Snoman314

OK I got an additional out of memory error on pre-release 7. Next up pre-release 6. That's awesome, I look forward to start learning how to use it. While you're squashing bugs... Pre-release 6 is the latest version I can find that has a working Mission Architect. See posts above about the orbit propagation erroring out.

It does right? As you can see from the first screenshot, the vessel most definitely is not on the ground. https://drive.google.com/file/d/16y6PYyZa5qR4Ya2bF0BbL-3z36dIPvBJ/view?usp=sharing In the meantime I'm rolling back through pre-release candidates to see if I can find one that works.

OK, now I'm having problems I haven't seen before with the Mission Architect. I'm trying to set a coast to ascending node to zero out inclination, and I'm getting error messages. The scenario below highlights the issue. The green line is set to coast to the _Ascending_ node.

Is there any more documentation on the LVD anywhere? I just can't seem to get started with it. The tutorial isn't much help, because it starts from a rocket launch, and at this point I build all me vessels in LKO. When I try to import the orbit data for a craft, it just... doesn't? I feel like there's an option somewhere I'm not setting, but I don't know what it is, hence asking about documentation. This is the problem: I select the craft I want to import data from: And then after I hit 'Use Selected Orbit', the values copied across are wildly different: What's going on here? Changing topics, as I look around inside the LVD, I'm really excited about what it looks like it can do (Once I get past step 1), and the new textures are awesome!

Hmm. Yeah and I've built other stuff in between so if that's the case it's not the same situation. Ah well, I'm having fun again, thanks for all your work!

I installed and tried recycling another obsolete station module, and it all went perfectly

Ahh OK. So sounds like we're on the same page after all, and it was a bug that I encountered. Sweet as then. Having the the recycling be a bit messy when productivity is less that 0.75 seems reasonable enough to me. That's command pod with untrained kerbals territory after all. I hadn't looked much outside that loop I mentioned, and was assuming that prod was the raw productivity value. I also now realise I got the last part wrong. I mistakenly thought that the 0 - children count part here included the parent part, meaning that regardless of productivity there was a fairly high chance of non-leaf parts being recycled. p = p.children[random (0, p.children.Count)] With your reply I see how it's supposed to be working now, and I take back most of what I said: If not for the bug this seems mostly fine. I will stand by my comments about the obscurity however. It's taken all this back and forth because without prior knowledge, the intended behaviour looks like a bug. It was only with more information you were able to tell that what I was reporting was an actual bug. You can you do tooltips in the difficulty settings UI, so that could at least be a place to give some bare minimum head's up. I like the idea of allowing a recycler equipped tug or auxiliary craft to go around and scoop up stray parts. I can't think of any other great ways to handle it when loose parts drift out of the recycling process. Yeah OK, that makes sense. The recycling bin in question was constructed onto the station using a micro-pad, so this does seem like it would apply. I hope you're able to get it all sorted after this

OK, first of all, let me go on record saying I think this whole idea is stupid. The first thing that happens is that it looks like a bug: The recycling operation fails straight away. Then if you see a little side note tucked away in the manual you get a clue that this is actually a 'feature', but with absolutely no clue how to figure out what's going on. Getting led by the hand above, plus spending more than half an hour reading through the source code to find the SelectPart function, I now see what's going on. My conclusion: Yes, zero-G recycling is stuffed. As soon as it recycles a part that has children attached, then it's over. Those child parts drift off and the craft is certainly going to be uncontrollable. There's no way to pilot a random fuel tank or solar panel back into the bin. what is the point of this? Best case scenario: there's a loose docking port (that's not tumbling too badly) that my tug will be able to dock to and push back towards the bin. As for the rest of the parts? Just unrecoverable debris. I'm trying to be reasonable here, but this just seems stupid. You say it's supposed to be 'not free'. OK fine, but once the vessel is in fragments what do you expect people to do exactly? Go EVA for 2 hours frustratingly trying to nudge parts back towards the bin by bumping into them? My station that has the recycle bin has a productivity somewhere around 24, so if I'm reading this right, I must have just got unlucky that the root part was immediately recycled first. If you're going to stick with this, perhaps rather than an even chance of having the root part get recycled first, how about some kind of inverse exponential probability that the part with children is selected? e.g.: while (p != null && p.children.Count > 0) { if (prod < 1 && random (0, 1f) < 1 - prod) { break; } rootChance = 2^(1-prod) / (1 + p.children.Count) if (random (0, 1f) < rootChance) { break; } p = p.children[random (1, p.children.Count)]; } That way you can at least mitigate the issue by adding more workshops and / or engineers.

OK, Removing the 0 keys and all mentions of efficiency got me going again, thanks! Now that the smelter is going, it was time to recycle some of the now obsolete station parts that I used to start the bootstrapping process. I gently nudged the original station seed craft into a large recycling bin, and I got a nasty surprise. Unlike back in the day, the whole craft was not recycled, just the root part (which was one of the first into the bin). I had RCS thrusters, radial monoprop tanks, docking ports and all sorts, flying everywhere. What gives? I found this in the manual: No I can't guess. I have no idea what is going on, other than the recycling bin only recycles one part at a time now? Is zero-G recycling basically dead now?

I thought I already had the second efficiency key?: Should I just remove the zero efficiency part?

Finally got around to creating the issue on Github. I'm really hoping I can pick that play through up again, I was having fun up to that point.

OK I finally finished constructing my space station. I mounted a smelter and switched it on to process the scrap that had accumulated, and the whole vessel glitches and disappears. Lots of occurances of this exception in the log: [EXC 08:46:26.026] IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array. ExtraplanetaryLaunchpads.ELConverter.DetermineEfficiency (System.Double temperature) (at <c9cf5b93cb4b4703a8fc2d8ce74fedde>:0) ExtraplanetaryLaunchpads.ELConverter.PrepareRecipe (System.Double deltatime) (at <c9cf5b93cb4b4703a8fc2d8ce74fedde>:0) BaseConverter.FixedUpdate () (at <c1858a3f77504bd1aaa946fdccf84670>:0) UnityEngine.DebugLogHandler:LogException(Exception, Object) ModuleManager.UnityLogHandle.InterceptLogHandler:LogException(Exception, Object) UnityEngine.Debug:CallOverridenDebugHandler(Exception, Object) Is this likely due to my recipe? It works fine in testing (with simple smelter/probe core/power source test vessels).

I found this hard to believe so I did the numbers, and wow. Yeah OK. USA 2019 average industrial electricity was 6.83c / kWh, or $18.97/GJ. Coke goes for roughly $150/short ton = $165/tonne @ approx 31 GJ/tonne = $5.37/GJ That makes sense, as it would therefore be the first method developed, and so the most mature method, even if other methods have been developed. I've learnt more about smelting in the last few days than I ever thought I would!

Yeah I don't know. AFAIK that's how aluminium is smelted - direct electrolysis. I'm quite sure if that worked for iron it'd be in widespread use, because it'd be cheaper. At least using hydrogen, the water produced is easily split with electrolysis, and you can re-use the hydrogen. End net result is energy and ore in, metal and oxygen out. I guess it's just the level of abstraction/complexity you want. Personally I liked the idea of hydrogen smelting, as that's becoming a thing IRL.

I had been reading the manual, but that post made it all click finally. I just got finished putting this together: You still need some kind of reducing agent for the ore to react with.

Yeah it's in the ECSmelter.cfg file, in the Resources folder. It uses EC with Liquid fuel as a reducing agent. I tried to make hydrogen recipe (Ore + hydrogen => metal + water) so that I could then electrolyse the water and recycle the hydrogen, and vent the surplus oxygen if I needed to. Unfortunately I could never figure out any of the units in the recipes.

I will go look for craft hulls. I've never heard of them until now. Looks like I didn't save the screenshot I took, sorry. Basically the root part of the craft I was building was roughly in the centre of the craft. Once finalised, that part was centered at the same location as the disposable pad, which meant that half the new craft overlapped the existing craft. Fortunately the new craft's parts were all at the end of the vessel in my persistence file, and I spent about 30 minutes adding 10 meters to the y coordinate for every part, clearing the existing vessel and allowing it to be released.

I didn't realise until after I finalised a build, that I needed to re-root the craft I was building when using the Disposable Pad. Now I've got two massive station sections overlapping, which took several launches to provide the parts for, over 3 real time evenings. Is there some way I can save my station? Edit my persistent.sfs maybe? I don't have the spare rocketparts storage to teardown the build, and besides I already finalised it, because I had no idea this would happen (I assumed it'd work the same as the Dock, with the end of the constructed craft connecting to the end of the construction area).

It doesn't survive without pre-coolers, because the engines explode during ascent without them. I've removed the FlatFNRadiator module, and I'm happy with things for now. I agree that it seems to be a bug, but I don't think it's that the radiator is working overtime pulling heat from other components with minimal atmosphere to convect into, if I understand what you're saying correctly. It seems more like that this one component is being heated directly by the air at high speed, at a much much higher rate than any of the others. Edit: I should add: I say this because if I point exactly surface prograde, the shock cone intake in front of the pre-cooler reduces the heating significantly, and if I let the craft tumble, when the pre-cooler goes behind the main body of the craft it cools rapidly. So seems like straight up re-entry heating.

Ok, it's this section: MODULE { name = FlatFNRadiator isDeployable = false convectiveBonus = 50 radiatorArea = 2 partMass = 0.15 } When I delete that, the problem goes away. Is it possible these variables are set wrong? In the meantime I'm just going to leave that module out.

OK, first result: Removing the ModuleSabreHeating module from radialEngineBody did nothing. Not surprising seeing as I'm having the same problem with the engine nacelle, and that doesn't have the ModuleSabreHeating module in it. Second, I removed the FNModulePreecooler module from the same part, and that also did nothing. From there, I searched for every instance of radialEngineBody in my Gamedata folder. There are only two mods patching it: Tweakscale and WarpPlugin. So I'm pretty confident that it's this mod that's causing the problem. Next up I'm deleting _all_ modules from rapier.cfg and running another test. But I'm starting to suspect the fault lies with these lines: @heatConvectiveConstant = 50 @thermalMassModifier = 5 @maxTemp = 2900 Do you know what they mean? (To clarify, I'm building a new craft with fresh instances of the part, to make sure the craft file isn't saving the old modules). Edit1: Oh I spoke to soon! I deleted all the modules in rapier.cfg like I said, and the problem is gone. Gimme a minute to work narrow down exactly which one.

OK, I'll give that a try. I did see that solution posted when I was googling this last night, but it looked like that module affected the engine heating, not the pre-cooler. When the power comes back on (don't ask), I'll try that and report back.

New data point: When I cross 70km, leaving the atmosphere at 2220ish m/s, the coolers temperature drops instantly from 600+ K, to around 300K.

Just unpaused and watched the pre-cooler on the other wing blow . Ratio stayed at 0 all the way to the end.

I didn't think to look for exceptions, as nothing suggested to me it was crashing or anything. It just steadily heats up and then explodes. I looked in KSP.log and did find this in there: [LOG 12:01:04.346] radialEngineBody Exploded!! - blast awesomeness: 0.5 But everything else was just log entries at a low rate.