triple cheeseburger

Slightly larger update, with balance tweaks, increased customisation options, and new Waterfall Plumes! Silly Photon Drives v1.1.0 Part Balance Changes PX-01 "Aura": Cost: 35,250 (Previously 48,250) Entry Cost: 170,000 (Previously 125,130) Thrust: 0.073 kN (Previously 0.03 kN) Mass: 0.15 tons (Previously 0.09 tons) TWR: 0.05 (Previously 0.033) Input power: 55 kW (Previously 59 kW) PX-02 "Zenith": Cost: 125,500 (Previously 176,500) Entry Cost: 406,000 (Previously 323,541) Thrust: 0.317 kN (Previously 0.224 kN) TWR: 0.054 (Previously 0.037) Input power: 190 kW (Previously 395 kW) PX-10 "Omega": Cost: 875,000 (Previously 1,059,000) Entry Cost: 3,440,000 (Previously 1,419,177) Thrust: 10.898 kN (Previously 3.771 kN) Mass: 13 tons (Previously 9.25 tons) TWR: 0.085 (Previously 0.041) Input power: 4,950 kW (Previously 5,950 kW) PX-10 "Omega" Antimatter Mode: Thrust: 54.488 kN (Previously 26 kN) TWR: 0.427 (Previously 0.281) Isp: 3,057,032.3 seconds (Previously 30,570,323 seconds) Added System Heat configs PX-01 "Aura" Loop temperature: 350 K Waste heat: 33 kW (55 kW input power, 40% thermal efficiency) PX-02 "Zenith" Loop temperature: 350 K Waste heat: 95 kW (190 kW input power, 50% thermal efficiency) PX-10 "Omega" (Electric mode) Loop temperature: 350 K Waste heat: 1,683 kW (4,950 kW input power, 66% thermal efficiency) PX-10 "Omega" (Antimatter mode) Loop temperature: 1,600 K Waste heat: 8,415 kW (4,950 kW input power, 66% thermal efficiency) For the larger engines, you may want to download Heat Control which adds larger and more efficient types of radiators adapted for removing large quantities of heat. Improved Customisation Features There's a new "spd_Settings.cfg" file in the mod folder. From here you can easily tweak the thrust and power usage of the engines in the mod with a single value. This config has been adapted from Near Future Propulsion, so credit for this config goes to that. This setting config also has an option to fiddle with the Isp of the antimatter photon drive mode, if you wish to do so. Bugfixes Fixed an issue where the Zenith's Waterfall configs were duplicated in the configs. Fixed an issue where EngineCoreGlow effects were ignoring their textures and were just using pure white instead. Fixed an issue with the VAB Organizer configs. Minor tweaks The Waterfall plumes for all engines have been revamped and improved. Optimised the meshes of the EngineCoreGlow effects. Increased the amount of the 'Radiation Pressure' resource stored and produced in the engines by a factor of 10, in order to reduce the chance of the engines consuming too much Radiation Pressure when the thrust multiplier is set to very high values. Reduced the animation rate on all EngineCoreGlow effects to 1/10th their previous speed. Updated relations Added Heat Control to Suggested Added System Heat to Supports

Added System Heat configs, and a few minor tweaks and fixes. Supplementary Electric Engines v1.3.2 Added System Heat configs: KO-A1 "Teacake" Loop temperature: 350 K Waste heat: 4 kW (8 kW input power, 50% thermal efficiency) KO-A2 "Gumdrop" Loop temperature: 350 K Waste heat: 16 kW (32 kW input power, 50% thermal efficiency) KO-F1 "Sorbet" Loop temperature: 350 K Waste heat: 11 kW (55 kW input power, 80% thermal efficiency) Other engines were calculated to have produced less than 2 kW of waste heat, which was deemed too small to be worth it. Optimised the collision meshes for these parts: KO-22 "Pancake" KO-33 "Waffle" KO-RR Resistojet RCS KO-R1 "Fudge" KO-R2 "Toffee" CS-R1 Liquid Caesium Tank Minor tweaks: Added a collider to the Toffee's shroud, since it didn't have one previously. Fixed the Toffee's 0.625m mount being offset vertically by like 1 millimetre. Added a collider to the Gumdrop's 1.25m mount, since it didn't have one previously. Updated relations: Added Near Future Propulsion to Suggested Added System Heat to Supports

Minor update with some bugfixes, tweaks, and added support for VAB Organizer. Silly Photon Drives v1.0.2 VAB Organizer support: Photon Drives now get their own custom "Photon Drives" subcategory when using VAB Organizer. Bugfixes: Fixed a bug with the mesh of the 5m engine's 3.75m mount. Other tweaks: Simplified the collision mesh for all engines. Adjusted how the multimode engine setup on the 5m engine works, such that CommunityResourcePack is no longer a hard dependency. If you do not have CRP the antimatter mode will not be available, with CRP it will be available. (Though you'll still want FFT & CryoTanks for actually providing tanks for storing antimatter and liquid hydrogen.)

Minor update with some improvements to VAB Organizer integration and a couple of bugfixes/tweaks. Supplementary Electric Engines v1.3.1 Vab Organizer support changes: Arcjets and Resistojets now get their own "Electrothermal Engines" subcategory when using VAB Organizer. Caesium fuel tanks now get their own "Caesium Fuel" subcategory when using VAB Organizer. When Near Future Propulsion is installed, Pulsed Plasma Thrusters get moved from the Ion Engines subcategory to the Plasma Engines subcategory when using VAB Organizer. When Near Future Propulsion is installed, the Resistojet RCS gets moved into the Ion/Plasma RCS subcategory. Adjusted the Fudge's bulkhead size such that it shows up as 0.3125m instead of 0.625m when using Vab Organizer. Bugfixes: Fixed a typo in the Gumdrop's variant menu. Part changes: Sorbet's ISP buffed to 14,000 (previously 10,200. The engine was too similiar to the HI-SNAP from NFP in terms of ISP, while providing a worse thrust-to-power ratio).

Hello once again... Supplementary Electric Engines v1.3.0 is out! This is quite a large update, with part balance changes, new parts, and a couple of extra things. Re-balanced the stats of many parts (Spoilered to avoid making this post too long) New Arcjet engines These engines run on monopropellant and can achieve better specific impulse than the resistojets, but they suffer from a limited lifespan due to the corrosion of their internal electrodes (represented by the small amount of ablator resource stored inside them). KO-A1 "Teacake" Arcjet Engine: 780 Isp 5.5kN thrust 150kg mass 3.74 TWR 8 kW input power 3,500 funds Runs on Monopropellant, 0.625m size Unlocked with the "Advanced Ion Propulsion" tech node (when using CTT) KO-A2 "Gumdrop" Arcjet Engine: 805 Isp 18.5kN thrust 650kg mass 2.9 TWR 32 kW input power 12,200 funds Runs on Monopropellant, 1.25m size Unlocked with the "Advanced Ion Propulsion" tech node (when using CTT) Other Minor Changes Added configs for VAB Organizer. Tweaked FEEP Thruster and Caesium fuel tank textures slightly to make their paint strips more vibrant.

Progress update... Hello again everyone, it has been awhile since I last posted here but I am once again in the mood to work on KSP modding... I was working on another, much larger project, but I got a bit distracted and decided to come back to this mod to tweak some things and finally try and add the remaining planned features. Thank you for this very in-depth reply! Yeah, I basically agree with like 90% of what you said lol, so I've decided to rebalance a lot of things. Here's the full list of changes coming in the next update and the plans for the new parts I want to add: Furthermore, here's a sneak peak of the Teacake - the 0.625m arcjet engine: Finally, something else I'm working on is adding localisation support to the mod. Though depending on how long it takes adding support for other languages might come in patches released after this content update. I've only got the 1.25m arcjet and arcjet RCS left to make, and then this update will be ready (I also plan to come up with some new graphics to use in the original post...) I'm a lot more familiar with KSP modding these days, so hopefully it should not take too long. Any feedback on the balancing changes I have planned, or anything else, is welcome! Thank you for your time.

Hello once again... Unfortunately I have gotten a bit burnt out on KSP modding for now, so it might be awhile until I get back to this. However... Supplementary Electric Engines v1.2 is out! This new update includes the FEEP thruster, its fuel tanks, and some minor tweaks here and there. Since these were already finished I figured I'd release them as an update. Still not 100% sure about the balancing with these, so any feedback is welcome. The FEEP thruster and its fuel tanks also include support for Community Tech Tree.

Alright just a quick progress update, after some feedback I decided to change the propellant choice for the FEEP thruster to Indium instead of Caesium. Also updated the plume colour to something hopefully more accurate.

Progress update Hello! I've been working on the Field-Emission Electric Propulsion (FEEP) thruster and its fuel tanks recently. This engine uses liquid caesium as a propellant, has an Isp of 10,200 seconds, produces 0.8 kN of thrust, and takes in 40 ec/s. The engine has a beautiful green plume (disclaimer: I don't actually know what colour plume you'd get with caesium, I think it would be blue/cyan, but I'm not entirely sure. I've always wanted more engines with green plumes in KSP, and green is way more unique than cyan with this sort of stuff so green it is. Perhaps the propellant contains some amount of some other chemical that turns it green, who knows). The (relatively) low power cost and high Isp can make this engine attractive for situations where you need lots of delta-v, but the thrust is somewhat lacking. More importantly, caesium is very pricy - even more so than xenon. So you'll have to be careful with its use if you're in career mode (caesium is also extremely reactive and explodes violently when it comes into contact with water, but that's for the Kerbals to worry about). Oh also, the actual caesium resource is a part of the mod - you won't have to download community resource pack or anything for this to work. Next on the list is the arcjets (a 0.625m engine and a 1.25m engine, and a set of RCS thrusters). Once those are done I'll release them and the FEEP stuff as an update. Thank you for your time.

Hello again everyone... recently I have been in the mood to play KSP again, and I decided I'd see if I can actually finish this mod. So I've been hard at work and have made some new thingamabobs for people to play with. Supplementary Electric Engines v1.1 is out! You can download it here I retextured and remodelled the Pulsed Plasma Thrusters, now they are closer in line to the proper Nertea artstyle. I also went and remade the resistojets for the third time, since the previous models were really quite bland. The resistojets run on monopropellant and have an Isp around 400 seconds, I also made an RCS version... I still have a few more engines planned, my list currently includes the arcjets and a FEEP (field-emission electric propulsion) thruster. All the stats are figured out, all that's left is to actually make the things. So hopefully that does not take too long... apologies this took awhile, I was doing other non-ksp projects. I hope you can enjoy! Feel free to post any cool screenshots you take with the engines, and give feedback if you have any.

Apologies for not checking here in awhile... I made an Imgur post containing the custom decals I use -> https://imgur.com/a/BUv1JFi Feel free to use these in any of your builds, credit is optional. Simply download the images and drop them into your flags folder, Conformal Decals can handle transparent images and flags with strange aspect ratios just fine.

Recently I've been more into modelling spaceships in Blender... But perhaps in the future I'll play more KSP and make more ships in it, we'll see. Thank you though

Alright I've updated the mod to change the internal names of the engines, so this should prevent any conflicts with other mods. Unfortunately this will probably break any ships you have that currently use engines from this mod, I suppose you could remove the engines in the editor before updating and re-add it once you've got the new version of the mod.

Hmm... Are you sure you've downloaded all the dependancies for the mod? The 1.25m and 5m engines are the only ones with B9 configs so you might be missing B9 Part Switch, or maybe you could check if it's up-to-date enough for the mod.

Are you sure you installed the mod properly? If you installed it manually then I'd recommend using CKAN instead to prevent any issues happening. You could check inside GameData -> SillyPhotonDrives -> Parts -> Engine, and see if the files for "photon_5" and "photon_125" exist or not, if not then I'd recommend reinstalling the mod.

The end cap at the front is just some of the structural pieces from Near Future Construction and a few of the stock structural panels. This mod doesn't add any other parts besides the three engines shown in the infographics.

The red and white truss in the first screenshot is just made out of Procedural Parts structure pieces that have been recoloured using SimpleRepaint

Thank you very much I know I already replied to the screenshots and images you made back on discord, but I'll say again that these ships are really pretty... and the the infographic you made looks extremely awesome!

Silly Photon Drives [1.1.0] Last Updated: September 19th, 2024 KSP 1.12.5 Download *Also on CKAN Although they carry no mass, photons still have momentum. We can use this principle to build engines that use light itself as an exhaust. This is a small mod which adds engines that use electricity to produce light – a photon engine. This is different from a solar/photon sail, which uses light from produced from an external source to push on a sail. These engines produce their own light and throw it out the back like a typical rocket to push themselves forwards. The gimmick here is that these engines only take in electric charge as an input, they do not require any physical propellant. The downside however is that the thrust is so small it makes other electric engines look beefy in comparison. Dependencies: Module Manager, B9 Part Switch (the mod won't work without these). Recommendations: Waterfall (These engines do not have any stock plumes configured). Suggestions: CommunityResourcePack, Heat Control, Far Future Technologies, CryoTanks, Near Future Electrical, Persistent Thrust. Supports: CommunityTechTree, VABOrganizer, SystemHeat. This mod currently contains three sizes of photon drives: PX-01 "Aura": A 0.625m photon drive, takes in roughly 60 electric charge per second and outputs a whopping 0.073 kN of thrust. PX-02 "Zenith": A 1.25m photon drive, takes in almost 200 electric charge per second and outputs 0.317 kN of thrust. PX-10 "Omega": A 5m photon drive, a very large flashlight indeed. Takes nearly 5,000 electric charge per second and puts out an impressive 10.898 kN of thrust As a bonus feature, if you have CommunityResourcePack installed, the 5m photon drive gains the option to instead run on liquid hydrogen and antimatter. This yields an Isp of ~3.1 million seconds, and even produces a whopping 54 kN of thrust, but comes with the downside of requiring physical propellant. You'll also want Far Future Technologies and CryoTanks as this mod does not provide any tanks for storing liquid hydrogen or antimatter. Due to the immense power requirements of these drives, Near Future Electrical is also suggested. That mod provides nuclear reactors which can actually meet such power demands. The engines in this mod produce far more thrust than a photon drive could realistically. If we assume 1 electric charge per second to be 1 kW, then 1 kN of thrust would take roughly 300,000 ec/s. For this reason the engines are 1,000,000 times more powerful than they otherwise would be. For extra customisation options, see "spd_Setting.cfg" inside the mod folder. This config lets you adjust the thrust output, power intake, and Isp of all engines all from a single file. So for example, if you wanted "realistic" levels of thrust you could set the thrust multiplier to 0.000001. This config has been adapted from NearFuturePropulsion, so all credit goes towards that. Liscense: CC-BY-SA

I made another ship today, or rather, this one took a couple of days because I spent awhile deciding on what sort of colour scheme to go with, among other things. Here is the EF-OM Project 02 "Hildemar", a small NTP ship that I like to imagine is used for transporting people between habitats on or around Jupiter's outer moons. Hanging out above Callisto, just after leaving an orbital habitat. The ship's comfortable 0.12 g's of acceleration make it well-suited for folks genetically engineered for microgravity environments. Two angled solid-core NTRs running on slush hydrogen propel the ship forwards. Drifting above the skies of Jupiter. I doubt the ship would ever really come this close to Jupiter, but it looks quite pretty. Stats: - With no crew the ship has 9,036 m/s of Δv. - Wet mass of 115.013 tons. Dry mass of 43.605 tons. - Mass ratio of 2.637. - 315 parts (like last time, most of this is in the decals). - 47.4 meters long. - Costs 341,755 funds. The engines have had most of the enriched uranium they store removed, this saves 300kg of mass and about 24,000 funds. - Uses two of the Neptune solid-core NTRs from Kerbal Atomics, each with an Isp of 950 seconds and a combined thrust of 134 kN. - Wet TWR of 0.12, dry TWR of 0.31. - Powered by a small fission generator near the back of the ship. - Also has some RCS that runs on hydrolox, there's a small oxidiser tank inside the ship. Mods and methods used: - The main body of the ship is a structural element from Procedural Parts, and I used SimpleRepaint to change its colour. Now by default procedural parts aren't able to be recoloured for some reason, to fix this you can go into GameData -> SimpleRepaint -> IgnoreParts, and then into the IncompatibleParts.cfg - in here you can remove or comment-out the part titled "Various procedural parts", it should be near the top at around line 28. This now lets you recolour procedural parts, which is quite handy. - The specific shade of red used here is a custom one I added to SimpleRepaint myself, I didn't like how saturated the default red was. The exact hex code for this lighter red is #C44D42 if anyone's curious. - As always there's plenty of Near Future parts involved, and lots of decals from Conformal Decals. - The logos featured on the ship are custom flags, I made the logos myself in Inkscape.

Thank you!

Today I made another ship, I wanted to experiment more with making ships that have well-defined colour schemes. I would say I'm quite happy with how it came out. This is the GX2 SP-26 Model A, an automated industrial cargo hauler. Its low refuelling cost and reliable nature allows it to exceed at long-distance regularly-scheduled interplanetary shipping jobs. Stationed above Triton, after departing from a dock and being towed to a safe distance away from any orbital habitats. The front of the ship while it charges its capacitors, repeated high-speed journeys through the Kuiper belt have scratched some of the paint, giving the ship a bit of a grimy look. And away we go, the ship begins slowly heading out of Neptune's gravity well. The harsh environment of fast interplanetary travel and the radiation from the engine necessitates that the cargo is kept in a well-shielded bay at the front of the craft. Stats: - When not carrying anything, the ship has a total of 529km/s of Δv (Unless I state otherwise, assume all these stats are for when the ship isn't carrying any cargo). - Wet mass of 129.275 tons. Dry mass of 105.889 tons. - Mass ratio of 1.221 (Perhaps for future builds I should make an effort to pack more fuel...) - 379 parts (That's thanks to the huge amount of decals involved). - 68.3 meters long. - Costs 1,412,049 funds. Most of that is in the radiators and the engine itself, which costs 730k funds alone. The cost of the fuel is only around 37k funds. - Uses the inertial confinement fusion engine from FFT. Fun tangent! The ICF engine in FFT seems to be based on this concept, which calls for an Isp of ~270,000 seconds and runs on deuterium-deuterium fusion. I use the patch that makes the FFT engines perform closer to what should be expected, but even that got the performance of this thing wrong. So I made a couple of changes to fix the Isp and make it run off of deuterium fusion, though it still has an alternative mode that uses DT-He3 fusion with increased performance. - Okay, tangent over. The engine runs on deuterium-deuterium fusion at about 80% power to reduce the amount of cooling needed, yielding 32kN of thrust. - Wet TWR is 0.025, dry TWR is 0.03. - Powered by the two small fission generators sticking out of either side, they're placed as to keep the engine's radiators within their shadow. - The section at the front is a cargo bay, it can open and store whatever you might want to store. I haven't actually tried this because I'm scared all the decals on the front will break if I open the cargo bay. Mods used: - The recoloured tanks were achieved using Simple Repaint, using a custom shade of cyan I added to the configs myself. - The decals are done with conformal decals. Some of them are custom flags I've made myself (the checker patterns for instance), the grime and dirt are custom flags too (though in this case their textures I just found on the internet). - The yellow lines are actually text decals, using the | character scaled up a bunch you can easily make painted lines with it. Furthermore you can easily change the colour of the text to whatever you want. - There's a few procedural parts, such as the rounded ends and some structural pieces here and there. - And then obviously there's near/far future and Heat Control and Restock and so on...

This ship I made a few days ago, it's a bit lower on the tech tree than some of my other ships - a crewed nuclear electric propulsion ship. It's wider than it is long, if you're confused the "forwards" direction is the direction the four tanks in the middle are facing. And here it is with its array of ion engines running. Slowly climbing out of Earth's gravity well. Stats: - 30,850 m/s of Δv. - Wet mass of 169.948 tons. Dry mass of 103.795 tons. - Mass ratio of 1.637. - 202 parts. - 19.3 meters long, 60.4 meters wide. - Costs 3,244,335 funds (if you take out all the fuel that drops to 598,240 funds. this is why I don't use engines that run on xenon in career mode, lol) - Runs on 32 of the AFTER ion engines from NFP. The engines are set to run at about 90% thrust so that they don't overheat (it looked ugly with another set of radiators). - Wet TWR is 0.036, dry TWR is 0.059. - Uses the 'Prometheus' fission reactor from NFE, producing the large amount of electricity needed to run this many engines. - Apparently the inflatable habitat can hold 18 people, but I imagine this thing would carry less than that. With 6 crew the ship has 1 year and 280 days of life support. - The ship is designed to rotate to produce artificial gravity, it's set up like this so that it can spin even while burning since burns with electric engines tend to take awhile. The arm with the inflatable habitat on it is about 30 meters long, at 3 RPM it could generate about a third of a g. So realistically this thing would benefit from being even wider, but oh well. - Remarkably, the ship's com is actually balanced in the middle. There's some tiny ore tanks on the nuclear reactor's side of things that can be emptied as it uses up supplies, helping it maintain balance. The nuclear reactor is placed on a long arm opposite from the habitat for radiation shielding purposes. Mods used: - The usual, near future, procedural parts (the fuel tanks are procedural if you were wondering), conformal decals.

Another fusion ship, though using a different engine this time. Due to its limited range (for a fusion-powered ship, at least) I'm thinking this one is used in the inner solar system, where travel times are not as large. Charging capacitor banks around the moon. Blast off! Drifting above the clouds. Meeting up with it's larger sister the Damascus-class, in reality this would be a bit of a sticky situation because both ships could easily fry one another with their engines. Stats: - 31km/s of Δv. - Wet mass of 55.366 tons, dry mass of 46.056 tons. - Mass ratio of 1.202. - 72 parts. - 25.2 meters long. - Costs 519,450 funds. - This time uses the spherical tokamak engine from FFT. Running in high thrust mode, producing 380kN of thrust with an Isp of 17,500 seconds. - Wet TWR of 0.69, dry TWR of 0.83. - Powered by a small fission generator tucked away near the back. - Has 8 crew slots, with 4 crew life support can last for 96 days. Though both these values can be adjusted. Mods used: - Remarkably there's no procedural parts involved this time, just Near Future and Restock stuff. - There's a bit of part clipping involved too, mostly around the engine. But that's pretty standard for a lot of my builds.

This next ship returns to the realm of nuclear fusion, a high-end interplanetary transport that can zip across the solar system at lightning speeds. I'm headcanon-ing that this thing is used a lot in outer solar system regions like the Kuiper belt or Scattered disc. Hanging around Pluto and Charon, certainly the skinniest ship I've made thus far. Cruising through space at a leisurely 290km/s. The business end of things, in reality at this distance you'd probably get fried pretty quickly from the radiation coming out of this thing. Stats: - 589km/s of Δv. - Wet mass of 166.882 tons, dry mass of 118.806 tons. - Mass ratio of 1.405. - 172 parts. - 74.4 meters long. - Costs 2,066,324 funds. - Once again using the FFT Z-Pinch fusion torch in afterburner mode, for an Isp of 176,800 seconds and 2,800 kN of thrust (That's a thrust power of 2.4 Terrawatts!). This time the ship has enough radiators to run the engine at full power too. - Wet TWR of 1.71 (Dry TWR of 2.4). - Powered by a small fission reactor able to operate at 65% power, though for most of the time it runs at only 25% power. - Docking port at the front, uses bipropellant hydrolox RCS. - Has room for 17 crew/passengers, with 101 days of life support when all 17 slots are filled. Mods used: - The custom engine nozzle is a mishmash of procedural parts and some radiators, it looks okay I think, but perhaps with more effort it could look better. - The fancy colour scheme on this ship is thanks to SimpleRepaint, using some tanks and flag parts coloured red (the stock flag parts because Conformal Decals' flag parts can't be recoloured sadly). - The rest of the ship is standard Near Future and procedural parts stuff, unfortunately there's a lighting bug with some of the procedural parts but I don't really think I can do much about that...