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KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread


FreeThinker

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On 3/30/2018 at 3:31 AM, Deckard said:

I'm confused by the purpose of the graphene radiators.  The stock radiators seem superior in every way, even fully upgraded.  For example:  Compared to one Mk3 large Thermal Control System, two Mk5 Large Folding Graphene Radiators cost more than twice as much, weigh 20% more, and provide only a fraction of the cooling to a reactor (A 3.75 Molten Salt Reactor with a thermal generator at full power operates at less than 8% efficiency compared to about 30% with the single TCS), not to mention requiring much more tech to fully upgrade.  Is this working as intended?  I don't have Near Future Electrical or anything else that affects radiators (as far as I know), if that's in question.  Are stock radiators overpowered, or are graphene radiators underpowered?

Not sure what you mean by Mk3 large Thermal Control System, all I know is the Large Thermal Control System, at a mass of 1t, KSPI version is 0.675 t so it is defiantly lighter but I agree it could be lowered further

Edited by FreeThinker
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12 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Not sure what you mean by Mk3 large Thermal Control System, all I know is the Large Thermal Control System, at a mass of 1t, KSPI version is 0.675 t so it is defiantly lighter but I agree it could be lowered further

The "Mark" notation is VAB tooltips' name for upgrade levels. Large Thermal Control System goes up to MK3 meaning two of the radiator max temperature upgrades apply to it.

 

Now here's the problem:

stock "Large Thermal Control System" at a mass of 1t has a max temperature of 2616 K and dissipates 7.1GW of heat

KSPI "Graphene Radiators Folding Large" at a mass of 0.675 has a max temperature of 3700 K and dissipates 2.87GW of heat

So in terms of mass/dissipation ratio graphene is about 50% worse at max upgrades, and way worse without upgrades. It's also 10% more expensive and performs poorly in atmosphere. Aerodynamic, etc properties should be the same as they use the same 3D model(just a recolor).

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Hi there and sorry if I've missed something obvious in the thread. 

I set up an orbital reactor and generator, and a working set of phased array relays broadcasting and receing in X-Band.

I have a ground base on a moon thats receiving megajoules, but is running out of stock electric charge. I'm sure I read somewhere that electric charge is supplied before beamed power is stored as megajoules. Have I misunderstood? Is there not a way to transmit EC?

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Version 1.18.4 for Kerbal Space Program 1.4.1 can be downloaded from here

Released on 2018-04-02

  • Added Improved Part module info for Reactors
  • Added Reactor maintenance now produces Wasteheat
  • Added Increased Maintenance for Quantum Singularity Reactor when under influence of gee force
  • Added Tech node Quantum Gravity
  • Added Tech node Extreme Electrical Systems
  • Balance: Increased Power output when connected to MHD and Plasma nozzle for several heat specialized Reactors
  • Balance: Increased Tech requirement Antimatter reactor
  • Balance: Charged Particle Direct Converter benefits from improved efficiency with Extreme Electrical Systems unlocked
  • Balance: Rectennas have improved efficiency with Extreme Electrical Systems
  • Balance: Made upgrade Alcubiere warp drive require Extreme Electrical Systems
  • Balance: made Quantum Singularity Reactor require Quantum gravity
  • Fixed Thermal Stock overheating issue of small thermal nozzles
  • Fixed Quantum Singularity Reactor to be started instantly from Reactor Screen
  • Fixed issue of exception in VAB when Generator was deleted
  • Fixed radiator with thermal animation to function at all
  • Fixed inconsistency Thermal, Particle, and Wasteheat Buffers (by Arivald Ha'gel)
Edited by FreeThinker
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On 4/1/2018 at 12:50 PM, FreeThinker said:

Not sure what you mean by Mk3 large Thermal Control System, all I know is the Large Thermal Control System, at a mass of 1t, KSPI version is 0.675 t so it is defiantly lighter but I agree it could be lowered further

As samoo said, Mk3 is what the upgrades are noted as in the VAB.

To put the issue another way, if you use tweakscale to reduce the large TCS to 0.675t, it still greatly outperforms a fully upgraded, full size large graphene radiator at a lower cost and smaller size area-wise.  All in all, I think the radiators need a balance pass at some point, with the TCS getting bumped down a bit and the graphene getting a big increase in performance.  Graphene should be the preferred radiator in vacuum, while the TCS and other stock radiators should be more general purpose, operating in atmosphere and vacuum both.

That's my take.  I'd like an excuse to use the KSPI radiators because they look great, but nothing beats TCS spam, and that's a shame.

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1 hour ago, Deckard said:

As samoo said, Mk3 is what the upgrades are noted as in the VAB.

To put the issue another way, if you use tweakscale to reduce the large TCS to 0.675t, it still greatly outperforms a fully upgraded, full size large graphene radiator at a lower cost and smaller size area-wise.  All in all, I think the radiators need a balance pass at some point, with the TCS getting bumped down a bit and the graphene getting a big increase in performance.  Graphene should be the preferred radiator in vacuum, while the TCS and other stock radiators should be more general purpose, operating in atmosphere and vacuum both.

That's my take.  I'd like an excuse to use the KSPI radiators because they look great, but nothing beats TCS spam, and that's a shame.

There has to be a mistake somewhere because Graphene radiators are supposed to have superior radiator performance in space where are both lighter, can reach higher temperatures and have a larger effective surface area. Besides looking at the raw number, have you performed any real tests?

22 hours ago, Chippy the Space Dog said:

Hi there and sorry if I've missed something obvious in the thread. 

I set up an orbital reactor and generator, and a working set of phased array relays broadcasting and receing in X-Band.

I have a ground base on a moon thats receiving megajoules, but is running out of stock electric charge. I'm sure I read somewhere that electric charge is supplied before beamed power is stored as megajoules. Have I misunderstood? Is there not a way to transmit EC?

It supposed to automatically convert MJ to EC , so something might have broken. I know that something went wrong for some of the animated receivers. Perhaps this is causing it not to function properly. It might have been fixed in the latest release where I addressed this problem. If not, please look in the log and see if any KSPIE related exception occur

Edited by FreeThinker
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9 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

There has to be a mistake somewhere because Graphene radiators are supposed to have superior radiator performance in space where are both lighter, can reach higher temperatures and have a larger effective surface area. Besides looking at the raw number, have you performed any real tests?

I flew both of these into space with an oversized generator, the VAB numbers check out when near 100% wasteheat.

Both radiators show the same surface area, and graphene does reach a higher temperature, but it still performs significantly worse. I'm guessing there's another variable in play.

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I was about to post that the latest version has made warp drives more powerful but nerfed my kerbsteins to 1/8 of previous thrust; however reading the release notes more carefully it seems as though I may need to go back through the tech tree and unlock some things that might be affecting that... ie, prior version, a certain kerbstein powered craft could pull 4G acceleration, now it's at 0.6G .. it has been sitting in orbit since the previous version.

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OK.. @FreeThinker the new version has.. changed things... 2 of my favorite engines now seem completely unusable compared to the previous version:

1. Thermal launch nozzle - these generate an INSANE amount of wasteheat with a plasma beam antimatter reactor now.  Without generators coupled to them, in the last version, they generated almost no wasteheat.  I thought this was because the nozzle was radiating heat away(?) but... in this version it pegs the wasteheat to max pretty much instantly.   If I cycle the engines down and up a few times I can get a little thrust out of them but not that much.  Doing a revert to launch has done one of two things for me so far, either 1. the wasteheat behavior changes completely and it generates a lot less, or 2. it destabilizes the game and I have to quit and restart.  I think there's some kind of bug here...

2. Kerbstein engine.  a 20m Kerbstein at level 8 (yes I have now unlocked all the nodes again) generates far FAR less thrust than in the last version... like, as I said in my last post, 0.6G vs 4.0G before .  In order to use more than one of these giant engines I'd need even more giant parts which would increase weight and part count even more...  Is there some new trick to this?  I'm using a 7.5m antimatter reactor and 7.5m charged particle generator to power it.

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1 hour ago, ss8913 said:

2. Kerbstein engine.  a 20m Kerbstein at level 8 (yes I have now unlocked all the nodes again) generates far FAR less thrust than in the last version... like, as I said in my last post, 0.6G vs 4.0G before .  In order to use more than one of these giant engines I'd need even more giant parts which would increase weight and part count even more...  Is there some new trick to this?  I'm using a 7.5m antimatter reactor and 7.5m charged particle generator to power it.

4

mm, that is not supposed to happen. The idea is that only after locking all 8 high tech nodes you can benefit the maximum (OP) performance, which as that point is justified. I will look into it.

1 hour ago, ss8913 said:


1. Thermal launch nozzle - these generate an INSANE amount of wasteheat with a plasma beam antimatter reactor now.  Without generators coupled to them, in the last version, they generated almost no wasteheat.  I thought this was because the nozzle was radiating heat away(?) but... in this version it pegs the wasteheat to max pretty much instantly.   If I cycle the engines down and up a few times I can get a little thrust out of them but not that much.  Doing a revert to launch has done one of two things for me so far, either 1. the wasteheat behavior changes completely and it generates a lot less, or 2. it destabilizes the game and I have to quit and restart.  I think there's some kind of bug here...
 

7

I haven't changed anything related to wasteheat meachnism for thermal nozzle, so I'm  a bit surprised to hear that. Are you sure you not confusing wasteheat with stock heat (which have been changed).I will look into them. By the way, in the future I suggest you post them as in issue in the issue track manager at Github, it makes my and other dev easier to track all issues

Edited by FreeThinker
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On 3-4-2018 at 8:52 PM, samooo2 said:

I flew both of these into space with an oversized generator, the VAB numbers check out when near 100% wasteheat.

Both radiators show the same surface area, and graphene does reach a higher temperature, but it still performs significantly worse. I'm guessing there's another variable in play.

Alright, Found the reason for the imbalance. Apparently is had a 10x surface area bonus. Not sure how that got in but is explains why performance on this radiator was much better.

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@ss8913 Regarding the Beam Antimatter core. Notice that from a technological point of view, the Beam Core Antimatter reactor is not ideally suited for thermal propulsion because Proton-Antiproton reaction is very messy and creates a lot of high energy Hard Gamma radiation which tends to pass though tungsten like paper. I currently considering removing the ability to use it a thermal propulsion entirely as the thermal heat is too defuse to be used effectively. Instead, you should use a positron antimatter reactor which by comparison has a much cleaner reaction as it produces only low energy gamma rays which can be used relatively easy for thermal propulsion. The biggest problem of Positrons is that they are hard to store in high density (in electrostatic containment devices).  But I recently learned of the potential of storage of positron in  Micro Penning-Malmberg traps which allow much higher density storage of positrons. Therefore in the next release, I will make it also easier to store positron more effectively. Combined with the fact positrons are easier to produce and therefore cheaper available on the market, it should make it more accessible than before. As a side note The Antimatter reactor kind of gone full circle as the original KSPI antimatter reactor had about the same capabilities. The original antimatter resource was never clearly defined what it was. It performed as a portion antimatter but we collected it as if it was anti protons.

Edit found an interesting Presentation on positrons storage

 

Edited by FreeThinker
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I only have one antimatter reactor in my part list... my tech tree is fully unlocked; is there supposed to be a second one?  I've never had more than one antimatter reactor in the part list, ever... I've been using it for thermal propulsion since... like the entire lifetime of this mod, really.  So I may have meant positron antimatter..

 

As far as the heat thing goes - unless stock heat changed drastically between 1.4.1 and 1.4.2... I was using the previous KSPIE in 1.4.1 as well and did not have the problem with the thermal launch nozzles.  The craft in question that actually exposed both of the reported issues was a craft that worked beautifully with 1.4.1 + the last KSPIE, and now has both of the aforementioned problems.

To isolate the thermal launch nozzle issue I created a simple rocket that's just nosecone -> probe core -> hydrazine tank -> antimatter reactor -> launch nozzle, and 4 radial RV antimatter tanks, 4 300% tweakscaled RTGs for electrical power, and some antennae... and 4 large winged edge radiators attached radially to the tank.  it pegs the wasteheat to full within seconds after throttling up, and in previous versions, this craft generated very little heat since it lacks an electric generator; that energy conversion generated far more wasteheat than using it for thermal propulsion.

I also notice that the CP electric gen now also holds far less electricCharge than it used to.
 

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6 hours ago, ss8913 said:


I only have one antimatter reactor in my part list... my tech tree is fully unlocked; is there supposed to be a second one?  I've never had more than one antimatter reactor in the part list, ever... I've been using it for thermal propulsion since... like the entire lifetime of this mod, really.  So I may have meant positron antimatter..

2

What list are you referring to? Could you make a screen dump?

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9 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

What list are you referring to? Could you make a screen dump?

just the reactors tab under KSPIE... there's only one antimatter reactor there.  either way this is getting into the weeds, this is something that worked in the previous release, and the behavior *drastically* changed from one version to the next; that usually indicates something is broken when behavior of something in a mod as mature as this changes that much in a micro point-release update...?  I'll see about getting a screen capture later tonight if you're interested in what the reactor list looks like for me, though.

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34 minutes ago, ss8913 said:

just the reactors tab under KSPIE... there's only one antimatter reactor there.  either way this is getting into the weeds, this is something that worked in the previous release, and the behavior *drastically* changed from one version to the next; that usually indicates something is broken when behavior of something in a mod as mature as this changes that much in a micro point-release update...?  I'll see about getting a screen capture later tonight if you're interested in what the reactor list looks like for me, though.

Based on your description I guess you use the old KSPI stock assembly part menu, which I admit have not properly maintained for some time.  I wrongly assumed you were using KSPIE Filter extensions but I guess not everybody had it installed as it is optional. In the next release I will add all missing part and added additional sub collection where all parts can be accessed easier.

In the next release you should be able to see this:

zVcMTjl.png

Edited by FreeThinker
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which is the right one?  the one in the top middle is the one I've been using for years.  fully upgraded of course.  Are you saying this will fix the fact that wasteheat goes from 0 to maximum in literally seconds after applying throttle?  It seems.. I don't know, this still sounds like a bug in the heat mechanic to me, not a "this reactor is supposed to do that" thing.

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OK, further testing... removed the launch nozzle, put on a thermal turbojet and air intakes (this is on my simple test rocket).

Put it in air breathing mode, apply any amount of throttle, the engine (not the reactor) instantly explodes.  That *has* to be a bug, yeah?  Also, confirmed I am using plasma beam core reactors, not the positron one.  Will try with that reactor instead.

EDIT: found the positron AM reactor.  The thermal turbojet problem doesn't exist with that one, although I don't think even with the other one that an instant explosion is desirable or intended in any way (?)  ... I'll convert my craft to using the positron reactor.  Looking forward to the Kerbstein fix as well; TBH I thought it was balanced and pretty useful in the last version, hopefully it's not difficult to fix :)

EDIT: side note, those positron reactors are SUPER powerful... wow...

Edited by ss8913
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One other thing I just noticed.. the retractable resistojet RCS... they used to have a button for "show actuation toggles" (in the SPH/VAB) which let me limit individual thrusters to pitch, roll, yaw, fore, aft, etc... this set of controls now seems to be absent.  However, craft that I made in the previous version still  honor the settings that were set at the time.. I just can't make any new craft with them.  Is this a bug or did I miss something?

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Just now, ss8913 said:

One other thing I just noticed.. the retractable resistojet RCS... they used to have a button for "show actuation toggles" (in the SPH/VAB) which let me limit individual thrusters to pitch, roll, yaw, fore, aft, etc... this set of controls now seems to be absent.  However, craft that I made in the previous version still  honor the settings that were set at the time.. I just can't make any new craft with them.  Is this a bug or did I miss something?

Pretty sure that's a stock feature on everything that has thrust vectoring or RCS. Try enabling "advanced tweakables" in the settings.

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On 4/6/2018 at 4:56 AM, ss8913 said:

To isolate the thermal launch nozzle issue I created a simple rocket that's just nosecone -> probe core -> hydrazine tank -> antimatter reactor -> launch nozzle, and 4 radial RV antimatter tanks, 4 300% tweakscaled RTGs for electrical power, and some antennae... and 4 large winged edge radiators attached radially to the tank.  it pegs the wasteheat to full within seconds after throttling up, and in previous versions, this craft generated very little heat since it lacks an electric generator; that energy conversion generated far more wasteheat than using it for thermal propulsion.

I'm having some trouble reproducing your problem

nAeadLL.png

As you can see I'm not experiencing any overheating issue. Notice the values for HeatProduction, could you make a screendump of the same?

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Just wanted to give some feedback on the updated part descriptions and upgrade descriptions.  I LOVE THEM!  Seriously amazing, Ive learned a bunch of stuff I didnt know and Ive been using kspie forever!

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20 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

I'm having some trouble reproducing your problem

nAeadLL.png

As you can see I'm not experiencing any overheating issue. Notice the values for HeatProduction, could you make a screendump of the same?

let me check if i screwed something up on the craft design, I may have used the wrong radiators or something.  the positron reactors are better anyway though.. lol.  At this point I'm mainly waiting for the kerbstein fix/update. I will check the heatproduction on my test rocket however.

EDIT: Please also try that same rocket, but add a few air intakes and use a thermal turbojet in atmospheric mode.  that seems to have bigger problems than the launch nozzle.  Using the positron reactor seems to solve it 100% though.

EDIT: One other thing I just noticed, the positron reactor, can it not generate power with a charged particle electric generator?

Edited by ss8913
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Version 1.18.5 for Kerbal Space Program 1.4.2 can be downloaded from here

Released on 2018-04-08

  • Compiled against KSP 1.4.2
  • Added new Model for Plasma Jet Magneto Inertial Reactor (by Eleusis La Arwall)
  • Added ability to configure generator capacity in VAB
  • Added improve Part Module info for Power Generator
  • Added localization for Power Generator
  • Added additional categories in stock part library
  • Added Increased Electric Charge buffer size, equal to MJ capacity
  • Added available Fuel Modes to Reactor PartModule info dialog
  • Balance: Increased Positron storage capacity of Positronium Storage Ring
  • Balance: Increased Core temperature Positron Antimatter Reactor
  • Balance: Reduced Thermal Propulsion utilization of Beam Core Antimatter Reactor
  • Fixed Null Reference Exception in AtmosphericIntake (credits by Arivald Ha'gel)
  • Fixed missing parts to stock part library
  • Fixed MHD or Thermal Generators ability to generate power from Fusion Engine in Aneutronic Fusion Mode
  • Fixed Magnetic Confinement Fusion Excess overheating issue
  • Fixed Stock Folder Radiators overpower performance
  • Fixed Magnetic Nozzle to function during time-warp when in suborbital orbit
  • Removed obsolete fuel tanks
Edited by FreeThinker
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On 4/5/2018 at 8:51 AM, ss8913 said:


2. Kerbstein engine.  a 20m Kerbstein at level 8 (yes I have now unlocked all the nodes again) generates far FAR less thrust than in the last version... like, as I said in my last post, 0.6G vs 4.0G before .  In order to use more than one of these giant engines I'd need even more giant parts which would increase weight and part count even more...  Is there some new trick to this?  I'm using a 7.5m antimatter reactor and 7.5m charged particle generator to power it.

Except for a spawing of exception, I'm Not sure what was going wrong, but to help you I will improve the Kerbstein Gui in the VAB in the next release

pjXRo5v.png

As you can see, it will list all upgrade tech and show if you have actually unlock it or not.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the display further  I would like to hear it

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