Fractal_UK

Particle Bed/Dusty Plasma Fission To further develop some interesting nuclear technologies, I bring you some more fission reactor designs. They are quite different to the existing Molten Salt/Gas Core designs and should offer some interesting options. (Model by AArtisan) Particle Bed Reactor The particle bed reactor is a fission reactor that uses small particles of nuclear fuel encased in pyrolitic carbon and zirconium carbide, the particulate design means these particles have huge surface area and are incredibly efficient at heat transfer. The cernamic materials used mean they can also withstand far higher temperatures. Additionally, a particle bed reactor is designed to be resistant to overheating, it takes advantage of a negative feedback caused by doppler broadening to progressively reduce the reactor power output as the temperature increases. This creates a nice passive safety feature, should the temperature ever get too high, the reactor simply stops producing power. This reactor runs at an optimal temperature of 1173K but can operate all the way to up 2700K. The amount of power the reactor produces depends on the temperature, at 1173K, it can generate its rated maximum. At higher temperature, you will produce less power. This creates an interesting situation in space travel because the specific impulse depends upon temperature, thus you can try to add lots of radiators to maintain the highest power rating, giving you the most thrust or you can allow the reactor to heat up a little and lose a bit of thrust but achieve a higher specific impulse. At optimal temperature, Isp is significantly lower than the existing un-upgraded fission reactors but, if you allow the reactors to heat up a bit more, values of just over 1000s are possible. That's pretty interesting for an early tech! Unfortunately, it suffers from significantly lesser fuel burn-up than the existing MSRs and the complicated fuel pellet design means that reprocessing cannot be done on the fly. Instead, you will have to make do with simple refueling - fortunately, this isn't too hard. This reactor uses UraniumNitride fuel, it comes fully stocked in the VAB and this fuel can be produced from Uranium Tetraflouride and Ammonia at your nearest refinery. (Tip: This makes Laythe an excellent location to deploy this design in a self-sustaining way). With proper tweaking, you might find this design can offer some unique and interesting capabilities, especially for thermal rocket applications. Dusty Plasma Reactor This is a very interesting design of reactor which suspends a "dusty plasma" of microscopic solid particles electrostatically. The advantage of this design is a feature rarely seen in fission reactors - the ability to use direct conversion on charged particles. Like certain fusion reactions, a significant proportion of the energy of all fission reactions is initially released in the form of fast moving charged "fission fragments," these are simply the lighter atomic nuclei that result from the fissioning of a heavy atom. In most fission reactor designs, the fission fragments are prevented from escaping so virtually all of the power is generated as heat. This design is one that specifically allows the fission fragments to escape, that means you can hook it up to a Direct Conversion generator and enjoy the huge efficiency gain that design brings. The downside of the dusty plasma is that it runs at very low temperature (4100K) for an upgraded reactor because the particles in the dusty plasma must remain solid. That means specific impulse with a thermal rocket is a fairly uninteresting (for the tech level) 1432.5s. These reactors also don't get a huge power upgrade over the original pebble bed design but the upgrade does offer increased fuel burn-up meaning that despite the (moderately) increased power, the upgrade actually uses less fuel! Of course, they are the earliest opportunity in the tech tree to make substantial use of Direct Conversion power and should be rather nice if you're looking for electrical power rather than good thermal rocket performance. Important Note I have changed the densities of UF4, ThF4, Actinides and DepletedFuel into units of t/l instead of t/m^3, this makes them more consistent with most of the other densities found in Interstellar and the general drive amongst parts of the modding community to adopt those units. It also gives you a more conveniently sized unit for the resource bars in game and basically looks a lot nicer. Your existing nuclear reactors will be automatically swapped to these units without interruption, so you don't need to worry about it breaking your existing reactors, however the hex cans of nuclear fuel probably cannot be upgraded in the same way, that means you may have to send out some new fuel cannisters for your ships after the update.

The scoop does not provide IntakeAir, IntakeAtm or anything similar. It compresses material from the atmosphere into fuel tanks, it is thus a totally seperate mechanic from the precoolers. The only constraint on precooler operation is that they have to be attached directly to the intake. You can put reactors and thermal jets, rapier engines, etc anywhere you want on the aircraft. Edit: You can, in theory, use scoops to run engines but the ways to do this are 1) Go to Jool, where you can harvest LiquidFuel from the atmosphere and use a high Isp engine to harvest more fuel than you use up or 2) Carry asymmetric quantities of LiquidFuel and Oxidiser and replenish the Oxidiser from the atmosphere as you fly.

The best way to test is to observe fuel usage at sea level and fuel usage at, say, 1000m/s. Testing at high speed is not helpful because you can be affected by intake air availability at high altitude, which reduces actual thrust in a way that does alter fuel consumption.

KSP displayed specific impulse doesn't change based on velocity but the technical definition for specific impulse is thrust per unit fuel mass flow. The velocity curve on those engines halves the thrust at sea level compared to high velocity flight without changing the fuel usage. In other words specific impulse has changed, even though the game doesn't tell you. Specific impulse readings are correct for rockets in KSP but for jets, they might as well be made up they are so inaccurate.

You already have a gas core reactor rocket - it's an upgraded fission reactor + thermal rocket. The new propulsion technologies in 0.10 will be the Solar Sail and the Adjustable Throttle Inductively Afterburning Arcjet. There are one or two other things I'm looking at too. Bussard ramjet is something I'm not sure actually works effectively, using CNO cycle fusion, the thrust/power is tiny, so small its questionable under what conditions it can actually overcome the drag force the collector produces. You might be able to get around this by seeding a prepared route with better fuel but by that point, I can't help but think that there are better ways. Such constraints don't lend themselves well to KSP in any case. Basically there are other interstellar drives that are probably both more interesting and more useful.

It's on my list of things to do, but it will probably be a unique update for that purpose in 0.10.1 or something. It's a moderate amount of work since I'll need to create another .dll that interacts with the toolbar but doesn't stop Interstellar itself being loaded if there is no toolbar installed. I don't want to add that amount of work to 0.10 because it's taking long enough as it is and I want to try and get this update out soon. It doesn't pose any danger, it's purely a mechanic that is there for interest purposes, for now. I've added a lot more depth to it for the coming update, you'll have a radiation dose over the surface of all planets in the system, a second Van Allen belt and cosmic rays won't just stop as they hit the atmosphere but it still won't pose an actual danger yet.

You have to take the change in mass ratio into account, in the first case a larger prorportion of your overall spacecraft mass is fuel: You need to compare a ship with LiquidFuel of 2126 and Oxidiser of 2640 with a ship with Liquid Fuel 4765. Then you'll get a meaningful comparison and indeed delta-v will be higher with pure LiquidFuel.

Solar sail will be in too, yes.

Thanks to some great work by AArtisan, you're going to have put up with fewer of my poor quality models in version 0.10 and will get some high quality work by him instead. The fusion reactors that I wrote about before will be replaced by this: You can find further details of the tokamak fusion reactors here, only the model has changed: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-23-KSP-Interstellar-%28Tweakables-New-ISRU-Preecoolers%29-Version-0-9-2-%28Beta%29?p=924772&viewfull=1#post924772 This is an antimatter initated microfission/fusion reactor. It uses small quantities of antiprotons to cause fission in Uranium nuclei, this fission then induces fusion in a pellet of Deuterium/Helium-3. It is essentially another type of fusion reactor - it always uses the same four fuels though, there is no option to swap between fusion modes, it's a nice reactor that produces comparable output to the 3.75m tokamak fusion reactor but, as it's D-He3, produces 80% charged power, which is great for efficient power generation and, crucially, it doesn't require any input power. It is also much lighter than the similar sized and output Tokamak (less than half the mass) and doesn't have any kind of minimum output, meaning operational lifetime can theoretically be huge. Convenience comes with a price, however, and that price is resource availability - Antimatter, even in tiny quantities, and Helium-3 are far more inconvenient to need for your reactor compared to the Tokamak's Deuterium and Lithium. This is the ATTILA (Adjustable Throttle Inductively Afterburning Arcjet) and its designed for people who want a higher thrust (lower specific impulse) electric engine. Specific impulse is ~3.92x lower than the MPD (that's 2,854s for LiquidFuel), the thrust is consequently higher by the same fraction. It's particularly useful for those earlier periods of the game where you want a different range of thrust performances from your nuclear electric rockets. It is, however, a little less efficient than the plasma engine and, because it's electrothermal, it doesn't get to use propellants like Lithium. Now to demonstrate why it's better when I don't make models, we have this: A 2.5m inline refinery - it doesn't come with all the resource extraction parts of the larger model but it does all the processing stages, that crucially includes the Sabatier process, so you can land this on Duna/Eve and use it to refuel with Methane.

I tend to assume that in order for things to be available in the VAB, they must be 1) relatively available without being insanely expensive at the quantities specified (that said, the amount of tritium available from the start pushes this condition to the very limit) and 2) profitable to produce. 2) is fairly key because it's hard to imagine fictional companies that exist in the background on Kerbin spending the effort to produce something unless it makes them a tidy profit in the process. Helium-3 is fairly unusual in Interstellar in that it is a stable element that is restricted but the reason is essentially the lack of availability in nature, you can't just go and mine it from somewhere (on Kerbin), you have to manufacture it. The manufacturing process that would have to be followed is the one that you can reproduce in game: Get Lithium (rare and expensive) -> Perform Tritium Breeding to get Tritium (almost zero abundance in nature, radioactive with short half-life and insanely expensive) -> Leave Tritium sitting around for several years -> Wait for Helium-3 to acculumate -> Sell Helium-3. On Kerbin, any major drive toward adopting Helium-3 fuel would be surprising. The two main advantages of either reduced neutroncity or completely aneutronic fusion are increased reactor lifetime (due to reduced neutron embrittlement) and smaller and more efficient (direct conversion) electrical power production but these come at the cost of reduced power density and increased plasma heating costs. These requirements fit those of a space program particularly well but you'd imagine demand would be small for these materials outside of that. Most imaginary Kerbal business, you would expect, to take the easy decision of mining Lithium and selling that to the commercial energy providers and skipping a lot of expense and several year lag time on getting revenues. Off Kerbin, you can find Helium-3 a bit more readily, in certain places, in nature but then it's in the space program's domain by default. Real space agencies do actually struggle with some similar issues, notably the increasing unavailability of Plutonium-238, which is used for almost all RTGs but is no longer produced in any country, NASA has been buying up Russia's stockpile since 1993 but availability is now starting to run low. Since, again, it's a short half-life element, the only real way of getting it is to manufacture it with nuclear reactors.

I've just been experimenting with new fusion reactors, the modelling is by me so it's no surprise they aren't zzz quality but hopefully you can forgive that given that you've all been asking for them for so long! These are the upgraded versions, running in Sandbox mode, so don't expect to be so wonderfully endowed with power so quickly in career mode. These Tokamak fusion reactors (2.5m and 3.75m) are a bit different to the smaller ones, they are really geared towards Deuterium/Tritium power and consequently have an onboard supply of Lithium and Tritium-breeding is their default behaviour. During normal operation, you'll see Deuterium and Lithium get used but the Tritium should only be being lost to radiaoative decay. Their ongoing power requirements are in line with their smaller counterparts relatively speaking but are, in absolute terms, vastly larger due to power scaling - indeed the 3.75m fusion reactor requires more power than the total output of a single 1.25m (upgraded) fission or (un-upgraded) fusion reactor just to heat its plasma to fusion temperatures. If you want, you can switch the fuel types over to Deuterium/Helium-3 or Helium-3 but this will up the power requirements even further and substantially decrease the reaction rate. The only advantage of this is that, due to the increased energy density of Deuterium/Helium-3 reactions, the upgraded 3.75m fusion reactor can produce ~4GW in this mode for more than 10 years if fully fueled. Both the 2.5m and 3.75m reactor are heavy, similar in mass to their fission counterparts. Indeed, unlike its fission counterpart, the 3.75m reactor is even suitable for SSTO rocket operations once upgraded. (By this I mean vertical takeoff rocket SSTOs with thermal rockets, you can obviously use thermal turbojets particularly coupled with aircraft to achieve the same thing earlier), in fact the rocket below was launched as a single stage using LOx augmentation to accelerate off the pad, followed by a low-power limp to orbit using LiquidFuel. The new DT fusion picture:

I don't think KAS pipes support fuel crossfeed the way that fuel lines do, they simply connect two objects together and allow manual transfer. For the refinery to transfer fuel to the tanks, it needs a proper crossfeed connection.

A reactor just generates heat (thermal power), you need a generator attached to the reactor to turn that thermal power into electrical power. The only thing you can power directly from a reactor is a thermal rocket.

Mathematically speaking, it's infinitely repeatable but the gains will get smaller with each impact, the result of that is on low science worlds, like Kerbin, only a few experiments are neccessary to get almost all the science that is practically available but distant, high science worlds, will be viable for a larger number of experiments. I might alter the rate of decrease based on the value of the first experiment, that way you would need to conduct more experiments in order to make up for having a poor network on your initial experiments but the total science available wouldn't change much. Recording vessel unique IDs, it technically doesn't stop you reverting but it does stop you using the same ship to gain science repeatedly.

Impactors I'm becoming increasingly aware that science in KSP isn't sufficiently interactive so I've been working on ways of making things more entertaining, at the moment you fundamentally have two sytems - Interstellar science labs where you build infrastructure and gain a constant trickle of science and the base game system where you fly somewhere and click a button - these are fine but there are plenty of other options available that require a bit more interactivity. The idea of this one is that you place seismic sensors (the accelerometers) on the surface of celestial bodies, activate the sensors, then when you crash other ships into the surface of that celestial body you will get seismic data and consequently science! For those of you following Interstellar Quest, I'm sure this idea was mentioned by Scott Manley several times and indeed it was famously done in reality with the Lunar Modules and I believe several of the Saturn 5 upper stages were used in this way as well. The results from these experiments are particularly useful because you have an object with very well known physical properties producing the seismic event and that allows you to infer more information about the structure of the body you are crashing things into. This will work by setting up one or several probes with the seismic sensor on the surface of a celestial body, you can deploy as many sensors as you want but the returns will be based on how well spread out the sensors are (they have to be landed of course): using lots of seismic scanners close together won't give you much of a bonus but antipodal sensors will give you a large boost. Once your sensors are deployed you can freely smash craft into the surface of that planet at your leisure and reap the scientific rewards:

You'll need to physically point your receivers at one of the transmitting stations as well in order to receive some power. It should give you information about the total number of transmitters/relays on the receiver so you can check that looks correct.

I don't see any antimatter tank in the stacks so it looks to me like fuel crossfeed is in fact the problem. Thus the solution is putting the antimatter tanks inline with the collector stacks or adding fuel lines.

I bet your engine is just using up all the available resource so the amount displayed amount in the bar is zero. It's a constraint of the game that an engine module cannot run without input propellant so it must be getting some.

Because the open/closed status of the intake doesn't matter when you're using IntakeAtm, this is because there is a seperate module that produces that resource and the standard controls don't affect it. Adding a second set of open/close controls is pretty pointless and would be very strange anyway, especially as in order for it to have any effect, I'd have to add a drag term to those intakes and then you'd get penalised twice for the atmospheric drag on the intake. This way the drag can be accounted for by the IntakeAir intake - yes it allows players a small option to make things easier for themselves by closing the intakes when they shouldn't but it's not a big enough advantage for me to bother about. With microwave receivers the power available varies with craft orientation - the thermal receivers want to receive power perpendicular to the receiver so certain orientations may indeed give you more or less power. If you're going to connect them like that, you'll need fuel lines and remember they need to go from the tank to the collector stack. I think running a fuel line from the tank stack to each docking port attached to it will be enough, then you can still launch the parts seperately.

Try just time accelerating up a bit and the infinite time remaining will probably become a real number. There are a few annoying things that do this as a result of a change to the base game in 0.23 but the next update will include a workaround.

Solar panels don't shutdown until the WasteHeat bar is 98% full, in your first picture, your probe has capacity for 800,800 units, so it won't retract the panels until you reach total WasteHeat: 784,784. I don't see how it's possible for the solar panels to retract before that. I would suggest you delete your GameData/WarpPlugin folder and reinstall Interstellar because something is not right here. If that doesn't help, please send me a copy of your KSP.log file.

A stock KSP turbojet has an Isp of up to 2500s, which is ~13x what you're getting. That means the thermal turbojet needs 13x the air to produce the same thrust, so while turbojets lose thrust in the mid-20kms, nuclear powered jets lose thrust at much much lower altitude. Ultimately, they do not fly particularly fast or particularly high, that is the price you pay for an aircraft that only needs refueling every couple of years. Forget about building a playload-carrying SSTO of any kind, building an SSTO that delivers itself and some Kerbals to orbit will be a decent challenge. I would suggest trying what you are doing again when you have unlocked new reactors that work at higher temperatures, then you'll get more specific impulse and better performance at high altitude. A lot of the early Interstellar technologies are not universally effective and pose some engineering challenges until you learn what you can and can't do with them. All you need is a Lithium tank and a Tritium tank anywhere on your ship and a nuclear reactor, it can be a fission or fusion reactor, though you can't do it with a fusion reactor using pure He-3 fuel. I suspect you're experiencing a weird issue introduced in KSP 0.23, if you time accelerate while tritium breeding up to 1000x or so, you should begin to see Lithium being used up and Tritium being added. KSP doesn't allow draws of ALL_VESSEL flow resources of less than 1e-5 for some bizarre reason, which means the draw isn't big enough at low time acceleration not be zeroed out. I've written some code for the next version of ORS, which reimplements ALL_VESSEL resource draw behaviour in a better way and that will allow me to resolve this problem in the next version of Interstellar.

I was just testing this and I think I've released what the problem might be - the solar panels and microwave transmitters produce/consume ElectricCharge in constrast to most Interstellar parts, which are using Megajoules - that means the consumption system is less refined. The transmitter draws power equal to what the solar panels are producing and the probe will draw a little bit more power on top of that. Over time, that will mean that the ElectricCharge on the ship will tend to deplete unless you have another source of power, like an RTG or two, that doesn't let the microwave transmitter steal its power. A ship running out of ElectricCharge will cause the behaviour you described. If you add an RTG or tiny nuclear reactor or something to your power satellite, that should take care of the problem. Hope that helps you.

If you can send me a copy of your KSP.log file, I might be able to shed some light on what's going on.

If you are having issues with 32 bit Linux/Windows you likely need to either pick up some texture reduction systems or you have an installation issue with Interstellar. There does seem to be an issue with Linux 64 that I can't, at present, explain.