Hremsfeld

The Fusebox plugin isn't yet compatible with KSPI because, in the mod author's words, "every part in it tends to be drowning in [electrical] charge." It's a plugin for determining if your electric charge production / consumption lines up or not, so Megajoules aren't factored in, but perhaps there's some chance of working with him to determine Megajoule production in the VAB. From there, the usual "X kN per MJ input at this level of thrust" applies. I think you may've already answered this, but there are plans for other LM-fueled engines in the future, right? It would involve making up new engines without real-world analogues, but the 1-D is strictly a lift-off engine right now. The methane tank is too massive and the 1-D is too powerful for use on a non-incredibly-overpowered lander, and the specific impulse is far too low for interplanetary flight when options like the Vista exist.

Uranium and Thorium can't be pumped tank to tank. If you shut down your reactor and wait 3 days, the decay heating subsides so that you can refuel/change fuels for your reactor. As for transferring to a station, you're probably better off using detachable resupply modules.

You can put a generator and fission reactor on a launch stabilizer. Let it build up a few MJ, start up the fusion reactor (may take several clicks), and launch. The fission reactor will stay put, and your fusion reactor will merrily plug away. You can also put Uf4 and Thorium hex cans onto the launch pads and build a rigging to swap out the fission reactors, if that's more your style. I found that building a car in the SPH and driving it over worked best.

Have you tried fuel lines? Antimatter follows fuel flow rules, so if you aren't running fuel lines from the container stacks to the collectors they won't get any. Also, I'm assuming you've got a single collector and are in a 100km circular orbit; your collection rate is going to be a very small fraction of a unit per second, probably on the order of 10-5 per second; at this rate, assuming you aren't using an antimatter reactor to power your antimatter containment, it will take 1,000 seconds to have gathered 0.01 units of antimatter.

My main scanning satellites only have the hi-res and biome scanners on them; I can send a BTDT lander later to fill that part in. I was referring more to the initial scan; I've read the Ideal Altitudes post and couldn't get Octave to work, or I'd find the non-resonant orbits that way. As-is, I'm basically plugging in an altitude, guessing that it's okay, leaving it going for awhile, and using up my excess dV getting whatever spots I missed. This has been more successful than it should, but on some maps it's difficult to see where that one missing pixel is. It's definitely an edge case, don't get me wrong; I'd be very surprised if it actually made it into the main build. Mainly, I'm just seeing if I could get an estimate for how hard it would be to tweak the source code and make it myself.

For the first part: Have you tried running fuel lines FROM the aluminum-oxide engines TO the electrolosizer/something in its stack? If electrolysis works like normal generators, it's consuming a negative amount of the resource; in other words it's withdrawing negative oxidizer from the tanks. Aluminum flows to the entire ship, much like monopropellant, which is why you're seeing it increase. If you run kethane, set it up like you would set up your converter lines. For the second: That's just normal rocket behavior. Try putting a rocket consisting of a command piece, single liquid fuel tank, and a single liquid fuel engine onto the launchpad. Before you fire up the engine, disable the tank's flow of either liquid fuel or oxidizer. The engine will still consume the other resource. In other news, I'm using the DT Vista engine with MechJeb limiting acceleration to 3 m/s2 and a joystick with the throttle all the way forwards. It's surprisingly amusing to watch the specific impulse steadily climb.

Got an odd question for ya: Would it be possible to make an "inverted" display of sorts? Not as in inverted colors, but a map that greys out mapped areas while making non-mapped areas some other (preferably bright) color. This would be useful for people trying to brute-force map every single pixel of a world by repeatedly tweaking their orbits, for example.

B9 actually includes several other mods's plugins within it; KineTech Animation, Firespitter, and Exsurgent Engineering. One of these - I forget which - is the one that lets you set initial states, and will probably be removed when tweakables arrive.

I very well could be, too. Maybe I should actually look it up instead of going off what I think had been said... Edit: Wikipedia, known far and wide as a perfect source of information that is never wrong, says that Tritium decays into Helium-3, which was probably what I was thinking of but didn't actually end up saying. Mental typos are fun.

Tritium is bred from lithium, and decays into deuterium-3 with a half-life of 12 years.

Fusion reactors DO make for pretty good planes, I gotta say. Edit: More than two radial radiators are needed for a 1.25m fusion generator, for those wondering.

I think you said you prefer not doing hotfixes, but given that some of these are fairly game-breaking (namely the antimatter and solar bugs), would you be willing to make an exception? Alternatively, a solar farm out in the Oort cloud could be amusing. Edit: VVVVV Awesome! Not really sure where I got the dislike of hotfixes from...

The engines produce lower thrust at lower altitudes, much like real-life rocket engines. Lob something straight up and test it in space, the thrusts should be normal. As for fusion's power being more advanced than we're likely to be able to do in the near future; the efficiency upgrade comes when we're working with antimatter reactors. All the antimatter ever produced so far in real life could maybe power a lightbulb for a fraction of a second, if it didn't annihilate within a nanosecond; if we had the technology for collecting, storing, moving, and using antimatter, it's pretty safe to say we could improve our fusion reactors. Plus, there's the whole warp drive thing.

Huh. Well, my window opens in 38 days, I guess I'll see if I just have to push it somewhere else. There might be one with delta_MJ, too; Two of the 0.625m nuclear reactors running off UF4 are enough to run a science station's research with an 0.29 MJ/s surplus, but if you go to 1000x speed or higher, Megajoule storage rapidly depletes. Liquid fuel is very-high-specific impulse, but very-low-thrust. Without knowing anything about your ship besides that it has a nuclear reactor and uses LF, I'd say it looks about right.

By not landing. This was strictly a tug to push an antimatter collector into orbit around Jool, and then deorbit itself. Or, that was the plan, until the antimatter collector exploded about ten seconds before I docked. I'm not really sure why, it was powered by a nuclear reactor/gen. I noticed the reactor itself wasn't visibly attached, though; it'd been up since before 0.8, so the models didn't line up. On another note, only two of the five antimatter tanks actually collect the antimatter as it comes in; I don't know if that'll change when they fill up or not.

Sadly, turning it off and on again did not work for me. I'm hoping my main antimatter collector won't behave similarly when I tow it out there. Relatedly, getting there sure won't be a problem, because wow fusion ships pack some dV. I may have included more fuel on this tug than is strictly necessary.

I'm still gathering antimatter, it's just that soon I'm not going to be able to store it due to a lack of electricity. This will be rather...unpleasant for Lenlin, so I'm hoping to avert this. Edit: This has happened before, and somehow fixed itself. As soon as it did, the reactor spooled up, the generator kicked on, and my megajoules shot to full. I don't know what I did differently then, but some finagling should be able to overcome it. Although, if it's just a matter of not using part.requestResource(), it might be a simple bugfix. Or is that an oxymoron?

An old bug is rearing its ugly head again: I've got a ship parked in orbit in Jool's radiation belt, powered exclusively by antimatter. The reactor and generator are both online, but neither of them are producing any power. I've got an antimatter collector inline with its tank, which is directly above the generator and reactor. My ship has 1043 out of 20,000 megajoules, and no electric charge (when timewarping to gather antimatter, it depleted and wasn't replenished). I've tried quicksave+quickloading; I've gone to the tracking station; I've switched to a vessel on the surface of moho, quicksaved, and quickloaded; I very briefly ran the engines while MechJeb limited me to 0.01m/s^2. This has happened before, but I don't remember how I fixed it. The reactor and generator's right-click menus I've uploaded here, along with a screenshot of the debug log. The "dT is NaN!" messages look quite suspicious, but I've got no idea what to do with them, or if it's even this mod. Edit: Unrelated, but I have a quick question: Is the radiation exposure a gee-whiz thing, or are you planning to incorporate that in the future?

For anyone trying to put a science lab on a lander: If you decide to power it with a pair of the upgraded 0.625m reactors/generators for weight/reduced heating purposes, and you use MechJeb, slap a standard RTG or two on there somewhere. The tricklecharge that MechJeb requires is enough to overcome your small surplus of power production when time warping. Edit: Unreal: Try a quicksave/quickload combo. If you did it at a place where the magnetosphere won't work, the option to log magnetic data is hidden from the right-click context menu. Alternatively, muck with your persistence file to put the log function into an action group; make a backup first if you aren't used to mucking with persistence files.

I mean, the sun's kinda good at blocking transmissions... Looking forward to the changes too, though. Four sats 90 degrees apart in GEO plus however many you want down by the sun equals a really nice way to use plasma thrusters.

Unfortunately, it's that 10% of the time. The power transmission is strictly point-to-point, regardless of how many relays you could have.

Going by the resources, I see you've got the 2.5m nuclear reactor on board. I'm assuming it's your only source of Megajoule production, and that you haven't unlocked Experimental Electrics or Fusion Power quite yet. By your powers combined, that's an accurate thrust readout for the plasma thruster using liquid fuel. Forums user Donziboy made a chart showing the various ISP and Thrusts from various combinations of upgrades and fuels: I'm pretty sure this is assuming the ship has only one reactor and generator; adding more increases your thrust, but also your weight. While you're working with nuclear engines, I'd recommend switching to Argon or Xenon due to their increased thrusts. 3.5or 6.3kN still isn't much, but it will increase as you progress through the end of the tech tree. You lose a significant amount of Delta-V by doing so, yes, but you'll also reduce your burn times by a massive amount. Non-chemical engines tend to have delta-V to spare anyway, so it shouldn't be too much an issue.

No, that one requires 5GW.

This once again raises the question: How similar to Methane is Kethane? (because obviously real Methane contains xenon) The methane will be added to the list of Thermal Engine fuels, I take it?

I hadn't done much with antimatter rockets before, due to thinking they weren't worth the effort. I have now changed my mind. Re-circularized at 900km after ditching the transfer stage into Kerbin and then boosted to Jool; I've used less than 900 units of liquid fuel with it so far, which will certainly prove to be the limiting factor. I'm wishing I'd thrown the adapter on front so I could cart around a few hundred tons of fuel or so, just so it wouldn't be such a drastically limiting factor.