Jestertrek

@FreeThinker, thanks for helping me with my questions! I'm really enjoying the mod despite all of them. 90% of the stuff I'm doing works just fine; it's just figuring out that last 10% that's giving me the shakes. EDIT: The file I edited was /Kerbal Space Program/Game Data/WarpPlugin/Parts/Microwave/phasedArray1/deployablePhasedArray.cfg The fix doesn't seem to have worked, though. It gave me an "Activate Relay" blue button on my relay satellites. I pushed them and it updated the dialogs to "Satellites Connected: 0/2, Relays Connected 0/2" but nothing seems to be working. Here's the current situation: The receiving station (the lander I posted the picture of a few posts ago) is on the north pole of the Mun. It's being relayed communications from a pair of communications relays in highly inclined orbits. My power station (circled in red) is in a ~600km equatorial Munar orbit. I moved one relay into a ~500km polar Munar orbit (circled in yellow). As you can see, it's right over the lander. But the lander isn't seeing the relay. When I select "Power Receiver Interface" on both the relay and the lander, there are no entries. And here are the dialog boxes for each transceiver, station on the left, relay in the middle, receiver on the right. I know 380 MW is kind of piddly but I only need a little over 20 MW at the lander (to run an ISRU Electrolyzer and a Universal Drill). Again, this whole setup works fine when the station is in direct line of sight. I've selected "Activate Transmitter" on the station and "Activate Receiver" on the lander. The relay satellite has two options: "Link Receiver for Relay" and "Activate Relay". I've tried them separately, then both together (three combinations: one, the other, then both). No joy. Is there another part I should use instead? I was just using this setup to hit all the Mun biomes before moving on to something more advanced.

Could someone post a picture of a working phased array/microwave-based beamed power relay satellite? Does such a satellite require both a receiving phased array antenna and a relay phased array antenna? The information I've seen (particularly here) implies the answer is "no", one phased array should be able to do both at the same time but I'm not sure (mechanically) how it works. What I've tried is launching my satellites, deploying the phased array antenna, and selecting "Link Receiver for Relay". The implication is that these should work just like communications relay satellites and don't need their own reactors/generators, right? In practice, they don't seem to work. Even when a relay has a clear line of sight to a beamed power station with reactors/generators and another deployable phased array transceiver, it doesn't seem to relay anything and it's never visible to a receiving phased array transceiver. My basic transmitter station is two Pebble Bed Reactors, a Thermal Electric Generator, a bunch of radiators, and a Phased Array Transceiver (Deployable) where I have selected "Activate Transmitter". My (attempted) relay satellites (there are two) are a battery bank, a capacitor bank, a couple of small radiators, a couple of solar arrays, and a Phased Array Transceiver (Deployable) for which I have selected "Link Receiver for Relay". Once I do this, when I go back to my transmitter station, it reports "Satellites Connected: 0/2, Relays Connected 0/0". For the record, the station works fine when it is in line of sight to a receiver wanting beamed power. It just doesn't work when the station itself is out of line of sight but the relays *are* in line of sight. What am I doing wrong? Again, I apologize for all of these basic questions. If there's a tutorial I should be looking at, please let me know. Most tutorials I've found are from previous versions of the mod and no longer seem accurate. Thanks!

My final, 100% working, near-100% sustainable Mun explorer: Has enough consumables to keep a Scientist busy on the Mun for up to a year, all the Mun-useful science instruments, and enough delta-v to land anywhere on the Mun, refuel, take off and go anywhere else on the Mun. Requires an orbital Mun beamed power station to run the ISRU Electrolyzer and an orbital Mun communications relay or two to control it remotely.

@FreeThinker, @Mine_Turtle, thanks very much for all the suggestions! I'll give them a try. EDIT: Aheh. Never mind the question below. I just looked a little further in the tech tree and found the Specialized Fuel Storage node. Apparently, I'm supposed to mate a Tokamak reactor with one of the Pressurized Gas Tanks. One follow-up question: is it normal for the Tokamak to run through all of its base fuel so fast? As I said, it goes through 100 units of Deuterium in seven or eight hours and it doesn't seem to matter what is plugged into the reactor (or indeed, if anything is). Even if I dial it down to 10% power, isn't that going to mean only 80 hours of power? Are Tokamaks completely useless for beamed power networks for this reason or is there something else that I'm missing?

First, @FreeThinker, thanks for your help with my use of the Aluminum Hybrid Rocket. After much mucking about, I was able to get a version working using a combination of the rocket, the ISRU Electrolyzer, and the ISRU Refrigerator. I now have another question. I've finally unlocked fusion reactors and the Vista engine so I decided to play around with them with a quick and dirty Mun lander. I got them to work... ...but as you can see, the Tokamak reactor has burned through virtually all of its fuel in seven hours(!) and I can't figure out why. (In the screenshot, I had just shut down the reactor and generator to let things cool down which is why MJ shows zero.) I've been playing around with different variations of this setup and it always works the same. In many cases, the Tokamak burns through all of its D-T before I even reach the Mun! Having the Vista active/inactive doesn't seem to make any difference. Even if I have the Vista deactivated and only use the reactor to keep MJ and electricity topped off, it burns through its fuel at 0.01/s or so. If it's not clear, the stack from bottom to top is Vista -> Tokamak -> Charged Particle Generator (and medium radiators) -> Remote Guidance Unit -> Lander cabin mk2 -> capacitor -> batteries -> docking port. Both the Vista and Tokamak are in default D-T mode. Sorry to ask these basic questions but all of the tutorials I've been able to find seem to be from a time when this mod worked very differently. Are there any more modern tutorials I should be looking at?

Thanks for your reply! And that explains the problem: I'm carrying the wrong part entirely. I'm carrying an ISRU Processor when I apparently should have brought an ISRU Electrolyzer.

A little help on this question? @FreeThinker? Anyone else? There doesn't seem to be any parts that can process Alumina any more.

Good news! I got the spudomene mining spacecraft working: It's even drawing the power it needs to run the drill from my beamed power network, so bonus. Bad news! This crew is stranded on the Mun because I landed on a location with 0% spudomene. Lots of alumina, though. In related news, the 4435 survey scanner is set up to scan for alumina, not spudomene. But I can't find a part that does anything with alumina.

I'm having some problems combining the ISRU with the Aluminum Hybrid Rocket. Somewhere along the way, the appropriate ISRU option for this rocket seems to have been changed from "Aluminum Electrolysis" (listed in the first post of this thread) to "Spudomene Processing". Spudomene processing produces (among other things) Aluminum and Liquid Oxygen from Spudomene. Fair enough. But places on the Mun that I've visited seem to be 2% or so Spudomene and 45% Alumina, which renders the ISRU/Aluminum Hybrid Rocket combination kind of pointless. It's taking forever to pull in enough Spudomene to run the ISRU. Is this an oversight in the composition of the Mun with the change to the ISRU, or is there an option in the ISRU to bring back Aluminum Electrolysis that I'm missing? TIA!

OK, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything. I'll wait patiently. What you have so far is really nifty!

Probably the easiest question in the world, but I'm having a hard time figuring it out: what parts do you use and how do you use them to strut two parts of the same spacecraft together (to strengthen it once in orbit)? In the old KIS/KAS, you'd attach one KAS strut end point, attach another KAS strut end point to another part of the space craft, right click on one to link and carry the link to the other, done. The free and fixed telescopic joints seem to work more or less the same way with the joint socket, but can't be used to strengthen parts of the same spacecraft. Is this just not implemented yet? Or am I missing something obvious? I've tried the EAS-4 strut and can attach it, but can't figure out how to initiate a link with one. I'm on KSP 1.21, KAS 1.0/0.71, KIS 1.3.0. Thanks!

Hm. Yours must keep Kerbin's home star named as "Sun", then.

First, awesome mod! Just installed it today, but I'm really enjoying it. Immersion +10! Thumbs way up! But yeah, you were exactly dead right here. When you mix Scatterer with a Kopernicus install that adds additional stars, you definitely have to make this change before starting up KSP. If you don't, when you go to the KSC, Scatterer immediately sucks up 100% of available memory, then starts filling cache until the cache file hits 64GB at which point 64-bit KSP hard-crashes the system it's running on. You have until the cache file grows to that size to either quit back to the main menu or shut down KSP. But making this change to planetsList.cfg clears the problem right up. I encountered it with Kerbol Starsystem, another Kopernicus add-on. You might want to add a line to your first post making that clear. In Kerbol Starsystem, changing Scatterer's planetsList.cfg fourth line to: mainSunCelestialBodyName = Kerbol fixes it. Again, great mod! Thanks for working on it!

Thomas, new poster here and I want to say how amazing I think the work you do is. Don't let the haters get you down. There's tons of us out here that appreciate all you do but just aren't the most vocal about it. ;-)