Ion engines boost

[Cassel]

Does anyone use ion engines? I tried, but the problem is time, even for x4 warp the acceleration lasts awfully long. Would it be possible to increase the thrust of ion engines by 4-6 times, of course increasing the same amount of xenon combustion and power consumption (would be nice to have larger batteries in different shapes ;-))?

 

Edited November 21, 2018 by Cassel

[Guest]

They wouldn't be ion engines anymore. The most powerful experimental RL ion engines have a thrust of 5N. The one in KSP has 2 kN. That's already 400 times more than the real thing. 

The whole point of ion engines is that they have absurd Isp and really low TWR, which means they're only suitable for some very special use cases. What you actually want is to have your cake and eat it too -- the ridiculous Isp of an ion engine and the TWR of a chemical rocket. That's cool but too sci-fi for KSP in my opinion -- comparable to a warp drive or somesuch.

To answer your question, yes I've used them. They're quite well suited for ultra-light probes. You can even make a lander that lands on low-grav bodies. They're just not good for anything heavy, or for anything that needs to operate from a high-gravity body. These are all part of the trade-offs that make KSP such fun to play: if would be much less fun if you had one engine that was so awesome you'd use it for everything.

[Cassel]

34 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

They wouldn't be ion engines anymore. The most powerful experimental RL ion engines have a thrust of 5N. The one in KSP has 2 kN. That's already 400 times more than the real thing. 

The whole point of ion engines is that they have absurd Isp and really low TWR, which means they're only suitable for some very special use cases. What you actually want is to have your cake and eat it too -- the ridiculous Isp of an ion engine and the TWR of a chemical rocket. That's cool but too sci-fi for KSP in my opinion -- comparable to a warp drive or somesuch.

To answer your question, yes I've used them. They're quite well suited for ultra-light probes. You can even make a lander that lands on low-grav bodies. They're just not good for anything heavy, or for anything that needs to operate from a high-gravity body. These are all part of the trade-offs that make KSP such fun to play: if would be much less fun if you had one engine that was so awesome you'd use it for everything.

But it wouldn't change things you said... power consumption would increase, so still using it to heavy job would be pointless because of amount of solar panels you would have to put in single craft.

[The Aziz]

Add more engines then, nothing is stopping you from putting 8 of them at the end of your craft. More thrust, increased power consumption.

[Cassel]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

Add more engines then, nothing is stopping you from putting 8 of them at the end of your craft. More thrust, increased power consumption.

my CPU is stopping me from this :-)

[Geonovast]

To actually answer your question, yes, you can.

One way would be to change the thrust numbers in the engine's config file, found in GameData/Squad/Parts/Engine/ionEngine/ionEngine.cfg.  Can be opened with any text editor.

MODULE
    {
        name = ModuleEnginesFX
        engineID = Ion
        thrustVectorTransformName = thrustTransform
        exhaustDamage = False
        ignitionThreshold = 0.1
        minThrust = 0
        maxThrust = 2
        heatProduction = 0
        powerEffectName = IonPlume
        EngineType = Electric
        PROPELLANT
        {

Change maxThrust to whatever you want.  AFAIK, the propellant numbers will automatically scale.

Better way would be to do this with a ModuleManager patch.  I don't know the syntax offhand, but there's a patch writing guide in the ModuleManager thread.

 

Just tested, yup, just change the maxThrust:

maxThrust = 2

maxThrust = 20

If you want to stay somewhat realistic and you're just doing it to keep part count down, go ahead and multiply the mass and cost in the cfg file by the same amount.

 

But it wouldn't makes sense to make this change stock. (If that's what you were suggesting)

 

Edited November 21, 2018 by Geonovast

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Cassel said:

my CPU is stopping me from this :-)

I very much doubt that. Seven more parts is not a whole lot.

[Aegolius13]

15 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

They wouldn't be ion engines anymore.

Agree.  I think the existing ion engine is a decent compromise between realism and playability.  It's wimpy enough that you typically have to mission-plan around it, but powerful enough that burns can happen in a scale that works for the game. 

14 hours ago, Cassel said:

But it wouldn't change things you said... power consumption would increase, so still using it to heavy job would be pointless because of amount of solar panels you would have to put in single craft.

Doesn't it have to scale this way, for balance reasons though?  If you had an ion engine with more power, but less electricity required, it would kind of destroy the other engines in terms of balance.  Unless you turned the specific impulse way down or something... at which point the revamped ion is starting to resemble the NERV.  Put another way, an in-game version of a real-life ion engine is not going to be well-suited for heavy lift, or landing, or those kind of tasks.  

You might want to check out the Near Future series of mods - they have several types of electric propulsion motors (VASIMR, etc) with enough thrust to work in "normal" gameplay.  The power consumption is correspondingly huge, but the mod also offers gigantic solar panels or (more practically) nuclear reactors to deal with that.  

[mattinoz]

Would it be possible to target this another way, Higher Warp?

When only low thrust engine(s) are used physics time acceleration can go higher to speed up burn time. Sure the wobbles might get you so there is going to be a trade between complexity and acceleration. Still gives two options on how to speed up the game time spent.

And to answer my own next question yes there is a mod for this.

 

[DerekL1963]

20 hours ago, Cassel said:

Does anyone use ion engines? I tried, but the problem is time, even for x4 warp the acceleration lasts awfully long.

Swap to a different window...  I usually catch up on the forums or social media when doing long burns.  I've also done dishes, prepped dinner, etc... etc...   Use KAC or MJ to pause the game or chop the throttle.

[Pthigrivi]

I would love to see a 1.25m ion engine with higher thrust to avoid the part count problem. Maybe 10x the mass and thrust with a slight efficiency bump?

[EvermoreAlpaca]

58 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I would love to see a 1.25m ion engine with higher thrust to avoid the part count problem. Maybe 10x the mass and thrust with a slight efficiency bump?

Agreed, a larger scale ion engine with the same stats relative to size and mass would be very helpful.  This would have the same performance as a cluster of the current ion engines, but would be far kinder on our PCs as a result of lower part count/engine count.

[Tyko]

I'm having de ja vu..I thought I already responded..guess there's multiple threads on the same topic right now.

@Cassel check out Near Future Technologies. NF Propulsion has larger ion engines based on tech currently in development. NF Electric has generators that pump out enough power to drive the new engines.