (and re-switch to get it back in 64-bit mode) didn't fix it. So I moved all my mod folders away, and miracle of miracles, it worked... definitely an issue with mods.

Then I tried the betas thing, thought it wasn't working, saw in my library that it thought it was, tried it out... Rollback successful, until everybody updates everything.

[Maelstrom Vortex]

You have my sympathies free thinker. Fortunately, my backup sustained my campaign. I am creating an experimental directory to try to sort things til it is figured out what's broken and what is not.

[Mandella]

14 hours ago, ss8913 said:

go to the betas thing for the game.. you can roll back to 1.3.0 or even earlier now.. they have multiple versions you can pick from.  I locked mine at 1.3.0 until things settle out on 1.3.1.  Right now I just need to rollback KSPIE itself to the previous version to fix the thermal propulsion issue.. still trying to find that.

I've gotten into the habit of keeping at least one version number back as backup with any mod. You never know what weirdness that might not be immediately evident will show up and demand a rollback.

I imagine that 1.3.1 rolling out now complicates matters, since many of us don't upgrade until the mods catch up. A fix might require two versions of the mod -- again... 

[Maelstrom Vortex]

On 10/2/2017 at 8:45 PM, juanml82 said:

The white mirrors that reflect visible light should reflect UV light as well, right? I've put an UV emitter in LKO, but it doesn't seem to be connecting to the relays (and yes, there are a couple within line of sight)

Thank you for double confirming my suspicion, none of the deployable mirrors are working properly in relay mode. There's some form of bug with them that has the solar panel behavior being called twice.. I had the same issue with the IR variant so it must be specific to the mirror types. I replaced my mirrors that were not working with bulb phased arrays and they worked normally for relaying IR, but the mirrors simply wouldn't pick up anything. I'm unfortunately not sure the Bulbs can be configured for UV.

[enewmen]

Hi All:

Help please!

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. But this is what I notice:

When using a salt reactor, " The actinide waste can also be reprocessed using a refinery or a science lab "  I don't see a way to reprocess actinide using ISRU or anyplace .  The only way I can find to "recharge" the salt reactor is to first move the actinide to another tank & dump the actinide, then mine Uranium, then process it to UF4.

All reactors (except for the salt reactor) only produce EC.  So if I'm using beam power, there is no way to power the transmitter - megajoules are needed.  I tried using capacitor and computer core to convert the EC to MJ, but it did nothing.   I can only use beam power from a salt reactor or a huge solar panel that produces MJ.  So I can't transmit beam power even with huge amounts of EC.

Good news is relaying and receiving beam power (even X-Ray) isn't a problem for me - works exactly as it should.  I also "re-broadcast" the X-Rays to microwaves so smaller drones & rovers get some free short-range power.

What am I missing? thanks!

BTW, I love the interstellar mod - it add dimension to an already huge game!

 

@ Maelstrom Vortex:  It looks like you're trying to transmit ultraviolet and receive in visible red.  I don't think this will work. In the VAB, set the transmitter and receiver to the exact same frequency.  This works for me.

Edited October 7, 2017 by enewmen

[Dave1234]

Hey, I am about at the end of my rope with your waste heat system here. I suppose I've already complained a lot, and I should've thanked you more--overall this is a great mod, and I can hardly stand the game without it. But there are still a couple of corkers that may or may not be bugs but are maddening nonetheless. Like, as I said, waste heat. I mean what was wrong with the stock system anyway? You could've just added your parts as an extension to that, but with more heat and more cooling. Instead we get this finicky, quirky, weird system that just seems to randomly overheat at the WORST possible moments even in a ship that is literally covered with radiators from stem to stern!

My ship uses twin upgraded Tory ramjets, with attached and upgraded thermal energy converters, and radiators on almost literally every single surface I can possibly stick one on as well as no less than four inline titanium radiators for atmosphere work. It was marvelously stable for my entire flight out to catch an asteroid that was going to impact Kerbin... until I was on my landing run, having managed to de-orbit and make re-entry without losing a single part, even the exposed sample drill. Then suddenly, out of the BLUE, not even a bloody temperature warning, AND not ten seconds after checking my waste heat and finding it to be fine, I got a reactor shutdown! No engines, no chance of making a spacewalk to restart it since I'd already re-entered, nothing to do but land right where I was, almost dead-stick from 23,000 meters.

This is ridiculous. I'm totally messing with your radiators in my game; I hope you can manage to fit a re-work into a patch somewhere. Thanks again for this, and for all the help you've given me so far too!

Edited October 7, 2017 by Dave1234
Made it a little nicer and added some thank yous.

[babbos]

Hello, re-entering the KSPI world and trying to figure out all the Fuel and ISRU capabilities, a few questions:

1. How can I produce Liquid Hydrogen for fueling my ships? ISRU produces Hydrogen Gas. The only way I found to produce LH2 is through Water electrolysis which is a cumbersome process that requires a lot of parts and tanks.

2. The Ore processing map posted on the first post is wrong, tried to follow the path to create Hydrazine and it requires a different path, and again, producing Hydrazine is very complicated and requires a lot of parts and tanks, is that intended?

3. What is your first, second and final ore setup? At the beginning with your first thermal and nuclear engines what is your main fuel and how do you setup your ISRUs to produce that fuel?

4. Can KSPIs ISRU converters produce monopropelant? I couldn't find a way, what is the solution for that?

 

 

[Dave1234]

5 minutes ago, babbos said:

Hello, re-entering the KSPI world and trying to figure out all the Fuel and ISRU capabilities, a few questions:

1. How can I produce Liquid Hydrogen for fueling my ships? ISRU produces Hydrogen Gas. The only way I found to produce LH2 is through Water electrolysis which is a cumbersome process that requires a lot of parts and tanks.

2. The Ore processing map posted on the first post is wrong, tried to follow the path to create Hydrazine and it requires a different path, and again, producing Hydrazine is very complicated and requires a lot of parts and tanks, is that intended?

3. What is your first, second and final ore setup? At the beginning with your first thermal and nuclear engines what is your main fuel and how do you setup your ISRUs to produce that fuel?

4. Can KSPIs ISRU converters produce monopropelant? I couldn't find a way, what is the solution for that?

 

 

1. As long as there's a place, however small, to store that hydrogen gas, you can use a cryostat or refrigerator unit to condense it into liquid H2. Look at the sliders in the right-click menus. If you use a cryostat tank, set it up for hydrogen and have a second tank to store the gas; if a refrigerator, make sure its tank is set up for hydrogen so that it will have some storage for both the gas and the liquid. And then have a tank set up to contain LH2.

2. pass, maybe someone else can answer that.

3. I think you were asking someone in particular so, again, pass.

4. Not sure if they can or can't, but the stock Convert-O-Tron can. Maybe it was left out of KSPI for that reason. The convert-o-tron will make stock fuels out of stock Ore.

Edited October 7, 2017 by Dave1234

[Dave1234]

New bug: when I reprocess nuclear fuel using a science station, the nuclear fuel consumption goes up drastically... and stays up. So I actually shorten the life of the reactor, even though I added fuel to it. Edit: Even saving and reloading the game didn't send the fuel consumption back down, meaning that reprocessing my fuel is a permanent net loss for that ship. A massive one too, taking decades off its fuel life.

Edited October 7, 2017 by Dave1234

[danielboro]

4 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Hey, I am about at the end of my rope with your waste heat system here. I suppose I've already complained a lot, and I should've thanked you more--overall this is a great mod, and I can hardly stand the game without it. But there are still a couple of corkers that may or may not be bugs but are maddening nonetheless. Like, as I said, waste heat. I mean what was wrong with the stock system anyway? You could've just added your parts as an extension to that, but with more heat and more cooling. Instead we get this finicky, quirky, weird system that just seems to randomly overheat at the WORST possible moments even in a ship that is literally covered with radiators from stem to stern!

My ship uses twin upgraded Tory ramjets, with attached and upgraded thermal energy converters, and radiators on almost literally every single surface I can possibly stick one on as well as no less than four inline titanium radiators for atmosphere work. It was marvelously stable for my entire flight out to catch an asteroid that was going to impact Kerbin... until I was on my landing run, having managed to de-orbit and make re-entry without losing a single part, even the exposed sample drill. Then suddenly, out of the BLUE, not even a bloody temperature warning, AND not ten seconds after checking my waste heat and finding it to be fine, I got a reactor shutdown! No engines, no chance of making a spacewalk to restart it since I'd already re-entered, nothing to do but land right where I was, almost dead-stick from 23,000 meters.

This is ridiculous. I'm totally messing with your radiators in my game; I hope you can manage to fit a re-work into a patch somewhere. Thanks again for this, and for all the help you've given me so far too!

joining you
i think my pic of 0 trust was do to waste heat engine shutdown
and thats in an engine that cant over heat at 100% trust (propelent is the colent)

[Dave1234]

3 minutes ago, danielboro said:

joining you
i think my pic of 0 trust was do to waste heat engine shutdown
and thats in an engine that cant over heat at 100% trust (propelent is the colent)

At least you weren't in atmosphere. Were you? You know that all you have to do to restart a reactor is send a Kerbal EVA to get it going again, right? of course, if it shut down due to heat, it'll probably do it again.

By the way, it's spelled "thrust". There's an H in it. And the second word is "Propellant". And, finally, "coolant".

[danielboro]

1 hour ago, Dave1234 said:

At least you weren't in atmosphere. Were you? You know that all you have to do to restart a reactor is send a Kerbal EVA to get it going again, right? of course, if it shut down due to heat, it'll probably do it again.

By the way, it's spelled "thrust". There's an H in it. And the second word is "Propellant". And, finally, "coolant".

un kerbaled drive section of a inter-planet ship running out of all oxidizer but not yet circulised
circulsing engine has 0 thrust on an 8M $ burning debris

just kidding PE was >70 by the time the normal chem engines run out of oxidizer

if my spiel checker cant or wont suggest a better  option i keep the closest thing to wat i think its the way to write it

p.s.
i used NPP to edit the save file to turn on the engines

Edited October 7, 2017 by danielboro

[Starchaser]

I started off with mostly stock KSP, modded with Mechjeb2, KER and Kerbal Alarm clock. I added a few of the Near Future mods (propulsion, solar, electrical, and launch vehicles) and their dependencies, and everything was working fine. Then at one time I added the remainder of Near Future mods, Kopernicus, OMP, and Interstellar Extended. Upon launch it went to the loading screen forever (20+ minutes I let it sit while doing something else on my other computer) and I was forced to end the program with the task manager. Disabling all the mods resulted in a broken KSP that crashes upon launch with an exception in mono.dll, even after I verified local files through steam. (which reports 1 file corrupted after every launch attempt. However it's a 21.3 mb file, and mono.dll is 201.)

I deleted and reinstalled KSP, and ran it vanilla stock It runs fine. I added the 3 mods I was running under. Again, it runs fine. My next step was to add the 3 mods I suspected might be the issue, 1 at a time. I started with Interstellar Extended, and it crashes right at the end of the progress bar filling. 

I'm running the latest KSP 1.3.1. I'm installed on my 2nd HD 

error log

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B99G8SQzn7guSjZhTmU4TU5yRDg/view?usp=sharing

Output log

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B99G8SQzn7guemFZcDNmRnpfZlU/view?usp=sharing

Any help would be appreciated!

 

FWIW, I haven't tried Kopernicus or OMP yet. 1 problem at a time.

[danielboro]

4 minutes ago, Starchaser said:

I'm running the latest KSP 1.3.1.

this is the problem
this mod was updated to 1.3.1 the rest i dont know yet

its new and most mods are for 1.3.0
mods will be updated soon
 

[Dave1234]

11 hours ago, danielboro said:

un kerbaled drive section of a inter-planet ship running out of all oxidizer but not yet circulised
circulsing engine has 0 thrust on an 8M $ burning debris

just kidding PE was >70 by the time the normal chem engines run out of oxidizer

if my spiel checker cant or wont suggest a better  option i keep the closest thing to wat i think its the way to write it

p.s.
i used NPP to edit the save file to turn on the engines

Yeah, I don't know what NPP is but I've had to go into Notepad to work on my own save files. Not because of the waste heat thing, although I did use it to actually edit the radiators, but because for some reason all the scaling on every ion engine--but just the ion engines--that I was using got lost somehow, so all my long-term research ships wound up with itty bitty 62.5 centimeter ion engines floating a few meters behind them... and with in some cases upwards of five hundred tons of liquid xenon to move around, they weren't getting anywhere with those.