forsaken1111

Certainly dumping the coolant would impart some force on the craft, but not much and this could be reduced depending on the method of its release. Either way, it would reduce the heat energy of the craft somewhat.

If you get the coolant hot enough and then dump it out of the spacecraft, it reduces the overall heat of the craft much like the way your body cools itself by sweating.

You are indeed missing something. Did you actually look at the ISP for that setup? The thrust may be lackluster but the ISP is far better than the stock NERVA iirc. Note: You want to test these things in space. Nuclear Reactor to thermal rocket is not a launch engine and not intended for atmospheric use.

Your waste heat is always going to go up. It will rise until it stabilizes. If you have enough radiator capacity it will stabilize somewhere below the reactor's maximum temperature. This is, as I understand it, part of the reworked thermal system. You will never have zero wasteheat any more, but instead your craft will reach an equilibrium point between heat producers and radiators. Your electrical generators will be more efficient if you can keep this equilibrium point low by including more radiatiors.

I believe un-upgraded generators cap out at ~20% efficiency anyway

Why not just use plasma thrusters rather than thermal rockets? They can be placed anywhere so long as you have enough power generation.

I have made some good progress designing usable planes recently but have been encountering a problem... when I try to use SAS to hold a heading the plane will 'bounce' continuously overcorrecting up and down over and over. It flies more or less straight but the bouncing motion is really annoying and can sometimes cause structural failure and really makes landing hard. Is there something I can tweak to fix this?

I have to say that these are fantastic. I have a science bay on my lander now which has a small ladder leading up to the doors. Lander looks nice and kerbal can climb ladder to retrieve science data for return to KSC later on, and I don't have crap sticking out all over the rocket.

And 0.9 isn't coming out until KSP 0.23?

Antimatter tanks are still pretty much impossible to use at high timewarp. It spams messages about explosions and drops the timewarp back down.

This mod is based on realistic or theoretically possible technology unfortunately, and even small satellites need some help cooling down in the harsh light of the sun. Most craft in space simply do not radiate heat efficiently unless they are designed to do so. The good news is that a single tiny radiator can handle the heat from a few panels.

Not really. A single big orange tank has more surface area than 4 little lights. Though now I wonder if there is a way to count the polys in every part on the vessel and base it on that. That might give you a better, though still not 100%, indicator. Edit: Calculating the area of each poly on the mesh of each part? Might be a bit cpu intensive but you only have to do it once each time the vessel changes. (Staging, decouplers, crashes...) Ooor do it once for each part the first time the mod loads and then add them up on vessel load? ... area ABC = 0.5 * | AB X AC | maybe this? http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/117388-figuring-out-the-volume-and-surface-area public float Area () { Vector3 result = Vector3.zero; for(int p = mVertices.Length-1, q = 0; q < mVertices.Length; p = q++) { result += Vector3.Cross(mVertices[q], mVertices[p]); } result *= 0.5f; return result.magnitude; }

Until there is a decent way to compute a craft's surface area I think mass is the only way to do it

This is a good point. I'd really like an aluminum hybrid engine which didn't include a tank for example.

Er... my point was to remove the power curve changes you made to vanilla panels as well. Leave them unchanged, and add your own which operate in your updated manner. Unless I am misunderstanding you and you're saying that the stock panels provide massive power in low solar orbit even without your changes? The passive convection idea is good though. Would you also consider adding some extra heat convection to the radiators based upon your current speed through atmosphere? It seems to me that flying within a certain range of speeds would make your plane's radiators cool quite a bit faster than sitting still. Obviously above a certain speed that effect would be lost by the compression heating of the air. Might be too complicated... Edit: And yes I realize that real satellites have to deal with heat but I think come confusion here is coming from you modifying stock parts. Just my 2 cents though, it is your mod obviously.

With all the posts about people adding this mod and then having problems with previous craft, do you think it would be worth it to make a new type of solar panel which works with your mod and leave vanilla panels alone? Some kind of concentrating solar panel which integrates with your thermal mechanics. You could even make it glow when it begins to overheat as a visual representation for the player, and you wouldn't have to worry about breaking existing craft for others by making their static panels explode or not work.

Does a relay need two transceivers if it, itself, is producing power? One set to transmit, one set to relay?

Oh man, now I want to test a spaceplane using plasma thrusters with microwave receivers.

I think the file is too large for it to convert due to the pictures. In any case I'll work on the doc a bit later today.

Donziboy2 can you throw the document you used to make this up onto google docs? I will help edit and expand it.

It can take a long while for the reactor to cool down, yes. That looks awesome! One of the two things keeping me from working on a deep space energy net is the lack of proper relay networks.

You have to wait a few days for the decay heat to dissipate so its cool enough for the kerbals to work on.

You said it was the same plane but you didn't report the reactor usage. If you're not getting 100% utilization then you aren't getting all of the available thrust.

Did the reactor reach 100% capacity? If not, you don't have enough intakes.

Any way to let us set the priority ourselves? It could be as simple as right clicking a part that takes MJ and clicking an up/down button to change the priority on a 1-10 scale, with 1 being first and 10 being last.