EnderiumSmith

for some reason when i click deploy the game just freezes and i have to force close it. even for something like a single fuel tank. i just have MKS installed on a test install in 1.12.2

Anyone know an addon that gives better plumes to the kerbal atomics engines? Something like what the candle from recycled parts has. the vibrant magenta is much better that the muted pink. The candle uses 2 waterfall modules so im not sure how i would apply it myself.

Im not sure how the boiloff module is intended to work. for once the EC use is gone as the little amount the radiators use for the pumps is insignificant. And normal tanks get the module too so the special cryogenic tanks arent different at all. maybe it should instead put out heat at 20K and you use the heat exchanger to raise it to 300K, in which case the EC cost of the exchanger would need to be overhauled too. that way it would make sense for all tanks to have it and normal tanks would get higher boiloff rates. currently hydrogen has like a half year half life. maybe 5x or even 10x for the non-insulated tanks would work. why is it a half life anyway? the surface area of the tank is the same even if half full. also ive found some bugs. in the cryo tank tab the heat is listed in watts but its actually kilowatts as the system heat tab reports. also if you disable the radiator, the internal heat of the tank climbs to infinity and doesnt reset on reload, making the tank impossible to restart cooling after time warping a long period.

Are the Clouds on Vessa only available as EVE clouds and not scaled space clouds? EVE is a bit too demanding for my integrated graphics and mods like whirligig world do well with scaled space clouds. You can only see then from the outside in but thats a minor limitation.

yes i mean the Neptune. The 500MW is the kinetic power of the actual nerv. Thermal would be higher. and Neptune is slightly bigger. I had to reduce the consumption by 17.5 times to get the same lifetime at the same thermal power and uranium load as the kerbopower. The Neptune is 20% efficient vs 28% for the kerbopower so you get 20kWe at 100Wt vs 60kWe at 210kWt. Garnet is 33% and the FLAT is 50%.

The nuclear engines consume uranium at a much faster rate than the reactors. a nerv generates 500MW of power vs 400kW for the garnet. The trimodal mode of the triton only makes 20kW. thats a loooot less than 2% of 500MW. The radiators are for the generator. The nerv and stubber dont have them. From what ive seen the engine would be kept warm in trimodal mode for the entire mission as that also reduces thermal cycling. there are no transient loads that happen close to burns so theres noting to power it it doesnt run the entire time.

An issue with the trimodal engines is that the electricity generation mode consumes fuel just as fast as running the engine at minimum throttle. This rate is much higher than normal reactors making them useless for actually providing power as leaving the engine on will quickly deplete the fuel. Also the engines have radiators in the part model so they should not make waste heat. After a bit of testing i did manage to make a patch cfg that seems to do what ive wanted. Theres also a few smaller issues ive found: the vacuum isp for hydrogen of the Triton and Poseidon appear to be inverted, the bigger engine should have the bigger value. Restock gives the small nerv the wrong manufacturer and also its alternators are being removed for apparently no reason. Possibly because without systemHeat the advanced engines use alternators to simulate the trimodal mode. Oh and if you empty the nerv of uranium it costs almost nothing. Also the patch gives the nerv the ability to run as a steam rocket so its still relevant after unlocking the trimodal engines. USI MKS provides the tanks and drills for water. While water gets less isp than even LF/O it requires no converter, only the drill so it can be useful around icy moons.

For some reason the pavonis and tharsis render their light cone when in the VAB. It works fine in flight, its only bugged in the VAB. This is a fresh install.

It seems the casaba does indeed perform much better but it still has the problem of using uranium as reaction mass, which us much more expensive than hydrogen. It can win on costs over the electric engines since argon is also expensive for some reason but the ablator means it has limited total impulse and is a lot harder to refuel or recover. As for the dirac it costs as much as a full length fresnel and requires you to collect antimatter in addition to helium 3. It also only wins for very low ship masses and target deltaV while using he3 as reaction mass. Those high isps are really only needed to go interstellar in which case the fresnel wins in both twr and isp. The asimov has higher twr, requires no exotics and uses hydrogen reaction mass while still having very decent isp.

I compiled the stats of the near/far future engines to compare them. Also included some ideas/suggestions. Also it seems the electric engines should be lower on the tech tree than the fusion ones