Nightdagger

I think his point is more that it seems pointless (and a waste of career mode funds) to play when we know that the next update is going to render every craft with Interstellar parts unusable. Why would I continue putting fusion power satellites into orbit at a cost of millions of dollars a pop if I know that an update tomorrow could turn them into orbital paperweights? Granted, in my case I'm starting a new game on update anyway so it doesn't matter to me, its not going to stop me from playing. It would be nice to have a timetable, but speaking as someone who has done coding in the past, very frequently "soon " is the most honest answer you can give, because there is always SOMETHING breaking!

Uninstalling KSP through Steam will NOT necessarily delete the KSPI mod folders from your installation. Since.you added that stuff after the original install Steam might not know its there or want to delete it since it didn't put it there to begin with...pretty common for games that you mod actually. So just uninstalling KSP doesn't guarentee a clean install, you have to manually go in and delete all of the KSPI folders from your Gamedata folder to ununstall the mod. What you describe sounds exactly like what happens when the latest experimental version is installed over an earlier version.

I actually did some thinking about it and compared numbers between the stock ion and plasma thruster...and although the burn rate seems higher than it should be, turns out not by much. If my very non rocket scientist math on the subject is decent enough in practice to hold any merit, xenon is a horrible choice for plasma thrusters. Bear with me here...an ion engine burns .485 xenon a second in operation at an isp of 4200 for 2kn of thrust. Meaning you get 1443 seconds of burn at full throttle with a 700 unit tank...just as a crude performance reference multiply the burn times the thrust and you get 2886 kns (Ihave no idea if that's an actual unit of measurement, only using it as a reference here). I was supplying 2.5GW of power to the craft. With the.1.25m thruster that translates to 214kn max thrust. At the same isp we would expect.it to take 13.5 seconds to generate the same 2886 kns of thrust. But its not, the isp is only 1/3 that of the ion, so we can only reasonably expect a maximum burn of 4.5s from 700 units of xenon. Which sucks at a cost of 3k a tank! I realize my math here is crude but I am admittedly no rocket scientist yet, lol. I might just for the sake of argument go through later and plug all this into the formulas and see how the math really breaks down but although it still seems a bit fast its nowhere near as unreasonable as I first thought. Its just that xenon is a poor choice of fuel for anything except a short kick in the pants.

I was questioning the rate at which it burned the xenon. The plasma thruster on liquid fuel mode didn't have enough thrust to budge the craft but a t200 tank was going to last seemingly forever. The xenon got enough thrust to take off super fast but burned off 700 units of xenon in a split second (the xenon tank was depleted before the craft hit 1500m). I get that xenon is high thrust to low isp but if that's intentional behavior xenon is pretty much useless as a fuel. Who wants to pack 10 xenon tanks for a 9 second burn?

So last night I was goofing off with the plasma thrusters and wasn't getting very far on liquid fuel, so I decided to strap on a xenon tank to get a little extra thrust on launch, since it provides higher thrust with lower ISP. Too much of both, it turns out...the craft took off very fast (which was not unexpected since it was getting 2.9GW of power and consisted of a probe core, a small fuel tank, a couple receivers, a radiator, and the thruster). It was fast enough to strip the small deployable radiators I had attached to the side clean off the craft. . What was unexpected was that it burned up the entire 700 unit xenon tank I had attached in less than a second. That seems...excessive, to say the least. Is that normal for a plasma thruster? I know its a smallish tank but at that ISP I would have expected it to last at least a little while.

I was having some issues with them. Chain was air intake to precooler to engine, and the precooler absolutely refused to function as anything but an intake until I closed the intakes on the precooler, at which point it started behaving as expected. Opening the intake on the precooler while in high speed flight would cause an almost instant and catastrophic overheating. It was behaving as if having the intakes on the precooler opened was bypassing the cooling mechanism in exchange for higher intake performance...which is a cool behavior if intended, but should default to cooling mode if you ask me, since its called a precooler and all.

That's what I did, but I'd try just removing Interstellar entirely (delete the WarpPlugin and OpenResourceSystem folders) and then reinstalling it before trying a full reinstall.

I had this happen to me too, reinstalling fixed it.

Yeah, I didn't try it without the generators attached directly to the reactors, since that's not how they're supposed to work to begin with. I was testing to see if they worked at all, because prior to this patch nuclear reactors did absolutely nothing, they weren't even properly recognized as reactors.

Nevermind - your patch seems to have fixed the reactor bug for me, I tested multiple sizes and types of fission reactor (unfortunately I do not have fusion or AM to test with yet) and all seem to work. Thank you very much for the quick fix, WaveFunctionP! KSPI has quickly become one of my "must have" mods for this game and having it broken trashes the desire to play for me.

I'll load up a save game (unfortunately it won't be with Interstellar as the only mod, but I'm running minimal others) and set up a quick and dirty reactor so I can get you an error log.

Yes, I scratched my head repeatedly over why my microwave transceiver that I was putting into my new nuclear transmitter was falling through and crashing into the landing pad when I tried to launch it. Then, I went to scrap an old nuclear satellite I had in orbit and watched it fly into three separate pieces even though it was still considered one part by KSP. And just now I built a new nuclear transmitter (with the transceiver strapped on with about half a dozen struts) and got it settled in only to find out that not only is it not producing any power, but none of the statistics are there, any of the fields with a gauge are there but the core temp, the power production, any field that's a digital display are completely blank, it doesn't even display. Also, a retrofit button was available on the reactor, and when I clicked it, it ate 200 science and told me it was a gas core reactor (interesting since I don't have fusion power unlocked yet...) but still did nothing but sit there like a gigantic, expensive tin can. Patch seems to have broke stuffs.

Yeah...that's exactly what I have. I hadn't seen anything about it, so I didn't know there was an issue. Guess it's time to beeline to fusion, huh?

They were beyond green. My maximum dissipation was 5x the total heat production of the radiator. I know the radiators are more effective in atmosphere but it seems really strange to me that they're less than 1/5th as efficient in vacuum.

Yeah, I figured out how to transmit and such. The way I have it set up is the power plant in orbit at 200k has two microwave transceivers on it, one set to transmit, one set to relay. The four relay stations I have at 750k have only one transceiver on them, set to relay since they don't actually produce any power, they're just meant to beam it where it's needed. The part that's really getting me now is that if I park the exact same generator off my runway it produces 1.91 GW of power (reactor running at 4.5 GW, no heat buildup at all with 4x huge radiators), but put it in space and even with 2 more radiators it accumulates a fairly large amount of waste heat, the reactor only runs at 2.2 GW, and the power plant as a whole only produces 450 MW of power. It seems to me that, even with atmospheric losses, it might be more efficient to just build four or five generators at KSP and focus orbital operations on setting up relays than to waste all the time, power, and resources putting power plants in space.