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OldSedan

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Posts posted by OldSedan

  1. On 7/14/2021 at 11:17 AM, RoverDude said:

    Transport credit bottlenecks are not too surprising - consider that you're building the infrastructure for in-orbit refueling and effectively infinite fuel.  It's worth it though.

    I've got the infrastructure more built out and oh my goodness, it is so very worth it. Thanks a million!

  2. I’m trying to build out some beginning WOLF infrastructure on the prerelease. I’m feeling bottlenecked by transport credits so just wanted to check - the fuel production ratio I’m seeing is 5 ore/water : 2 fuel per refinery module, meaning 5 refineries and 2.5 bulk extractors for 1 set of 10 transport credits. Yeah?

    Reason I’m asking is that now that I’m trying to set up transport credit production in orbit to expand out from there I’m finding that I need really quite a bunch of stuff shipped up - materials for the transport credits themselves plus 7 cargo slots of food, o2 and water. It ends up creating a pretty hefty TC cost on the ground just to push that all up to LKO. Not complaining, this is end game stuff and I figure once I’ve got the basics in orbit I can start building out infrastructure on Minmus so it’ll feel easier; I just have the vague sense I’m doing something more onerous than intended.

  3. On 6/19/2021 at 4:21 PM, Nertea said:

    I can't reproduce this. I put a GARNET reactor on the pad and set its manual power level to 100%. At full timewarp observed a 0.14 fuel consumption rate. Turning the power level to 25% I observed a 0.03 consumption rate. This looks fine to me. 

     

     

    You’re right - the displayed core life doesn’t change but the fuel consumption is appropriate. Sorry!

  4. 8 hours ago, Nyarlathotep- said:

    The fuel being lighter strikes me as an obvious reason to use the fusion engine over fission.

    Yeah that’s what I would have expected since nuclear engines generally have more thrust and worse fuel efficiency, but the Asimov has an ISP of 45000 even on high thrust mode while the Discovery only gets you 17900 ISP on its high efficiency mode. I just looked again and the heat output is significantly more with the Asimov so I suppose you suffer a bit in radiator mass but I dunno man seems like a pretty easy choice. That said it’s the top tier nuclear engine vs only the second tier fusion engine so I guess it’s nice to get some benefit for spending the extra science on what would otherwise be a dead end.

  5. First time playing through the mod and I have a balance question: the Discovery fusion engine and Asimov fission fragment engine are at the same tech level (on CTT). They have similar masses and heat production. The Asimov produces more thrust at roughly three times the ISP. Is there a reason to go with the fusion engine that I’m missing? Is it a refuelability thing?

  6. Waste heat seems to dissipate at a constant rate that isn't affected by time warp. I've got a craft with a reactor for power and an open core engine; waste heat accumulates during a burn and then begins to dissipate via radiators while the engine is idle. My core temperature and waste heat doesn't dissipate any faster (in real time) when I increase time warp - the displayed rate of waste heat decrease does scale with time warp but so does the waste heat pool for my vessel so the proportional change is the same. I understand that waste heat is a little wonky because of the underlying stock heat system, but does this mean I need to twiddle my thumbs with my vessel loaded at 1x time warp to let my radiators work every time I burn?

  7. 1 hour ago, FreeThinker said:

    No, it should automaticly prioritize power production over consumption, so this should not happen. I recommend you read

     

    Am I supposed to have both the magnetic nozzle and the electrical converter on the same reactor? Wouldn’t that pull power away from the nozzle?

     

    edit: the tutorial is very useful but the images are not loading

  8. 13 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

    Please make sure you add sufficient amount of radiators and your reactor is connected to a compatible power generator or has an integrated power genrator. If it doesn't work,  please post a screendump so I can advice you what to do.

    I think I did not have enough power on board to support both the fusion reactor powering the magnetic nozzle and the nozzle itself. I switched to a plasma nozzle and it's working very well. I'm not able to timewarp, however - I get an in game error message that the propellant is depleted despite full tanks. I think it's a bug, I'll keep testing.

    Where can I find information on the power usage and supply from different reactors and consumers? I'm not sure how to know how much power the magnetic nozzle needs.

  9. I'm trying to set up fusion reactors for propulsion and find myself quite confused. From what I can piece together, a fusion reactor requires electric power either from an attached generator or a separate reactor on the vessel to sustain the fusion reaction. How do I know how much power this requires?

    For propulsion, each reactor has a set of either thermal, plasma, or magnetic nozzle that it is compatible with. Thrust and ISP vary with the fusion fuel set in the reactor interface as well as the fuel specified by the nozzle. Fusion reactor and engine nozzle should be the same size for efficiency.

    This all seems to work in the VAB, although kerbal engineer can't seem to handle the magnetic nozzle; it gives 0 ISP. When I attempt to launch however the fusion reactor appears inactive and I don't see an option to start it. Is there a button to press to initiate the fusion reaction or does it just happen passively when enough power is available on the vessel to sustain the reaction?

  10. 3 hours ago, OOM said:

    Heat will still be. The question is, did your nuclear plane explode from waste heat?

    For so much I know a nuclear ramjet as well as NERVA (unlike nuclear reactors for the production of electricity and thermonuclear engines) do not need a "green" 100% cooling. They mainly use regenerative cooling with fuel (hydrogen as NERVA and air as nuclear ramjet) in combination with a small number of radiators. If you use conventional radiators to cool a nuclear ramjet, this is a mistake, they are not effective in the atmosphere and should be replaced with special air heat exchangers. Use a small number of radiators only in the upper atmosphere to remove heat. For the rest, rely on regenerative cooling and heat exchangers.

    Thanks! Sounds like some waste heat isn’t necessarily a problem? What prevents it from continuing to accumulate? I haven’t had an issue so far but I worry that over an interplanetary mission waste heat would continue to build up and explode my craft. Do radiators become more effective at higher levels of waste heat?

  11. Im new to the mod and having a little trouble understanding waste heat. I’ve built a couple craft using the first two nuclear engines, with enough radiators to cover the heat output according to the heat management window in the VAB. My vessel still generates waste heat after the engine is activated, even if the engine and generator are later shut down. Am I missing something?

  12. 55 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

    Its true that in generat you need a large vessel for the high deltaV mission but you could also use a totaly different route using beamed beamed power.

    The most extreme version would be to use use PhotonSail, which when small enough can send you to the stars at a decent percentage of the speed of light

    Alternatively you could build Solar/Beamed electric propulsion, ehich would have a huge power to mass ratio using power transmitted from the surface of Kerbin.

     

    Wow, that's bonkers! Is that propelled using a laser from a ground based installation?

    So let's say I wanted to propel a small science lander for example at Duna. Would the smart move be to send out a large solar beamed power provider and use that to power a small craft with either an ion/plasma engine using beamed power converted to MW or a thermal nozzle with beamed power converted to heat energy? Does solar cut it or would I need reactors orbiting?

  13. Howdy,

    I just switched from KSP 1.7.3 to 1.8.1 and I'm no longer able to change the fuel types for the stock tanks; they're locked to LFO. Specifically I can't switch to liquid fuel for use with nuclear engines which is hobbling. I also have global construction and near future installed which might cause a conflict - is this a known issue? Is there something i'm missing? Thanks!

  14. On 11/29/2017 at 7:20 AM, Nertea said:

    So in every test that I have done, in isolation the reactors perform exactly as they should. Ignoring the debug values and going by adding up core transfer numbers, any combinations of reactors work just fine.

    I have to conclude that (again) there's a critical bug in stock to work around. Here's some testing of my own.

    This base has enough radiators deployed to run the reactor at full power (800 kW) plus 4 drills at regular power or 2 drills at max power (200kW)

    1) The reactor is enabled, nothing is enabled. Perfect stability, perfect radUsage (800kW expected, 799.98 kW used)
    2) A single drill is enabled (+50kW, up to +100kW). The reactor immediately overheats and and its radUsage has dropped by ~175 kW, suggesting a lack of radiators on the base
    3) 4 more small radiators are deployed, + 200 kW radiation capacity. The overheat slows, but radUsage is still 738 so the reactor will overheat. 
    4) I can stabilize the reactor by increasing the capacity by another 50 kW. So that one drill is using something like 350 kW of cooling.

    By this we can conclude that any stock BaseConverter module is somehow requesting far, far more radiator capacity than it needs, even though the debug does not show it. This makes absolutely no sense. 

    Hey, sorry to bother you; I finally upgraded to 1.3.1 and ran smack into this issue with some off-world mining bases I'd set up with MKS and NF parts. I understand it's being worked on and I appreciate all your hard work! For the moment could you suggest any workaround? Would rolling back to an earlier version of NFE avoid this bug? Thanks!

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