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

[undercoveryankee]

Hi Fractal

To date, I have been unable to combine a thermal turbo jet with a precooler to get anywhere near 2000m/s

While I have heard this is possible, I am yet to achieve it, is there something i am missing, or something im doing wrong, standard set up is (in order from front to back) Sabre M intake, sabre precooler, microwave receiver/reactor, thermal turbojet. This far, as soon as i get over 1100m/s the overheating starts and usually by about 1400m/s the engines have shut down.

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Regards

The Gecko

Screenshot of the craft showing the precooler's right-click menu?

[FluffySilverUnicorn]

@Fractal_UK, do we have an ETA on Karbonite support? I'd like to be able to use it with thermal rockets and such.

[undercoveryankee]

@Fractal_UK, do we have an ETA on Karbonite support? I'd like to be able to use it with thermal rockets and such.

If Fractal doesn't have an official Karbonite fuel mode by the weekend, I'll add one to my Interstellar/CRP integration pack.

[Fractal_UK]

Experienced some strange problems with AIM reactor.

Producing no power, zero thermal power in description in VAB, and attached generator also show zero maximum power.

p.s. also if i attach thermal nozzle to it, it shows exactly the same behaviour as described above - zero FF and thrust.

I think you can fix this yourself while you wait for the update by adding "consumeGlobal = true" to the part.cfg

MODULE
{
	name = InterstellarCatalysedFissionFusion
        .....
        consumeGlobal = true
}

[RoverDude]

If Fractal doesn't have an official Karbonite fuel mode by the weekend, I'll add one to my Interstellar/CRP integration pack.

This, by the way, is why community is awesome Thanks for this as it saves me a lot of work. On my side I've taken great care not to step on KSPI, so that should help your efforts.

[Fractal_UK]

Version 0.12.2 Released

Version 0.12.2
-Fixed Electric Engine nan bug
-Fixed Antimatter Initialised Reactor
-Fixed smallest fusion reactor
-Removed precooler integrated intake
-All atmospheric engines now shutdown correctly when non-precooled (they no longer explode)
-Added resource deprived message to reactors
-Update to ORS v1.4.2

Download links on the first page have been updated.

[-Velocity-]

Maybe it's been answered in this thread somewhere, but have you thought about making a more realistic version of this mod- a version without things like warp drives and quantum thrusters which appear to violate known physics? Even with a most generous appraisal of the odds, such technologies appear to be very unlikely to ever reach fruition.

KSP scales stuff by like an order of magnitude; so we might expect the closest stars would be only 0.4 light-years away, meaning even if you traveled at 10% the speed of light, at 100000X time compression you could reach the closest star in only 20 minutes (obviously though, acceleration at 4X time compression will end up taking up most of your gameplay time... so some work-around such as a hack to allow acceleration at 1000X TC may be required). Of course, with no stars to travel to yet, this problem does not even really exist yet. But my point is that assuming we do get distant stars we can travel to in future versions of KSP, conventional time compression combined with the reduced scale of the KSP universe means that we do not need exotic technologies to accomplish interstellar travel within practical gameplay time limits, as long as we have some way of accelerating at time compression levels at least a few orders of magnitude higher than 4X.

There are multiple types of high impulse, high thrust propulsion methods that may allow interstellar travel that we already know of, using known and practical physics. I'd be highly interested in a mod that focused on these-

Nuclear thermal (various types)

Fission pulse

Fusion pulse

Antimatter catalyzed fusion or fission pulse

From what I've read, it is unrealistic to harvest enough antimatter from the magnetospheres of planets to power a pure antimatter rocket; however there may be enough for an antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse rocket. I donno.

Anyway, I was just curious if you had put any thoughts into a version of the mod that gets rid of the highly speculative and unlikely forms of propulsion for us realism purists. Basically, it would just be a version that takes out the warp and quantum drives (and maybe the antimatter drive, replacing the antimatter drive with one that is antimatter catalyzed) and modifies the tech tree accordingly. It wouldn't be a major modification (would it?), but I can understand how you might feel that maintaining two separate versions and trying to balance gameplay on both may not be worth your limited time you have to work on this.

[Fractal_UK]

Maybe it's been answered in this thread somewhere, but have you thought about making a more realistic version of this mod- a version without things like warp drives and quantum thrusters which appear to violate known physics? Even with a most generous appraisal of the odds, such technologies appear to be very unlikely to ever reach fruition.

KSP scales stuff by like an order of magnitude; so we might expect the closest stars would be only 0.4 light-years away, meaning even if you traveled at 10% the speed of light, at 100000X time compression you could reach the closest star in only 20 minutes (obviously though, acceleration at 4X time compression will end up taking up most of your gameplay time... so some work-around such as a hack to allow acceleration at 1000X TC may be required). Of course, with no stars to travel to yet, this problem does not even really exist yet. But my point is that assuming we do get distant stars we can travel to in future versions of KSP, conventional time compression combined with the reduced scale of the KSP universe means that we do not need exotic technologies to accomplish interstellar travel within practical gameplay time limits, as long as we have some way of accelerating at time compression levels at least a few orders of magnitude higher than 4X.

There are multiple types of high impulse, high thrust propulsion methods that may allow interstellar travel that we already know of, using known and practical physics. I'd be highly interested in a mod that focused on these-

Nuclear thermal (various types)

Fission pulse

Fusion pulse

Antimatter catalyzed fusion or fission pulse

Interstellar already has these things, except for a Project Orion analogue because there was already a mod for that - I don't know if it's still in development or anything though.

You already have nuclear thermal rockets which are pretty faithfully recreated according to their real life statistics, you have the DT vista which is a (high repitition rate) pulsed fusion engine, you have an antimatter catalysed fission-fusion reactor which can power thermal rockets or electric engines. These things, I would say, are already the core of Interstellar from my perspective and you definitely could use some of these propulsion systems for interstellar travel in KSP, it's really just a matter of patience when accelerating - especially with the DT Vista which has a constant power consumption so as thrust goes down, Isp goes up.

The main thing I'd really like to do in this area now is draw a real distinction between thermal rockets and magnetic nozzles but I'm waiting for a good model before I do that.

From what I've read, it is unrealistic to harvest enough antimatter from the magnetospheres of planets to power a pure antimatter rocket; however there may be enough for an antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse rocket. I donno.

It's pretty unrealistic to harvest enough for an antimatter thermal reactor, the only hope for that kind of thing in reality would be to produce the antimatter ourselves using fission/fusion power or fantastic amounts of solar arrays deployed closer to the sun. Enough antimatter for an interplanetary antimatter-pion based propulsion system is sort of feasible, assuming that you're okay with collecting the anti-protons from Saturn's magnetic field. Such drives aren't very interesting in KSP though due to the incredibly high Isp and consequently incredibly low thrust so I decided a touch of compromise with the amounts contained in the magnetic fields was in order.

Anyway, I was just curious if you had put any thoughts into a version of the mod that gets rid of the highly speculative and unlikely forms of propulsion for us realism purists. Basically, it would just be a version that takes out the warp and quantum drives (and maybe the antimatter drive, replacing the antimatter drive with one that is antimatter catalyzed) and modifies the tech tree accordingly. It wouldn't be a major modification (would it?), but I can understand how you might feel that maintaining two separate versions and trying to balance gameplay on both may not be worth your limited time you have to work on this.

I don't really see the point because it would literally just be Interstellar with a couple of parts taken out, I have nostalgic reasons for not wanting to as well because the alcubierre drive was essentially where Interstellar began and the premise grew backwards toward more realistic interstellar technologies.

The vacuum plasma drive is probably the most unreasonable thing in Interstellar and it's just a propulsion option, if you really want just delete that fuel option from the ElectricPropellants.cfg file and then you'll only have the standard fuel options for the electric engines. At which point, it's really just the alcubierre drive and the easiest thing to do then is probably just to not use it, if you really don't want to.

I don't know if you've used it much but it's actually pretty interesting to play with because of the way it translates you across space without actually changing your velocity. The drive is valid conceptually in that it's a valid solution of Einstein's field equations but whether it's actually realisable in practise is a different question.

[MaLuS]

It's fixed in my development version, will hopefully release that later today.

The thrust is working now thanks, new bugs for you though:

The Particle FX seems a little bugged, they seems to be emitting particle FX from the whole parts not just the nozzle the 2.5m plasma has very little FX and the 62.5cm plasma has an always on flame

Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/tFQHA

[Lightwarrior]

Thanks for quick fix.

Also i have another bug. When i try to use unupgraded generators with upgraded pebble bed reactors or fusion reactors they sometimes either switch to direct conversion mode or just give 85% efficiency while tooltip still shows brayton cycle gas turbine.

[CaptainKipard]

Where can I find documentation for modders who'd like to use KSPI part modules?

[Northstar1989]

@FractalUK

I thought you might find this article interesting. It's on ISRU on Earth's Moon (Luna), which *apparently* contains significant quantities of Nitrogen (this isn't the only article mentioning it either- a search for "Moon Nitrogen" on Google turns up dozens of articles on Nitrogen in the lunar regolith...)

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2009/09-083.html

Considering Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Carbon (the last of which is also found in low concentrations in the regolith- in the form of graphite) are all that is needed to produce a variety of hypergolic propellants such as Hydrazine, Aerozine, UMDH, and N2O4- all of which are represented in the RealFuels mod- I was wondering if you might not consider releasing an alternate config for Interstellar that is designed to work with RealFuels and allow production of all these propellants (which are all currently in the RealFuels mod).

Changing "LiquidFuel" to "LH2" and "Oxidizer" to "LiquidOxygen" is a trivial change to the Interstellar configs to allow production of LH2/LOX on the Mun. However production of denser and more storable propellants (LH2 tends to rapidly boil off) such as Kerosene (can be made from Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen via the Fischer-Tropsch Cycle), Hydrazine, UMDH, and Aerozine (which is really just a 50/50 mixture of UMDH and Hydrazine) would require significant expansion on the current set of ISRU reactions.

My thoughts for Interstellar always come back to ISRU system. There are many, many interesting possibilities for ISRU around the solar system, and the more I read up about them the more I think KSP-Interstellar would be wise to expand the options and even consider adding RealFuels support directly...

I'll give on quick additional example of an ISRU possibility that hasn't been looked at in Interstellar yet- CO/O2 engines (and the ability to produce Carbon Monoxide for them via direct electrolysis of CO2). Basically, you burn Carbon Monoxide and Oxygen together which were originally electrolyzed from atmospheric Carbon Dioxide for a quick-and-easy propellant on Mars/Duna that doesn't require a source of Hydrogen... It can also be coupled with the Reverse Water Gas Shift Reaction (CO2 + H2 --> CO + H2O) and the Fischer-Tropsch reaction (CO + H2 --> Kerosene + O2) for a more efficient overall utilization of Mars/Duna resources than anything dependent on the Sabatier Reaction... (CO2 + 4 H2 --> CH4 + 2 H2O)

Regards,

Northstar

P.S. Last, but not least, I'd still love to see a smaller version of the Aluminum/Oxidizer Hybrid Rocket. Preferably one in the 1.25 meter range. Or, some sort of integration with TweakScale or ProceduralParts. Anything would be nice, really- the current 2.5 meter version is just big, unwieldy, and ugly...

Edited September 26, 2014 by Northstar1989

[LuciferWolfgang]

I upgraded from the old interstellar to the new version today. It is the only change I made so I'm fairly certain that it has something to do with interstellar, but before I assume is anyone getting this error:

http://i.imgur.com/2KxRFde.png

Basically right clicking on a Kerbal, fills up the drop box with soooooo many rad status I cant select anything else. It is making EVA's and surface samples impossible.

[LuciferWolfgang]

NEVER MIND. IM AN IDIOT. I fixed the issue above.

If anyone else comes across this issue.... You forgot to delete the warp plugin before installing as described in the instructions.

[oktav]

@fractal

Hello Fractal, I tried to produce tritium and He-3 in background but it doesn't seem to work. I put a simple satellite in orbit with a nuclear recator, the various elements + containers and a generator.

Everything works fine if I am running the vessel, but now it's not just He-3 not being generated in background, it's also tritium breeding.

edit:

no, tritium appears working now, I had forgot to remove a port of another mod and was interfering. but now on a clean build He-3 doesn't decay as it should. It actually evaporates. I left the ship with 0.08 of He-3, after 100 days it was 0.07 while the tritium increased.

Edited September 26, 2014 by oktav

[ESteve]

Is there a way to get the Microwave Beamed Power Receivers to start closed when switching to a ship?

I have a cool ship tucked away in a cargo bay, but when I switch to the ship the receiver starts open and grabs things while it is closing.

Other deployable items such as the radiators start closed as I would expect.

[Haifi]

Hi Fractal

I mentioned this already while you were pausing, but what about solar thermal satellites instead of photovoltaic solutions. They would offer a better efficiency (50+% instead of about 10%) in Kerbin orbit. And some parts that are already in KSPI could be used to realize them. Basically a huge mirror, a heat exchanger and a turbine/generator placed in Kerbin orbit would make a fine support for the microwave network. I think reactors in space should be on the side of "rarer" seen stuff. For huge ships for example on long range missions...

Best Regards

[Barklight]

I just did a fresh install of KSP and a handful of mods for my laptop. I'm trying to get Interstellar working... But hit a snag.

When I fire up a new game and am prompted by Treeloader to select a tree, the Interstellar tree simply isn't there. I can hit --Refresh List-- or --Select--. I've already tried reinstalling Interstellar, but I don't know what's going on to make the tree missing. I already tried searching the thread for input on this, and my results were basically for missing items in tech nodes or editing configs... What would cause the tree to not show up in the first place?

For now I'm just copying the tree.cfg from the WarpPlugin folder and replacing the one in my save folder, but it's still odd that you'd have to do this on a fresh install.

Edited September 27, 2014 by Barklight

[Fractal_UK]

I just did a fresh install of KSP and a handful of mods for my laptop. I'm trying to get Interstellar working... But hit a snag.

When I fire up a new game and am prompted by Treeloader to select a tree, the Interstellar tree simply isn't there. I can hit --Refresh List-- or --Select--. I've already tried reinstalling Interstellar, but I don't know what's going on to make the tree missing. I already tried searching the thread for input on this, and my results were basically for missing items in tech nodes or editing configs... What would cause the tree to not show up in the first place?

For now I'm just copying the tree.cfg from the WarpPlugin folder and replacing the one in my save folder, but it's still odd that you'd have to do this on a fresh install.

TreeLoader is not exactly functioning brilliantly at the moment, I'm looking into ATC and whether new techs can be added with it so that I could replace TreeLoader in the future.

I mentioned this already while you were pausing, but what about solar thermal satellites instead of photovoltaic solutions. They would offer a better efficiency (50+% instead of about 10%) in Kerbin orbit. And some parts that are already in KSPI could be used to realize them. Basically a huge mirror, a heat exchanger and a turbine/generator placed in Kerbin orbit would make a fine support for the microwave network. I think reactors in space should be on the side of "rarer" seen stuff. For huge ships for example on long range missions...

Best Regards

I'd be happy to make something like that at some point, though getting my hands on suitable 3D models for that could be tricky!

[Fractal_UK]

Some have asked about the ISRU system and the refineries and what's going to be done in the future with the system. As is pretty much generally the case at the moment, any new system is pretty much going to be done from scratch so I can architecture the system a bit better. One of the things that bothers me most about the current system is that the refinery part context information is way too busy and the status information that you get in the part isn't really sufficient to give you very much information about what's going on behind the scenes - you only get to see one rate even though multiple resources might be being consumed and produced at the same time.

I'm going to move this stuff to another window so that you can see a lot more pertinent information and a lot less clutter. I'll also be implementing in such a way that it's trivial to add loads more functions to the refinery if I want to do that in the future. Here are some images outlining how this new system will work.

[DivisionByZero]

Thank you for coming back, Fractal.

That's all I wanted to say right now.

[lordkrike]

Fractal:

There is something pretty wrong with the emissives for the Small Radial Radiator and the Radial Radiator.

I was wondering why my recently purchased laptop was chugging along when I checked the output_log.txt to find hundreds of thousands of this line:

rd _Emissive:

(Filename: C:/BuildAgent/work/d63dfc6385190b60/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 49)

The file gets huge, because for every frame it has a small radial radiator or radial radiator in the flight scene it throws this... well, not even sure it's really an error. But it's specifically those two radiators (I imagine they share the same emissive settings). All the other radiators work just fine. When I load up a craft with one of those in flight it just does this and slows my laptop down by quite a bit.

My output_log.txt was up to 50MB. 50 MB of that line over and over again. :-)

Edited September 27, 2014 by lordkrike

[Lightwarrior]

Is AIM reactor antimatter consumption wrong?

It shows ~46mg/day which is impossible with small antimatter bottle and lab production rate at this tech level.

Also direct conversion generator does not work correctly with this reactor, it shows zero maximum power production. It still produce power, but things like electric engines does not work correctly with zero maximum power.

Edited September 27, 2014 by Lightwarrior

[Northstar1989]

I'd be happy to make something like that at some point, though getting my hands on suitable 3D models for that could be tricky!

I suggested solar thermal satellites in the past too! How come that never noticed?!

Then again, he is reminding you- it looks like you missed his original suggestion of it as well...

Anyways, I also hate the current over-reliance on reactors in space, and would love to see solar thermal power satellites as well... And when players *DO* use nuclear reactors for Microwave Power, I would love to see heavy+cheap reactors specialized for power generation on the ground.

That, and some improved ISRU options/flexibility... More reactions and more resources would be nice- maybe to keep the context menus manageable, players could be made to have to select which reactions a reactor is capable of in the VAB through tweakables (with certain reactions coming "default", and some reactions adding mass to the reactor- to encourage launching reactors/refineries specialized for a particular role rather than a single general-purpose ISRU reactor/refinery you take everywhere...)

Regards,

Northstar

[Northstar1989]

Some have asked about the ISRU system and the refineries and what's going to be done in the future with the system. As is pretty much generally the case at the moment, any new system is pretty much going to be done from scratch so I can architecture the system a bit better. One of the things that bothers me most about the current system is that the refinery part context information is way too busy and the status information that you get in the part isn't really sufficient to give you very much information about what's going on behind the scenes - you only get to see one rate even though multiple resources might be being consumed and produced at the same time.

I'm going to move this stuff to another window so that you can see a lot more pertinent information and a lot less clutter. I'll also be implementing in such a way that it's trivial to add loads more functions to the refinery if I want to do that in the future. Here are some images outlining how this new system will work.

http://i.imgur.com/fMPyxeb.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/OZkKnsI.jpg

That's AWESOME, and *exactly* the kind of thing I was hoping for. I guess I should have read the last page before posting before...

That being said, you could probably reduce clutter further by making it tweakable what reactions a given ISRU Refinery is capable of once built. That, or the ability to show/hide reactions in the window based on whether you want to use them at that particular moment (the window could be configurable MechJeb2-style) would make it MUCH more manageable... I *highly* recommend looking at the code used in MechJeb2 for configurable windows if you want to get a basic framework for what I'm talking about that has already been designed...

As always, GREAT work FractalUK, and I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Regards,

Northstar

P.S. I'm not good at coding, but I might be willing to play around with a config file or two, and I'm GREAT at looking up/ digesting information- seeing as I'm trained as a scientist/researcher in real life. So I'd be glad to help research potential ISRU reactions- including what ones might be possible on certain planets/moons (for instance, I bet you didn't know there was low-concentration Nitrogen and Carbon in much of the lunar regolith...) and what would be realistic/believable concentrations/rates/energy requirements, etc.

Edited September 27, 2014 by Northstar1989