mbaryu

I've had success with a non-plane SSTO (though it could be converted to a plane easily enough): plasma nozzle + positron reactor + lots of positrons. I didn't bother with refueling, but the basic structure has enough lift to take all the hardware needed to refine fuel. To make it easier to handle in atmospheres I gave it some small LF tanks. For everything else, a giant H2 tank. I can see if I can dig up a craft file for it later. This is, however, fairly high tech, so not suitable to an early career build (I used it in mid career).

Perhaps you could block fuel usage I'm afraid not. I'm afraid the refuelling mechanic never took into account for more than one reactor. It's one aspect I want to address when I overhaul the nuclear salt reactor. In general, I would recommend using one nuclear reactor per vessel to prevent issues and it also offers mass bonuses as a single big reactor has a lower mass than multiple smaller reactors with the cumulative same capacity. The first time I encountered this was on a station I built to breed Tritium and beam power using four MSRs. The second time was on a spaceplane using 4 Lanter Engines. Since they were running on enriched Uranium, the onboard ISRU drained them while making UF4 and I was unable to refuel them. The second instance is more of a problem because using multiple nuclear engines on a vessel is pretty standard. I agree that in most circumstances using a single reactor is a better use of mass. I've noticed that the UF4 in tanks can't be used to refuel reactors. I've never figured out what's going on or if that's even intentional. At least for one of the other reactors you can only refuel it when it's fully shut down.

Hahah! Indeed. I wouldn't worry too much. If I'm reattaching IR parts in flight, I'm pretty much expecting explosions

This could happen quite easily with KAS/KIS. I'm curious how much IR would freak out if you completely detached something, then built it into some other vessel (but not enough to give it a try just at the moment :) ).

Oh cool, I thought I was doing something wrong and moved on to positrons + plasma.

Very Kerbal of you!

I haven't been able to reproduce this on a simpler craft and the one that had the failure was ridiculously complex, so I suspect something else was going on. It still points to a strange power distribution problem. I didn't see any evidence of geforce spiking (though who knows when exiting warp) and I'm pretty sure the heat sinks were much more than necessary. Certainly wasteheat wasn't near max.

@FreeThinker I was able to reproduce the problem with a similar ship in a totally different situation. The ship has 2 plasma nozzles with positron reactors and MHDs, and a QSR. The plasma nozzles worked fine until the ship crossed from Kerbin SoI to Kerbol SoI. After that I had to shut down the QSR to get the plasma nozzles to work.

Interesting. I see the rationale, though I think there are three problems with it: 1st, even a PBH wouldn't have a lot of impact on the atmosphere and PBHs are many orders of magnitude larger than what I suspect the Quantum Singularity Reactor is supposed to use (I assume based on the fact that it feeds in Hydrogen or Helium that it is an unstable size, which means fairly small). 2nd, if that were the reason, why could I then power it up inside the atmosphere? 3rd, The ship has a bunch of MHDs, one for each positron reactor, which haven't been turned off (this is how the ship was originally launched, after all). So something is wrong with the power feed to the plasma nozzles if that's the case. But it's definitely a weird problem.

Great, that makes sense, thanks! However there's still the problem of the example 3 which causes the plasma nozzle(s) to fail after entering the atmosphere. The bizarre workaround is to turn off the singularity reactor, then power it back up after entering the atmosphere (although at high altitude so there's still near 0-g acceleration).

Also the Quantum Singularity Reactor produces positrons. The rate of production of the free electron laser is so low that in career mode it took me less time to develop the more advanced tech (and faster production) than it took to recharge a single ship using the free electron laser. However the quantum singularity reactor is also massive and seems unable to connect to any nozzle to provide thrust (it says it can be hooked up to a magnetic nozzle, but the thrust produced is minuscule).

I'm currently puzzled by something I've been experiencing for a while. This seems to apply to plasma nozzles (when I replace the plasma nozzle with a krusader, the problem seems to go away). KSP 1.6.1, and the previous 2-3 releases of kspi, situation is vacuum. Game is career with the positron reactor fully upgraded. Ship design is a simple stack: mini molten salt reactor and thermal power plant, positron storage, probe core, large Lh2 tank with graphene radiators wrapped around it, positron rector, nozzle. With the plasma nozzle, the ship sometimes will operate properly, and I get a reasonable expected amount of thrust. However more often I get 0 thrust. The engine seems to pulse a tiny bit of thrust when I throttle up, but then immediately goes back to 0. Occasionally on more complex vessels I also get a small percentage of expected thrust (like 1%) which seems to very slowly ramp up (though not to 100%). As stated above, if I replace the plasma nozzle with the krusader, the craft works perfectly (albeit with lower ISP and higher anticipated and actual thrust). What is going on? What am I doing wrong? Edit: Craft file: https://gist.github.com/chris9871/c0648ff8c48e4cfc700cad2d76ab340c Edit 2: This design appears to work: https://gist.github.com/chris9871/a7445410fdc09bb042f4cea05da0fe8b Note that in the working design, I've removed the molten salt+ therm and replaced them with an mhd on top of the positron reactor. Edit 3: This design works except in a weird case: https://gist.github.com/chris9871/52934705a37fd646583ea7ab30a01e0f In this design, power up the black hole reactor, then quicksave and reload. _then_ enter the atmosphere (of kerbin). After entering the atmosphere, the nozzle stops producing thrust. Edit 4: PS On a side note, the triangle radiators on testr3 seem to have a noticeably lower weight to heat dissipation ratio than other head radiators. This doesn't seem like it was intentional, though I can't tell for sure.

I figured it was something like that. Not to worry, I've downgraded for now

Yes:

There's an interaction between KAS 1.2 and Extraplanetary Launchpads 6.5.1 that causes EL to break when selecting a craft in the UI (definitely including a craft that does not have KAS parts). I'm guessing it has to do with one or more of the deprecated parts. Reverting to KAS 1.1 solves the problem.

I just ran into a strange bug after upgrading KAS to 1.2 with EL 6.5.1 installed. I don't think I changed anything else and I don't see any (other?) corruption so far. When I 'Select Craft' and select any of my craft that worked in EL before, the EL UI goes out to lunch. I actually had it overlaying all the mechjeb windows over the EL UI at one point, but for the most part it's just blank with a green selectable dot.. The only thing I've been able to do to clear it up is to go back to an old save. Effectively this means that EL is busted. I'm going to try to downgrade from KAS 1.2 back to the previous version to see what happens. Edit: Reverting to KAS 1.1 solves the problem. KSP version 1.6.1. One of the tested craft had no EL or KAS parts. BTW, thanks for the great mod!

The one I always want to miniaturize is the black hole reactor. But I figure that's not miniaturizable due to our current view of the distant future tech's possibilities (since at that end of the tech tree, play balance isn't really much of an issue anymore).

I've seen this happen randomly from time to time. At first I thought it was my questionable piloting skills, or my questionable vector skills, but I've seen definite reversal of velocity vector in a few cases after crossing an SOI boundary. But getting this consistently is interesting. Has anyone else seen this?

It seems like since water is not compressible, but hydrogen and oxygen are, wouldn't liquid O2 and liquid H2 compress to a more dense fuel than water? Math (maybe my math is right and maybe not - this isn't an area of expertise for me): Oxygen is 16g/mole, hydrogen is 2g/mole = 16g + 2*2g = 20g / mole. Water is 18g/mole. I guess water is more dense, though if you could cool the liquid oxygen/hydrogen further, perhaps the density would go up? On the other hand, if the system could also use the energy produced by the O2 H2 -> H2O conversion (thermal generator for a hall effect engine?) there might be an advantage. While looking this up it occurred to me that I don't remember seeing a Metallic Hydrogen engine in KSPI. Definitely Science Fiction at this point, but conceivable. Does it belong?

I've noticed that several of the reactors (not that one in particular, but I haven't tested it) get corrupted in the save file if they run out of fuel. For example, I created a ship with a molten salt reactor using Extraplanetary Launchpads. I didn't have fuel for it (oops), so I had to ship some from Kerbin (oops). When I fueled the reactor it wouldn't do anything. I looked at it in the save file and noticed that its KSPI reactor info was full of NaNs. I assumed that was a bug (was it?) so I copied values from a similar sized reactor and it worked fine.

I tried this a while back (not recently) and had problems with it because the non-basic ISRU's would not work when the craft was not in focus. On Laythe that was not a big deal, but on Mun and Minmus hydrogen separation took a really long time, so focus would need to remain on the outpost for extended durations.

Regarding the Thermal Turbojet, I think there's a couple ways kspi playability could improve playability. 1) I understand that the design of the turbojet is unsuited to reducing fuels like LiquidFuel, however there are a few components that are often used in the same craft as a thermal turbojet which can't support a variety of thermal turbojet fuels. In particular mk2 and mk3 (and Nertea's mk4) spaceplane hulls and the precooler. The only thermal turbojet fuel I seem to be able to select is CO2. To help gameplay could these be added to IFS for helium? 2) <pie in the sky feature request> When building spaceplanes attaching some of the reactors to the back to make a single-engine craft results in excessively long (and heavy) tail sections. To solve this, I usually clip the reactor into the spaceplane hull and leave the fuel tank empty, but it would be really cool if some of the spaceplane tail-section-hull pieces could have a reactor version. Thanks for a great mod and for teaching us a little about rocketry!

I've also noticed that sometimes the warp drive results in inconsistent velocity vectors when you exit warp. I haven't been able to figure out the characteristics of the failure, and it seems to be rare. Usually the velocity vectors after leaving warp are appropriate to the source velocity vectors.

Oh! Yes that makes a lot of sense. That explains why KSP interstellar did what they did with wasteheat as well. Thanks!

I've noticed this as well. With larger reactors it seems to happen less, though perhaps that's because they aren't anywhere near their (heat) maximum.