Fractal_UK

Ideally, yes but rewriting the tech tree and making sure everyone gets the new tech tech tree would be a difficult task indeed. In principle though, I agree, it is obviously better than the other parts on the same tech node - it's big and heavy and still requires massive fission reactors to power when you unlock it but if you do it, it's obviously very very powerful.

The point is that I'm interested in adding intermediate parts in the future that need to use a tiny bit of antimatter by existing part standard. At the moment, you unlock the ability to produce antimatter before you actually unlock the items that actually use it, that provides scope for earlier technologies that don't require anywhere near as much as a pure antimatter system. Fission reactors, especially the larger reactors and upgraded ones already burn fuel quickly enough that refueling is fairly important. The lifetime for the top reactors can easily reach a couple of hundred days, which is comparable to an interplanetary voyage. I'm hoping to get my hands on some new parts for resource extraction and reprocessing in the near future which will hopefully make transporting the equipment to mine various materials a bit easier - no need to lug the large refinery around. I definitely regard this as the most important goal in this area. Tritium and He-3 synthesis is realistic, neither occur naturally (well okay, He-3 does but He-4 is rare on Earth and He-3 is orders of magnitude rarer still so fuel production is totally unviable on Earth) and producing tritium is also extremely easy. For reference, at current prices, the amount of Tritium that you start off with in a 1.25m reactor is worth ~ $750 million so it's already pretty generous. Instead of bankrupting your space program further, you take Lithium with you and it becomes the stuff you want on the way. Additionally, fusion reactors (and particularly the DT Vista) are powerful enough that they really need the extra balancing factor of resource acquisition. Many spaceprograms have real problems with the availability of radioactive elements, Plutonium-238 used for RTGs is a good real-life example because it is no longer produced in the US or Russia yet is used in the vast majority of RTG power systems. Lack of availability is going to pose a real problem in the near future if new Pu-238 isn't produced. The DT vista always burns Deuterium/Tritium at the same rate, regardless of throttle because the power requirements remain constant due to the way the variable Isp works. Antimatter useage (and nuclear fuel useage) does change though, so I could show that.

It looks like you have bigger problems that just the magnetometer not working, it seems to be your other science experiments too and various other parts as well - this is just a sample of all the parts that are having problems. [WRN 08:56:44.302] Part GooExperiment cannot load module #2. It only has 2 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.302] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.303] Part GooExperiment cannot load module #3. It only has 2 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.303] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.309] Part GooExperiment cannot load module #2. It only has 2 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.310] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.310] Part GooExperiment cannot load module #3. It only has 2 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.311] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.317] Part sensorThermometer cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.318] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.319] Part sensorThermometer cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.319] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.326] Part sensorBarometer cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.327] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.327] Part sensorBarometer cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.328] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.334] Part sensorBarometer cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.335] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.336] Part sensorBarometer cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.336] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.343] Part sensorThermometer cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.344] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.345] Part sensorThermometer cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.345] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.352] Part sensorAccelerometer cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.353] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.353] Part sensorAccelerometer cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.354] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.360] Part sensorAccelerometer cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.361] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.361] Part sensorAccelerometer cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.362] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.369] Part sensorGravimeter cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.370] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.370] Part sensorGravimeter cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.371] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.378] Part sensorGravimeter cannot load module #3. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.378] PartModule is null. [WRN 08:56:44.379] Part sensorGravimeter cannot load module #4. It only has 3 modules defined [WRN 08:56:44.380] PartModule is null. You could try rebuilding your saved craft from scratch and see if you see an improvement. If that doesn't work I'd suggest starting a new savegame with the stock game and start adding mods back one by one until you have a problem. I'm sorry I can't help more, but I guarantee the magnetometer does work in career mode, something is making it fail - unfortunately I can't determine what from the log file.

B9 precoolers already function as precoolers within this system.

I mean, in theory it's possible to do this too, you could have some kind of powered sail variant where you check for line of sight to Kerbin and apply substantially more thrust from that vector to the sail - unfortunately it'd be more difficult to control because your orientation relative to Kerbin is completely not obvious much of the time.

No, the thrust is indeed realistic. Solar sails aren't viable for interstellar travel unless you can actually beam power into the sail - large lasers would be suitable for this kind of task. Without that, you're largely restricted to inner system travel.

It depends on distance from the sun. At Kerbin orbit, the maximum is ~ 1.31N. At Moho, it's ~ 8.75N and at Eeloo it's ~ 0.029N. In my opinion, it's pretty useable once you get the hang of it out to maybe Duna's orbit. You can get to Jool with it by making your orbit really elliptical like I showed but you will have to aerobrake if you want to achieve orbit because once you're actually out at Jool the sail is basically useless.

I've heard reports of people who have SCANsat installed having some major problems with the magnetometer. I think the GUI button also has a habit of disappearing if you use it a time when the experiment isn't available, if that happens, reloading the craft should fix it.

Now for a bit of a development update/future information post: So, first of all I've been going over many of the functions of the science lab and refinery in order to make them work better and to add certain sections of code to their own classes to avoid duplication and generally improve performance. This should result in massive improvements to the internal handling of deuterium centrifuging, antimatter production, nuclear fuel reprocessing and resource extraction. It occcurs to me that now I'm handling things like this, I can make antimatter production efficiencies at the science lab vary by tech level to provide a more logical progression as you advance down to the tech tree. The ultimate advantage of this is that currently you experience a jump between zero and viable antimatter production. If this works well it could be the start of a system that provides tiered part with multiple upgrades that slowly make them better and better rather than a simple binary state of a part being either unupgraded or upgraded. In reality, there are some fairly interesting "antimatter initiated" concept rocket designs that use quantities of antimatter that might actually be (just about) practical to produce in the very near future not as a direct reactor system but to initate fission and fusion reactions. Typically they use antiprotons to induce fission in a heavy element like Uranium which provides the power to kickstart a fusion reaction between Deuterium/Tritium or Deuterium/Helium-3, a bit like a thermonuclear bomb only on a far far smaller and more controlled scale. These are rocket designs that I'm very interested in looking at in the future and I'd like to create a smoother transition between the standard rockets found in the stock game/early Interstellar and the very high-tech end game period. These rockets tend to be high specific impulse, moderate thrust and are very heavy - the DT vista is probably the best example of such a thing that appears already albeit it at the high powered end. I'm quite interested in these realistic concept interplanetary rockets at the moment so these are things I'm interested in working on for future updates. I'm also going to be changing the relationship between charged and thermal power such that unused charged power is useable as thermal power - this is both more realistic and makes the charged power producing fusion reactors a bit more versatile. I've also done some work recently that hints at the possibility of creating an entirely new engine module that would work during timewarp - this would, of course, be something of a holy grail for electric engines in KSP as the burn duration would no longer matter! You could simply adjust your course while timewarping through interplanetary space and the anaemic thrust of the plasma engines in KSPI, at least when using nuclear reactors, would no longer really matter. Hell it would probably make solar powered plasma engines worthwhile. This is all at an early stage and there are a lot of technical details to fill in but I'm certain now that it's at least possible. I'm also interested to hear suggestions and what priorities you would want to see developed in future versions.

The thrust is applied along the y axis (because whatever angle you are facing, the incident and reflected photon momentum cancel in all but the direction normal to the sail) but the magnitude of the force determines the force applied to the sun, maximum force is applied when the sail is perpendicular to the sun.

There is no special mechanism provided but, of course, you could create your own Lithium tank using a stock fuel tank as a basis if you like.

Ah okay, just wondered why it looked different to what you showed off earlier. Do you want me to take the reflectiveness / semi-transparency into account in the thrust calculations?

Direct conversion only works for fusion reactors (requires charged power).

It's certainly possible that we can find a way to display the resource abundance in a way which provides significantly more detail though I'm not exactly sure what that method should be at this point. In other news, I've written a new ORSHelper.fixedRequestResource() method which functions very much like KSP's part.requestResource (indeed it calls this method for STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH and NO_FLOW draws) except that if you request a large amount than can be provided it uses the maximum amount it can manage and returns the change (rather than doing nothing and returning 0). It also implements new code for ALL_VESSEL flow resource draws so that you can draw less than 1e-5 of a resource without the method arbitrarily returning 0. I'll release this along with a few other minor tweaks in the fairly near future.

The code to control it seems to be working really nicely now. The new code can be found here: https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/blob/develop/FNPlugin/ModuleSolarSail.cs . I'm having some issue with the texture though:

It's a rounding issue on the gamma ray spectrometer rather than there actually being zero there, you'd need a parts per billion display rather than parts per million to actually get a reading. Eeloo doesn't really have much of those heavy elements.

I just used a temporary update to make the acceleration changes to before changing the vessel's orbit parameters to match. I don't know why but for some reason this produces far better results. I've used a 2x2 structural panel to double as a solar sail. I spent over 1600 days in space doing this, about 1000 figuring out how to control it and then 600 or so sailing out to Jool's orbit. The thrust is actually more than adequate provided you don't let your periapsis go far above Kerbin's orbit (i.e. spiralling out is a bad idea, better to raise apoapsis and lower periapsis).

Can you provide a KSP.log file please?

Yeah, the module is loosely based on the code you sent me but, you're right, it's actually very difficult to get the orbits to update properly with a continuous acceleration - even if you get the velocity alterations right it's easy to lose numerical stability. I think I have finally solved that problem though. I think I can use this code to make an engine module that works during timewarp but it would have to be an entirely new engine module with new particle effects handling and everything so it's quite a big undertaking. I'll talk to Nathan though.

You can use atmospheric scoops to harvest Deuterium from Jool's atmosphere too. By the way, I decided to add to ORS a replacement function designed to be used in place of KSP's standard part.requestResource() method. This function replaces the behaviour only for ALL_VESSEL resources and allows me to fix some annoying issues created by the 0.23 update, you can see when using this the Lithium breeding code works at normal speed:

You can do it with plugin code easily enough but there is no generic module you can add to do it. What are you trying to make generate waste heat?

Pretty easy, I'd just have to write a custom solar panel module, the main difficulty would be controlling the animations but all I'd need to do would be copy the radiator code and rotate it by 90 degrees so the panels face the sun rather than their edges facing the sun. It'd work fine for new ships but I'm not sure if it would break existing ships pretty badly - that's one reason I haven't looked into it too much.

I think I've pretty much got it working now, it isn't at all easy to fly with until you get the hang of it. It's pretty powerful in the inner system but going to the outer system is all about making your orbit increasingly ellipitcal so that during the phase close to periapsis you can make the most of all those photons to raise your orbit. I also decided to lie about the area and pretend the surface area is 100x bigger in order to increase the thrust (the size I've used is still perfectly reasonable for a realistic solar sail, it's just not reasonable to portray in game at that size, so I think that's fine). It probably still needs something to help control it, I'm wondering if I can lock the orientation of the craft relative to the sun because that's potentially helpful. It's pretty cool though, I even got a couple of Duna encounters - I mean, those aren't so useful since I had to eject it from Kerbin to make successful use of it and that is most of the delta-v cost of a Duna mission right there but I could see it shining for Low Kerbol missions, Moho missions and maybe also some Jool missions. I could certainly see the sense in using it to deploy things like solar power satellites in Low Kerbol orbit because those missions can easily use up a lot of fuel.

The power consumption should never drop below 2.5GW regardless of the thrust. I don't really know why it has suddenly started doing that in the current version, I'm guessing it's related to engine changes in 0.23. Regardless, it needed rewriting to be compatible with the megajoule power management display anyway so I've done that ready for the next version and it performs properly there.

Doing anything with the kethane grid is a no-go for anything other than personal use. Hooking into the Kethane API is allowed but distribution of Kethane, modified or unmodified, is prohibited which makes it license incompatible with this system. It should but I've just realised that it doesn't so I'll fix this for the next revision. Using optional image maps to vary concentrations like the PLANETARY_RESOURCE_DEFINITION nodes do is on my list of planned features. I like the extra control of this approach because it allows you to be very specific in creating points of interest.