Fractal_UK

Of course, people are more than welcome to make use of nodes on the KSPI tech tree. As far as I'm aware, you really don't want any normal Hydrogen at all in a Fusion plasma because the other reactions, H+H, H+D, even D+D have really low cross sections compared to D+T interactions. In order to get net energy production, you need to maximise the probability of D+T interactions because they are the ones that can be produced sustainably. Most tokomak fusion experiments so far have used purely deuterium plasmas, I think because of the radioative nature of tritium and the increased neutron flux caused by having a genuinely high rate of fusion, your reactor core has to be able to handle that. JET in Oxford, however, was designed to work with D+T plasmas albeit in something like 9:1 mixtures. Ideal operation conditions for a functional reactor would be with a 50:50 mix of Deuterium and Tritium plasma.

No, there is simply not enough scope on the stock tech tree, the tech nodes are far too cheap and are inappropriate for the advanced technologies. If I did this, you'd have almost everything from the mod arriving on the same or almost the same tech node and there would be no logical progression at all. The mod will revert to using stock tech nodes if you try to play with a different tech tree but not all features will be supported if you do this. Unfortunately, the way the tech tree is at the moment, there are always going to be trade-offs but given the extended tech tree is a major feature of the mod and thematically very important, no I won't be removing that.

Indeed, fusion reactors are in the works, the whole point of getting all the Deuterium-Tritium resource system setup was to prepare for that. It looks like there was an error with the orbit averaging that takes place to determine collector efficiency over long periods. That would have revised quantities down below what they should have been, I believe this is fixed now.

Nathan, it might be worth specifying that the KSPI patch on the first page is for RealFuels rather than MFS itself. Interstellar should work fine with basic MFS without a patch.

Delete the tree.cfg file in your savegame folder, should be found alongside your persistence and quicksave files. After that, you should get the option to choose your tech tree again.

The WarpPlugin, HexCans and TreeLoader folders should all be in the GameData folder. If you look in the zip file, there is a GameData folder in there so that if you unzip it into the main KSP directory, those folders will automatically get unzipped into the GameData folder. That NaN bug should be gone now, do you have the latest version?

Going from such high thrust on one side to zero thrust on the other, I would definitely check out Taris' idea and make sure that the antimatter storage tanks on both sides have antimatter in them, otherwise only one side will get any power (and needing crossfeed capable parts to supply antimatter to reactors is very much intended).

You're right actually, it could be that problem too. That one I have definitely fixed properly for next time Not entirely. I did definitely consider the idea that people would want to build antimatter SSTO, afterall, it's possible to deliver antimatter fuel back to KSC and build up a supply for use in launch vehicles. It isn't entirely straightforward to do but its definitely very possible.

No, it's not supposed to happen but it's also proving hard to fix. It's a balance between not making the engine thrust drop too early and avoiding asymmetric thrust/flameout problems. I have something much better working in my dev build for 0.8 but I feel it still needs more work yet.

No, there is no transmit button anymore, it should be added automatically as soon as you go back to it. I think I'll add a message in the next version telling you how much science has been added when you go back to your labs, that should make this process more transparent for players.

Did you check the R&D centre after you switched back to it or before? Science won't be added until you go back to the lab.

I don't really see the comparison between the DT Vista and any of the stock engines, even with supporting mass, don't forget that you are getting Mainsail levels of thrust on an engine with 15,500s of Isp in its lowest Isp/highest thrust setting. That engine is already easily the most overpowered one available, it even unlocks in the tech tree at the same time as the reactor upgrades that make it easier to meet its rather excessive power requirements and only has a relatively small drawback in that you can't use it near your other ships/kerbals. The reason that it needs LiquidFuel though is to actually get some thrust from it. Even with a fission engine, you can design a method of using the nuclear particles directly to get thrust (fission fragment rocket), exhaust velocity goes up to 10% of the speed of light or so, while thrust comes down to 20N or so if you're lucky. To get even 10kN, which is still not a useable engine in KSP, you're looking at needing something like a 1.5TW reactor on your rocket at that exhaust velocity. So, every engine presented in the mod, uses some scheme for spreading out the energy from nuclear/antimatter reactions into a lot more hydrogen propellant. That gives you a lot more with a much lower exhaust velocity, so you become less efficient with respective to propellant but your rocket now has useable thrust. You only need 1 reactor and 1 generator, provided you use the biggest reactor and generator and they are both upgraded. That's pretty much expected when using RealFuels. LiquidH2 has a really tiny density, meaning that you need to add lots and lots of hydrogen fuel tanks - much more than you would need with LiquidFuel in order to get anywhere. Of course, where the difference arises is mass, you can happily use several fuel tanks of Hydrogen in RealFuels for every liquid fuel tank you would have to use because it won't be any heavier. Basically, RealFuels won't change the mass of your rockets much but it will change their volume.

Funny thing is, I haven't changed this code at all for quite a few versions. It's possible a recent KSPI update or the 0.22 update affected it in some way, do you have any idea at what point it stopped working for you?

I'm not sure if you might've been killed by your large collection capacity. If you collect enough in one session of timewarping to overfill the tanks, then the amount that gets added will immediately become zero. I've had to add in code throughout the mod throughout the mod to guard against that happening, unfortunately it's a strange quirk of KSP's part.requestResource method but I've obviously thus far overlooked the antimatter collectors. For the next version I'll make sure it checks and caps out its supply at the amount of remaining capacity needing to be filled.

It's some kind of incompatibility with the propellers, I believe. I think I have it fixed ready for the next version.

Yeah, this definitely shouldn't work. I think I have a working fix now so you should see that sorted out in the next version.

One of the biggest problems that exist with regard to nuclear energy rest in the public's understanding of risk. Most people have no experience of actually quantifying risk, they judge it entirely qualitatively based on what they see on the TV and read in the newspaper. People will hear news for days about a plane crash and worry about getting on a plane for weeks or months afterward but they won't think twice about getting into their cars and driving somewhere, an activity which is far more likely to get them killed. Another related point is that most people are also very unfamiliar with (and often outright distrustful of) statistics, hence the common phrase "there are lies, damn lies and statistics." This is because while almost everyone has the ability to understand an individual statistic, they don't have the experience to look at the way those statistics were collected to determine if they have been weighted correctly, determining whether the sample size has been abused to produce a particular outcome, etc. This is unfortunate because it means that even a very sound argument based on good data might be ignored solely because you're using those damned evil statistics to make a point. Nuclear energy, unfortunately, suffers from both of these issues. Nuclear accidents are big news because they are scary and have some emotional resonance with the general public, when people see a coal power plant there is not the same fear, they don't see something that has caused a comparable number of deaths to the entire history of the nuclear industry, even though depending upon its period within its lifecycle and its location, it's quite possible that it actually has. The coal plant is the car accident to the nuclear power plant's plane crash. The nuclear industry likewise suffers from abuse of statistics, the biggest example of this at the moment is probably with regard to cost. The anti-nuclear lobby point often to Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France and draw conclusions about the cost of nuclear power based solely on their costs. Of course, we need to realise that we're looking at the first two of a brand new type of reactor. In Europe, there hasn't been a great deal of new nuclear construction since the 1980s, expertise is not as available as it once was and there is a large knowledge and skills base that needs to be built up. Virtually all large-scale engineering projects suffer from cost overruns with their initial units, with costs dropping dramatically for later units. There is plenty of data available from previous rounds of nuclear engineering projects to help estimate just how the costs will change with varying amounts of new construction - those with an interest in performing a meaningful analysis will apply discount rates for later units to try to derive an accurate forecast of costs while those with a point to prove will continue to add up the costs from the two power plants, divide by capacity and point to an excessive cost / MWh.

Treeloader, yep but that is distributed with Interstellar, so you should have a copy of it already.

If you're having problems selecting the tech tree with treeloader, try downloading this tree.cfg file and place it in your game's save file folder (alongside your persistence and quicksave files).

This is not caused by having too many mods installed, it's caused by installing Interstellar in the wrong location. Unzip the mod into your main KSP directory and it will work.

Mechjeb doesn't work pre-flight because there are a lot of special factors involved in the calculation of thrust for a thermal rocket/jet. If you want to know how much thust you'll get, look at the table in the OP and (approximately) multiply by 4 for intake air. If you want to fly with KIWIs, you need a small plane.

Go right ahead.

Yes, I'm very interested in the combination of KSPI and the rescaled solar system for the future, you could imagine career mode would present a whole new challenge when just making a landing on and returning from the mun becomes a genuine challenge. It would really slow the rate of technology acquisition and make developing the parts in KSPI, to unlock the colonisation of the solar system, a real difficult journey where you could genuinely feel like you had played through the early days of spaceflight to far beyond current levels of space technology. The parts would, afterall, become genuinely essential to unlocking numerous mission profiles in a realistic solar system that would be simply impossible with a rocket having ~450s of Isp. I suspect that trying to complete the tech tree like that would be quite difficult but ultimately, the more difficult something is to complete, the more rewarding it feels at the end when you have done it. Either way, I'll keep an eye on the rescaled solar system mod and see how it develops.

More or less a crosspost from the ModularFuelSystems thread to say that I've updated the RealFuels compability file to properly support the DT Vista engine using LiquidH2 fuel. Find it here: Real Fuels Compatibility

Here is a new copy of the Real Fuels compatibility file for KSP interstellar https://bitbucket.org/FractalUK/kspinstellar/downloads/ModularFuelSystemCompatibility.zip, I've updated it so that the DT Vista now properly uses LiquidH2 fuel rather than continuing to use LiquidFuel. Hopefully in the next major version of KSPI, I'll be able to add compatibility for changing the base electrolysis types, so that water electrolysis produces LiquidH2 and LiquidOxygen, as opposed to LiquidFuel and Oxidiser for those with real fuels installed. This requires a plugin update rather than mere cfg changes though so can't be done immediately, unfortunately.