artforz

Unless I'm mistaken, with base R&D 30 sci/day should be about 7300 upgrade points. Even with T3 R&D, it's still ~3650 upgrade points. I find spending north of 40M funds on R&D and science upgrades while still in T2/T3 era a bit hard to imagine. Are you sure it's sci/day and not sci/year (afaict KCT displays sci/year until you get above 36.5 sci/yr = 0.1 sci/day)?

I think that's is running into this, should be fixed in next CC update: https://github.com/jrossignol/ContractConfigurator/commit/0dccf557056699004155256bab237bb838c97cb9

Needs Helium-3 to run (note the 0.00/500). Did the math a few pages back, they need *very* little antimatter. 0.008 AM is enough to burn through 500 units of D and He3

That's... odd. I tested with just a command pod, a extendable solar panel and a AM bottle on the pad, and it works pretty much as expected. When <= 1e-8 AM stored: Enabling charging makes it consume 1EC/s and charges up at 2 charge/s until it reaches 1000 charge, then it drops to 0.5EC/s and maintains 1000 charge. Disabling charging ... disables charging. No EC consumed. Charge level stays at whatever it is at. When > 1e-8 AM stored: Enabling charging makes it consume 1EC/s and charge up at 1 charge/s until it hits 1000, and it keeps consuming 1EC/s. Disabling charging ... does nothing. Still consumes EC and charges up, exactly the same as if charging was enabled. If it runs out of EC, charge starts dropping at 1 charge/s. If it hits 0 charge, no explosion. I'm just limited to <= 50x timewarp due to the "Cannot Time Warp faster than 50x while Antimatter Tank is Unpowered" thing. ... Is it me or is there basically no downside to always keep charging stopped on AM bottles (saves power below the "free" fill threshold, makes no difference otherwise)? edit: This whole behavior seems rather counter-intuitive. Wouldn't it make more sense to have it drop to 0 EC/s when below the "free" threshold and fully charged, and above the threshold drop to 0.5EC/s when fully charged?

As small AM bottles only require 0.5EC/s to maintain their charge, I suspect the solar panels were enough for that draw to not really show. Unless I'm reading the code wrong, AM containers can hold 0.001% of their max capacity for free. If they contain more than that, they will always consume MJ or if that isn't available EC to maintain 1000 charge, regardless of the "Charging/Discharging/No Power Required" display. And yeah, there's a bit of a bug there: The checks for "should consume charge" and "should consume MJ/EC to replenish charge" in OnFixedUpdate use (current_antimatter > 0.00001 * antimatter.maxAmount) The checks for buttons and display state in OnUpdate use (current_antimatter > 0.01) ... edit: ... and another bug. A small AM bottle can't ever explode, as DoExplode() does nothing if current_antimatter is <= 0.1 ...

The parts do remember their state, which should be enough. The problem is the anim init code in OnStart, as it currently is we *always* play the !state->state animation. Swapping the normalizedTime around for the IsEnabled and !IsEnabled cases makes parts not do the weird animation dance when switching to a vessel.

Indeed, in the Tokamaks D/He3 is rather sad and pure He3 is close to useless. For pure He3 upgraded 1.25m produces a net excess of ~465MW_cp, uses ~11.5% of total output for laser power, weighs 2.7t including generator upgraded 2.5m can't even power itself. upgraded 3.75m produces a net of ~768MW_cp, uses about 67.4% of total output for plasma heating, 44.5t including generator So for pure He3, a pair of 1.25m fusion reactors has more usable output power, about 10 times the power/weight ratio and higher efficiency at every load point...

Err, with the current KSPi, ChargedParticles produce thrust just fine.

LqdWater is flow mode STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH, and the only water tank in stock KSPi is a radial... put a fuel line going from the empty water tank to the stack the scoop is in and it should work. As for the Nitrogen... no idea. Looks like KSPi doesn't turn it into a tank-able resource and the only place it's used is in a check in the Refinery for the Haber Process (only works if atmospheric density * atmospheric nitrogen abundance is >= 0.1). Odd.

"New and improved atmosphere, now with 134% extractable resources.":D As for ISRU... I suspect for land/ocean resource extraction you could add FNModuleResourceExtraction for new resources to the ISRU via MM (or create your own "miner" part that has a bunch of FNModuleResourceExtraction). ISRU Processing... nope. That's hard-coded. Though makes me wonder how hard it'd be to generalize the concept and turn all the copypasta in FNRefinery into a part file configured generic "x of A + y of B + z MJ (which is really just a special case of the more general C, D, E, ...) -> some of this + some of that + ..." FNResourceProcessor module.

I think you should be able to just stick it in any .cfg As for making a atmospheric water resource, something like ATMOSPHERIC_RESOURCE_DEFINITION { name = KerbinWater guiName = Water Vapor celestialBodyName = Kerbin abundance = 0.01 resourceName = LqdWater } Should do the trick The way ORS/KSPi generally do things appears to be to have the generic resource def without a resourceName in ORS, then add that with a MM @ line in KSPi. as for how it works... name is what's used to refer to the atmospheric/oceanic/... resource within KSPi or with a MM line guiName is what it's displayed as by the scanner celestialBodyName is obvious abundance is *I think* a fraction of ... something (intakeatm by volume? by mass? who knows?) resourceName is the name of the actual the-kind-you-store-in-tanks resource it turns into

Extra options like... what? It should automatically pick up any atmospheric resource defined via ORS.

In space or on the pad? Thermal nozzles only provide 40% of their vacuum ISP and thrust at sea level on Kerbin.

If you're using the KSPi 0.11 tree for 0.23.5, Vista is in Advanced Fusion Power. You should have gotten a "Interstellar Tech Tree Update" notification box from KSPi in the space center after selecting the interstellar tree with TreeLoader. Click "Install Update" in that, exit to main menu and resume that save. If you didn't... exit KSP and manually copy the the tree.cfg from GameData\WarpPlugin into that save.

Yup. The IR telescope doesn't actively use helium, the cryostats constantly boil off helium at a rate of maxAmount*1.667794e-8 per second when powered and at 25 times that rate when unpowered. So no matter how many cryostats you have, if they start full they will last for about 694 earth days powered or a bit under 28 earth days unpowered.

Hmm. The UN consumption rate of the AIM seems off. With its 20 units of UN it can run flat out for 339692 earth days... low by 3 orders of magnitude due to unit confusion(informed guess, the tooltip talks about m^3. UN comes in liters)? Also, when resource limited (e.g. running off a trickle of He3 from T decay) the consumption rates are completely off due to consumeReactorResource consuming the full amount of everything and then returning the minimum of received/wanted over the different resources. AM consumption rate seems reasonable, 0.007320937AM for basic and 0.007059476AM for upgraded to burn through 500 D/He3. That's not quite 8 small AM bottles worth, easily produced with a lab on the launchpad or in flight. D/He3 consumption rate and runtime also look ok, 500 units D/He3 is enough to run flat out for ~148 days for the basic and ~47 days for the upgraded. Well, that's assuming you can somehow *get* 500 units of He3...

*warning, contains sarcasm* "Waste heat is a just a thing that makes you add parts to your ship." ... unlike ElectricCharge? I mean, if vessels can magically dissipate a few gigawatts of heat, they might as well magically produce a few kilowatts of electricity. Also, which radiators you use and where they're placed doesn't affect your Cm and aerodynamics at all, right? Generators: if I just want to run a big thermal nozzle or jet, I don't *need* the extra mass of a big generator. Depending on what reactor I'm using I might not need any generator, or maybe a kiwi + 1.25 gen somewhere on the vessel is enough to run the plasma heating on that 3.75 fusion gen... "hmm, let me check the numbers on that". Yeah, clearly no consideration involved at all. And I guess where to put that APU is "a forced requirement", too. Right? Reactors: Somewhat agreed. A fully fueled fission reactor lasts a loooong time. Unless you're building bases and/or letting years pass just for fun, they seem rather overfueled. As for the AIM, if that thing didn't require bloody He3 it'd be actually rather useful, a basic AIM has power/weight rivaling upgraded fusion (!) and the upgraded AIM is up there with AM reactors. As for "always go for 3.75 fusion"... currently that's a pretty good bet, assuming you have unlocked it and assuming there will never be such a thing as a "budget"... Hmm, re-reading this post up to this point, the tone ended up quite a bit more confrontational than intended. Too lazy to re-write it in a more diplomatic tone, just consider it a character flaw or something. In closing... Well, I guess there's quite a few legitimate balancing issues. Anything involving He3 is too painful to use. Particle bed reactors' better TWR is non-obvious. Beamed power is way too easy when you can throw a dozen 3.75m reactors into orbit for free and active microwave power receivers don't snap off going mach 7. Lots of the ISRU stuff seems to fall into the "pointless stuff to waste time with once you unlock everything" category. not sure where I'm going here, guess I should just stop rambling.

Overall pretty nice, kinda long winded in some places. Some notes: ThF4 is not only higher output than UF4, it's also lighter. 12 vs. 15 tons for 3000 units. Not really useful, just something I noticed while messing around. @39:00 - that's actually a bug in the part files. In the pfission .cfgs the ChargedPower resource should be ChargedParticles @45:00 - D/He3 and He3/He3 modes in the big fusion reactors produce relatively small amounts of power. The 1.25m reactor produces nearly the same power as the 2.5m in D/He3 and *more* power in He3/He3 mode. Additionally the large reactors need *tons* of MJ just to keep the lights on in those modes. Unupgraded they run net negative and even a upgraded 3.75m in pure He3 mode needs 1350MW of field power to produces a max of 2356MW in ChargedParticles. Even with a DC gen that only leaves 767MW or so left over in ChargedParticles at 100% reactor output... @52:30 max generator output is scaled down by the ratio of the areas = squared radiuses(radii?). @59:40 No, it won't. It'll grab Lithium for breeding from everywhere and spread the bred T around, but will only use its internal D/T/He3 for power generation, so external D/T tanks also starve Tokamaks over time unless you manually pump the T back in... And yeah, Vistas pull D/T from every container on the vessel and just *love* to steal what little T your reactors have. @1:03:00 Conversion ratio is exactly 1 (well, ignoring the bugs that break breeding...) @1:09:00 Yes! Why can't $%$#% generators just #$%# remember their #$%$% mode setting? (yeah, I forget checking that a lot...) @1:24:00 The small radial rads are kinda useful with solar panels on small-ish probes, and... err... uhh... yeah. @1:29:00 I suspect the VAB thermal display assumes your thermal receiver gets the sum total power output of all transmitters and that 100% of that gets converted to WasteHeat. Not terribly useful, but... what's the alternative?

Well, as far as I can see there's only 2 possible cases with fusion reactors: 1. Reactor OnUpdate called before any generator OnUpdate. Uses 1x deltatime EC in reactor OnStart and 1x deltatime EC in reactor OnUpdate. 2. Any generator OnUpdate called before reactor OnUpdate. Uses 1x deltatime of EC in reactor OnStart and 1x deltatime MJ in reactor OnUpdate. Note that as long as we have enough MJ in the global buffer, we should always be able to start the reactor after the first tick, EC is just required to keep them active across a vessel load or when we have no MJ at all. To start up without MJ, a reactor *should* need 1x deltatime worth of EC, but it seems they can sometimes start with less... mysteries of ORS?

Well, the whole ThermalPower/ChargedParticles system seems to currently be a bit broken. Stick some other reactors on a vessel, a AM reactor and a thermal nozzle on the AM reactor. The thermal nozzle happily works even though there's no AM anywhere...

I'm honestly not sure. It's really 2*TimeWarp.fixedDeltaTime, which seems to always be 0.02s here at 1x independent of max physics delta.

Done, the reactor page needed some love anyways (thermal generators and rocket nozzles *can* use ChargedParticles...)

Like I wrote, I added code to WarpPlugin to actually get that output in KSP.log... Hopefully Fractal will fix this in the next version so you no longer need undocumented magic values of EC on a vessel for fusion reactors to reliably work.

Well, you can actually calculate how many EC you need for guaranteed startup. You need enough EC to run the laser/field for 0.04 seconds. A 3.75m tokamak running D/T needs 184.69MW (even says so in the tooltip). 184.69MW * 0.04s = 7.3876MJ 1EC = 1kJ, so you need at least 7387.6 EC on the vessel. It *may* work with half that, but that is in "generator has to tick before reactor" territory.

Imo it's a combination of at least 2 bugs/design problems. 1. Consuming managed resources in OnStart (there's no guarantee the ResourceManager for that resource even exists at that point) 2. ResourceManager seems to refuse to hand out MJ if no part(s) have called supplyFNResource so far (guess what, generators do that in OnFixedUpdate ...). Fix for 1. would be to do all the "process resource consumption/production for time elapsed while vessel was on rails" stuff in the first call of OnFixedUpdate and not in OnStart. For 2. Ugh. The whole ORS/ResourceManager/ResourceOverManager stuff is rather complex. Can't really tell how it's supposed to work, let alone if what it's actually doing is anywhere close...