Fractal_UK

My code executes later than ModuleManager so the values are briefly read into the game but are superceeded when the solar panel is actually loaded by a vessel. It's currently not possible to fix without deleting the WasteHeat function for solar panels (which you can do by deleting everything in the GameData/WarpPlugin/Additions folder). That's a very temporary solution though because I'm changing the way that system works in 0.8 - so in 0.8, instead of hard-coding Kerbin's orbital radius, I'll have it check Kerbin's actual distance from the sun. That should make the values scale correctly for players who use both RSS and the stock solar system. Also, the nuclear reactors and nuclear resource system is getting a big upgrade in 0.8, so you'll probably enjoy all that - it makes the system a bit more consistent and improves the simulation of nuclear reactor performance and the nuclear fuel life-cycle.

Yes - it's rather sneakily modified in FNSolarPanelWasteHeatModule. The idea is to make the solar panels have more proper inverse square dependence - power at Kerbin stays the same but outer system power is much lower and inner system power much higher. Also, glad to hear you're enjoying it!

MechJeb and the plasma engine don't get on at the moment due to an extremely subtle bug, it's extremely hard to spot as a player but it throws off MechJeb completely. Currently the plasma engine doesn't throttle linearly, it throttles to something approximating the square of the throttle - so 10% throttle is actually calculated as ~1%. At 100% throttle though, there is no difference, which means the ships are easily flyable by Humans but not by MechJeb. It will be fixed in 0.8 anyway. Yes, it will work in the background so long as the ship has power. You'll have to go back to the ship before the science is added to the R&D centre though. It's not disassociated from stock electrical energy - everything that generates Megajoules also generates ElectricCharge seemlessly. No, you can't power a Brayton Cycle turbine with a solar panel because solar panels produce electric current directly, while Brayton cycle turbines produce electricity from heat. A part that generated heat from solar energy would be quite different to a solar panel (i.e. a different part). A conversion part has very niche uses given that at Kerbin it would take 333 stock solar panels to power a science lab - the only way that is really practical is to used solar satellites with microwave beamed power and that already works just fine because they generate megajoules as it is. A converter is only useful with either absolutely massive modded solar panels or at the orbit of Moho or closer. Such a part might get added at some point but trust me when I say that it isn't as useful as people expect it will be. If you want self-sustaining orbital infrastructure, a network of Low Kerbol solar satellites with microwave transmitters is the way to go.

I'm hopeful it won't be long now but the update is massive, so even though development has almost finished, tying up loose ends and testing is a massive job compared to previous releases.

You shouldn't scale down the specific impulse by the fraction of the pusher plate surface area against the surface area of the explosion, regardless of what fraction of energy you are receiving, what does arrive comes with the same specific impulse. The fraction instead scales down the power available. Assuming we have a 1 megaton bomb at 25km/s and 0.0004 of that 1 megaton (4.184x1015), that corresponds to thrust of 133,888,000N. Actually, since we've used an energy rather than a power, that is an impulse rather than a thrust and we should scale by the timescale of the explosion to get the actual thrust. In vacuum, this timescale would be very short so 1 second might be a reasonable guestimate anyway. Regardless, it would be a very efficient drive, I'd guess only the very best Interstellar engines - DT Vista and upgraded 3.75m antimatter drives would outclass it. Donziboy - no, changes won't break saves but, as always, new models may mean some ships need small modifications in the VAB to fit new attachment node positions.

Numerous people, including Scott Manley, have made the argument to me that the Science lab is too versatile and simulates far too many roles at the moment. I'm inclined to agree, there are at least two parts worth of functionality in there, if not more. For a while I've wanted to add a refinery part that takes care of most of the ISRU aspects of the science lab, letting me draw a distinction between relatively simple resource extraction and processing processes that can be automated and those which require Kerbal oversight. I'm going to split the functionality as follows, for the time being: Science Lab (Requires Kerbals) Research Antimatter Production Deuterium Centrifuge Refinery (can be automated) Electrolysis Mining Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Any such change, of course, required new models. Fortunately, ZZZ comes to the rescue again - I decided to get around to giving his Hab module a purpose in the game. Originally this was imagined as something like a hitchhiker storage module but I removed the crew capacity and replace the airlock with a radial attachment node. The result is, in my opion, quite fantastic. I can already see some exciting bases being built with these. Even with a quick test mission to demonstrate mining thorium, I was able to produce this: If you look closely on the map view, you should be able to see my location - right on top of a Thorium hotspot. Refueling Deuterium will be far less of an issue after the update as all the Deuterium tanks will start full, that will let you carry a more significant supply of fuel with you between refueling rounds. The part you'll need to worry about refueling is just the Tritium.

ElectricCharge is not sufficient for the Science Lab, you will need something like a nuclear reactor+generator to power the science lab. It uses 5MW for research so the 1.25m reactor and generator (with some radiators) should be sufficient. Can you check your KSP.log file and check that there is a message indicating that a Megajoule resource manager has been created, it will have a [WarpPlugin] tag at the start of the line. Feel free to just post a copy of this file if it's easier for you.

Lead is a very effective shield against alpha/beta/gamma radiation but is much less effective against neutrons and protons - protons being the prime constituents of cosmic radiation. Lighter atoms are far more effective shields against these, thus making water particularly effective. Hydrocarbons are also quite good, so many types of spacecraft fuel can in principle be used. Heavy atoms like lead tend to scatter protons and neutrons without greatly changing their momentum, allowing them to pass through with enough energy to still do damage. The problem with any material shielding is that interactions between cosmic rays and the shielding tends to produce secondary radiation and you must also shield against this.

It certainly looks like a fuel crossfeed problem - if I had to guess I'd say it looked like the top tanks have the antimatter in them and for some reason they aren't connected up to the reactor. If the collectors were connected then the reactor would still run but at a vastly reduced rate, that would explain the lack of an "Antimatter Deprived" message on the reactor. Are you able to pump antimatter between tanks?

Late-game tech is very much on my mind as well, creating a part that shields you from radiation but with a huge power draw is not a problem at all. I would have to draw a slight distinction between types of radiation in order to do this though: you can deflect charged particles from cosmic rays and Van Allen belts very effectively by containing a diffuse plasma in a magnetic field around the vessel. You'd have to have a way of refreshing the plasma, particularly between re-entry and departure from celestial bodies with atmospheres and I'd guess the trapping wouldn't be perfect so some of the plasma would leak away over time. One thing I haven't found out yet is how complete their protection would be and what kind of flux would be needed before they start to become ineffective. Additionally, such a device would also not offer any help against your ship's own nuclear reactor because anything charged that the plasma could stop, the vessel walls have already stopped. Still, you're much better off with just some tiny neutron flux from a nearby reactor compared to that in addition to being totally unshielded from cosmic rays in space. Indeed, water and many other light molecules/nuclei are, by constrast, very good at stopping neutron radiation. Having some sort of command/crew module surrounded by water would probably also be very effective for a future space mission, it offers radiation shielding, drinking water and other water supplies and can additionally be electrolysed for fuel/propellant. I wonder if something like that could also be simulated...

I could have but there are several issues with that idea, it adds dependencies meaning that people have to have Kethane installed in order to take advantage of primary features of this mod. Kethane doesn't support resources being available everywhere in varying quantities, it works off fixed deposits and elsewhere there is nothing. I have control over the exact positions of all resources which gives me certain options for future updates. I've also set things up somewhat differently, these resources will be the same for everyone, which has both benefits and drawbacks but it does mean you can share and discuss good resource locations on each planet. I think both the Kethane and this resource system can happily sit side by side, each having slightly different applications.

The deposits are pretty large so if you land on the marker, you should be fine. You don't need to be directly on target either, the map has resource values for an entire planet and they tend to be somewhat concentrated so if you're trying to land on a high value target and miss, you won't get as much but there's a good chance you'll still be in area with a reasonable amount. Main problem with underwater deposits is detection, even with a gamma ray spectrometer (and gamma rays are very penetrating), there is no way you're going to get readings through even hundreds of metres of ocean. Almost any orbital detector you could imagine would have the same problems, localised detectors might function differently but it would require a lot of extra code to support making those kind of distinctions. What I'm doing at the moment is fractally generating resource maps, then trying to modify them to conform to the terrain of the planet. Since they're images, they're fairly easy to work with if I have a 2D map image of the planet at the same scale. For the planets with oceans, I'm trying to avoid visible concentrations being automatically generated and placing them manually - that way I can try to put them in interesting places.

I've now added support for multiple resource textures so you can display different resources in different ways, making it easier to see at a glance which map you are looking at. I've also improved the Kerbin resource maps to ensure that all the large deposits are found over land - and as much as possible in the sorts of areas you might expect to find them. The resource system is pretty much finished now, it's just a matter of generating maps for every body now. Laythe and Eve are going to pose the same problems as Kerbin thanks to their oceans but thankfully the rest can be randomly generated. Purple = Thorium Yellow = Uranium If you're a modder and you're interested in hooking into this system, it's incredibly easy. You can generate planetary resources with a ConfigNode, like this: PLANETARY_RESOURCE_DEFINITION { name = Uranium // The name you want to use to refer to the resource celestialBodyName = Mun // The name of the celestial body you want the map to apply to resourceName = UF4 // The name of the in game resource that should be generated by exploiting this resource mapUrl = WarpPlugin/PlanetResourceData/mun_uranium // Path of the image texture to parse as the resource map, grayscale values are read resourceScale = LOG_SCALE // You can use LOG_SCALE or LINEAR_SCALE, linear uses amount = 1/255 * pixel value*scaleMultiplier, log uses scaleMultiplier*scaleFactor^(pixel value)/1000000 scaleFactor = 1.0311580936394657748190008944693 // the scale factor used above scaleMultiplier = 2 // the scale multiplier used above displayTexture = WarpPlugin/uranium_resource_point // the texture the displayed sphere will use displayThreshold = 0.001 // the minimum amount of a resource at a particular point that is worth displaying } A resource map image might look something like this: You can then create some kind of scanner to detect that resource with this module added to a part.cfg MODULE { name = FNResourceScanner resourceName = Uranium mapViewAvailable = true }

Not quite as productive a day in development as yesterday was but I did realise that in order to actually test out my new resource system and mine some Uranium/Thorium I was going to need to be able to reach some! The markers on the ground are really useful for when you're in the vacinity but not so useful if you want to perform a targeted landing, many people, myself included, tend to resort to mechjeb to save time when a targeted landing is needed which means I needed to make sure the resources were visible from the map view. Same setup as before: if your vessel has line of sight to a deposit you can see it, otherwise not. These are the thorium locations seen in the normal game view. Don't worry about the ones over the ocean, moving them is easy, it's all the backend stuff that is the hard work. Now we can also see them on the map view It will be fine. You don't strictly need TreeLoader even in career mode, it just improves the experience with the extended tech tree.

I think that's a fairly typical conclusion actually, there isn't much complelling evidence that even long term exposure to elevated background radiation actually does very much harm - above a certain point you start seeing percentages rise for lifetime risk of cancer. Short term exposure elevated doses are quite survivable as well, so long as you don't get into that critical regime where heavy cell damage starts to occur - when people start experiencing radiation sickness. Sending some Kerbals off into Interplanetary space for two or three years is probably not ideal for their health but it probably won't do them major harm provided you do let them spend some time back in a low radiation environment for a while afterwards. This would just be an incentive to rotate your crew rather than having the same Kerbals do everything. Leaving Kerbals in Van Allen belts for extended periods seems like the really dangerous one, as far as I can determine, it looks like even in the Earth's magnetic field, the maximal dose within the belts is around 70x higher than in interplanetary space and you could imagine Kerbals getting ill within a matter of days within that kind of environment. The way I would implement this is to have a static dose limit that a Kerbal can receive over their career before they die, the amount of dose they accumulate would be based on adding up all the instantaneous dosages they receive. There would also be a fixed rate at which they recover from radiation, say 11µSv/hour (100mSV/year). So, any time spent at a lower doseage than that would improve their longterm condition while higher doses would degrade it. There would then be special effects for really high doses (say 100mSv/hour+) causing accute symptoms immediately. You could also indeed imagine medical equipment that might help you recover from doses or accute symptoms more quickly. Yep, there's a lot of scope for probe parts in this as well. I do like the idea of differentiating probe cores based on radiation shielding, you then have to trade-off weight against resistance to radiation and can design probes around the kind of radiation environment they are operating in. I know the Brave/Stupid parameters are something I can control so that's definitely something I'm interested in making use of. I'm not sure yet to what level I can apply other effects to Kerbals, though their ability to run and jump might well be possible. This is one where I shall have to spend some time exploring what the APIs will let me do and then find ways to trick them into letting me do more Cheers for those links, I'll look through those.

It's supposed to unzipped into the main KSP directory. It sounds like you have a GameData\GameData set up, which is why it won't load. If you take the three folders out of the second GameData folder and put them in the main one, it will work fine.

Yes, I've created a system that automatically attenuates radiation by a certain amount depending on the mass of the capsule and the amount of crew it hold. The base value is for the 3 man pod, which attenuates radiation by 10x (my research suggests that's about the right factor to go from spacecraft to EVA). Yes, at the moment the radiation drops to 0 the moment you enter the atmosphere though I can make it attenuate with atmosphere rather than cut off completely, that would mean Duna wouldn't be completely protected from radiation even on the surface. I could likewise use my new resource system to generate some radiation hotspots on the surface of various celestial bodies so there would always be some background radiation. I need to map Uranium and Thorium deposits on planets for my nuclear resource system anyway, so I could base the radiation dose off the concentration of those materials at a particular point.

Time to stop developing for today and get some sleep. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with these fusion reactor stats to look at - I've created a tiny 62.5cm one that is useful for making probes that produce a reasonable amount of power. They can operate for 482 days at full power without refueling or 1607 days at their minimum level, this puts them almost exactly on par with the largest fission reactor in terms of lifetime but far less long-lived than the smaller fission alternatives. The unupgraded versions are not far distant from the gas core fission reactors in terms of overall performance (which is what I'm going for because they do appear in the same tech node) - the fusion reactors have an advantage in power output but a disadvantage in longevity. They are, however, in some ways easier to refuel.

Such is the hope but I'm not entirely sure how. Killing Kerbals off is easy but also not very entertaining as a sole game mechanic, death is better used as the result of ignoring a bad situation. There are local effects that could be achieved, for example within Interstellar the efficiency of a science lab is dependent upon the stupidity of the Kerbal (they are better at research if they are intelligent) so altering their stupidity could simulate their sickness and being unable to work at full capacity. That's a very specific impact and it'd be nice to be able to achieve something a bit more general, however. Maybe, evaluating them for sufficient values to display any kind of 3D visualisation would be nightmarishly expensive computationally to do at a reasonable level of detail though. That said, there's probably some clever way of displaying some level of information.

Kerbals would probably invent nuclear weapons just so they could build Project Orion

This is an advantage of Thorium. This is an advantage of Molten Salt reactors, Uranium or Thorium and many of the other countless Generation IV reactor designs with passive safety features. Disadvantages of Thorium include there is no infrastructure set up for Thorium fuel production, as far as I'm aware even the prototype LFTRs have usually gone straight to the stage of using U-233 rather than actually starting with the Thorium so all of that would have to be established. Protractium-233 has a long half-life and is bred as an intermediary between Th-232 and U-233, meaning you have to take it out or suffer from it degrading your neutron economy until it decays to U-233 which complicates operation. You also can't just start with a Thorium fuel cycle, you need some kind of neutron source to get the whole thing going. Don't get me wrong, LFTR is a neat idea but there are lots of other good nuclear designs out there, Uranium and Thorium. Choosing between them on abudance grounds is pointless, there is enough Uranium available on land to power the world for thousands of years and enough in the sea for hundreds of thousands at only moderately increased cost - I estimate 40,000 tons of Uranium per year for 100,000 years - enough for 40,000 1GW plants (or 2.5x current worldwide energy useage). Breeder reactors might multiply that by another 100 or 200 so there's a fair bit of room to increase both supply and lifetime simultaneously. So, Thorium has plenty of time to catch up. The main pressures I can see for Thorium use are in countries without domestic Uranium supplies already available (like India, which is actively pursuing Thorium research) or development in western countries to sell proliferation resistant power plants to other countries. Personally, I don't really care which fuel future nuclear reactors use, countries can build whichever is most convenient for them for all I care. A nuclear plant of any type is one less fossil fuel plant.

Some people will be familiar with the idea of planetary magnetospheres from the work I've done in KSP Interstellar, the particle flux mechanics give me an excellent basis for trying to implement some wider radiation effects, however, the Interstellar thread is extremely busy and not a good place to discuss individually features or plugin mechanics so I wanted to start a seperate discussion about this. I already have a basis for calculating the radiation dose received by Kerbals at various altitudes and applying some radiation shielding to them due to the composition of various command modules, though at the moment this is as far as it goes. In principle, I can use these mechanics to apply negative effects to Kerbals depending on radiation dose or to apply negative side effects to unmanned vessels in high radiation environments. Additionally, I could also look at heightened radiation environments and solar flares from Kerbol as an additional hazard to interplanetary and high orbit travel. The radiation environment is based on components from a hierarchical list of spheres of influence, e.g. the Laythe radiation environment is based on not only Laythe's magnetosphere but also Jool's magnetosphere and Kerbol's magnetosphere. So, the point of this thread is to discuss mechanics that you'd like to see. What kind of side effects would you like for leaving your Kerbals in deep space, unshielded from radiation, for years on end? What kind of side effects do you want to see for unmanned vessels operating in high radiation environments, particularly those near say Jool. Also, what don't you want to see? This is not a set of mechanics I want to rush into a release in the near future, just something I want to strike a discussion up about and make incremental progress on while working on other things. Pictures

Yes, they are upgradeable - in fact, that one is upgraded. The basic version is called "D-T Inertial Fusion" as opposed to "High-Q Inertial." The High-Q might, at some point in the future, have options to use He-3 fuel, which would be unique in that the reactor would generate mostly Megajoules instead of ThermalPower - He-3 + He-3 fusion has really low neutronicity so you can just extract electricity directly from the charged products as they move through a magnetic field. That would make it particularly suited to running electric engines but far worse for thermal engines. There is no special power requirement to starting it, you just need to be able to fill the ongoing 7MW cost of running the laser. So the KIWI is the minimum starter reactor. It's custom code based on dynamic pressure, you should be fine so long as you don't drive them around too fast. No firm plans at the moment but I'm always considering options.

New Nuclear Reactor Models Thanks to some great modelling and texturing work by Vaporlynx (and a tiny bit of tweaking by me), I finally have a set of new nuclear reactor models that look really nice and don't cause problems with radial attachments. This is a bit of a godsend because after all this work on new nuclear stuff, having new models to make them look nice is so handy so I have to give a lot of credit to Vaporlynx for taking the time to do this. Now, ZZZ has already provided the existing 1.25m KIWI model. Now, this gave me the option of either sticking with the same model for the 1.25m reactor OR using ZZZ's model to do something else. Since I like doing doing new things, see below for what I've done with it. For now, here's a shot of the new nuclear reactor set in the VAB. Fusion Reactors Yes, some of you may have guessed it. Why not turn the KIWI model into a fusion reactor? Now, fusion reactors are a little bit funny, they aren't like other reactors because they need a constant supply of electrical power in order to function. Once they are running, that is not a problem, provided you keep them with a generator, they will fulfill their own power requirements with ease. The only problem is if for some reason your reactor shutsdown (overheating or whatever) you may not only lose power but also the ability to restart your reactor. In other words: be careful about turning your fusion reactors off! I thought it'd test it out on a plane, so I have to build a little assembly to make it work. Once the reactor is started, we can dump the launch clamps and fly! Using Fusion Power, we have something much more readily flyable than those heavy and slow fission planes. As you can see from the pictures below, the fusion reactor is, like the nuclear reactors, capable of breeding tritum. You can thus carry a supply of Lithium with you in order to breed more fuel. I'm afraid not. Edit: Fixed.

Yeah, got it, thanks. I've been experimenting with it a bit. The reason that Thorium is good with respect to nuclear waste is that it is lighter than Uranium, as Uranium absorbs neutrons you get transuranic elements immediately while Thorium has to work up through a chain of several neutron captures in order to reach the same point and that's far less likely to happen, of course, you're dealing with massive collections of atoms so that just translates to a smaller proportion of those atomic species. You can usually do something with actinide products when you have a breeder reactor though and turn them into something useful, you're much better off with short-lived high activity fission products than a bunch of actinide waste. LFTR is a really neat design but I think it has been both over and under-hyped by different groups respectively. I'd guess it'll take some time before we see their deployment because I don't see a major pressure to switch to Thorium fuel, Uranium is already so abundant we could use it virtually forever without risk of running out and the Uranium infrastructure is already there, so it might take a while before people start heavily investing in Thorium alternatives. One of the main pressures for that might be in selling LFTRs to non-nuclear weapon states because thorium reactors are harder to produce weapons grade material from, existing nuclear states might prefer to use their large stockpiles of existing waste as fuel. I'm trying to present it as something that has some real and useful advantages but also a few slightly irritating drawbacks.