Fractal_UK

You can add both direct conversion *and* KTEC thermoelectric generators to a D/T reactor. You should then still have enough power to do it with 8 (in fact you get slightly more power than you used to). The major downside to using both types of generator is that there is no room for a thermal rocket/thermal turbojet but if you're using a DT vista, you won't need that anyway. Main advantage of He-3 is that no thermoelectric generator is needed.

That's not enough, not even close. 1.25m fusion reactor is 525MW thermal. There was someone building DT vista ships using fusion reactors and generators earlier in the thread, I believe you need 8 of each, assuming the fusion reactor and generators are both upgraded. You can also power it with one upgraded 3.75m nuclear reactor and 3.75m upgraded generator. Reactors List

The 0.22 version is here: https://bitbucket.org/FractalUK/kspinstellar/downloads/KSPInterstellar-v0.8.2.1.zip (Not compatible with KSP Version 0.23). I've found the problem, I'm really embarrassed, the atmospheric code in version 0.9 would've worked perfectly if it wasn't for a typo. I've since reverted to earlier code and been messing about with lots of wacky solutions when the original solution should have worked (and now does work) brilliantly. It's christmas eve tomorrow so no promises but I'll try and put a new version with this fix included out tomorrow.

Do you have enough power? It isn't like most engines in that it doesn't use less electricity when running at 10% throttle than 100%. Instead, the throttle changes the specific impulse so the engine is just as "good" at low throttle, it simply produces less thrust but more fuel efficiency. You need 2.5GW of power to run it, at any throttle setting.

Because you have the upgraded fission reactors and basic fusion reactors. Nothing is "going on," that is just what intakes do. No modifications are made to stock intakes.

The system still auto-throttles engines down to prevent flameout. I'm not entirely sure yet why the thrust asymmetry with multiple engines has returned though. I'm investigating though.

Interstellar version 0.9.X is for KSP version 0.23. It is not compatible with KSP 0.22.

Because they 1) Have an intake area 4x too large, 2) Don't produce any drag and 3) Don't produce both IntakeAtm and IntakeAir (which is totally illogical). At the moment, the module that produces IntakeAtm is ideally suited to being attached to existing stock and modded intakes because the stock intake module takes care of the drag calculations. If I was to keep a solely IntakeAtm intake, I'd have to write an extension to the existing class that added drag calculations and the result would be a bizarre creation that took in Atmosphere from Kerbin without collecting any oxygen. Larger turbojets, however, will probably get added soon. At the moment all radiators are assumed to have emissivity = 1. My impression is that, in space radiator systems, the practical emissivity is almost always very close to 1 and that choice of material actually makes only the most marginal difference. The value would start comfortably over 0.9 for the unupgraded radiators (most likely even higher than 0.95) so I don't really see the point of modelling it. If you want to write something on the wiki, I will be able to edit it afterwards. It is much quicker and easier for me to polish off someone's attempt at an explanation than for me to find the time to write all of it myself, in addition to trying to develop new features. Basically because there is nowhere else to put them. You don't really need to unlock these things and anywhere else I place them is awkward - I could add them in Nuclear Propulsion as NTR fuels or have them unlock along with the refinery but then what if you unlock one of those before the other? Why can't you have a tank of water, of all things? Start feels like the least bad node to place them, rather than the best node, if that makes sense. Solar panels produce 50% of their capacity, their energy flow is assumed to be in KW. That means, in general, all the radiators will cool a whole load of solar panels to the point that one tiny radiator will almost always handle it, unless you're trying to stick something close to the sun. I fixed support for MechJeb in version 0.9 with Thermal Rockets, so you can toggle through all the fuel combinations in the VAB and see accurate thrust and delta-v values. I haven't tested it with Engineer but I presume it works just the same. There is the R&D building that tells you how much science you have. Part upgrades are usually done automatically in the VAB (for free). You only need to manually upgrade components that are leftover from before you unlocked the tech node that gives you an upgrade. In those cases, you'll have an upgrade button and a science display on the right-click menu for the part. Use the side node on the refinery. The refinery has everything you need integrated into it for producing and refining resources. If it doesn't, you'll have to add fuel lines going from the thing you want to fill up to the refinery (i.e. in reverse order to what you expect).

There is no issue with radiators not working. They work perfectly.

Maybe, I mean, you do have automatic reactor power adjustment and you'd still be stuck by the 30% minimum anyway so some kind of controllable output would only apply in a limited selection of circumstances. I've thought about adding it but my conclusion was that I don't think I'd ever have a use for it. If other people tell me they would have a use for it, I could be convinced to add it though - it's probably only a 10 minute job. Yeah, that's right. This is another one I'm interested in opinion on. I have considered some options for changing this to support radial intakes but, on the other hand, none of the radial intakes I've seen in the base game or in mods seem especially suited to pre-cooling. It isn't as if having no precoolers makes it impossible to build an SSTO spaceplane, it simply makes it a bit harder. So in many respects I'm inclined to say this is some kind design trade-off - you can use convenient small convenient radial intakes but that has the downside that you have to switch to LFO earlier. Or you can use the larger intakes and reach higher speeds and higher altitudes. I do think some element of compromise is very important to represent in the design process. It is 100% but I cheekily used a power scaling in the WasteHeat percentage, so you'll get ~84% of maximum when the bar is only 50% full. The radiator temperature readout is a good guide to the amount of heat you're dissipating compared to maximum, of course it doesn't convert linearly. I am interested in making some kind of WasteHeat summary (like the new megajoule power management display) in the future so I think I'll look into that rather attempting a more primitive solution.

That is correct, upgraded radiators are never worse than their unupgraded counterparts but they might not be any better. The only difference between upgraded and unupgraded radiators in this respect is that upgraded radiators can get hot enough that if you don't put enough on, generator efficiency can actually go to zero. The unupgraded radiators never get hot enough to cause generator efficiency to go to zero but, of course, they do still cool the ship far more slowly. I think that is why there is some confusion. Basically, reactors produce WasteHeat equal to their ThermalPower and generators consume an amount of WasteHeat equal to their electrical output. This is basically assuming that 100% of the energy that becomes electrical power does something useful and the rest is useless. Thermal rockets use up all the WasteHeat that their reactor is producing to power them, meaning they can always be powered without heat buildup. The radiators calculate their temperature based on either the minimum reactor temperature or their own maximum temperature, whichever is higher. They start at the ambient temperature and then increase in temperature and thus WasteHeat dissipation until they hit the maximum temperature they can achieve - the amount they radiate at any given moment is determined by how full the WasteHeat bar is. For realistic power generation systems in space, the golden rule is that 50% of the system mass is radiators. If you want to run the 3.75m reactor in space at 100% power, then you will find that that is approximately correct in the mod. That said, you don't neccessarily need to run the system at 100% power - because thermal rockets have open cycle cooling you can make use of the reactor at 30% power for electrical purposes and still be able to run the reactor at 100% throttle without ever having WasteHeat issues. My general approach has been to build unupgraded nuclear rockets that only dissipate the resting 30% WasteHeat because then you only need 30% of the radiator mass. Due to the power scaling, the smaller reactors are a little easier to cool with their associated radiator size.

When Antimatter Storage Tanks have antimatter in them, they require power and the "Stop Charging" button dissappears, you can only stop charging a tank that has no antimatter because stopping charging a partially or fully filled tank is like pushing a button labelled "explode". They are very benign when they are empty so that's why you're seeing such a big difference. The antimatter tanks, especially the larger ones, require quite a bit of power to actually contain the antimatter. It can certainly be met by solar panels but you'll definitely want to add quite a few batteries for those periods when you're in darkness. You can see how much power each tank will need in the VAB.

Thorium is actually stable so its not really down to half life, its actually that the Thorium fuel cycle has poor neutron economy so as you build up neutron absorbing materials in the reactor, it kills the power output. This means that although a given amount of fuel actually lasts longer with thorium and you get more power output, you have to baby the reactor a bit more. The new methane tank is backwards compatible but it is a fractionally different size so you'll want to snap your saved launcher back together to correct the small difference in part alignment. It is only a fraction, so it shouldn't affect your existing ships much.

Check your installation would be the main advice I can give, most crashes are caused by either incorrect installation or by running out of memory if you have a lot of mods installed. For the installation, particularly check that you don't have two GameData folders. Elan, good idea about being able to start with reactors disabled, I like that idea and will include that in the next update. Time remaining for fuel is tricky because it depends on current power output and changing units is a nice idea in theory but would result in a horribly breaking update, so that's why I haven't done it. The antimatter container doesn't use any power when it doesn't have any antimatter in, indeed you can only turn it off when this is the case. Antimatter has units of milligrams, not micrograms, so the current display is correct. You do indeed need a way to attach a refinery or a science lab to deal with the actinide waste but only the larger reactors use their fuel up at any great rate, the small ones will last for years without any reprocessing.

You appear not to be reading my posts. I've explained this several times already. Graphene radiator max temperature >3000K. Molten Salt reactor temperature = 1674K. Can the radiator reach >3000K? No. The radiator can reach 1674K, then it can get no hotter. No more increase in WasteHeat dissipation, ever. If you can't cool your ship with the radiators at operating at < 1674K you never will. The only difference between upgraded and basic radiators is the maximum temperature. If you can't reach the maximum temperature, the upgrade is irrelevant. The only examples you have provided of ships that don't work are of ships that cannot work, the only thing that surprises me is you saying they worked for a while.

The way you are describing how the radiators *should* work is exactly the way they do work, so I can only assume that if you are observing something different you are running an out of date version. All the radiators do is they have a fixed area, their temperature increases as the WasteHeat bar fills up and they radiate energy according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which considers radiator area, emissivity and temperature (to the fourth power) as you rightly say. Why do you think the upgraded radiators are so much more effective than the basic ones? The maximum temperature is over twice as high so its no surprise it goes up so much. Since the 0.9.1 update, I've also added a range of heat dissipations at a range of radiator temperatures to the display so if you want a cold bath of say 1200K, you can see how many radiators you need to maintain that temperature. Edit: Just to be clear, the radiators will start (at 0 waste heat) by radiating at the ambient temperature which for Kerbin is going to be around the 270-300K mark. They will heat up, increasing their WasteHeat dissipationin the process up to an absolute maximum of the reactor temperature. If the reactor temperature >> max radiator temperature, as in the both parts upgraded then the radiators will get up to max temperature no problem and everything will be fine. If max radiator temperature > reactor temperature, radiator temperature -> reactor temperature and generator efficiency -> 0. This can occur for upgraded radiators and basic reactors, the solution is more radiators. It seems like you are expecting radiator temperature to exceed reactor temperature, which is, of course, totally impossible.

Yeah, that'll be because Monopropellant has an ALL_VESSEL flow type so the recent change to the part.requestResource() method is going to be a problem. Since that is a stock resource, there isn't much I can do about that one, other than hope the devs sort out that function. I think you must have totally misread what I said with respect to radiators because you seem to be under some mistaken impressions about how they work. I never said radiators don't work as well when they get hotter, in fact, I said quite the opposite. What I said was that an upgraded radiator cannot reach its maximum radiation potential because the unupgraded reactors are not sufficiently hot enough to allow the radiators to reach their maximum operating temperature. The temperature of the reactor does matter because obviously the radiators cannot get hotter than the reactor than they're attached to, that makes no sense. If they're equally hot, there is no temperature difference to work with and generator efficiency goes to 0%. Generator efficiency is based on (1 - TC/TH) * percentage of carnot efficiency where TC is the average radiator temperature and TH is the temperature of the reactor. If you've updated to the latest version you should be able to see this in the VAB as there is now a list of temperatures and radiation values at each temperature. Finally, you are mistaken about reactors with their generators turned off not generating WasteHeat and about them running at 0%. Fission and Fusion reactors operate at a minimum of 30% of their power output all the time, turning off your generator is actually negative in terms of waste heat production because it means that all of that 30% becomes WasteHeat rather than some fraction of it becoming something useful. Now, as I said before: Case 1) Definitely not enough radiators. Case 2) Definitely not enough radiators. Case 3) Might be enough at minimum power (30%) but you probably want at least 3 or 4. If you have un-upgraded reactors and upgraded reactors you cannot simply read the upgraded radiator value in the VAB and expect to get that. Upgraded radiator maximum temperature is 3500K but unupgraded Uranium reactor temperature is 1674K, so the reactor is less than half as hot as the radiators can be at maximum temperature. If you actually want some reasonable efficiency out of your generator then you aren't going to want your radiators getting hotter than about 1200K to 1300K at which point, you're better off continuing to look at the base radiator outputs. Now, you might be right, there might be a problem but I'm going to a lot more to work with than three vague examples of situations that probably shouldn't work at all anyway to convince me that that's the case. I'll need radiator temperatures, radiator outputs, total reactor output (from all reactors) and generator useage (from all generators).

I have no idea what the intake flow value is supposed to mean - it could be the adjusted fuel intake flow once you account for density. The engines, however, do not account for the density of the propellant in the displayed flow - that means in order to see how much IntakeAtm you're using you take the 0.077 figure and divide by the density, which is 0.005, that gives you 15.4. You then multiply by the physics delta-time, this measures how often the game's physics is updated and that value is often something like 1/43 but it depends on your settings. Assuming that's right, it gives you an intake value (as you'd see on the bar) of 0.358, i.e. each engine running at that rate needs 0.358 in the resource bar to run at the currently displayed power. You can derive the 0.077 figure from the engine's thrust and Isp by taking thrust/isp/9.81 = 111/147.7/9.81 = 0.0766.

Unfortunately if you're comparing atmosphere intakes in 0.8.2 to other intakes in later versions, you won't see the same performance - the atmospheric intakes had intake values 4x what they should have had with no drag. I checked out the engines quite carefully for this update and they do seem to be using almost exactly the maximum amount of IntakeAtm/IntakeAir they can get away with without causing a flameout. You should, however, see fairly significantly improved LFO thrust from fusion engines in this update which should make the post-atmospheric part of the ascent easier.

Okay, ModuleManager is back in the download. If you downloaded without ModuleManager, please download it here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55219-Module-Manager-1-5-%28Nov-11%29

How did that creep out of there? I'll have to re-upload

Version 0.9.1 Released I've replaced the badly retextured methane tank by a probably similarly bad unique model and texture. It also comes with a smaller, half size methane tank that is more suitable to landers. Anyway, on the bright side, Interstellar finally has a model created by me, which is at least a novelty. Version 0.9.1 -Methane tank replaced and new smaller tank more suitable for landers -Fixed Reactor and Generator Upgrades -Fixed loading of warp plugin settings -MJ treatment of plasma engines improved -Megajoule display now responds to F2 and is hidden for vessels with no appropriate power supply -Improvements to atmospheric engine code -Tritium breeding option can now be selected - due to stock problem this will only function while ship is unfocused or at moderate time acceleration -Expanding refinery in VAB workaround -More info on radiators -Atmospheric intake removed from VAB -DT magnetometer rerunnable Download links on the first page have been updated.

I can, it's not a big change to make, that said there are certain things (like the tank explosions) that are tied to that module, depending on what you want to do you might be better off looking at the AntimatterStorageTank class and making your own module based on it.

There are two things that contribute to this, there is obviously the radiator change which does mean that in vacuum you are going to get lower efficiency as you have a smaller heat difference to deal with. You also have the reactor scaling, where the bigger reactors are significantly and disporportionately better than the smaller ones. Still, I think being able to get 5MW of electrical power out of that small 1.25m nuclear reactor is actually about right - there are lot of things you can do with that, it's enough for science research and it's enough for many of the refinery functions too. If those generators were twice as efficient, it wouldn't make a lot of difference because there aren't all that many new capabilities you could unlock with 10MW. So, in terms of power production, I'm fairly happy with it. The thermal rockets and their performance relative to the stock LV-N is all down to the reactor power scaling. The equivalent TWR point is, I believe, somewhere between the 2.5m and 3.75m reactor and thermal rocket combination so the biggest reactor is simply invariably better than the stock one, the 2.5m one is certainly lower thrust but not massively and brings that better Isp to the table. By the time you get down to the smaller ones though, although you've still got that improved specific impulse, you're really starting to have thrust problems. I'm pretty committed to retaining the non-linear reactor scaling, it's much more realistic and adds a bit more compromise to the design process than having everything perform identically relative to size.

The amount per day is the indication that it is being collected. Only a few parts have upgrade options available by default, you need to research technology in order to unlock the upgrades. There is a problem with generator and reactor manual upgrades but those upgrades would probably not be available for you at the moment anyway. Most of the time, you'll find that upgrades generally occur automatically in the VAB when you have researched a new tech.