xRei

So after messing around with beamed power and relays in creative mode I still can't seem to get it to work. What I've tried: My craft trying to receive power has an inline thermal receiver(I also tried an electrical receiver tuned to the right frequencies). I tried both types of mirrors(infrared and light), and made sure to switch on their 'start relay' buttons while in orbit. I made a reactor ship and attached the transmitter that lets you switch beam types on the fly. I put in orbit, turned on the transmitter and tried switching between various beam types. I tried near infrared, regular UV, vacuum UV, far extreme UV. Regardless of what type of beam type I tried, the mirror wouldn't relay the beam. In the network window it showed up in the bottom still, but like in the pic I submitted in my other thread the text was offset incorrectly and looked a bit off. Either way, no power was being received from the mirror relay. The craft worked fine as soon as it came into direct LoS with the reactor ship. Am I missing something?

LH2 is usually(always?) the superior choice for ISP, and it has good thrust, but as you pointed out it requires huge tanks because it has crappy density. If the awkwardness of the tanks isn't an issue, LH2 is always a solid choice. If you play around with the ISRU stuff that comes with the mod pack, LH2 is also fairly easy to create in situ, so that's another benefit. If you have mods that let you create vessels in orbit (Like Extraplanetary launchpads), even better, since then you don't have to care about lugging those huge tanks into orbit. But if you want only density, stuff like kerosene, liquid fuel, HTP are all pretty good. Even monoprop. Some of the fuels come with better thrust even than LH2. I use LF and HTP a lot when I can get away with it though. The hybrid mixture fuels also tend to offer great thrust when you have a reactor/combo that works with them. That's your FUELNAME-lox fuels (fuel + liquid oxygen), like hydrolox. The biggest issue with a lot of those denser fuels is that they aren't always compatible with some of the more ISP/efficient reactor types, which tend to rely on stuff like noble gasses, such as xenon, krypton, etc. Many of those reactors can also use Liquid CO2, which has decent density and thrust. Some can use HTP also. As you said, you kind of have to play around with it each time you design a craft. There's a lot of variables involved since many of the reactors and nozzles can only use certain fuels, and some of the tech nodes will unlock additional fuel choices later on(IIRC). LH2 is the gold standard since it can be used with almost everything and the ISP is always excellent... if it just wan't for that awful density.. Beware liquid Xenon, it's insanely expensive. For simplicity sake, I also really recommend the MIC Fusion Rocket for efficiency. It's actually one of my favorite engines in the game. It needs only 2 things in abundance: a small bit of power to run, and lithium for fuel. Lithium is pretty dense fuel, but requiring megawatts of power to run does mean you'll need a reactor on the ship, but the requirements are small, so it doesn't need to be a big reactor. IIRC it's around abouts ~30MW for the unupgraded, 2.5m fusion rocket. The mod comes with a nuclear reactor that has a built in generator (it sits in the utilities submenu) which is often what I use early on in career mode for cheap MWs. The storage tanks you need for lithium are found in the fuel storage tech line. Another nice thing about this rocket is that it has upgrade tech nodes all over the place, so as you unlock more tech it's being upgraded passively all the time. It's efficiency is high enough that with enough lithium you can go anywhere in the Kerbol system with a moderate sized payload pretty easily, even before it's fully upgraded. Quick note about generating electrical power: right click on the generator(or reactor/generator combo) and it'll show you what the efficiency is expected to be. The efficiency of the normal generator starts really low, and as you upgrade tech nodes at the bottom of the tree, it increases. But importantly, you have to remember to multiply the maximum expected power of the reactor you're using (in GW or MW) by that number, and that's how much actual electricity you'll generate. So if your nuclear reactor says it produces 100 MW total output and your efficiency is currently 40%(0.4), expect less than 40 MW of actual power. I say expect less because generators perform worse as temperature rises, and it very quickly will while it generates electricity. Upgrades help a lot though. And as I mentioned in the other post, the charged particle converter is much better since it's efficiency doesn't drop with temperature increases, but those charged particles are harder to get. The moral of the story is that if you are using the normal generator for powering your engines, bring enough radiators to offset the at least some of the heat. For the MIC Fusion Rocket, something like 4 medium graphite radiators should be okay. If the generator starts producing less power than you need for maximum thrust with your fusion rocket, the rocket will automatically throttle itself down, so it'll still work, just less effectively. I'd say a general rule of thumb is that you want at least twice as much expected power from your generator than what you need for the rocket's fusion maintenance. Maybe 3x as much at low tech levels if you want be to be sure that you can run the engine at max thrust near constantly. Later on you can use the colliding beam fusion reactor which uses charged particles to make highly efficient electrical power. It's all in one so you don't need to attach the converter. It starts off large in the VAB, but upgrades will allow you to shrink it down. For mid-late game tech tree, this is one of the best ways to get easy, carefree power. So if you want 30MW of power and you currently have 30% efficiency, then a reactor which makes 300 mw will have a max electrical output of 100mw/mjoules (300 x 0.3), and assuming heat drops the efficiency of the generator down to 11%, you'd still have 33MW of electrical power. So take your MIC Fusion Rocket, include your choice of reactor/generator for power, 4 graphite radiators and a big tank of lithium. That's enough to shove a 2.5 command pod, a science module, a lander and some other crap to just about anywhere in the system. Also don't forget that you can time warp with many of the engines in KSPI to offset dealing with obnoxiously low thrust.

Yeah, I replied and my comment got deleted.. for whatever reason. If you still need it I can repeat what I said in a private message.

To start off it'd likely be easiest to use one of the pre-made engines rather than using the reactors and nozzles. You could aim for the Timerwind for example, which is a powerful rocket engine. If you want highly efficient dv and don't mind mediocre thrust, you could take a look at the 'Lightbulb' engine or the Open Cycle Gas Core Engine. For radiators you actually don't need to worry overly much about getting the numbers green in the VAB. Those numbers assume 100% uptime on the engine/reactor. Most of the engines will generate little heat while idle, so the number of radiators needed is minimal. Some reactors do have minimum throttles though, like the molten salt reactor which is 30% iirc. Most of the fusion engines and reactors will run cool until you start thrusting. That said, unlocking more nodes in the thermal management branch will passively improve all your graphite radiators by a significant margin. By the time you get to the last 2 in the line, even small numbers of radiators will give you green in the VAB, excepting the most aggressively hot reactor and electric engine setups. So, if you want to make your life easier with heat, just plonking down some science on the next node of the branch will be a benefit. If you still wanna try a reactor/nozzle combo, you could try something simple to start with. Take a pebble bed(which is the reactor equivalent to the timberwind) and stick a nozzle on it. 4 medium extendable graphite radiators should be plenty for that set up, though the pebble bed does get worse as it heats up, which is I believe unique to that reactor, but again it only becomes a problem if you're thrusting constantly or attach a generator to it that's being constantly used. Anyway, supply it with whatever kind of fuel you can. Some reactors and nozzles can't use certain fuel types, but I think the pebble bed and krusader can use liquid fuel. If not, just play around with the 'next propellant' button til you land on sometime good. For starting out, I'd recommend looking for a fuel which is dense (unlike hydrogen, which needs huge tanks to get decent delta v), while still being reasonably good isp. If you look at the window while switching fuels you'll see numbers for expected isp and thrust. For isp, anything above 500 is decent for nuclear reactors. The Open Cycle Gas Core reactor will have much better isp but weaker thrusts than the pebble bed, generally. To start out, I'd avoid electric engines. They require more set up and unlike the other reactor and nozzle combos, they will murder you with heat and are very fussy to get working with good thrust. The electric engines are more for super efficient(high isp) propulsion, and generally suffer for thrust. In fact, that's a general maxim for most of the tech tree. Things with great ISP tend to suffer for thrust and vice versa. As a final note, attaching generators to reactors to make electricity will produce a lot of heat if that electricity is being used. Thermal generators are probably the worst offender since their efficiency plummets as waste heat accumulates (and it will no matter how many radiators you stuff onto the ship). Charged Particle converter is unquestionably superior in basically every way, but is harder to use because.. you need charged particles rather than thermal energy, which only comes in abundance once you start getting fancy with fusion reactors and stuff.

Hey, I've had an issue with power relays. Specifically, I have a reactor out in Kerbin synchronous orbit with an attached laser generator and a medium sized dish. The laser is generating in the vacuum UV. I also tested far UV and Red Light spectrums. Anyway the problem is that I later launched a double pivoted light mirror to relay the beam. The description of it says it works in 'the uv spectrum' so I assume the three UV beams I tried would work? Well, I couldn't seem to get it to actually relay the beam. I did make sure to click 'relay' on the light mirror for that craft before switching away from it. As a note, direct LoS with the reactor does work, it's only the relay that I'm having trouble with. I launched a craft with an inline thermal receiver which was in LoS to the relay but not the reactor (the relay has clear LoS to the reactor) but there was no incoming power. In the network info panel it does show both reactors in the relay network though. I took a screenshot but I couldn't get the forum to inline it, so here's a link: http://tinypic.com/r/2it546o/9 Am I misunderstanding how relays work, or how the light mirror works? Oh, also on a semi-related note, I downloaded the last 2 or 3 updates for KSPI last night and noticed that the maximum power output of several reactors was decreased... mostly (exclusively?) the fusion reactors, but I couldn't find anything in the balance change notes about it. Was that an intended change? The max upgraded power output of the stellarator for instance dropped from ~15GW to 10GW.

This seems like a cool idea. Although would that also include the AIM reactor? It also uses fusion technologies... Perhaps the upgrade for the AIM reactor could be inside the fusion techs so that you need to unlock fusion research to get the full benefit of the AIM?

@FreeThinker Yep! That is exactly what my current tech tree looks like. All the techs at the top are the ones that used to be in the lower nuclear propulsion branch and the experimental power branch at the top is missing all it's old techs.. so yeah sounds like they got mixed up. Whoops.

@FreeThinker I'm having issues with missing reactors even in a new career mode. The missing techs are listed in my above post. @ss8913 Could it be due to engine spooling? A lot of the engines in KSPI have a spool-up time. If you have Kerbal Engineer installed you can easily see the effect of this as the listed TWR and Dv values for a given engine fluctuate as the engine spools up to full/partial throttle. In fact, a lot of the KSPI engines report anomalous data to Kerbal Engineer so I would expect other mods would have trouble dealing with KSPI's engines unless they were specifically coded to account for the oddities in how they function relative to stock engines.

Not sure if it's a mod conflict or what, but on career mode there are certain techs missing now: Open Cycle Gas Core Reactor is missing along with its upgrades. All upgrades for the Pebble Bed Reactor are missing(but the reactor is still there). Can't find the Dusty Plasma Reactor either. If I start a sandbox game all of those reactors and their upgrades are unlocked and accessible, it's only affecting the tech tree presumably. I do have the newest version of community tech tree along with empty tech node mod(I tried disabling the latter to see if it would do anything and it didn't). My version of KSPI is 1.71.

AH. So you have an extension for KSPI-E that scales back the power output/requirements specifically if Near Future is installed. I didn't notice that. Thanks for clearing things up for me.

Right sorry, getting my terminologies mixed up I think(Or maybe I don't understand what im doing lol). In the VAB right-click menu its listed as: Active Raw Power: ####MJ This number goes up with upgrades and as far as I could tell it affects max possible thermal power/thrust potential. Here, I loaded up Near Future Electrical again to show you what it looks like. This time instead of 3 GW it turned to 2MJ: Which is.. quite the downgrade. I switched to the launch pad and the reactor control window also shows reactor output as 2MJ. When I removed Near Future Electrical it goes back to normal again, showing 1000MJ.

Hey! I've been loving the mod after returning to KSP for 1.1.3. I do have a few notes though. In prior versions(the one just before this in fact) it seems like the various reactors had multiple nodes on the tech tree in which their upgrades appeared to let you know that reactor has improved. The Molten Salt Reactor in particular had quite a few, up to Mark 4 I think? Is it just me or are those missing in the new version? They still get upgraded as you unlock various nuclear-line techs though, same goes for the radiators too. Is this an oversight or intended? Fortunately you did list all the upgrades on the front page which I can reference. Another thing was that the right-click fuel switch menu in the VAB doesn't reflect any change in Power/Core Temp when swapping between UF4 and Thorium fuels with the Molten Salt Reactor. When you get on the launch pad the reactor control window does show the correct info however, so it still works fine. Last thing, I've been seeing weird anomalies with reactor output when Near Future Mods is installed. My Molten Salt Reactor shows 3GW! i had the whole suite of mods, but it didn't seem to be any specific one. I tried adding them one at a time and ones I tried all did it. Great mod, thanks for your hard work.

Nice work Taniwha! It'll be great when you do get the mod running. I've got MKS bases ripe for EPL. Programming is always easier when you aren't tired, though. : p