Fractal_UK

Yep, sounds fine. What "science per day" rate is the science lab reporting? Hard to say without pictures but that sometimes happens in KSP, often as a result of the placement of struts. Check that you have fuel lines from the hybrid rocket to the refinery. That DT is NaN is nothing to worry about, perhaps check that you have enough power to start the fusion reactor. It needs the stated power available to be able to turn on.

Of course it does, the solar panels are components that absorb heat when they are in sunlight and that heat needs to be dissipated by radiators. The electrical system on the satellite is nowhere near 100% efficient either, that causes heating too.

It could be something about the environment of your ships, is one in sunlight and the other not, for example? Yes, you just have to wait for the decay heating to subside, you can't work with the reactor while it's still running hot. It should take about 3 days to cool off.

Thanks for the report Quabla, this was a hard one to track down but I think I've figured out why this is happening now and the fix should be fairly straightforward. Yep, this one is already fixed ready for the update. I do mean to add this eventually, it just hasn't been a major priority and it needs a bit of work to properly integrate the animation and such like.

This unfortunately doesn't work because of the way the resource manager works - let's say we've put a transmitter in orbit, it isn't doing anything so it's not really needing to produce any power, generator is at 0%. Then we turn the microwave transmitter on, microwave transmitter says give me the current power, current power is 0, we get nothing. We have to request more power than we have right now, otherwise we get nothing or nearly nothing. I think this part may be the key to the solution, there needs to be an additional step that compares the thermal power received to the reactor output and, in some sense, gets rid of the power from other sources. I did some work on an electrical RCS system, it was actually designed to use Xenon propellant and function similarly to the plasma engines but I wasn't particularly happy with the result and turned to other things - I may go back to it at some point because it'd be nice to offer a long term RCS alternative, especially with ISRU options.

This is a surprisingly nightmarish problem to solve - everything is functioning correctly it's just that that functionality is giving an absurd result, there is simply no internal way to distinguish between power than has just been received from a receiver and power that has come from an onboard reactor. The easiest solution is to either prevent transmitters being activated while receivers are active or to have activating transmitters turn off all other receivers on the same ship. I'd prefer that there was a more elegant solution than this, however so I'll keep investigating.

Straight out of the anti-nuclear book of nonsense once again. Uranium availability is not an issue. Sea water extraction of Uranium can be done at only 10x the cost of current commercial deposits and this has purely been demonstrated as an academic exercise. Note that a 10x increase in the costs of fuel accounts for a maybe 2% increase in the operating cost of the reactor's lifetime costs. There are sufficient deposits on land to maintain production at slightly increased costs for thousands of years and sea water production for hundreds of thousands. Uranium availability is not and never will be an issue. Next please. Apologies about the link https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223940/DECC_Electricity_Generation_Costs_for_publication_-_24_07_13.pdf

If I just accept that estimate without doing any investigation, we're looking at ~13 billion euros per reactor, which is probably 1.5x or 2x the cost of building the reactor. So capital costs are maybe 500million euros per year over a 40 year plant lifetime. A 1.6GW power plant produces electricity worth ~2 billion euros per year at French electricity prices so the capital costs (which are the predominant cost of a nuclear reactor) are accounted for 4x over in reactor revenue. The reactors are paying for their decomissioning and far more besides.

There are different assumptions made in different countries with regard to things like decomissioning costs and disaster funding, for example in the US, there is a liability limit for nuclear power plants and the state will cover the rest beyond this limit; the Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act is what it is called. The costs are estimated to be something like $600k to $2.3million per reactor per year, which obviously doesn't make a vast difference to the economics of a reactor though. This is a fairly recent estimate of comparitive costs of electricity generation for the UK https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/223940/DECC_Electricity_Generation_Costs_for_publication_-_24_07_13.pdf. I did have a really good study done by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that contained a breakdown of all the different costs for different components of each power plant design but I'm struggling to find it right now, I might have to look for some links where I've posted it previously. That one is better because you can see the breakdown based on construction costs, fuel costs, decomissioning costs, etc. I'll try and get back you with that one soon. There's a decent enough page on wikipedia about the Relative cost of electricity generated by different sources which uses a wide variety of sources and tells you something about the stated assumptions used in each.

Nonsense, no technology has a negative learning curve. The idea that something gets more expensive by doing it more, as a general rule, is totally ridiculous and illogical. It is possible in specific circumstances, e.g. diminshing returns from the last group of power plants in a predominantly nuclear grid that have to be restricted to load following duties. Nuclear is not an ideal power source for these load following duties, it's great for baseload. These are specific circumstances, creating a particular condition, in a particular country and it is dishonest to suggest that such a thing applies universally. Additionally, nuclear power has suffered from a lack of investment during the 80 and 90s which has meant that a lot of the positive curving curve that could have been maintained wasn't and construction costs have leapt right back as a result of lost expertise and experience at dealing with these power plants have been lost. As for nuclear power being expensive, that's nonsense. Almost every study done on the relative costs of power from different sources suggests that nuclear power is currently quite modestly priced but often more expensive than most fossil fuels, yet they also, in general, show it could be cheapest option or second only to gas in this respect and is utterly superior to all renewable generation methods (except maybe onshore wind, which provides incredibly unreliable power and every KW needs, at worst, 0.9KW of backup). Regardless, France as has some of the cheapest electricity in Europe as well as amongst the least carbon intensive energy grids, so suggesting the French have suffered for their pro-nuclear apprach is totally absurd.

The receivers only differ on receiver area, since the power density isn't currently limited, it's almost universally true that the smaller ones are better. I wouldn't worry too much about it, the problems are confined to a small subset of the parts, the vast majority of the parts are working as expected. Hopefully the update will be out soon anyway. The velocityCurve is dependent upon exhaust velocity, if you have low exhaust velocity, low velocity curve limit, also the velocity curve only applies to atmospheric propellants. LiquidFuel is much lower thrust than atmospheric propellant, this is intended because air has a much higher molar mass than hydrogen. LiquidFuel thus gives you less thrust at higher Isp.

Just a quick question since I don't have time to go through the entire list at this moment: it looks like your ship in the picture has a very large number of microwave receivers on. I'm guessing all the power to power the transmitter is coming from those receivers - at the moment the transmitter will try to draw power equal to the generator's maximum power output, even if the generator is running at 0.1%, so if it can't get it from the generator, it will try to get it from elsewhere. This power draw is done using the resource manager, which means it can't just create power out of nowhere, it has to be available on your ship somehow - I'm guessing it's coming from all those receivers. Equally, I see you have thermal receivers which are lit up, that'll be where all the thermal power is coming from. If you disable all the attached microwave receivers (the dishes and the thermal receivers) on that vessel, I'm guessing this effect stops?

When you're getting a good rate, the extraction will be shown in cubic metres/hour, i.e. 1000x more. I could have used cubic decimetres per hour but I think that would mean a lot less to people. Nope, it doesn't matter at all. Hopefully the advent of tweakables will help with this, it might given options for choosing fuel in the VAB but we'll have to wait and see what SQUAD come up with. It would make sense in space where you can more or less orient your spacecraft as you like but it makes a lot less sense when you're spacecraft is constrained due to being, say, on the ground. The RT antennas are much smaller and you could imagine they have a range of mobility, most of these antennas clearly do not move. Having a small but mobile antenna definitely seems like the best solution to me. Is this only happening if you switch away from the antimatter ship or is it continuing to transmit power while the vessel with the antimatter reactor is still active? Edit: Seeing your latest post, still not sure what is going on, what happened to make the reactor output go down in the last picture? Ah, the relay value wasn't being stored persistently, I have fixed it for the next update now. Strange, I didn't think I'd changed any of the animation code but I'll have a look. A receiver just tries to connect to every transmitter, if it can't connect to a particular relay, it will attempt to connect to that satellite via each relay in turn until it has either found a connection it can use, or it can't find a possible connection at all. Correct. There shouldn't have been but then I rewrote the entire microwave system almost from scratch so it's always possible I've missed something out. I will check it out. Edit: It doesn't look there is anything wrong, I think your satellites are probably just close enough that range losses aren't proving to be a major issue. Notice that there is a small difference in power between the two. You're not really losing much, to be fair. How ideal the turbojet is for SSTOs depends more on the reactor than the performance of the jet itself but, I recently built an twin antimatter reactor powered thermal turbojet that was easily capable of SSTO operations in the Real Solar System mod. Sure it's a design constraint but it's hardly constraining functionality. I do have some code for heat exchangers, it basically allows you to place another attachment point that you can attach thermal rockets to but the operational temperature is capped so it's something you can use with temperature equal to MSR operating temperatures without penalty but you can't pump around heat at the temperature of, e.g. Gas-Core designs. The result is, using the heat exchanger, your Isp will be always be capped at around ~900-1000s. Basically, we just have to take into account materials limits when transporting heat around.

Hopefully soon, I don't want to release it too quickly though, I'd like to make sure the issues I know about are dealt with and properly tested. That should avoid me having to do another one too quickly. I've been thinking about some ideas for supporting the mechjeb delta-v viewer and, if I can do that, I think Engineer should work too. It's really difficult because the engines are way more complicated than I could ever simulate in the VAB but I might be able to provide a best-case estimate.

If you updated from 0.8 -> 0.8.1 you needed to delete your WarpPlugin folder before updating. As for the magnetometer, you need to be in orbit to make use of it, could that be the problem? I discovered a bug with the handling of stock ElectricCharge this morning and fixed it, this should solve the problem. Detection of EC demand is never going to be as accurate as detection of MJ demand but it should at least be close.

You can correct the shifting resources bug by disabling and re-enabling the map view, I haven't had chance to work on it extensively but the game doesn't always seem to be reporting correct scaled space transforms just after SOI transitions - which is when the resource marker positions are updated. If you refresh the markers by turning the display on and off, they should always be rendered correctly. I'll see what I can do about this. As for the science labs, it doesn't look there are any errors, as far as I can tell from that log file, you have a cupola module that is overheating and exploding. All the other explosions in that list follow the cupola modules explosion, the cupola explodes and apparently sets off the science lab. The science lab appears not to be the culprit, merely the victim of an exploding cupola. [PlanetariumCamera]: Focus: Science Crawler1 mapView is not enabled. [B][00:00:00]: PPD-12 Cupola Module exploded due to overheating.[/B] cupola (Science Crawler1) Exploded!! - blast awesomeness: 0.5 [fuelLine]: Deactivated [cupola (Science Crawler1)]: Deactivated [00:00:00]: Chadney Kerman was killed. [B][00:00:00]: Science Laboratory exploded due to overheating.[/B]

I did just fix a bug with the handling of ElectricCharge in the Megajoule resource manager, I wonder if this is responsible. Are you having similar troubles with the larger reactors/generators out of interest? In some of my Jool-bug testing, I just spent over 500 days of max-timewarping on an antimatter powered ship and never had any trouble with it. I was using a 2.5m antimatter reactor/generator though. Some more testing with a Warp Spaceplane using a 1.25m generator but this was done after my EC fix - as you can see ElectricCharge is full, as are Megajoules and ThermalPower:

Nathan's Module Manager patch is better now that he has finished it - mine was a temporary solution. The advantage of Nathan's patch is that no changes are made to Interstellar files themselves, so as I release updates to Interstellar, you won't have to keep patching your installation. Both of them also require version 0.8.1 of Interstellar as I changed some of the file formats for compatibility purposes.

Alright, that's okay. I think the problem is mainly a cosmetic one now that I look at it in more detail. In order to handle passive generation smoothly, all solar panel power satellite data is recorded in the data files as if the panel is in orbit of Kerbin, regardless of the satellite's actual position - the saved power output is then adjusted for the satellite's actual position. That way, even when the power satellite's power output changes due it being in an elliptical orbit and not the active vessel, for example, the power should be detected properly. At the moment, the display code is using this adjusted to Kerbin value for power output rather than displaying the actual power that it's currently transmitting. If you set up a receiver to get power from that Kerbol station, you will get more power than the transmitter is telling you about. It looks like it's a GUI problem only.

Still the same for both types of panel in LKO?

Well, you've certainly discovered a bug, the power output there is totally wrong, it should be much higher. Looks like the transmitters are still suffering from the inverse square bug that I fixed a while back for the panels themselves. I'm guessing the panels are just appearing to perform the same because most of the power output is being divided away. This one is also now fixed. The panels are certainly detecting as different for WasteHeat purposes and the transmitter code is definitely checking this output properly so the above problem seems the likely candidate.

Good news, I've figured out this problem and fixed it. It seems to be a result of load up a craft in Jool's SOI - it seems that the ambient temperature of Jool can fall to absolute zero, which causes problems for radiators and generators (the radiators emit nothing at 0K). Capping the radiators at an absolute minimum of 2.7K allows the radiators to start up correctly and then the generators and radiators can adapt to the spacecraft's actual power/heat situation. I'll get this fix out soon.

Hmm, it should just turn itself off when there isn't sufficient power, you shouldn't be getting a resource deprived message.

Okay, but here is a picture of a fusion reactor working perfectly on the runway, so obviously the problem is more specific than building a ship with a fusion reactor and putting it on the runway, otherwise this wouldn't work. With the information you have given me, all I can say is: it works fine for me.

Can you provide more details about when this happens? How have you used them on your vessels? I'm going to need more information to figure out what is causing that.