Fractal_UK
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This is still not very surprising. If you aren't in a location that has at least a moderate amount of the resource then you're unlikely to see even a small increase for a very long time. There are some "moderate" areas, usually close to the marked high value resource areas that are quite viable to mine despite not being marked but if you just pick "any old spot," it's not going to work unless you're prepared to wait for months or years. The ship it is attached to has to be landed, yes. Then like the other person who asked about this, did you have some UF4 tank capacity to store the old UF4 from your reactors? If you can't put the UF4 somewhere, you can't swap the fuel. The thermal receiver functions best when it's side on a receiver. Imagine you're pointing a microwave beam at that receiver, if you're pointing at it from behind, you've got engines blocking your line of sight, from the front there is the rest of the vessel so you need to hit it side on. RemoteTech functions the way it does because you are pointing one receiver at one transmitter, this system has the capacity to receive power from multiple receivers at the same time. You cannot point a receiver at transmitters that are in two different physical locations so using physical orientation is the only sensible solution - other than making it possible to receive power from both in front and behind the receiver at the same time, which isn't very sensible and I also don't really like. Not at present but I think adding this in the future could be viable. Transmitter orientation does not matter but receiver orientation does, so you should try and point your receivers in the direction of transmitting vessels.
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Display on the map of only one resource is supported at the moment, this can be changed in the future to make multiple displays possible but at this early stage in this resource system's life, I'd rather err on the side of caution and just make sure the system is working nicely before I make it more complicated.
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The refinery attachment nodes are proving to be a nightmare, sorry about that. The stock game seems to only allow attachment nodes to work in pairs, so this is very much an issue I'm grappling with and trying to find a solution to. Did you add Tritium tanks or Thorium tanks? You need Thorium tanks to mine ThF4. There isn't a very high abundance on the launchpad either so it won't fill up at all quickly, there is a good mining location not far west of KSC though, you should be able to find that with the Gamma Ray Spectrometer. Had you been using the reactor for a while? Basically, you can only swap fuels when the reactor is more or less empty of Actinides so if you've been running the reactor with Uranium for a while, you need to do some reprocessing before you can change fuel type. I know this isn't clear at the moment and I'll try to make this system more transparent.
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It's quite interesting to hear how the Kethane resource system has changed, I haven't really had chance to look at Kethane since 0.7.X so I'm unfamiliar with these changes. This is, indeed, one of the problems with doing so. It would be possible to include a soft-dependence on Kethane for all of the resource stuff but that would make it required for everything resource-based, people without would lose that functionality completely. Since I want to expand the resource system, that idea isn't really ideal. The alternative would be a hard dependence which isn't practical with either a mod the size and scale of Kethane or, likewise, one that prohibits redistribution.
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Do you both have spare capacity for Uranium too? You need something to hold the Uranium that was in the reactor too. Edit: This is a pain, it may be that the game is only going to let them work with paired nodes. My ability to fix this is limited because it's a problem with the way the stock game handles attachment nodes but I'll do what I can to find a good compromise solution. Which attachment nodes on the refinery are people finding most useful?
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This is completely normal. You're never going to get power to compete with a 30 ton nuclear reactor no matter how close your solar panels are to the sun. Even totally unupgraded, 1/1000th of a 3.75m generator/reactor's output is 600KW - 33x a solar panel's normal power output at Kerbin. Upgrades compound the difference further. As for this one - I wish you had asked me this before I uploaded the fix - looks like you've discovered another bug already . Multiple solar panels will be handled properly but multiple generators won't be. I've fixed it but I'm afraid you'll have to wait for another update for this one.
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So I have a quick question about "global warming"
Fractal_UK replied to vetrox's topic in Science & Spaceflight
20 million incandescent bulbs is probably a massive underestimate of the amount that are in use. If we were to assume that there were one incandescent bulb for every person in the US, for example, the figure would be more than an order of magnitude larger. This might be a reasonable figure for the US itself but for the world as a whole, the figure must be massively higher again and as such the amount of wasted energy extraordinarily large. Interestingly though, switching from an incandescent bulb to an energy saving bulb is generally positive but not universally so. Any region which has an electricity supply based on low carbon power generation but uses gas central heating for domestic heating is likely to be better off sticking with incandescents because they "waste" far more energy as heat, reducing demand for domestic heating. One example of such a region is apparently Quebec. Interestingly, it is far less true of France which, because of its large supply of cheap Nuclear energy, often makes use of electric domestic heating solutions directly. -
Modular Fuel System Continued v3.3 (OBSOLETE)
Fractal_UK replied to NathanKell's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
Players using RealFuels and Interstellar should download this new compatibility patch MFS-RealFuels2.zip. The old compatibility file is no longer valid and will not function. This new patch is far more comprehensive and includes features like electrolysis of water into LiquidH2 and LiquidOxygen, atmospheric scooping of these resources and the aluminium hybrid rocket also properly uses LiquidOxygen and Aluminium fuel. -
Version 0.8.1 Released Version 0.8.1 -Microwave fix for vessels with more than one transmitter -Improved resource manager handling of high time acceleration -Fixed the solar panel power curves and made the solar panel waste heat module and inverse square law fix apply to all solar panels, rather than just stock ones -Fixed Tritium breeding with fusion reactors -Rewrote the antimatter reactor consumption code to a custom method, which should prevent the reactor power output from ever unexpectedly dropping down to zero while you still have fuel and need power. -Changed Refinery to remove top attach node, this prevents problems with it failing to attach at certain times in the VAB -Applied radius fixes to the generator meaning that a generator works best when paired with a reactor of the right size -Made propellant definitions for the nuclear and electric engines compatible with ModuleManager -Updated RealFuels compatibility file -Tweaked fusion resource consumption rates to make them correct -Removed all the const definitions from the science lab and refinery and moved them to a seperate class, for some reason KSP sometimes takes offense to these on part loading. Download links on the first page have been updated. Important Note: If you are upgrading from a previous version of Interstellar, be sure to delete the WarpPlugin folder in your GameData folder before installing. Additional Note: There is a new RealFuels compatibility file in the first page. The old version will no longer work.
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I think I've found the problem, KSP seems to only support 2 attachment nodes to attach parts to other parts. This is why you often have to fiddle around with the 6-way Rockomax HubMax Multipoint Connector in order to get it actually attach to other parts. There isn't anything I can actually do about this, other than remove one of the nodes so that the remaining pair will always work reliably. I have therefore decided to remove the refinery's top attach node and keep the bottom and side nodes. I have, however, added surface attachment so you can stick parts to the surface of the refinery, which gives you some options back. I hope that's a good enough solution.
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Deuterium is Hydrogen-2 (i.e. Hydrogen of atomic mass 2, one proton, one neutron). Tritium is Hydrogen-3 (i.e. one proton, two neutrons). Tritium decays to Helium-3 (2 protons, one neutron) with a half life of ~12 years. Tritium is produced by Lithium-6 + 1 neutron, which decays to Tritium and an Alpha Particle (Helium-4 nucleus).
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Was the science lab the root part of the vessel? For some reason KSP really doesn't like ship parts with PartModules that have const field definitions as the root part - it can cause this issue usually not when you spawn the vessel the first time but when you load it up a second time. It doesn't happen when the part is not the root part of the ship though. I've made a seperate class to store all of these definitions in to avoid problems like this for 0.8.1. You can check this out though by looking what errors are reported in the KSP.log file.
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Okay, I have a fix sorted for this problem now, will get this out with my other fixes shortly. It's basically because the fission fuels come in much larger quantities because they are more readily available. Fusion is a bit different, Deuterium is expensive but readily available and you can make it easily enough by centrifuging but Tritium is extremely rare and expensive. Tritium costs about $30,000 per gram, so the amount you have in your 1.25m reactors to start with already would be worth $750 million at current prices. Refreshing the Tritium is easy once you have a supply a Lithium and an operating fusion reactor but the in order to actually turn the thing on and get the Tritium breeding program started, you'd obviously need a large enough supply to ensure that you wouldn't run out of Tritium before you could breed enough to keep the cycle going. So, I basically want to simulate the idea that fusion is self-reinforcing, the more you do it the more fuel you have and the easier it gets but when you're just getting started, it's advantages are more moderate. Yes, you have to some fuel containers to store the depleted fuels in or you can't do the reprocessing step. That is something I'm considering, maybe less so for the DepletedFuels but perhaps there might be a somewhat increased dose for Kerbals around nuclear reactors that are very full of Actinide Wastes. One of the reasons I went with the upgraded fusion reactor as a "High-Q" design was to permit the its use with certain second or third generation fusion fuels. The most likely one I'd go with is Helium-3, p-B fusion would probably require a totally different reactor design, also the He-3 resource would be far more interesting and some of the basics are already laid. For example, Tritium decays into Helium-3 with a half-like of ~12 years so by storing Tritium for long periods, you could get access to He-3 fuel. Additionally, mining of Helium-3 in regions like the Mun's poles would be quite interesting and could be handled by the new resource system.
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Here is an updated table of the reactor and engine performances for all the reactors in the mod including the new ones: Thorium and Fusion Thrusts are accurate for LiquidFuel in vacuum only. Sea level thrust and Isp will be lower. To modify for Liquid Fuel and Oxidiser - multiply thrust by 2.67 and multiply Isp by 0.75. To modify for Kethane - multiply thrust by 1.79 and multiply Isp by 0.56. Modifying for IntakeAir/IntakeAtm is trickier but in general multiply thrust by 4 and Isp by 0.25.
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Alright, following the recent reports about 0.8, I have: Made some tweaks to the resource manager which should vastly improve its handling of resources at time acceleration Fixed the solar panel power curves and made the solar panel waste heat module and inverse square law fix apply to all solar panels, rather than just stock ones Rewritten the antimatter reactor consumption code to a custom method, which should prevent the reactor power output from ever unexpectedly dropping down to zero while you still have fuel and need power. Applied radius fixes to the generator meaning that a generator works best when paired with a reactor of the right size Made propellant definitions for the nuclear and electric engines compatible with ModuleManager Updated RealFuels compatibility file, this will later be converted into a ModuleManager patch within RealFuels itself Tweaked fusion resource consumption rates to make them correct Removed all the const definitions from the science lab and refinery and moved them to a seperate class, for some reason KSP sometimes takes offense to these on part loading. I have a bit more testing to do but I'll try and get these out tomorrow. Edit: AdmiralTigerclaw, the solar power curve is currently inverted, so it's a square distance dependence rather than an inverse square. This was rather stupid of me but it's in my list of above fixes.