ArmchairPhysicist

Strange bug, request assistance. On my current starship I’m building in orbit I’ve hit a wall. Any time I attach my reactor module, no matter how stable it ran on it’s own, it runs out of power and the fusion reactor dies. There’s nothing except life support and a few small cryo tanks using electricity, and nothing using mega joules. But the moment I dock the reactor to my ship I get spammed with the “Not enough power for stable reaction” warning and my plasma ratio drops like a rock. Any ideas on this? Is this a known bug? Ok I’m back with a possible reason but no solution. Even though I have enough radiators for a sun dive mission, if I end up in the shadow of a planet, my reactor dies. If I get into sunlight it starts up and glows merrily. My setup is an IXS MCFR with a pebble bed reactor as the spark plug. I’m paranoid about power outage so I pack extra. Not sure why the reactor goes down when in the shade, I would think it would work better in the shade. Either way I’m reporting it here.

Are there many anomalies in this pack?

Alright this has been bugging me and I must have answers. Ive installed kerbal engineer recently and have been playing around with different combinations of thrusters and fuel types to get an idea of what setups get me the best DV, the best thrust, and the smallest tank size. But one thing I’ve noticed again and again, hydrogen is awful. From the low tech thermal “nerva”, timber wind and closed cycle rockets all the way up to atillas vasmirs and MD plasma thrusters, hydrogen has awful d/v potential. The strange thing is that the low tech rockets are best with hydrogen, all other fuel types provide worse D/V. The Electric thrusters are wasted with hydrogen, and the Vista (although better than the rest) still needs a massive amount of hydrogen to have any appeal. By the time I’ve built the drive block for a Vista (fuel, heavy reactor, radiators) it ends up more expensive, less efficient, and larger than clustering MIFs, especially because MIFs don’t need a heavy reactor. I feel I’m missing something. Maybe I’m supposed to mine hydrogen from the moon? Maybe I’m expecting too much out of my rockets? Maybe I missed a fuel type that is the right one to use on the fission thermal rockets? Also, what’s the difference between the Charged particle direct generator and the magneto hydrodynamic electric generator?

I have a question, is it possible to use GPP secondary but still use Gael instead of kerbin? I love the setup that lets us have both solar systems, but I want to start from Gael and shoot for kerbin, not the other way around.

I’ve never been that lucky, if I take my eyes off the game, usually results in splattering a ship on a moon mountain. Can’t rescue a corpse......., And there’s todays feature request, a kerbalnaut graveyard/monument with procedural tombs. Killed kerbals are automatically inscribed in the monument. If you retrieve the body if it’s in one piece you get to bury it. Doing or not doing this affects your rep.

Update, repair mission went flawlessly, brand new upgrades will extend the mission for many more planets. And I nearly gave Mission Control a heart attack. My 620t 320 part mothership came into bop orbit way too low during the near science run after the lander got done sticking a flag on the Kraken. By close I mean 200 meters close to bops mountain. Any closer and I would have shaved my radiators off.

Ten points to Slytherin

Inspired by a near fatal mission failure (and the ongoing recovery support mission) I got to thinking about what problems other players have had and how the solved them. My current Kraken created disaster. Mission: Journey 2 A possibly one-way exploration mission built with the sole purpose of detailed investigation of other worlds. This knowledge will be used to bootstrap the Kerbal race up to a massive mission out to Ciro, a newly captured solar system orbiting very very far away from kerbol. Location: Joolian system Disaster: Kraken induced detonation of the only docking port inline with the motherships CoM. The motherships lander was returning from a Pol run with a bounty of science ready to be processed in the onboard lab. After some more than normal docking difficulty it was decided to abort the docking, back far off and try again. Disaster struck when the lander suddenly phased into the nose of the mothership (weird time warp problem). This obliterated the docking port as soon as matter remembered that it was violating the laws of physics and space-time prison is a bad place. Now the only lander was useless, the secret agenda of investigating the Bop signal can not be completed, and a 9 million funds expedition can only do half its planned work. Great. Glad I packed 60 years worth of snacks for the very bored 6 kerbal crew. Back at KSC the Engineering department found a solution, build another lander with a docking port that fits the backup resupply port on Journey 2 (yes I planned on miscalculating snack of UraniumNitride stores). Time to send this new lander, an upgraded science lab built to find the Kraken that hates me, and a fusion rocket to send it all the way out to Jool. The Mission must continue. TLDR I buggered up my mission, got to send another out to fix it. Tell me about your most awesome/stressful/expensive planned or unplanned missions.

The reason I ask is because on my last save (this is an extreme project) I built the SuperSpaceNuka station. This mofo sat in KSO above the KSC and used a Quantum reactor and 4 Akulas to pump pour 76 GWs of ultraviolet beamed goodness. The downside was that I had 8 400% large winged radiators, 8 200% ones, and 16 100% ones. Darn thing still melted faster than Three miles islands core when I fired up the far ultraviolet transmitter. I figured I was overkilling it with the SuperSpaceNuka, but still that much radiators spam should have fixed my meltdown, at the very least my part count needs help if realistic radiators numbers can’t be achieved.

I have a question, are there any plans to add some form of active heat management for late game craft? By this I mean a cryogenic cooling facility to help cool the high end fusion reactors and drives. I’ve found that for high energy reactors to be useful, even with beamed power, radiators simply can’t keep up in space without using an unreasonable amount of tweak scales radiators.

Oh awesome. Maybe the fission engine can be a lower tech analog to the z-pinch. Potential downsides being very expensive fuel and high mass? No matter what your idea ends up being, I look forward to checking it out. Your mod is still one of my favorites. Keep up the great work man!

These do seem similar, I suppose original ideas are impossible. However (I could be misreading the NSWR’s method of operation) the goal of my rocket seems to be a hybrid of the NSWR and project Orion. NSWR seems to simply use supercritical fission mass as a propellant. I’m envisioning a continuous atomic detonation being formed by the ejected and compressed fission fuel.

I had an idea today and in the short time since I thought of it I’ve become obsessed and must share it. Supercritical liquid/gas fission rocket. I shall expand on my idea. This rocket is fueled by subcritical powdered fission fuel, most likely plutonium, stored in neutron absorbing fuel tanks. These tanks feed into a heating chamber(also neutron absorbing) where the still subcritical powder is melted into a fluid or a gas, and then pumped out of the device. Once out of the device and potentially on the other side of a shielding apparatus, the fuel goes supercritical due to a combination of a lack of moderation and violent compression of the fuel by a magnetic field. The resulting continuous atomic explosion out the the business end of the rocket will drive glowing kerbals to the stars and beyond,. Im sure there are numerous issues with my idea of nuclear physics with this drive, however I figured I would share it anyway,

I hope to not come across as impatient or such, I simply wish to know if this is coming. Are there plans in the works for KSPI to be made compatible with 1.4? I was caught off guard with the surprise release and I can’t revert to good old 1.3.1.

I’m going to start off by saying that this mission is not possible stock. You need extraplanetary launchpads, the K&K base’s mod, kspi and some config tweaks to pull this off. That being said this mission was too awesome to not share. On my current career save I’m not very efficient with my funds. All of my spacecraft are large, expensive, and offer powered by unreasonable amounts of xenon. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. However playing like this gets very expensive, and the contracts system couldn’t compensate for my xenon habit. This lead me to investigate setting up xenon Isru support. While my original purpose for mining xenon out of magic moon ore was initially to reduce the cost of ion probes, it soon turned into something much more sinister and ludicrous. I remembered that the game pays you for all the fuel you recover on kerbin. Next thing I knew I was flying an abomination of a rocket to Minmus. 5m core with 4x3.75m strap ons, Carrying a literal stack of outpost prefabs all piled onto a nerv powered lander. Still not sure how I managed to get it into orbit, much less land the stack on minmus, maybe Jeb was piloting the drone from the Space center. The base setup consisted of 3 main parts, although I’ve since expanded. It has a mining core with isru, a workshop with engineers and enough snacks to keep them working for years to come, and a launchpad. Dubbed Xenon CO, this base works by mining xenon out of minmus’s lake, pumping it into a drone rocket containing an IFS pressurized gas tank. This drone, when full and fueled with Liquid fuel blasts off from Xenon CO, sets up a re entry trajectory with kerbin, and lands a tank of xenon back on the surface. Pilots get a bonus check based on how close they land the tank to the KSC. Pilots that bullseye the KSC get a rocket ride with Jeb. Currently I’ve already payed for the base with the xenon shipments, my model one tanker can net me anywhere from 200k funds to a whopping 500k if I land it near the SC. The moral of this story, capitalism of minmus = profit. Profit = bigger rockets. Bigger rockets = more science. Capitalism = science.

I shall tell you why multiplayer is a good and stupid idea. KSP let's you build rockets. Space launcher=icbm. KSP just turned into a missile defense simulator.

I apologize if this has been suggested already, but things get buried in the forums so finding them would be problematic. Many times while playing I've wished that all I needed to do to put a probe in orbit it to press the space bar. How cool would that be? For example, in the VAB you would have a simple scripting system accessible in your probe core that lets you pre define actions. Launch: Fire Mainsail. Burn time=Flameout> proceed to next action. Action Two: Jettison Stage(select parts to define stage). Wait(10 second). Rotate 45' east[or appropriate space terminology]. Fire engine. Burn time = 60 seconds. etc etc. Being able to have fully automated probe control would be awesome.

Sadly no, the oscillation is exactly that, it oscillates. If it gets high enough it will bounce a second time, this time in the correct direction, and then again and again and again until it decelerates enough to stop triggering the bug. And as I'm writing this I realized that it could be possible to perform an oscillation aero breaking maneuver. Theoretically you could hit the atmosphere at insane velocities to bounce back and forth in the atmosphere to kill that 10 km/s return velocity. The thermal shielding would be a problem. How to you protect a pod going that fast? Time to cheat, going to slingshot a pod around the mun and burn on the way back, going to set myself on a tower buzzing trajectory at 20 kms Need to see if it's possible to trigger the bug like that.

To begin with, I have no clue where to put this thread, it's not really a bug report that needs fixing, and it's not a call for help. So mods help me out. Im posting this because I made a discovery with regards to KSP physics. If I launch an object at ridiculous velocities within the atmosphere, the object will travel a certain distance before it reverses its trajectory and flies back to its starting point, almost as if it bounced off on the air. Related mods, BDARMORY, NK dynamics. As I normally do when I get bored in KSP, I revert to my go to physics game exercise, launch things at ridiculous velocities and or nuke something. Today I tried both. Enter the Thermonuclear space gun. My inspiration for this insane idea came fun accidentally detonations of warheads in orbit. One space plane of mine collided with its bomb mid orbit with indestructiblity cheats enabled, only for the ship to be catapulted into space like a bat out of hell. So I got to work. I put together a quick shell (really a single crew pod), mounted it on top of a nuclear testing tower, and dropped the bomb. As expected the pod flew upwards at a few thousand m/s, only to slingshot back into the launcher a second later. I'm not sure exactly why the atmosphere becomes a rubber band, but I suspect it's a side effect of an atmospheric drag calculation in the code where the drag becomes high enough to push the pod back to its origin. Im going to test later to see if I can bounce pods off of the atmosphere from orbit at high speeds. If I can get around the rubber-air bug, the applications of atomic space guns are very fun, but slamming into the runway to 3k m/s isn't good for a kerbals health.

Not sure if this was answered already, but I'll try anyway. I don't want to come across as insulting your intelligence, not my intent, but kerbstine engines are vacuum only. No kerbstine launchers. It also might be software, it can happen if the mod didn't download fully or norton gets trigger happy and kills a file (looking at you firespitter.dll). You might want to try wiping you mods and reinstalling. Dig around to make sure the dependency hell didn't kill you. Very nice, makes my Starship Two look silly.

My latest endeavor has been to build very large shuttles capable of putting anything short of other giant shuttles in orbit. I've gotten the craft design down, but the whole point of a shuttle is the high cost savings of reusablity. I can get to orbit, do stuff, and prepare for the return deorbit. My trouble comes in with figuring out when and where I should deorbit to land back at KSC. I almost always overshoot or come up short and land in the mountains. Any tips?

Are there any plans to incorporate antimatter rockets into KSPI? We have Thermal rockets, fusion rockets and antimatter power, but no annihilation rockets.

Good to know, time to get my aviation division working on the Starship program This mod is probably the best thing since KSPI

You're joking! Can I finally build nice looking space ships? Wooohoooo! Do I need to start a new career game? Or can I just use these parts in my current one?

Silly me, I completely forgot about beamed thermal power, I'll give it a try.