Fractal_UK

The next major version will be 0.10

As I said, I'd like to do this but it's a long way to go from having a solar sail that can do it to having an engine that does it. Even if I wrote an engine module that was capable of it, which I could only do by writing my own copy of all the engine code found in the base game there are still some interface problems - as an example, the game won't let you time accelerate while the throttle control is set to anything other than zero or change the throttle during time acceleration. The only way around this that I can think of at the moment would be to give you a seperate time-acceleration throttle controller, which I don't like because it's a bit of a messy solution. It's also potentially a tricky one for users as I'd be having to maintain my own engine code, entirely seperate from SQUAD's, and that could pose some problems down the line as well as compatibility problems associated with introducing it initially. I'd need to find a satisfying resolution to all of these issues.

Yes, I made a mistake when accounting for compatibility with the B9 sabre engine, I already fixed it ready for the next update though.

Oh, yes I did, I altered the MM configs for the next release as you suggested. The configs seem to work fine for me without the change but I certainly intended to do it the way you proposed anyway.

Nope, you can lower or raise your orbit by orienting your sail at 45 degrees to the sun so you could use them to fly into the sun if you so wished. You can't "burn" radially toward the sun but radial burns are pretty rare anyway. All other directions are possible by orienting the sail properly. Maybe but it's difficult to do because I have to write a totally new engine module that does everything the engines in the stock game can do, I can't reuse any base KSP code. Call it a long term objective, I'd really like to do it because it'd be literally a game-changer.

That's correct, when off the rails the game applies forces to the ship, adjusts your orbit "physically" by the force the planet's gravity acting on the ship, thus engines can function simply in the same way, by applying thrust to the ship as you'd expect. When on the rails, the game has the ship following an exact Keplerian orbit. Instead of the craft sitting on this same orbit with only the time parameter changing each frame, I update the characteristics of the orbit to account for the change in momentum produced by the solar sails - you will therefore see your apoapsis/periapsis/inclination changing in real time as you time accelerate.

Solar Sails Solar sails, for those who don't know, are essentially just huge, light, reflective surfaces attached to a spaceship which reflect light from the sun in order to produce thrust via the light-pressure imparted on the solar sails. These are of interest in space travel because they require no fuel and no energy other than that required to point the sail in the proper direction. The downside of solar sails is that the thrust is minimum (0.08µN/m^2), thus very large sails are required to produce useable thrusts. My interest in solar sails in KSP started when Honey Fox sent me some code after producing some initial work on solar sails, the problem, as it so often is in KSP, was that solar sails didn't really work because you can't timewarp fast enough for their tiny thrusts to actually do anything without the player waiting for days or weeks. I was fairly certain I could solve this particular problem by making the solar sails work at normal time acceleration (i.e. up to 100,000x) but development stopped at a half-finished state because I decided to work on other things and I had no suitable models anyway. All of that changed a week or two ago when SasquatchM posted a topic on the development boards about a solar sail part he had made and requested some plugin code to control it. I pointed him toward the half-finished solar sail module found in Interstellar, I subsequently finished the work on this Module and indeed it now works properly during both physical and non-physical time acceleration. Subsequently, SasquatchM has generously allowed me to make use of his model for Interstellar. Initially, the sail will be purely solar powered - under those conditions it operates rather nicely up to about Kerbin's orbit and adequately out to Duna's orbit, it's brilliant for inner solar system missions - indeed I imagine it becoming a top method of propulsion for Moho and Low Kerbol transfers particularly, since these misisons have very high delta-v requirements. We do, however, have future plans for a laser part, which sort of like like the microwave arrays, could be used to beam power into the sail and permit higher thrust operation at far greater distances and making the sail far more versatile!

That's not exactly true Greys, ORS is only parly about custom resource definitions, the other part is exactly the topic of this thread. Notably it includes the resource manager that I wrote for Interstellar, which is designed to provide a managed alternative to part.RequestResource for resources featuring long term ongoing supply and demand. This is mainly advantageous for resources that behave like ElectricCharge and have a large and consistent turnover. The upcoming version will provide a "fixed" RequestResource function which behaves like part.RequestResource for STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH and NO_FLOW resources but implement custom behaviour for ALL_VESSEL flow resources, this is to avoid the unusual stock behaviour of part.RequestResource returning 0 when the resource draw is 1e-5 or less.

Download Eadrom's KESA Resource Integration if you want to unify the Interstellar and TAC resources.

I decided to perform a first experimental mission of this new gravitional lens/telescope code. My ship is a bit wobbly due to the poor design but it's a nice enough demonstration of concept. This was done with all the techs unlocked and the journey took ~9 hours ingame. It remains to be seen how early in career mode it can be done.

I have a spare file for when people can't get it to load: download this tree.cfg file and put it there. Then it should work.

Go to your game save folder [KSP Main]/saves/[Game Name]/ and delete the tree.cfg file then reload the game. That's a really awesome model but it's very high detail and I have no hope whatsoever of texturing it appropriately, sadly it doesn't seem to include any by default.

Well, originally I thought about setting it up that way but it doesn't really make as much sense. The precooler is basically the first thing in the chain of components after the inlet, so any active inlet (i.e. not a ram intake) would contain turbomachinery that would itself melt if the intake flow weren't precooled. I would like to find a way of distinguishing ram intakes from other intakes but active intakes aren't actually required in KSP because all the atmospheric engines have between about 7.5x-15x (depending on altitude) as much fuel efficiency as they should compared to real life (this is in contrast to rocket engines which are generally less efficient in KSP) and if I change that too, well, I'm suddenly making a huge number of changes that make all aircraft massively harder to build - I've tested some of these changes and I was still able to build an SSTO out of stock parts but it was a genuinely difficult task that took a long time to complete. I don't think that is really everyone's cup of tea so I'm looking for a sensible alternative.

Space Telescopes and Gravitational Lensing It's about time I started adding some challenging objectives to actually get people making use of all the advanced propulsion technology found in Interstellar to do something a bit more challenging. Here's something I'm working on to that effect. Infrared Space Telescope This is more or less based on the James Webb Space Telescope, it's an Infrared (with a bit of visible) space telescope designed for surveying the cosmos. It functions a little bit like science lab, you place it in orbit and it will begin to generate science at an initial rate of 0.5/day - this makes it equivalent to a science lab landed on the Mun with Kerbals of average intellect. The advantage of the telescope is that it doesn't require large amounts of power to perform ongoing research, the downside is that it has a performance factor that decreases over time, reducing the amount of science produced until the telescope is maintained - this will probably involve transporting fresh supplies of Liquid Helium coolant. Maintenance will bring the telescope back up to full performance and the cycle repeats. In effect this is just a new, ongoing, science experiment part. As usual, if you leave it running, science will be generated in the background and be added to your pool when you switch back to the telescope. Gravitational Lensing This is the interesting part. Massive bodies, like stars, focus light in much the same way as a lens. This effect can be exploited in existing telescopes by looking at distant objects behind massive bodies, this is useful but it doesn't allow us a choice of what we are looking at, we can only look at things along the proper line of sight with the massive body we point our telescope at. Here comes the however: if we can get sufficiently far away from the sun, we can use our own sun as a gravitational lens. We could then point our telescope at whatever interesting objects we choose, for example, we could observe nearby star systems where we have detected planets using indirect methods such as Doppler spectroscopy - then we could image those planets directly using our sun's gravity to massively increase the magnification! What is the catch, you ask? Well, in order to actually make use of the sun as a gravitional lens, we need to reach ~550 AU, that's about 1/115th (~0.87%) of a light year. The actual distance will, as usual, be scaled to Kerbal distance scales, meaning that you need to reach 550x Kerbin's orbit radius (or 80x Eeloo's orbital radius). If we can send out a ship to this enormous distance containing an IR telescope and either a science lab or an upgraded AGI core: we can conduct a new planet-observation activity, which will be largest science/day producing activity you can perform. Now, this mission is, of course, using the alcubierre drive relatively easy but the alcubierre drive is one of the last techs to become available - if you can somehow complete this mission before getting it, you will accelerate your technological progress considerably. Without it, completing the mission within 5 years of ingame time requires about 95km/s of delta-v, so is certainly possible given sufficiently high standards of engineering. The challenge is set! Telescope in action I made the telescope model myself, it looks reasonable but I'll happy replace it if someone can provide a better one.

It would illuminate the sail so I could maybe have it light up the appropriate face? Then you'd be able to see the laser light reflected off the sail but yeah, there would certainly not be a visible "beam" in space, that is caused by the laser scattering off molecules or small particles suspended in the atmosphere.

A piece of plugin code, it adds FNSolarPanelWasteHeatModule to any part that contains a ModuleDeployableSolarPanel.

The solar panels have an Interstellar module added to them which creates a resource manager for WasteHeat if the ship doesn't already have one and then produces the heat. The batteries that you're using and the Kethane generator don't have any such module so the waste heat mechanics don't work properly. The assumption of the radiators is that there is nothing producing heat so they simply do nothing. I can't do much about this because the stock resource system isn't advanced enough to simulate the WasteHeat mechanics. I'd guess from the look of the Balka panels that a new part module has been created for them. If that's the case, I'd have to write some new code to update those as well. I'll try and find some time to have a look at the KOSMOS pack and see if it's an easy fix to make them work properly again - I'm fairly sure they used to work so perhaps this is a recent change.

Where are you seeing this 100 for the 0.625 stackable? The area in the .cfg file is 1.25 not 100. You can't just use stock or modded modules to produce WasteHeat, the Interstellar power resources: ThermalPower, ChargedPower, WasteHeat and Megajoules all use a special resource manager to produce them. If you produce them just by adding them to the total, the resource manager will not properly understand where that heat is coming from, why it exists or how to deal with it. Not sure why the BALKA doesn't work though, the WasteHeat changes should be applied to all solar panels. Does the BALKA display the heat production bar? At present you can't but it's really easy to avoid anyway, switchover to LFO before your engines overheat or add some precoolers to the intakes.

On Duna, it will work similarly to how it does when you're in Kerbin's ocean, the only difference is the rate, extracting water from Duna's soil is a slower process and requires some power. The rate is based on the water abundance in the soil and that varies according to latitude, Duna's ice caps naturally have far more water than its equatorial regions.

It's potentially doable, I have plenty of code in Interstellar that could be adapted to do it - you could have laser parts powered by nuclear reactors or whatever to beam power to your sails. The microwave transmitter code could be adapted to it. Of course this then becomes more a case of me acquiring your model for my mod than me helping you make a basic plugin, which may not be exactly what you had in mind! So it depends where you want to go with it and whether you want it to be a small plugin with a simple part or something that becomes part of a more involved set of infrastructure to use it, or, of course, both is also an option.

Yeah, I imagine that is something that could be responsible but it's not a plugin that I've tested with. Please let me know the results.

Have you checked that your installation includes the file it notes: GameData/WarpPlugin/PlanetResourceData/kerbin_uranium.png ? Check out that that file is there and opens properly. You may need to delete the WarpPlugin folder, download a new copy of Interstellar and reinstall.

I'm not really sure what you mean? What are you trying to do exactly? Again, I'm going to need more specifics. Which modules aren't working for you and exactly at what point are you unable to use the science options. A KSP.log file and potentially a screenshot showing the problem would also be useful.

No, it can't, it's just informative. The only radiation that can harm Kerbals comes from nearby active DT vista engines.

All parts are automatically upgraded by default in sandbox mode.