WaveFunctionP

Everyone has to reinvent the wheel I guess. - - - Updated - - - Everyone has to reinvent the wheel I guess.

Liquid fuel is hydrogen.

Orientation and size of the array does not matter when transmitting or relaying power. Receivers however have to be pointed at a transmitter or relay, the angle of which determines the percentage of power recieved. Along with other factors. See the article on the wiki, or the video on power networks linked in my sig.

Einarr, I'm currently testing my revamped grand tour vessel. With the tech available after finishing kerin, mun, and minimus.

I think it was just a hold over from Fractal's Repo. It has since been removed I think. I have no idea how resource extraction is supposed to work. That functionality is mostly handled by OSR and it looks like greek to me.

Receivers will always differ slightly in available power. Best way to compensate for this is either just use one since there is no cap on how much power they can receive as well how much power a thruster can use, or to balance the fuel consumption with a mod or fuel pipes.

Continuing from the earlier discussion about generator placement. I've been naughty.

The .cs files for each of those modules are all included. You may need set your dependencies and outputs. Thought that should be included in the project files along with the alias for ORS. Each solution may need it's references updated. You don't need c sharp first pass. I don't even know what that is. Oh, and when I say my version, I mean on github. Not the compiled dropbox release.

Mine should work out of the box, but it includes my personal changes. Which are documented in the changelog. Obviously, you may need to update references.

Fractals repo is a mess. You'll need to start a new project and import the files into it because the project files are missing. As are most of the part configs.

I blame Canada.

^^ this. Manley is a great communicator, and I watch all of his videos. But that does not mean he is a good game developer. Neverless, feedback is always good.

People have been reporting NaN's for various resources in stock kspi. I don't not know the cause. Probably because I don't understand how OSR works.

There's gonna be a lot of INT's here. Personally, I'm INTP.

You have to manually run unresetable experiments. Otherwise, it might waste them right now. With better logic and settings in a future update, it will eventually be able to run them as well. It does automatically collect the experiments though. Collection will happen automatically when changing situations or when automatic collection is first enabled. So to force data collection, simply toggle automatic collection back off and then back on again. - - - Updated - - - The window is a temporary solution. But, I'll see about removing it in sandbox, since there is no science.

What I meant by my statement about waste heat is that it doesn't create very interesting limitations. The number of radiators you use is pretty much determined by the equipment you've already selected to use. The aerodynamics aren't much of a factor unless you are using FAR, and even then if you are using thermal nozzles/jets you don't have to worry about it much. In that configuration, most of your power demand and thus waste heat production is both created and consumed by the nozzle during operation. You also have the option of using the atmospheric radiators for that duty as well. COM issues will be present with or without the radiators. I'll contrast that with payloads. Payloads on the face of it simply means that you need to fulfil a requirement (the dv for your mission), so you design a launcher to do the job. However, you have a wide variety of options to choose from to complete that goal. Lots of interesting decisions about staging and part selection and placement. Keep in mind, this is a contrast, not an analogy to waste heat management. With waste heat, you simply put whatever number is needed. The only real consideration is where you are going to place them and like any part, how much it will effect DV. It's not as deep. Stating that EC isn't any more interesting than waste heat doesn't somehow justify that we need to have another system equally as uninteresting. And to be frank, EC management at least has the fortune of being straightforward to understand. The limitations of generators to be placed directly to the reactor, while more realistic, basically removes a design choice. A similar thing can be said about the penalty to mismatched sizes. Maybe I don't need a lot of power generation, but I need some. Well, I have to place another small reactor somewhere else on the vessel and place a generator on that reactor. The generator limitations aren't making that an interesting decision (the power requirement is doing that itself), they reducing the possibly space. If you add a requirement, you want it to change the possibility space, not reduce it. True, games are about arbitrary rules, but removing possibility is something you want to try an avoid in a game. Removing the ability to throw the ball in american football doesn't make the game more interesting, however limiting the conditions of when and where the ball can be thrown does. Just as requiring a generator to be placed directly on a reactor removes possibilities, whereas having placement of the generator on the ship effect max power generation, thermal or particle efficiency or reactor temperature would be much more interesting by changing or even increasing those possibilities. The point is that a gameplay element should be interesting in this particular fashion or it should be removed unless absolutely required to make the gamespace small enough to be understandable and therefore, playable. Don't worry, I didn't take your tone offensively, as I hope you do not for mine. Tone can be a very subjective and hard thing to express. I learned to mindful of that fact about it on the forums I frequent.

Nitrogen is used to create ammonia. Hydrogen is liquid fuel. You can see what various resources can be used for on the wiki. The flow chart on the isru page may be particularly helpful. https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/Isru-Refinery

I'm a geek. I have a background in physics and chemistry, but I still see no reason to include every variation of nuclear power production conceivable unless it add depth to the gameplay. Many things currently just add complexity. (Looking at you waste heat and generators) It adds parts, and complexity to the design process (or more correctly, adds to the learning curve), but I'm not convince than it adds much depth. Which sounds like jargon, so let me explain. I can choose to build my rocket with a variety of engines. Each size has viable engines that have niches they are intended to fill. There are gaps between available parts, like where I need more ISP and less thrust or weight or less parts or whatever. (Square pegs to fill a round hole. It'll never be optimal, but you can get close intuitively.) Now whatever goal I have for my rocket's design, I have to design around these gaps to compensate for them. This is gameplay, an optimization problem, complex enough that it is difficulty to optimize fully, but not so complicated that I need to resort tools to help me parse the information. Not so much with the way many things work in KSPI. Waste heat is a just a thing that makes you add parts to your ship. You figure out how many you need. The vast majority of the time, this means enough to put the numbers in the green in the VAB. Adding more or less radiators has little benefit, so there is little incentive to optimize. Radiators simply force the player to remove the waste heat penalty. The resource adds no functional gameplay. Generators are also problematic. If you need power, add one(or two). Even the placement on the vessel is a forced requirement, as is the size of the generator, for all intents. The mode of the generator, has already been decided by the reactor you've already chosen. There is very little decision making in this process after you learn the mechanics. The only challenge was learning how they work, which was only a challenge because there was little player messaging in the mod to tell the player how they work. Reactors. The long duration of fission reactors has little value given the duration of a typical save, and particularly, given the duration of the mission they are needed to accomplish. The EVA maintenance shenanigans and requirements for refueling and operating the reactors only make them more of an inconvenience. Since their duration is not really much of an advantage, their limitations (power to weight ratio, maintenance trickery) make them obsolete very quickly. They don't have a niche to fill. They are simply an inferior square. The PFission reactors have no niche as far as I can tell. None. Fusion is great, but the extra modes are useless. He-3 is so hard to get, even if did decay properly, that it isn't worth bothering with. And antimatter reactors, well, they break the game. But you are pretty much done with the save by the time you get them. The AIM reactor is useless. And all that is before considering that usually there is very little reason to use a smaller reactor. So, in most circumstances, your reactor size is chosen for you. Concerning KPSI, the design process goes something like this: Use whatever number of the 3.75 fusion reactors you need to complete your mission either onboard the vessel or via network, if you need onboard power put a generator on the reactor to meet demands, and fit as many radiators as required.

Shows how much I use them. They are part bloat as far as I am concerned. The basic fission reactors could have a UN mode if it were important to have that resource mode in the game. It isn't, as far as I can tell, so...yeah.

I have a thread in the tutorial forum for the videos. And my youtube channel has a playlist dedicated to my KSP videos. It's in my signature. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/76917-Video-Tutorials-KSP-Interstellar-Power-Networks-Power-Generation-%28May-4th-2014%29

True. I do usually have a set plan for how I intend cover the topic. I've done quite a few videos for other games. The complexity makes it hard to not cover certain topics because they are so interrelated. I don't mind being wrong so much on air so long as I'm able to show the viewer how I find the information that I'm looking for, so that if they run into the same question themselves, they know how to look for it. There is a very slight method to my madness when it comes to my fumbling around. And things that I intend to not cover end up in the video simply because of as I'm speaking I thinking in the mind of the viewer, and I realize that I really should cover it. Case in point, going over radiators and waste heat again because I remembered that I misspoke on my earlier video, and using thermal receivers as power sources for generators simple because I wouldn't be covering generators again. And this is just my personal taste, but I like to think my unscripted and unpolished style helps keeps the information (which I'm actually usually covering quite a lot of complicated stuff) from becoming overwhelming. And of course, my slow southern cadence doesn't sound like a fire hose of information. I actually have high retention rates on my videos, so I have some indication that this tactic works for me, or at least the viewers that watch my videos. I'm not a very good speaker. I'm not a big talker, so I'm actually spending a good portion of the time just making sure that I'm actually saying the word that I'm thinking. For instance, I'll often say power instead of heat quite often. It's my little oral dyslexia if there was a such thing. The last video, I kept wanting to stop, but as I got into it, I just felt like I would end up breaking the videos up into segments that wouldn't make sense if someone just linked in from the recommended videos links or a google search. Fortunately, I think that will be the largest video I have to make, and it was just because of all the different parts that have to come together to explain the mechanics. That's not so say that I don't think things can't be improved. They certainly can. The sound was bothering me as I forgot to extract the audio and run a noise filter on it and re import the new track. Plus, my filtering settings seemed a little off on my last video making it harder to hear what I was saying. I could have perhaps make each reactor a separate video, but I would still want to cover all about generators and upgrades and waste heat and radiators for each one, and I just wanted to get it done. A bit of laziness on my part, but noone else seems willing to do comprehensive video guides for the mods, so I decided to just go ahead with it. Not that I thought it was end up taking an hour and 40 minutes.

The custom information windows and automation features make mechjeb my prefered source. I have a nice set of windows, one for landing info near the navball, and a bigger info window with all the main orbital, situational and vessel information I need all nicely laid out.

Thanks for your feedback. Not sure that I'll be able to address all of those in that video, but I suspect I get around to breaking up the reactor tutorials later as the mod updates. I was also able to correct the config files in my experimental version for the pfission reactors (my confusion now feels properly justified. ), along with a few other node config tweaks to the thermal receivers that I noticed while reviewing the video.

New tutorial on reactor types, generators, and radiators. Warning, it is rather long. I noticed quite a few minor errors here and there, but I think on the whole it gives a decent overview.

Update OP with new video covering reactors, generators, and radiators. Along with some bug workarounds.