[0.25]KSP Interstellar (Magnetic Nozzles, ISRU Revamp) Version 0.13

[singlet]

Dear Fractal_UK,

There are two small problems in the ScienceDef.cfg.

id = gasChromotographyMassSpectrometryExperiment

title = Analyse Magnetosphere

The 'id' contains a typo (Chromotography), and the 'title' line should be corrected. (e.g. "Analyse Atmospheric Composition")

[Domfluff]

I may be being really dense, but I can't get the Radio telescope to produce "Deep Field" science.

I have the telescope, attached directly to a Helium tank (it reads "0.50 Science/Day" to begin with, and worse as the helium gets used, as you would expect), and this is attached to a reactor/generator/radiator combo, as well as a probe body and docking port.

It claims that it's providing science per day, but I haven't seen any evidence of this - I was expecting it to show up (as a line of text) on change of focus, like with the Science Lab, but this just doesn't seem to be happening. The science in the Science lab isn't being updated secretly either.

I launched two to confirm that there was a problem - the latter also had a communications dish, in case this was the problem, but to no avail.

Unless the "Deep Field" scan has to be run for a length of time? I switched back to this halfway through a Jool mission (so, a couple of years) and this still wasn't updating science.

Am I missing something here, or is this borked?

[artforz]

Snipped Delusional Banter.... I was drowsy the first try lol.....

Lets try it again below.

Well from what I can tell AM Collection and AM Reactors are acting pretty screwy.....

Item number one, a 10 Collector AM sat with a 2.5 AM Reactor. As you can see its putting out 1.4GW of Thermal Power, now look at the AM Collector, it is collecting 4.612306e-5 AM per second. Now lets do the math here....

(AM Collection amount x Seconds in a day x number of collectors) 4.612306e-5 * 86400 * 10 = 39.85mg/day

Ok now the reactor can use up to 3.324 mg/second and output 120GW of power or 36.1011GW/mg

Now lets do some more math here... (GW per mg * mg / seconds in a day) 36.1011 * 39.85 / 86400 = 0.01665GW/second Thermal Power

So the math says 16.65MW per second but the part says 1.4GW per second???????

Confirmed, AM reactors produce way too much power when supply limited.

The more oversized the reactor relative to the amount supplied by collectors, the more pronounced the effect.

see https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/pull/37 for a tentative fix

[wasmic]

I may be being really dense, but I can't get the Radio telescope to produce "Deep Field" science.

I have the telescope, attached directly to a Helium tank (it reads "0.50 Science/Day" to begin with, and worse as the helium gets used, as you would expect), and this is attached to a reactor/generator/radiator combo, as well as a probe body and docking port.

It claims that it's providing science per day, but I haven't seen any evidence of this - I was expecting it to show up (as a line of text) on change of focus, like with the Science Lab, but this just doesn't seem to be happening. The science in the Science lab isn't being updated secretly either.

I launched two to confirm that there was a problem - the latter also had a communications dish, in case this was the problem, but to no avail.

Unless the "Deep Field" scan has to be run for a length of time? I switched back to this halfway through a Jool mission (so, a couple of years) and this still wasn't updating science.

Am I missing something here, or is this borked?

There is a bug that causes it to only generate science while you're focusing on it. So send something towards Jool and place the IR telescope in focus while timewarping.

[Domfluff]

There is a bug that causes it to only generate science while you're focusing on it. So send something towards Jool and place the IR telescope in focus while timewarping.

Ah great, thanks. I'll give that a go later.

[WaveFunctionP]

There is a bug that causes it to only generate science while you're focusing on it. So send something towards Jool and place the IR telescope in focus while timewarping.

That should have been fixed with .11.

[EdisonMaxwell]

Actually, if you stay at 10x or lower timewarp while transmitting you'll never run out of electricity.

I have a question. What is the duterium/tritium cryostat for? We already have small containers for those.

[phoenix_ca]

I assume it's for carrying larger amounts of fusion fuels. Possibly in a more compressed state? I haven't looked much but that's possible. Squish it so it's liquid. Hold more of the stuff in the same area as a result.

[OctarineNoise]

What is the duterium/tritium cryostat for? We already have small containers for those.

The cryostat, as long as it's powered, has much lower boil-off.

[Sokar408]

I know I ask a lot of questions, but I just can't help myself! This mod is so amazing, and seem to leave so many things unanswered. For example, and I think I asked this before though I can't find it again; What is the range on the Gamma Ray Spectrometer? In the VAH, Thermal Nozzles and Turbojets and even Plasma Engines, has the exact same values lists, except for the maximum MW they can use, and their weight. However when used there seem to be a difference. How can this be? And if its just me over seeing something, then isn't there just a ton of parts that are obsolete?

[singlet]

Dear Fractal_UK,

it seems that the impact experiment has been quite a source of dispute, so I would like to make a suggestion for the design of the impact experiment. How about splitting the process of determining the scientific value of each set of impact data into two separate processes?

My idea is like this. A 'base value' is determined by the primary body and the distribution of seismic sensors. In case of the Mun, for example, this 'base value' is always 850 if the sensors are perfectly distributed, regardless of the number of impacts. The value is saved in the WarpPlugin.cfg. When the data is being transmitted, the 'base value' is scaled according to the total science and remaining science, and become the true scientific value. As this system does not depend on the number of impacts, it has several advantages over the current system I think.

1) There is no permanent loss of science. Suppose a first-time user of KSPI wants to make a test and puts 1 seismic sensor on Kerbin and performs an impact experiment. He/she just lost 62.5 science points permanently under the current system. (Yes, I did just that, and was quite embarrassed by the consequences.) In the system I described above, he/she can deploy more sensors and make more experiments and still can get the same amount of science because this system does not care about the number of impact experiments at all.

2) The science cap shown in the science archive can exactly show the actual limit of total science gained through the experiment. The current system shows some discrepancy between the shown cap and the actual limit, and I guess it is somewhat cumbersome to exactly match the two under the current system. The proposed system does not suffer such a problem because the science value is scaled according to the remaining science.

3) The problem reported by tmbomber(LINK) can be, at least partly, resolved because one can always run the experiment again. (I also experienced the symptom, and complete elimination of the problem is impossible for now I guess because that problem affects all kind of science experiments in KSP. I also use RT2, so it might be a problem that only happens to the users of RT2.) Actually it causes a lot of inconvenience for me too. Permanently losing 300-ish science points without any real cause is quite annoying.

Could you consider this idea, Fractal?

p.s. English is not my native language, so sorry for the inconvenience if there is any trouble understanding my writing.

[BlackBird1696]

The amount of power it takes varies, as you've seen. As undercoveryankee pointed out,

Given that each impact experiment can yield very large amounts of science, it also means it has a very large transmission size. This isn't particularly realistic, especially as it means the next impact under otherwise identical circumstances will only provide half the data, but it's how things are now. However, there is a bug in how transmissions work, where timewarping does not speed them up - it does, however, speed up how quickly you recover electric charge. My Eve seismic probes had a single RTG for power generation, and no batteries to speak of, but at either 100 or 50x time warp, I was making more ec than I was using. Yes, it's not ideal to rely on a bug, but even the smallest fission reactor on an unupgraded reactor provides far more than enough electricity to transmit the entire thing. I can understand not wanting to slap a reactor on a probe for the purpose of transmitting a few reports, but the reason no one can give you a definite answer for how much power a given impact result will take to transmit is because no one can predict offhand how much data a given impact will generate. Each planet has a different pool, and both the number and the placement of your recorders will determine together how scientifically useful the impacts are.

Fractal: Are there plans to set the seismic transmissions to a set size? It does seem rather odd that one experiment would contain half the data of an identical experiment simply because the one came before the other.

Once you've swapped fuels, you still need to restart the reactor. Quicksave, EVA another kerbal over to the reactor, and then hit restart. If you've tried hitting Swap Fuels a few times, it's possible you filled it back up with Uranium - If this is the case, quickload, swap fuels one more time, and then restart your reactor.

Due to limitations in the version of Unity that KSP is built on, you can only use approximately 3.7 Gb of RAM with KSP. A single bit more and the game crashes hard with an access violation error, and both Planet Factory and KSPI are big mods. Some mods come with optional texture reduction packs, and sometimes third parties release reduced texture packs for popular mods. Find and use those. If you already are, check out the Active Memory Reduction mod. I don't use it personally, but I've heard good things about it. It'll take a long time to load up the first time, but it'll cut your memory footprint down dramatically.

Edited for typos and clarity.

thanks for the help. I'll give it a try.

[DivisionByZero]

Based on earlier accounts, this looks like a problem interacting with RT 2 rather than KSPI.

Does this happen with RT 2 and a stock instrument?

Edited April 22, 2014 by DivisionByZero

[phoenix_ca]

I know I ask a lot of questions, but I just can't help myself! This mod is so amazing, and seem to leave so many things unanswered. For example, and I think I asked this before though I can't find it again; What is the range on the Gamma Ray Spectrometer? In the VAH, Thermal Nozzles and Turbojets and even Plasma Engines, has the exact same values lists, except for the maximum MW they can use, and their weight. However when used there seem to be a difference. How can this be? And if its just me over seeing something, then isn't there just a ton of parts that are obsolete?

No, but the tooltips for a lot of parts are out-of-date. Especially the ATTILA engines which don't actually give accurate information.

[singlet]

Based on earlier accounts, this looks like a problem interacting with RT 2 rather than KSPI.

Does this happen with RT 2 and a stock instrument?

Mod or stock, yes, any experiment with sufficiently large data size will more or less be vulnerable to this problem. So I guess it can be a problem of RT2. Still, the problem is only a slight inconvenience in case of other experiments, because all other experiments can be done again. It is not so in case of KSPI impactor experiment. When your 3rd impact is made, you can never run another 3rd impact. If you lose the 3rd impact data, you cannot recover. This is a KSPI problem.

EDIT: Actually the RT2 problem is so minor that I had not been aware of the problem at all before the KSPI impactor experiment came. However, with the impact experiment, I usually permanently lose 10~20% of total science amount from the Mun impact experiments so the problem became very noticeable.

Edited April 22, 2014 by singlet

[db48x]

Once you run out of power and the transmission is broken you lose all remaining science! So you have to have a 100 percent transmission to get all the science!!!! And the author thinks that he is just ified in not sharing the formula because the power to transmit the stock experiments is not published. But all you need to transmit any of the stock experiments is not more then 500ec. His modified experiment draw a ridiculous amount of power to transmit so you can't just simply slap on a couple batteries you really need to know the total number of packets that will be sent so you can determine the fixed power rate of power generation needed to transmit 100 percent of the data. I am not asking for anything unreasonable!

I've never had this happen. If you run out of charge, the antenna just waits until you get back to 10ec and sends the next packet. Once it's sent all of the packets you will have received all of the science points.

[Hremsfeld]

In the VAH, Thermal Nozzles and Turbojets and even Plasma Engines, has the exact same values lists, except for the maximum MW they can use, and their weight. However when used there seem to be a difference. How can this be? And if its just me over seeing something, then isn't there just a ton of parts that are obsolete?

I don't know about the GRS, so I pruned that out of the quote.

The thermal turbojet, when upgraded, is identical to an equal-sized thermal nozzle but with the added ability to use the atmosphere (provided you have scoops). I think the different sizes of thermal nozzles all perform identically, except they have different attachment node sizes, which impacts ship stability. The Plasma engines all perform equally up until a set amount of power is given to them; a single large plasma thruster has 133% the thrust of an equivalent mass of the next smaller thrusters when all involved are fully powered. The Attila thrusters have the wrong tooltip text, this is a known error. Having not used them, I can't say how good they are or aren't or what the difference between the sizes is, but I presume it's similar to the regular plasma engines.

[ArcFurnace]

Yeah, the only difference between different sizes of plasma thruster is the maximum electrical power they can accept (and thus the maximum thrust they can produce), and their mass. For the thermal rockets, I believe there's some special code that means they work best if attached to the appropriate size of reactor; if you try to attach, say, a 1.25m thermal rocket to the 3.75m reactor because it weighs less than the 3.75m nozzle, you won't get nearly as much thrust as you would if you used the heavier 3.75m nozzle (because the bigger one has more heat exchanger area to handle the higher throughput, or whatever). That was added in because Fractal wanted to make sure there was actually a reason to use the larger, heavier nozzles.

[Iforgotthis]

The power network is not necessary for any of the engines I believe. You can attach reactors directly to thermal rocket engines, and you can attach reactors with generators to run plasma engines. Power networks are not required, but the work put into setting one up definitely pays off. Reactors can get very heavy and having a power network up allows you to use their power without any of their weight.

Edit: Might I suggest watching the excellent Power Network tutorial video made by WaveFunctionP which can be found in this thread?

Hmm... I suppose it would give me something to do whilst waiting for window openings... I'll take a look at that video. Thanks!

[BigD145]

Mod or stock, yes, any experiment with sufficiently large data size will more or less be vulnerable to this problem. So I guess it can be a problem of RT2. Still, the problem is only a slight inconvenience in case of other experiments, because all other experiments can be done again. It is not so in case of KSPI impactor experiment. When your 3rd impact is made, you can never run another 3rd impact. If you lose the 3rd impact data, you cannot recover. This is a KSPI problem.

EDIT: Actually the RT2 problem is so minor that I had not been aware of the problem at all before the KSPI impactor experiment came. However, with the impact experiment, I usually permanently lose 10~20% of total science amount from the Mun impact experiments so the problem became very noticeable.

RT2 changes antenna's a great deal, from their electrical costs to their retract/extend state. It's VERY different from stock. It breaks normal stock behavior.

[bonesbro]

I don't know about the GRS, so I pruned that out of the quote.

The thermal turbojet, when upgraded, is identical to an equal-sized thermal nozzle but with the added ability to use the atmosphere (provided you have scoops). I think the different sizes of thermal nozzles all perform identically, except they have different attachment node sizes, which impacts ship stability. The Plasma engines all perform equally up until a set amount of power is given to them; a single large plasma thruster has 133% the thrust of an equivalent mass of the next smaller thrusters when all involved are fully powered. The Attila thrusters have the wrong tooltip text, this is a known error. Having not used them, I can't say how good they are or aren't or what the difference between the sizes is, but I presume it's similar to the regular plasma engines.

I added a little information to the wiki about the ATTILA the other day: https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/ATTILA-thruster

[undercoveryankee]

Based on earlier accounts, this looks like a problem interacting with RT 2 rather than KSPI.

Does this happen with RT 2 and a stock instrument?

With RT2 and a stock experiment, if the file is large or transmission is delayed due to power, I sometimes see the "Received data. Science added." message partway through the transmission. It appears that when that happens, the experiment's multiplier updates at that point and I get reduced science for the remaining packets.

If that happens to a transmission of impact data, there may be a sequence of events where Interstellar interprets the post-update packets as an attempt to retransmit the same impact and zeros out the science, as ctbram reported.

[phoenix_ca]

And thus was there much complaining that KSPI is broken, when in fact, it is RT2...which is labelled clearly as being broken in 23.5.

I mean really.

[BigD145]

And thus was there much complaining that KSPI is broken, when in fact, it is RT2...which is labelled clearly as being broken in 23.5.

I mean really.

RT2 is also broken in .23. Also .22.

When it comes down to sending science, Interstellar and RemoteTech do things differently. Don't be surprised when they don't work together.

[terrendos]

Is anyone else getting a problem where their Alcubierre Drives won't leave warp? It makes them functionally useless. I'm updated to 23.5, and it seems to exist whether I use old or new save files. Basically, the button to "Activate Warp" doesn't switch to "Deactivate Warp" when I hit the button.