Problem with calculating core heat radiation

[Ranger1 0]

Hello,

I'm not quite sure if this is any bug (I'm using some mods) or if there's some unknown multiplier within the core heat calculations. Perhaps someone here can help me to unterstand.
In my setting I landed on Minmus with a level 2 engineer. The ship has 2 Drill-O-Matic Junior's attached to a fuel tank and attached to this tank a large radiator panel. Nothing else (of any heat importance) is conected with this fuel tank. There's no termal control system on the whole ship.

Now each each Drill-O-Matic Junior has 50 KW max cooling and the large radiator panel has 200 KW of core heat xfer. So there should be more then enough cooling. But when I start mining, the drills core temp climbs up to 561 K. Thanks to KAS & KIS  I was able to try some different settings. If I attach another small radiator panel (50 KW core heat xfer), the drills stay at 500 K. So the cooling requirement seems to be somewhere between 200 KW and 250 KW - the drills should only generate 100 KW.

I also checked the additional thermal data over the debugging console (ALT + F12) but I'm no expert in those numbers and they don't gave my any hint, what happens with the heat when the drills starts to overheat (I mean going over 500 K).

This behavior starts with 1.3.1, in prevoius versions the cooling for this ship was fine (but in those days I drilled on mun ) .

Best regards

Edited May 24, 2018 by Ranger1

[mystifeid 377]

If you right click on the large radiator panel in the VAB you'll see that it only cools nearby parts. Try using a couple of medium thermal control systems (extended) instead.

Edited May 24, 2018 by mystifeid

[blag 1]

Could you try the same "overheating" setting, but with a fuel tank twice the size of the actual ? (like a 32 instead of a 16)

My guess is your fuel tank is not big enough to buffer all the heat of the drill-o-matic.

The point with thermal is the transmittance, that mean a radiator at one end of the ship will not be able to cool down the other end efficiently.

 

[bewing 2,597]

It sounds to me like you have your radiator hooked up correctly to do the cooling. However, did you turn it on?

(One other thing to note that shouldn't make any difference is that engineers make your drills and radiators perform above their 100% max. It's always supposed to be set up so that your radiators gain performance faster than your drills. They all should max out at 125% of max performance.)

 

[Ranger1 0]

Hi,

thanks for your input.

The radiator is definitely working - otherwise the heat wouldn't stabilize at 561 K. If I remove the radiator from the fuel tank, the heat of the drills goes up to 1000 K (shutdown temparature).
So yes, the radiator is well placed, online and has a cooling effect ... the cooling of one large radiator panel is just insufficient.

@mystifeid : According to the documentation and also my own experiences, a radiator panel cools the attached part (fuel tank) and also all part attached to this part (drill). Otherwise you would never be able to cool drills with radiator panels.

@blag : Unfortunately I can't easily test this scenario as there's no bigger fuel container on this ship (and I had no cheat mod installed yet). I've also thought about this possibility, but rejected it: With the fuel tank as a bottleneck in the heat transfer, how could it work with the two radiator panels attached (the variant with a small and a lage radiator panel on the fuel tank cools the drills perfectly)

@bewing: Yes, it's activated.
I didn't know that engineers also affects the efficiency of radiators.

Any ideas?

Edited May 25, 2018 by sumghai
Fixed user mentions - remember to put a space after the username for mentions to work

[Laie 1,194]

To the best of my knowledge, "core heat" is distinct from ordinary heat and doesn't follow the same rules about heat transfer between parts; for all practical purposes it's a thing between parts generating it and radiators removing it, without middlemen.

The next best thing I can think of, may there be another core heat source feeding into the radiators? Even if it doesn't look like it, the game may have it's own idea of how the ship was put together.