Fractal_UK

Can you send me a copy of your KSP.log file? That might shed some light on what the problem might be.

I'd guess this is an installation issue, check your [KSP]/GameData folder and make sure the WarpPlugin, TreeLoader, HexCans are in that folder; not inside any other folders. If the directory structure isn't right, you will have lots of bizarre problems.

Actually radiation shielding is "automatically generated" - you will see that if you EVA a Kerbal, the radiation count displayed on their EVA suit will be much higher than occurs inside a command module. All the modules have different radiation resistances that are determined by their mass and the number of Kerbals they carry. I will make this number visible in the VAB before I add any radiation hazards. In the future, I will add a contained plasma radiation shield (a diffuse plasma surrounding your ship, contained in magnetic field) which will provide almost perfect protection against charged particles but zero protection against neutral particles (e.g. neutrons from a nearby DT Vista).

You're right but it does make a difference to the other reactor types. A more universal change is a lot of work for what is a very low priority issue now that the reception of thermal power from your ship is fixed and the only effect it has is to make things marginally easier, unless I'm missing something. If I come up with something better I'll include it but there are other things I need to give my attention to more at this point. I will deal with it fully as soon as I can.

It should work after you have throttled up the engine a touch after loading the spacecraft. As for the generator issue, it just requires the generator to detect if the reactor is on or off before deciding to supply power. I'll put it in the next update.

I'm going to need more information, do you actually have some power draw that the generator needs to provide power for? Is the nuclear reactor working? Have parts shut down due to overheating or something?

The altitude factor only kicks in if you orbit at higher than the planet's radius above the surface, so for Kerbin you need to orbit at 600km or less to get the maximum rate. You generally get a bonus of 2x for being landed but a couple of places give you a bit more. The base science rate is determined by celestial body and depends on a combination of how difficult and how scientifically interesting I think a place is but it mostly follows the distance scale. The Mun and Minmus will give you more than Kerbin, Duna and Eve will give you more than the Mun and Minmus, etc. I don't want to provide an exhaustive list of all the numbers because it will take away the enjoyment of investigation but anywhere you go that isn't Kerbin will give you a large bonus, potentially a massive bonus.

The dose rates are totally wrong on Kerbin at the moment, it's really only modelling proton belts at the moment, I need to add in electron belts, cosmic rays and ground-based sources of radiation. Most places you go in the system though, it's not really very dangerous - the biggest danger would be spending time close to Jool, the radiation levels can get pretty high in that area, other radiation belts aren't very dangerous dangerous for short term exposure (i.e. passing through) but would be dangerous for an extended period in orbit, aside from that, it's mainly more long term dangers. Regardless, there is zero danger at present, just thought I'd make some of the information available as a bit of a teaser to invite discussion. I created another thread here to discuss this idea because the Interstellar thread itself is a bit too general for discussions of specific features and this particular idea offers a large number of possibilities.

Unlikely - the cost of acquiring materials in space is enormous, even if you're recovering huge supplies of (extremely expensive) precious metals which simply can't be produced in those quantities on Earth, the only way to try and achieve a profit is to return large quantities, at which point you massively distort the market price because of the quantity you just returned, that makes it harder and harder to get the needed return. For a worthwhile economy in space, you really need the ability for fairly advanced in-situ manufacturing as well.

It wouldn't matter if you had 0 methane in Titan's atmosphere, you don't need any reactive chemicals to heat your propellant if you have a nuclear reactor to provide heating, in fact, fewer reactive chemicals are actually a positive because you don't need to worry about said hot reactive chemicals reacting with engine components. You can just take in atmospheric nitrogen, heat it up with your reactor and expel it to produce thrust. Going back to your point about chemical propulsion though, keep in mind that titan actually has higher atmospheric pressure than Earth so the 5% methane is a larger absolute quantity than a 5% proportion on Earth would be. Additionally, you use more oxidiser than fuel by mass, methane burning uses 2.67x more oxygen by mass than methane, which means that with both of these factors accounted for, you can burn methane with oxygen almost as quickly on Titan as you can on Earth. Yes, you have to carry oxygen rather than methane, so you're carrying the chemical that is both heavier and needed in greater quantity but that part is accounted for by the reduced gravity on Titan. Edit: when you take both Titan's atmospheric pressure into account and the methane/oxygen combustion mass ratio into account, burning methane in stored oxygen there would be like burning stored methane in a 20% oxygen environment.

The primary problem with the current setup is that the un-upgraded reactors aren't as warm as they should be, which is capping radiator temperatures below their maximum and leading to reduced radiation. In the next version, the reactor temperatures will be increased somewhat, generator efficiency will also be slightly increased but the amount of heat radiation from the radiators will depend upon how full the WasteHeat bar is, in other words, it will become a representation of how much heat your spacecraft's heat rejection system is carrying. That will mean your WasteHeat bar will always be somewhat filled rather than ideally empty. The result will be that generator efficiency properly depends upon heat rejected and more radiators will always give some kind of efficiency advantage. Radiator ratings won't change, the VAB heat dissipation rating will simply be the maximum possible dissipation at 100% waste heat. If you keep an eye on the megawatt radiator ratings compared to the reactors rating and leave yourself some spare capacity, you won't go far wrong. Once you get the upgraded parts, you can make do with a lower proportion (maybe 50%) due to increased reactor temperatures and generator efficiencies. For solar panels, the energy flow is assumed to be in KW, since the radiators are generally dissipating MW or at least significant fractions of one then you'd need a truly impressive solar array to task any radiator at all, at least near Kerbin. Of course, solar panels are tricky to deal with universally because you can move them around, a ship that has no heat problems near Kerbin could easily have problems near Moho, for example. Thorium reactors give 1.38x more power and 1.17x higher temperature, which translates to about 8% more specific impulse and about 27 % more thrust. Thorium reactors also use less than half the fuel compared to Uranium reactors but the power output will begin to drop after even a small amount of actinides accumulate, so you'll need to reprocess a lot more to maintain the power advantage - probably every few months.

I think this is a commonly held perspective but a very worrying one, there will always be something else that we can spend money on than gives more immediate and more short term benefits than space travel and, more generally speaking, scientific research in general. Ultimately though, the more efficient path in the long term is the one that produces more scientific and technological discoveries, because that is the way we find novel new ways to improve people's lives, all the time scientists and engineers are taking front-line research done for science's sake and finding practical applications for them. Space travel is no different, when we try to explore beyond what we have already done, we give ourselves a complicated engineering problem to solve and the solutions that we find are inevitability applicable to wider society. There is a worrying trend at the moment toward policy that is immediately profitable, its not just in space or even just confined to research in general, we see it in infrastructure as well. In the longer term, I fear we'll pay for this approach.

Apparently you have misread the definition I provided for the word circumstance as "a fact or definition that follows from event" rather than "a fact or definition relating to or connected with an event." I have no dispute with your understanding of the physics of the situation, yet you have apparently started a discussion based upon your misunderstanding of an English definition and I'm struggling to see the value in debating it, so I'm not going to participate further in this rather pointless derailment of the original topic of the thread. Getting back on topic, yes, nuclear jets would be an excellent option for travelling on atmospheric bodies using generic atmospheric propellant. It is somewhat difficult to achieve the necessary thrust with a nuclear reactor small enough to be jet mounted, the aircraft nuclear reactor experiment produced some of the early research into molten salt reactors because something compact, high power and relatively high temperature is required. If you are interested in having a fly in KSP, I have attempted to model the thermal turbojet with reasonable respect to reality in my Interstellar mod where you'll find fission powered aircraft slow, heavy and generally low on power but extremely long lived and capable of flying in any atmosphere. I would assume that Titan, with its low surface gravity and thick atmosphere would be almost the optimal environment for such a craft.

Did you set the compiler for .NET 3.5? If not, you will definitely encounter problems with KSP. My change actually just zeros the connection from the same vessel to inline receivers but I'm sure I can incorporate that into the algorithm. The code that ensures energy conservation should take care of the megajoule producing receivers. Thinking about it, this is probably because you're using a radiator that is hitting a temperature cap, there is a limit to how hot the radiators can get as a proportion of reactor temperatures - this mechanic is getting improved in the next update. In any case, a 1.25m inline radiator is totally inadequate for a nuclear reactor in space. Those inline radiators function well in atmosphere but they simply don't have the neccessary area to dissipate much heat in space. You need deployable radiators for reactors in space - even with the full 0.941MW, that's only 2.35% of the reactor's 40MW capacity. The reactor won't run at less than 30% so you're producing 12MJ of heat every second and are capable of dissipating 8% of that under optimal conditions -> your spaceship is going to cook. A small deployable radiator has 20x the radiating area, so adding a couple of those will just about keep the reactor cool under any operating conditions (though you might want a 3rd for safety). Yep.

The figure in the VAB is a maximum amount of heat dissipation, if you aren't producing that much heat, you won't be able to radiate it. 0.941MW of heat dissipation is enough for a great deal of solar panels though, you should be able to see the panel's production by right clicking on them.

Cheers, this looks like to be one of those bugs that happens due to particular flight and engine use profiles so I hadn't spotted it before. You can write this one down as fixed for next time. Thanks Myten, I'll try and incorporate this code sometime this evening or tomorrow. Once that it's in, we should be about ready for a new update including the improved thermal mechanics. You want your velocity vector on departure to be parallel to your velocity vector on arrival for the minimum burn to circularise at your destination, so travelling is optimal when the destination and departure planets are moving parallel in their orbits, which will occur at those planet's minimum seperation.

Fixed it. Just use wiki#item instead of #item. The preview doesn't always work brilliantly for the wiki unfortunately, sometimes links that work in the preview don't work in the final version and vice-versa.

You can reprocess with a lab as well, there is a known issue with reprocessing Uranium using a lab but reprocessing Thorium should work fine and it will be fixed in the next update. There are a lot of reasons for which I'd like to avoid having the option to remove actinides from the reactor - 1) I would need to produce more containers which clutters up space in the VAB with parts that won't be used very often, 2) Actinide waste is really nasty dangerous stuff so I'd need to find some way of modelling that and 3) I'm currently using a trick to minimise the number the number of resources - at the moment a reactor can reprocess actinides into either Uranium or Thorium but if you can move them around you lose the knowledge on what they should go back to being. MSR can use pyroprocessing, basically working directly with the molten salt fluid at high temperatures to conduct fuel reprocessing so you can at least do this non-disruptively. Fixed. What kind of tutorials are you interested in? There are lots of different topics that could be covered, as an example, a lot of people ask about building fission planes so I could make a tutorial about how to do that but that's no use to someone who wants information on using and refueling the DT-vista, for example. It's very tricky for me to know what features people aren't making the most of or are struggling to make best use of because, for me, every feature that goes into the mod is already second nature by the time it's publically released, so watching this thread is the only way I find out what people understand and what they don't.

Circumstance: a fact or condition connected with or relevant to an event or action. I'm pretty sure that the result of a random event that occurs in 1 in ~10,000 times qualifies as a specific circumstance. Jupiter's atmosphere is not solely Hydrogen, it contains quite a bit of Helium as well as various other things in low quantities. By using purely Hydrogen as a lifting gas you could lift a small proportion of that same mass, it's just a matter of making sure you have enough hydrogen to offset the mass of whatever you're trying to lift.

Much work has been done on the first post and the wiki - feedback would be appreciated. Particularly, what you like, what you don't like and what needs to be added next.

Sorry about that, unfortunately new posters can often get missed because the posts don't show up at the end of the thread after they have been approved by moderators. I try to watch out for that but often the thread moves quite quickly. The idea of the refinery was to replace some of the ISRU functionality of the science lab - I've had a lot of people commenting that the science lab part was way too versatile, it was rapidly turning into a part of miscellany for every function that didn't have another place so I'm trying to address that by splitting functions logically. I'm doing a major overhaul of the documentation at the moment, eventually I will get rid of the part descriptions in the first thread and have that information solely in the wiki. Wiki Sorry about the inconvenience and hopefully you can find a use for your science lab.

I've written up a section on the wiki summarising the options available to the Reactor and the conditions under which they are available: find it here. Hopefully this will help overcome some confusion as to how everything works. I'm going to try and do this for all the parts in the mod but that is going to take some time. As always, experienced players are encouraged to help out with the wiki.

The point is, you have to refuel these reactors somewhere between every 2 years and every 20 years depending on the exact configuration and how much power you're using. If you could turn on and off the reactors whenever you wanted without a waiting period, there would be no need for refueling because you'd never run out of fuel, ever - you'd be toggling on and off your reactors every 5 minutes. When you do need to refuel, you have to spend about 3 seconds time accelerating, which is not really a major gameplay impact compared to the balance implications of having reactors you can use essentially forever. Putting timers in a game without timewarp would be far worse from a gameplay perspective. Edit: Let me expand on that. A period like 3 days in game time is enough for ingame events to occur, as an example, a reactor that fails due to overheating and needs to wait for decay heating to subside could have real gameplay implications, 3 days is more than enough time to fall out of orbit, for example, but it's not enough time to actually waste the player's time warping through it. It's important, in my opinion, for simulation games to convey ideas, you don't and will never get close to 100% accuracy but you want to get across an idea that people can recognise in a particular technology. Nuclear reactors have massive advantages in terms of power output and amount of fuel required to achieve that power output and indeed are very safe, especially the Molten Salt designs potrayed here - but you can't go just tinkering around with them any old way, you perform the maintenance by the book so you don't kill yourself.

Not really, the coulomb barrier is far higher meaning you have to put in orders of magnitude more energy to get it started (deuterium-deuterium is bad enough and p+p is much much worse), plus, most of the time the (He-2) product of the reaction generally just decays back into 2 protons meaning most of the orders of magnitude more energy you've put in are spent doing absolutely nothing. You're waiting for the very specific circumstance in which a He-2 decays into a Deuterium and you get a stable product. In other words, if you aren't a star with huge gravity to maintain high temperatures and pressures for billions of years, forget about obtaining energy via this method.

You will need to be specific, what do you mean the game doesn't work? What happens that is not working and when, exactly, does it happen? Likewise when you say the game crashes, what do you mean? At what point does it crash? Do you have many other mods installed? If you have other large mods like b9, have you installed texture reduction packs?