Modifying ION Engines to Only use Electricity?

[iFlyAllTheTime]

That can't be true, SRBs use only one resource.

Yeah you're right, I guess the mass thing is hard coded then.

Pretty sure SRB use solid only. Also Near Future Propulsion has a patch that removes the need for oxidizer and use only liquid hydrogen.

And the O 10 Mono-propellant Engine?

[KerikBalm]

So how about changing electric charge to have a non-zero mass instead, like the MechJeb AR-202 ?

Yes, the simple solution is to give electric charge a small mass, and then it will work.

If you give it as much mass as 1 unit of xenon, it should work just fine, and that won't increase the weight of other modules that contain electricity by all that much (the batteries would be most affected).

But since the ion enegine uses 1.8 units of electricity for every 0.1 units of Xenon gas.... if you make electric charge weigh 1/18th (0.1/1.8) as much as a unit of xenon gas, then your ion engine will have the same electrcity consumption, and the electric charge mass for most parts should be negligible.

[Commander Jebidiah]

Ehh..... When I posted I didn't realise this thread was long dead and I don't think the OP even looks at this now.

And 129828 necro much this thread has been dead for more than a year, but at least you added something useful to the discussion.

[Mesons]

this is not completely true, it already has been done. Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters (MPD) uses the Lorentz force (a force resulting from the interaction between a magnetic field and an electric current) to generate thrust - The electric charge flowing through the plasma in the presence of a magnetic field causing the plasma to accelerate due to the generated magnetic force.

This is essentially what the ion engine does. The Lorentz force is just a term for the force on a charged particle from electric and magnetic fields. This includes accelerating xenon ions with an electric field.

If you read the OP's post, you would have seen that he tried it, and it didn't work.

And here's why:

An engine must consume a resource that has mass. Electric charge has no mass. By removing xenon gas, you have a situation where no mass is being consumed, and therefore no thrust is being generated by the engine. You literally cannot break the laws of physics here. KSP does not support reaction less drives in its code.

As a workaround you can jury-rig a module setup in the config where an engine creates its own propellant as a generator at the same rate that it uses it as an engine (think of it like merging a turbojet and an air intake into a single part). It's a clumsy hack, but it works... still, if you're in the market for a complete fantasy drive, just give it something like 500,000 Isp and call it a day. You won't see any noticable fuel use from that no matter how much thrust.

KSP does not rely on physics, it models the physics in various ways. There is no momentum conservation requiring mass to be ejected to create thrust; when an engine is active, the game checks if fuel is available, decrements the supply by some amount per engine, then specifies what magnitude and direction of force to apply for each engine. To be physical, all of the required fuels do have non-zero densities. Setting the density of XenonGas to 0 and increasing the capacity of the xenon tanks should work fine. The density values are set in: KSP_Main_Folder/GameData/Squad/Resources/ResourcesGeneric.cfg

What the OP really needed was the debug menu, and to that the OP was directed.