undercoveryankee

Just so the details are here for anyone seeing this conversation, ModuleManager can target a part's module= line. An example from FAR: @PART[AdvancedCanard]:FOR[FerramAerospaceResearch] { @module = Part }

That's about right. Real-life ion and plasma engines tend to use xenon because the ships are powered by solar or RTGs and have power budgets in the kilowatts, so a low-Isp fuel with more thrust per kilowatt is a good choice to get burns down from weeks to days. For us, with power budgets in the gigawatts, it does make more sense to choose something heavier than hydrogen but lighter than xenon for your "low-gear" fuel. E.g. lithium. And yes, you're not the first to calculate a system's total impulse in newton-seconds. Impulse, measured in newton-seconds, is defined as the amount of momentum transferred to the system by a burn, impact, or other interaction. A Over a short enough interval that the mass of fuel used is insignificant compared to the mass of the rocket, the three ways to calculate it (Isp * reaction mass expended, thrust * burn time, or delta-v * ship mass) are equivalent. (Over longer burns, they diverge because they account differently for the cost of accelerating fuel that's expended later). As a matter of fact, the term "specific impulse" comes from the fact that you can calculate it as (total impulse / reaction mass expended).

As far as I can tell, the references to ChargedPower are just a mistake that hasn't been fixed yet. The intent has always been for them to refer to one resource, and given where and how often the names occurred it was easier to converge on ChargedParticles.

Most of the images' captions say "includes parts from Procedural Parts", and they look like Procedural Parts tanks to me. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70676-0-24-2WIP-Procedural-Parts-Parts-the-way-you-want-em

With the proliferation of "test part flying at Kerbin" contracts that require interesting combinations of speed and altitude, I decided that I wanted to guarantee that a DP-10 would never lose signal. So my first ring of communication satellites became eight Communotron 16s orbiting 175km above the equator. With that spacing, a DP-10 will connect from surface to at least 350 km anywhere along the equator. Maybe overkill, but it saves hassle and power requirements on everything else in LKO.

The cone exists only if the dish is targeted to a body (planet or moon). Targeting "active vessel" means only one vessel at a time. But if the dish is targeting a planet it will cover any vessel in the cone in that planet's SoI with range and line of sight.

Here's what's going on there: The precooler is coded to affect only intakes that are stack-attached to it. It doesn't check whether an intake module exists on the same part as the precooler. The precooler is active and affecting the stack-attached intake even when its own intakes are open, but any unprotected intakes that open on the ship will dominate the heating effect. So the practical effect is what you described, even if it may not have been planned that way: the intakes on the precooler act as a bypass for use at low airspeed. I would personally still have it start with the uncooled intake open, because starting on the runway at zero speed is exactly when you would want to have the extra intake open.

There's always something to do (at least with my generous collection of mods). Resupply bases, rotate crews, ship fuel to fuel depot, chase debris, adjust spacing of communication satellites . . . and now, do Kerbin/Mun/Minmus contracts.

SF writers like to talk about putting large colonies at Lagrange points or parking asteroids to mine there. Basically, since the real world has enough gravity sources to require station keeping, they're the places where station keeping is cheaper.

The last time I checked, the only difference between Wave's ORS and MKS's ORS is the dll. If you've already installed MKS ORS, you just replace the DLL with the one from Wave's distribution of Interstellar. That's the fix. If you haven't installed MKS ORS yet, quickest is just to install ORS from Wave's distribution of Interstellar and then skip the ORS folder in MKS.

Ore, Substrate, and Minerals scannable through the Kethane scanner are from the older versions of Modular Kolonization System that used Kethane.

Should work. If it doesn't, play with the top radius and height a little until FAR realizes that it's connected to the capsule. I've been able to right-click a fairing in the VAB and see "partsShielded: ##", so I have some idea whether I've got it right (although you probably have to turn it on in the FAR debug menu.)

If all you need is the animation and not science-over-time, then any of the generic animation modules will work. A lot of parts packs use the Firespitter plugin just for animations. BahamutoD has an animation plugin that might be lighter-weight than Firespitter.

You would basically have to take the model and write a config for it that removes the dependency on the Megajoules system. I don't know whether there's another plugin out there that does science-over-time and fires an animation when the part is active, so you might end up needing your own plugin to get that working.

Dependencies for the Alcubierre drives include at least the high-end reactors, because nothing else has the power. The reactors depend on antimatter infrastructure, and are hard to separate from tritium and helium-3. But perhaps you could break Interstellar into a list of packages something like this: Power Management, Heat Management, Power Generation, Reaction Engines, Alcubierre Drive, ISRU, and Science. Power Management would be the system that allows Megajoules requests to have priorities instead of just running out. Everything that produces or consumes Megajoules would depend on it. Heat Management would be the WasteHeat code that every heat source would depend on. It would be separate from Power Management so if another mod wanted to supply Megajoules while tracking heat in a different manner, it could.

Linked from the KSPI wiki: https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/Alcubierre-Drive

First thing to check: the built-in 3km omni has "TechRequired = unmannedTech". It's supposed to be a late addition to the probe cores you already have. Try giving yourself enough science to get to Unmanned Tech in the tree and see if it works once you unlock the node. Suggestion to the RT2 team: add a dummy part to Unmanned Tech (like MechJeb and Procedural Fairings do) so it's obvious that that node unlocks "Probe Core Upgrade: Integrated Antenna".

Recycling now produces metal, not parts. I think it changed in EL 4.0.

Concentration of the resource varies from place to place and affects the speed of extraction. If I remember the maps for Interstellar's resources correctly, you don't generally get a hard zero if you're on a planet that has the resource at all, but you may get not enough to bother with. For detection, Interstellar's gamma-ray spectrometer can show you uranium and thorium hot spots from orbit. For other resources, any mining part that can mine it will show you the concentration in its right-click menu when you're landed, but you may need to hack .cfgs to make a scanner if you want to see it from orbit without SCANSat.

Not a bad idea. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to give up retrofitting. Can you turn a part into a different part in flight?

I still think the game is more fun if the science you get by actively running missions carries weight all the way to the end. Time warping for longer than an Eeloo transfer at a time shouldn't be the required or optimal way to proceed. If I'm reading Cairan's point (3) right, I think we're in agreement that to finish the Interstellar tree, you should have to demonstrate mastery of planetary exploration. Here's how I would take a stab at balancing: Add up all of the science available from running stock or Interstellar experiments at all possible locations. Add a percentage margin for renewable science sources like labs, asteroids, and contracts, and subtract a percentage that gets spent on retrofitting upgrades to hardware. I would guess that if the whole KSPI tech tree cost about 110% of what you can get by running experiments, it would feel about right. The tricky part is that so many other mods are science sources, Custom Biomes being a big one. Might need a couple of versions of the tree so you can pick the one that feels right with the rest of your setup.

The license ( https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/blob/master/FNPlugin/License.md ) permits you to distribute derivative works, so if you follow the terms about using a compatible license and giving credit, no question. If you just put the module into your part config and depend on the original distribution of the plugin to be present, so the only thing your stuff has in common with Fractal's is the module name, I wouldn't even consider that a "derivative work" subject to the license requirements. I would still follow the license if possible unless I had the copyright holder's assurance that he didn't consider the license applicable, because some people would consider invoking a module to be a derivative work. (E.g. the Kethane license, which purports to limit third-party use to a specified list of "public" modules.)

I had the same idea, where "failure" would be a reset to starting funds and reputation to represent "You are now playing as new management." I would have kept unlocked techs available (since the manufacturers haven't forgotten how to build anything, the more they can get you to buy, the better) and just penalized unspent science (new boffins don't really understand where their predecessors were going with some of those files). All random kerbals that aren't in space should be laid off at the same time. I like the idea of having to pay for access to anything that was in space after a transition. You might even require science to unlock unmanned probes to represent the work that has to be done to figure out the controls. I would leave manned ships controllable so a crew doesn't miss an encounter, because letting an uncontrolled encounter gravity assist a crew into "stranded" is cruel and unusual for the kerbals. You would just have to pay for the manned ship before you earned any funds, reputation, or science from it.

Once it comes out, I'll run some analyses and try to come up with a formula that gives an "average" cost for a part given its attributes. Then I can write a program that looks at all of the .cfg files in a folder and outputs a ModuleManager file that gives each part its calculated cost.

On my screen, your post is on page 260.