ProgorMatic

Hi, I'm trying to enable TweakScale on SystemHeat and HeatControl radiators. A ModuleSystemHeatRadiator looks like this: @MODULE[ModuleActiveRadiator] { @name = ModuleSystemHeatRadiator // ..snip.. // option: use deterministic temperatures // Power radiated per temperature temperatureCurve { key = 0 0 key = 400 2.5 } // area for convection convectiveArea = 0.15 } The convective area, and the power radiation (second column under temperatureCurve) should be vary with the square of the scale, but the first column should remain constant. So, if the scale was doubled, the second key would go to key = 400 10 My understanding is if I just set the Exponent to "temperatureCurve = 2", it would set the key to 1600 10, meaning it would quadruple the temperature rating as well as the power radiation, which would not be helpful. Is there any way to specify different exponents for different elements of a list, or to address a single element in a list? Edit: Never mind. I just tried temperatureCurve = 2. I strapped a couple of Ion engines onto a reactor, so that the ion engines used every drop of power coming from the reactor. Then put a single radiator on it and scaled it up until the power radiation was just barely enough to cover the heat generated by the reactor (assuming that would make the temperature it was effective at about 8000K, but it kept the temperature at 983K like I would expect if the first field was not modified. So if anyone can explain why this works, that would be great, but it does seem to work.

Yeah, I'll be happy to help test. I think the trickiest part is going to be getting the System Heat module to scale correctly, especially on stock radiators. I tried and never could get them to work properly, but looking back, I think I was only adjusting their convection parameters and not the actual radiator surface area or whatever that drives the majority of the module. If you haven't played with it before, stock Titanium radiators are important to Far Future and System Heat because they are the only way to use the advanced engines in atmosphere. Even with the largest graphene radiators, which I think technically come from the HeatControl mod, heavy launch colony landers end up looking like this: So tweakscale is very much needed on all the radiators. These graphene radiators can't survive ascent, much less reentry, and the titanium ones that can would require more than 3x as many. Instead I'd rather build it like I did with these KSPIE Metallic Hydrogen engines (still working on aerodynamics): Right now I'm taking a bit of a break from my Far Future Interstellar Colonization game and playing with RSS/RO/RP-1. May end up combining the two and seeing how well my multi-million fund colony ship works with all the contstraints of an ROKerbalism game. Either way, I should have a couple of different mod sets to test TweakScale in over the next few weeks. Or I might be way underestimating how long it takes to even get an Easy start on RP-1 up to future time.

Sweet thanks! Any plans to include Far Future and System Heat radiators any time soon?

That screenshot is from a standard HD (1280p) monitor, but luckily the PAW will scroll if it overflows. The "Select Cargo" dialog doesn't look like it will though, so you'll probably have to use the left and right arrows under Cargo in the PAW to get to the bottom entries.

In MKS, sometimes you just need a container that holds a little bit of everything, like in your Factory base that makes whatever you need on demand. You can let Planetary Logistics handle the overflow, you just need a bit of storage in a Planetary Warehouse container to hold stuff until you can ship it to the big warehouse. I started by putting 25 Kontainers on my ship, but that's a bunch of parts to hold a little bit of everything. So I thought, why not create one segmented container that holds everything? I'm no artist, and SSPX parts already look like they are segmented, so I added the feature to SSPX containers: I also added TweakScale to all the stack and radial containers - because sometimes you need super tiny or super huge containers, and I can think of any reason why a container shouldn't be able to scale. In any case, here's config if you want to add this to your own mods - just create a MyPatch.cfg file in GameData and paste the contents of the spoiler into it.

That image looks cool, but I don't see anything resembling fuel tanks, engines, or radiators from this angle, and there doesn't seem to be enough room for them to cover a long interstellar voyage. I don't think I could make a functioning ship in KSP look like this without cheating. If I were going to try, I'd probably hide a full length Frisbee in the central truss, replace the back domes with LH2 spherical tanks, and build the Command center area out of Kontainers (to hold the fertilizer and supplies) and Antimatter tanks. I'd probably also have to scale the mission down to 20 kerbals or so, and use the 10m or 5m domes, or it would take 100s of years to get from one star to the next. The vision I have right now is basically several domes all facing prograde, so that the thrust from the engines behind them produces artificial gravity (hoping to engineer it so I can provide at least 0.5g for the entirety of a 10 light year voyage). I'm limiting myself to technologies that we've at least been able to detect the fundamental particles for, so antimatter is in but warp drives and gravity generators are out. The engines that have interstellar ISPs all seem to be super long, so it will probably end up looking like a 9-headed jellyfish. I'll call it the Hydra, because every time a "head is cut off" - dome undocks to land and start a colony - the colony will be advanced to self-sufficiency as quickly as possible so it can grow the mothership a new head and send it on its way.

I ended up switching back to KSPIE for my high end engines. I love the simplicity of far future, but for what I'm trying to build, embracing TweakScale is a necessity. The same build came out to 65 parts with 2 Metallic Hydrogen engines scaled to 8.5m.

I've found that most of the Far Future engines have a limitation when it comes to atmospheric flight (or would not be used in atmosphere if you care about realism, like the NSW rockets that spew radioactive material out of their nozzles). The atomic engines fit well here because the nuclear reactor is just used to super heat the propellant, and only the propellant leaves the nozzle. So I use atomic engines (especially the Deliverance aerospike) for landing and ascent, and far future engines for interplanetary and interstellar travel. Also, some of the atomic engines are fully cooled by their own exhaust, so one optimization strategy is to only use these engines at full or 0 throttle. This lets you save on radiators, but you should be good at suicide burns to land that way. For the most part, far future engines need a lot of radiators, so you can save on part count with atomic engines. With that said, if you don't care about realism (or want to keep part count down and still launch kilotons), the X-42 will get you anywhere in the Kerbol system, and the Frisbee will take you everywhere else. You can just pretend Kerbin doesn't have a magnetic field, so all life evolved with radiation immunity.

The X-42 needs some "torch" radiators to go with it. 8 radiators to cool one engine makes sense if you only have one engine, but once you start clustering them to lift kiloton plus payloads, it gets a bit crazy: What I'd like to do is scale a VF-1250 Delta (the biggest that can survive ascent through atmosphere) radiator up to 800%. This should make one radiator that covers 50k waste heat, assuming the heat disippated is proportional to the surface area. But when I scale it up, it doesn't change the System Heat values. Has anyone got TweakScale to work with System Heat? Alternatively, I'd love to see an active cooling module that could consume Liquid Hydrogen (in lieu of adding Liquid Nitrogen as another resource to manage) to produce Radiative Flux.

I think the domes are actually in USI MKS. There are 12 kerbal 10m domes and 96 kerbal 20m domes. Stockalike Station Parts Expansion also has some 5m domes that honestly look significantly better than these. They just don't have the Global Construction factory modules like the USI ones do. Update: the X-42 does indeed require more radiators than the engine replaces. Need to figure out how to get TweakScale to work with System Heat or make some bigger radiator parts.

Just wanted to show off something I made with Kerbal Atomic Engines: 40 Deliverance engines and 32 million units of Liquid Hydrogen gets a USI 20m Atlas Factory, Habitat, and Greenhouse, plus all 25 2.5m Kontainers (full), a reactor, all the necessary radiators (even to cool the engines when they are running at low throttle), and the Global Construction Ground Assembly Line to Minmus in a single stage. Vessel Mass fully fueled is 5,330 tons, Kerbin TWR is 1.49, total delta-V is 6646, and it has 176 parts. There's enough delta-V left over that I'm sure I can bring along some Convert-O-Trons and drills to refuel and go just about anywhere else, so this seems to be a great craft for single-stage-to-anywhere-and-build-whatever-else-you-want-when-you-get-there that will end up being the main colony bootstrap lander for my far future generational colony ship. With that said, 176 parts slows the game down pretty considerably. I'm going to try to build a smaller version based on the 10m USI Atlas domes. Also, now that I've proven I can do it with a "safe" engine, I don't mind replacing the Deliverance with some Far Future X-42 Nuclear Salt Water Rockets just to keep the part count down (assuming I don't end up just replacing the extra engines with more radiators).

Ok, I tested the Orbital Shipyard landed, and as expected, it told me it had to be in orbit. So I'll go back to my original setup with stable versions and Global Construction, and keep an eye out for updates. Thanks for all your hard work!

Hi, I'm starting to play with the new Konstruction features. I noticed this page https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/wiki/Bleeding-Edge:-new-and-modified-things. mentions a "Ground shipyard". Is that still in the plans (or will the orbital shipyard work landed?) I'm wanting to build entire bases from a seed lander, and the Konfabricator doesn't seem to let me do that.

Hey, is there a Constellation download somewhere with all the latest bleeding edge stuff, or do I need to pull all the individual repo releases? I looked here: https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/UmbraSpaceIndustries/releases but only saw an unstable release 28 days ago, and it looks like several of the repos have bleeding edge releases from 3 days ago (with some Jenkins stuff in it - is there a build server somewhere with nightly builds on it?)

I am totally on board with using danfarnsey's patch as the default. Then I'll look at releasing mine as a separate, optional compatibility patch. I knew it was a big change when I made it. Can CKAN be told to overwrite an existing file, or would I need to add some lines to delete the existing modules and make sure mine gets loaded last?