samooo2

You have two options: a) install one or more heat exchangers. Not sure if they're from Interstellar or one of the recommended mods, maybe Heat Control. They act like radiators with almost zero heat dissipation but very high heat capacity, so you can keep the engine running for longer. b) install a pre-cooler. This reduces the heat generated by all air-breathing engines. Perhaps even combine a) and b), if it's not enough.

I get this too. Pebble bed is supposed to be entirely thermal, and I know it used to be. But now 6/7 of its output is in charged particles, making it almost useless.

Can you show the transmitter info as well? Based on just this image it looks like the reactor is running on idle since you're barely using any power.

It's been split into multiple different nozzles. Krusader for atmospheric launches, aerospike for...I guess general use? And then Wyvern, Pelican and one more turbojet, those are air-breathing. Also, they all have some fuel limitations now. Something about preventing chemical reactions between the propellant and the engine itself.

I'm not far enough in yet to use that generator, but if you just need solid hydrogen you can get that in any of the cryogenic storage tanks. By default they store something else but just rightclick them in VAB and it gives you like 20 options.

Even if you do calculate by hand it won't necessarily be accurate, since some thermal engines change ISP based on throttle or wasteheat level.

Thanks for responding. But I only added the transducer later, for comparison. Sorry, I should've been more clear. I can reproduce the problem even with just the thermal receiver, no other receivers on the ship or on others. Here is a minimal example: just a probe core, thermal receiver, thermal engine and two decouplers. You can see the ship is getting less than 0.5% power initially, and then jumps to full once I throw the decouplers away. Logfile: https://pastebin.com/wh0ZPMN8 It's not really a problem now that I have a workaround, it's just a ...weird mystery.

I'm getting some weird behavior with beamed power. I'm sitting right next to the transmitter, spotsize is tiny, facing is almost 100% and my thermal receiver is only getting about 0.5% of transmitted power. When I stick a microwave transducer on the same ship that one can receive the proper amount. Am I missing something obvious? Didn't have this problem with earlier versions, and I checked the videos above they don't show it either. My fisrt thought was a mod conflict, but the whole beamed power thing is exclusive to KSPI-E so I don't see how... EDIT: Seems to go away once I decouple two stages, ragardless of where they are mounted or what's in them. So I just carry two empty decouplers for every rocket launch, as a workaround.

Seems like the old version works fine with Kopernicus 1.8.1. Did seriously no one try, or am I going to run into problems later on?

edit: deleted

Too much stuff to quote, but basically: Maximum ISP is only based on fuel type and core temperature. That huge list of formulas. Afaik the various nozzle types should only affect which propellants you can use, nozzle mass, thrust vectoring, atmospheric performance etc. Minimum ISP is very weird. Each nozzle loses a set amount of thrust in-atmosphere, base on it's size and type. Like, say -60kN flat. It's the "treshold" value you see when you rightclick a nozzle in amospheric flight. So I guess you could calculate minimum ISP from your thrust at maximum ISP and sea-level treshold force, whatever that is. Also keep in mind some reactors (like the PebbleBed in your example) change their core temperature in-flight.

You're looking for LiquidHelium, the regular one. Helium3 is super rare fusion fuel, would be kind of a waste to use it for cooling telescopes...

Did you do it correctly? I'm sure the process was documented...somewhere, it's unintuitive. You have to hit "shutdown" from the reactor control window. Reactor status should change to "decay heating", where it produces only 10% power (and you can't use any of it, for some reason) and this slowly decays down to 0% over several days. Then the status chages to "Idle" or something like that. Now go EVA and hit refuel, here you need to have enough fuel to fill up the reactor completely and enough storage for actinides/depleted fuel which you'll be taking out. Finally hit restart from EVA.

See if it helps if you save and load the game when this happens. A similar problem used to occur when you docked or undocked a ship with a nuclear reactor, and this was a workaround. Might be worth a try. As for reactivating nuclear reactors, you need to wait for a few days (so it's status in reactor control goes from "decay heating" to "offline") and then reactivate it from EVA. There's no way to reactivate without live crew.

If I print an OSE storage container on-site, is there any way to switch its storage from the default Materialkits? Like if I forgot to bring a RareMetals box with me.

If you're talking about engine temperature and not wasteheat (that is, it tends to explode) I find that scaling up the engine a little usually solves the problem. Perhaps its heat generation doesn't tweakscale as well as its heat capacity/dissipation. Also I think it might be generating more heat when running at low power, far less that its receive maximum. But I need to test this some more.

What is this launch abomination . Anyway, you cannot beam power within a single vessel, looks like the system wasn't designed for it. Ablative nozzle is pretty much impossible to use as a first stage because the beam needs to come from directly below. And it also tends to lose reception once you start the gravity turn... Low power is my first guess, it that's the case it should also show some completely wierd value for ISP, like 14.8 or 100000 and not use any fuel. In-atmosphere thermal engines get a flat thrust penalty (like -100KN) which can put their actual thrust at 0 if they're not strong enough. (Not sure if this was intended or not.) For example: when scaled to 1.25 the nozzle can receive a maximum of 750MW, which is not enough to get any thrust at all while on Kerbin below 3KM. Larger scale versions work better, even at sea level, but they take way more power. If it's something else, maybe post a screenshot of the ship in that state?

Far as I can tell the ablative nozzle has a very tight receive angle, as the description states the beam has to be coming from directly below. As for the low thrust, you need far more power in the beam to get maximum thrust out of it. I'm guessing 500+ MW, but the VAB tooltip should have an exact number.

Don't the nozzles have to be attached directly onto the reactor? The reactors I've seen up till now only have two attachment points, and one of them likely connects to the rest of the ship.

Well for example the science junior module and surface scanner get more expensive as you make them smaller, so basically you pay for miniaturization. If that's doable it may even allow miniaturization for some of the bulky parts like Tokamak or the huge beam receivers, without breaking game balance.

The wiki is talking about WasteHeat, that is this mod's version of heat. If it gets too high it shuts down generators and beam receivers, that's all. There's also the stock heat mechanic generated by drills, ISRU and some engines. If it gets too high it blows things up. This is the one giving you trouble. First off it works really strange with TweakScale. For example if you scale the stock asteroid drill down to half size it actually produces over 4x more heat than the regular sized one. So as a general rule don't scale down stuff that uses stock heat. Secondly one of the more recent KSP updates changed the heat mechanic and some parts are weird now. Like the pulsed fission drive blows up after about 30sec of running full thrust, unless you have it's own weight in radiators. Even though it requires barely any WasteHeat dissipation.

I have a network setup with "Diode Laser Array" set to "long infrared", transmitted with "Multi Bandwidth Dish Transceiver", relayed with "Double Pivoted Infrared Mirror" and received with "Inline Thermal Receiver Mk1". Running on the newest version 1.19.11. Everything works as expected. Maybe one of the parts you picked is broken, or you didn't enable relay mode? Just guessing here...

Nice, thanks!

Afaik the priority system only determines which reactor is utilized first, so you can have the resource-intensive ones sitting on idle when you only need a bit of power. Engines auto-throttle to match reactor output so you shouldn't have any problems there, and beam transmitters have a "power control" slider. Only problem is the "power control" for ISRU doesn't work so they always drain their full power requirement, even if not producing anything due to lack of input resource or full storage. But that's always been this way so just plan for it... Convection based cooling does work but only if the craft is moving (within an atmosphere), and its efficiency is based on speed. I really hope this is a bug, used to work all the time. All of my microwave launch generators are useless now.

Looks like the TORY ramjet built-in air intake is messed up somehow. It's always showing intake exposure 0 and is not getting any air by itself.