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


Fractal_UK

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High warp factors can't charge once the capacity of the warp drive is maxed out. At 20 times speed of light the charge is only at 30% and not growing because the part can not hold enough resources. I am guessing that this is a side effect of making the warp drive scale based on the mass of the ship. This ship isn't that big, most of the mass if from your own parts like the reactor and gas turbine.

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I noticed that the Thermal Rocket Nozzle breaks my quantum struts. Upon further investigation, the quantum struts are working, the problem is that the instant I throttle up the Thermal Rocket Nozzle, my Electric charge goes from full (9755) to "NaN/9755 (NaN)".

Any idea what might cause this? All of my batteries show full charge, my antimatter tank is empty, and megajoules are also empty.

UPDATE:

I shutdown the TRN and my charge went back to normal and everything works again. It seems that if the TRN is active but doesn't have the required resources, it screws up the ElectricCharge resource.

Edited by Blaylock1988
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I noticed that the Thermal Rocket Nozzle breaks my quantum struts. Upon further investigation, the quantum struts are working, the problem is that the instant I throttle up the Thermal Rocket Nozzle, my Electric charge goes from full (9755) to "NaN/9755 (NaN)".

Did this happen when simply activated the Thermal Rocket Nozzle or did you have to throttle it up as well to produce this effect?

The Thermal Rocket Nozzle code shouldn't affect Electric Charge directly, it might be a side effect of the electric charge producing property that most of the engines in the game include.

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This only happened the instant I hit shift to throttle it up the first time. Bringing the throttle back down to 0 didn't fix it, only deactivating the engine did.

Also, this was on your first release, I just now noticed that 0.2 is out, I'll see if that makes a difference.

UPDATE:

Tested it in 0.2, problem persists.

Edited by Blaylock1988
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This only happened the instant I hit shift to throttle it up the first time. Bringing the throttle back down to 0 didn't fix it, only deactivating the engine did.

Also, this was on your first release, I just now noticed that 0.2 is out, I'll see if that makes a difference.

UPDATE:

Tested it in 0.2, problem persists.

Yeah, that will because the thrust of the engine is re-calculated on the fly in order to ensure that it is being supplied with enough Thermal Power but only when the throttle is > 0. This should be easy to fix anyway, thanks for the report.

Could you make the TWR and ISP of the nuclear reactors a little bit more interesting? I thought about to build a probe with the smallest parts, although relativly efficient (okay no, still 1/2 less efficient than the stock nuclear engine) it delivers nearly zero thrust. The biggest one works, but... It's simply too large for a probe.

(I think it's intended, although it would be awesome).

But as a source of power, the nuclear reactors work fine.

And could you explain how to read your Magnetospheric Probe? I have no idea. :/

Greetings,

Khoal

I've been running a lot of numbers with respect to the nuclear reactors that I've included and came to the inescapable conclusion that the nuclear engines included in the stock game are really rather powerful.

The problem with upping the thrust/Isp is that it also involves upping the power output of the reactors (Power = Thrust * Isp * 9.81/2) and that has a host of other implications in this mod, including lowering warp drive charge times and excessive power to weight ratios for nuclear reactors. Also, since my nuclear reactors are useable from the start, I don't want them to prove to be overly powerful.

One thing I'm considering for future updates is an anti-matter catalysed fusion reactor, this would offer power output higher than the nuclear reactors (but still much lower than the antimatter reactors) at the expense of requiring small ongoing antimatter use. I need to convince myself I'm creating components with sufficient levels of variability before I create such parts though, I don't want to end up producing lots of parts, most of which never get used.

With the smallest nuclear reactor you can easily power a stock ion engine (actually you could power a few of them), which might be a good way of getting about very efficiently but obviously this doesn't solve the low thrust problem.

As for the magnetic probe: |B| is the absolute magnitude of the planet's magnetic flux density at a given point. B_r is the radial component of the magnetic flux density and B_T is the azimuthal component of magnetic flux density. All of these values are given in Tesla. Then the particle flux is just the rate at which the antimatter collector will produce antimatter at that location.

Edited by Fractal_UK
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Wonderful work! I'm playing with it now.

Anyone else LOL at the pic where that tiny little rover was receiving almost 46 Megawatts of power? Did it turn into a puddle of expensive molten metals right after after the pic was taken? ;)

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Does the Microwave system only draw power from the Solar arrays?? I'm building some Power Sats and noticed some power draw that would eventually drain the batteries, will adding a RTG cancel that out?? The power draw was about 0.06.....

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I'm just going to leave these here

warp drive

vRpYJWj.png

anti-matter collector

yG7GL4F.png

feel free to use: Download

EDIT: also it probably would be a good idea to re-think the nerfing on the parts. The joints in KSP were not meant to hold up 18 ton parts.

Edited by SpaceK531
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Does the Microwave system only draw power from the Solar arrays?? I'm building some Power Sats and noticed some power draw that would eventually drain the batteries, will adding a RTG cancel that out?? The power draw was about 0.06.....

Yes, it draws power exactly equal to the amount of power produced by all solar arrays on the ship with the transmitter. You can add RTG power to your satellites to cancel out the small amount of power drain from having a probe core, that should work fine. At some point I'll also add the capability to transmit power from nuclear reactors included in the mod but the logic to perform this is different and ships that have both power from solar and nuclear reactors would be particularly complicated to implement (have to split the power into two sections, one dependent on line of sight to the sun, the other not). This all stems from the physics engine in the game not loading objects that are more than 2.3km distant.

EDIT: also it probably would be a good idea to re-think the nerfing on the parts. The joints in KSP were not meant to hold up 18 ton parts.

18 tons isn't too bad, the big rockomax fuel tank is 36 tons, there is also an 18 ton rockomax tank so it isn't unprecendented. Some of the parts packs that include 3.75m have really massive parts and they don't seem to perform too badly. I think with any of the larger parts, vertical strutting is key. The larger nuclear reactors do have some advantages over stock parts too - you can use a brayton turbine to generate power from them as well as thrust which means you can power an atmospheric scoop to help refuel. You also get vacuum Isp ~ 920s instead of 800s and sea level Isp of ~330s instead of 220s (not that sea level Isp matters much with such low thrust).

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Thermal Engine ? I've been working on building a scifi looking engine, unfortunately my modelling and texture skills are less than professional grade.

2013-08-07_00004_zps37627620.jpg

2013-08-07_00003_zpsb24bc2f8.jpg

2013-08-07_00002_zps9765c8a1.jpg

EDIT: You can download the Large thermal Rocket here that uses this model

Edited by gl0ryh0und
Adding Download for thermal Rocket
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Thermal Engine ? I've been working on building a scifi looking engine, unfortunately my modelling and texture skills are less than professional grade.

-snip-

-snip-

-snip-

Looks better than anything I could ever do

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Looks better than anything I could ever do

Perhaps it is the nature of a creator to be most critical of his/her own work, I really like your model, especially how you got the words on there without it being all distorted. whenever I try that it looks like a 2year old did it with crayons. You seem to have a better grasp on the UV mapping, my model has over a dozen objects and half a dozen textures, just so I could keep the UV Maps simple. I really needed to bring down the texture quality.. and the first time I did collider meshes.. lol well let's just say 1 part and like 2 frames a second.

cheers

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Development Update:

So, I've been working on trying to make the thermal rockets in the game a little bit more versatile, especially to give the thermal rockets powered by nuclear reactors a little bit extra. It irritated me that my thermal rocket nozzle required a mixture of liquid fuel and oxidiser, there is simply no need for that. I don't need a chemical rocket fuel, I just need propellant to throw out the back.

In fact, throwing oxidiser into your nuclear reactor would be crazy and liable to result in nasty consequences but if you inject oxidiser into H2 exhaust from a nuclear thermal rocket, you can increase the thrust at the expense of specific impulse. So using Oxidiser alone is right out but anything else goes!

I have managed to implement this:

LiquidFuel + Oxidiser = High Thrust, Low Isp (Vacuum Isp = 687.75s)

5KMOl1e.jpg

Liquid Fuel = Low Thrust, High Isp (Vacuum Isp = 917s)

Ue3a6nD.jpg

Kethane = Moderate Thrust, Low Isp (Vacuum Isp = 687.75s) - Not great but it saves refining the stuff!

bNo43aF.jpg

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Kethane fuelled rocket? Throw a scanner and couple of drills on your lander and POOF - you have a lightweight, self-refuelling ship that can do Grand Tour alone :) Nice. I have to try this.

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I cannot figure out how to generate anti-matter. I get into space, have antimatter tank, nothing.

You are getting antimatter, you're just getting it incredibly slowly. At that level of flux, it will take you about 10 days to collect even 1 antimatter. I'm guessing your collector is just in LKO, which is definitely not the best place to collect antimatter. At the best locations you can collect around 5000x more animatter than you're getting there. Searching around large celestial bodies is the way to go as they have the powerful magetic fields needed to traps lots of antiparticles.

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Hmmn...

since we are gathering and storing Antimatter, which is quite possibly the most insanely reactive substance yet known to man (and kerbal), how about taking into account AM's volatility?

for example, in space, since you are (hopefully) not experiencing large G-forces, you could use a large AM storage tank that wouldn't need a large battery backup to keep the AM containment fields at capacity. However, for more extreme operating conditions, such as what a SSTO and a probe would experience, you'd have to use a much smaller capacity tank that would be insanely durable AND have its own backup power supply, sufficient to either figure out a way to dispose of it someplace away from anything important, or to get out of the blast radius...

in other words, you'd need to plan out your missions quite finely; having a ship explode due to containment breaches would suck rather badly after all....

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So i just downloaded this mod and i instantly tried to make a warp-capable ship without setting up any power infrastructure like solar satellites and antimatter farms first (i gather that this is a necessary first step) and the ship would probably have worked... if i had waited a few years for the 2.5m nuclear generator to charge the warp drive(even though the speed was set to 0.1c). realising that that would be a Bad Idea i added a few xl solar power generators to the ship, but they didn't contribute anything to my megajoules. Could you make solar cells contribute MJ to the ship rather than having to transmit them from satellites?

Anyway, despite the fact that i didn't actually do anything with the mod, i was really impressed! (btw don't worry about making new models too much, the stock models look fine to me)

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"No random damage in KSP" - remember that? We won't have meteorites, parts breaking down just because etc. Which means antimatter is perfectly safe to store :wink: Anyways, i thought of another part that could be useful. A huge, heavy and power hungry cyclotron of sorts. When you attach it to a base or space station it will (slowly) produce antimatter, even when there is no particle flux around. It would not be most efficient way to refuel, but it would let player to make fuel wherever he wants - for example adding usefullness to already existing space stations in LKO. Most players already stick a lot of solar panels and batteries on their stations - they would have enough power reserves to create slow trickle of AM (i know my station can :)

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"No random damage in KSP" - remember that? We won't have meteorites, parts breaking down just because etc. Which means antimatter is perfectly safe to store :wink: Anyways, i thought of another part that could be useful. A huge, heavy and power hungry cyclotron of sorts. When you attach it to a base or space station it will (slowly) produce antimatter, even when there is no particle flux around. It would not be most efficient way to refuel, but it would let player to make fuel wherever he wants - for example adding usefullness to already existing space stations in LKO. Most players already stick a lot of solar panels and batteries on their stations - they would have enough power reserves to create slow trickle of AM (i know my station can :)

I second this idea.. a massive collider station part.

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Kethane = Moderate Thrust, Low Isp (Vacuum Isp = 687.75s) - Not great but it saves refining the stuff!

bNo43aF.jpg

Since you actually have to find the kethane and drill it out, don't you think it would work better as a "middle ground" with moderate thrust and moderate Isp?

EDIT: Maybe make the exhaust jet green when burning kethane?

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"No random damage in KSP" - remember that? We won't have meteorites, parts breaking down just because etc.

Well, power failure isn't necessarily random. The way Lazurkri thought about gravity affecting materials inside the tanks does seem uncontrollable; I'd imagine that the kerbals' antimatter containment is advanced enough that they are able to store it safely (albeit with power usage, to keep particles from hitting the sides via magnetism) in their tanks already. If one does run out of power, the tank could explode with regards to the amount of antimatter inside. This is able to be prevented, just like one is able to prevent a spacecraft from crashing into Kerbin by adding parachutes. The explosions, however, would give antimatter a nice element of danger that is really lacking at the moment.

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Since you actually have to find the kethane and drill it out, don't you think it would work better as a "middle ground" with moderate thrust and moderate Isp?

EDIT: Maybe make the exhaust jet green when burning kethane?

I could tweak the numbers slightly to make Kethane slightly different but I'm stuck for making it an inbetween value. If you look at the thrust power (0.5*Isp*9.81*Thrust) of each of these, we have the liquid rocket = 0.5*917*9.81*334000 = 1,502,293,590 ~ 1.5GW (the power rating of the reactor). Again for Kethane, 0.5*687.75*9.81*445400 = 1,502,518,484, again this equals 1.5GW.

The Liquid Fuel + Oxidiser rocket gives you 0.5*687.75*9.81*688100 = 2,253,777,726.375 or 2.25GW, this is higher than the power output of the reactor because some extra energy is coming from a chemical reaction.

I could potentially add a Kethane+Oxidiser mode that has better thrust performance, this might have vacuum Isp = 515 with Thrust of 890.8KN (this would again be 2.25GW of thrust power) and would be the highest thrust, lowest Isp mode.

A huge, heavy and power hungry cyclotron of sorts. When you attach it to a base or space station it will (slowly) produce antimatter, even when there is no particle flux around. It would not be most efficient way to refuel, but it would let player to make fuel wherever he wants - for example adding usefullness to already existing space stations in LKO. Most players already stick a lot of solar panels and batteries on their stations - they would have enough power reserves to create slow trickle of AM (i know my station can :)

I'm looking into options for this. I really don't want to add a particle collider part, it would irk me that a device that ought to have a 15km+ radius had been scaled down to something capable of being launched on a rocket. Instead, I'm looking into the possibility of a massive ultra-high power orbital laser facility, this would use incredibly brief pulses of incredibly high power laser light to seperate virtual particles (which are always produced in particle/anti-particle pairs).

I got the idea from the European Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project, which despite being not very well known, seems like an interesting project.

It would still be far too large to fit on a rocket but the orders of magnitude are much more favourable compared to a collider.

Either way, it really makes no difference from a gameplay perspective, it's just about how I justify the physics to myself and the players.

Well, power failure isn't necessarily random. The way Lazurkri thought about gravity affecting materials inside the tanks does seem uncontrollable; I'd imagine that the kerbals' antimatter containment is advanced enough that they are able to store it safely (albeit with power usage, to keep particles from hitting the sides via magnetism) in their tanks already. If one does run out of power, the tank could explode with regards to the amount of antimatter inside. This is able to be prevented, just like one is able to prevent a spacecraft from crashing into Kerbin by adding parachutes. The explosions, however, would give antimatter a nice element of danger that is really lacking at the moment.

It is something that I have considered and will continue to consider but I'm cautious about implementing this, I'd have to be extremely careful with any implementation to make sure that people had ample time to take precautions against antimatter containment failures otherwise I'm just blowing up people's rockets and I don't think anyone enjoys that happening. I'm certain that any realistic system of antimatter containment would have backup containment systems and backups of those backups as well as emergency ejection systems, etc.

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It would be realistic, yes. But equipment from this mod is already power-hungry. I don't fancy continuously burning hard-gained antimatter so i can hold said antimatter in the tank. Another way of preventing unwanted annihiliation would be to stack power sources, so they can sustain magnetic containment without tapping into antimatter supply - but it would also add mass and parts to already huge ships.

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I tend to play ksp like a 4X game, so here is my take on antimatter production:

imjRAdH.jpg

it produces about 500 units a day. i would love to build a bigger one, but even my 4770K+770gtx can't keep the framerate up as soon as my 250part ssto comes to collect the antimatter. :/ therefore i would love to see a "factory" option!

Edited by Ratata
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