Fractal_UK

It's a by mass measure so although water has two Hydrogens, the Oxygens are 16 times as heavy as one Hydrogen. So 9 units of mass of water will give you 8 units of mass of Oxygen and 1 unit of mass of Hydrogen.

I think I *might* have figured out why this happens but I'm not 100% sure. Regardless, the possible fix won't do any harm so I'll include it in the next version and we'll see if it resolves the issues. In other news, I'll be introducing a new feature in 0.6.2: the ability to perform electrolysis on Duna. Unlike the ocean or the water ice surface of Vall, on Duna it isn't simply a matter of electrolysing a direct supply of water: the water must be baked out of the soil first (you could call this a topical update after Curiosity's confirmation of ~2% water by mass in the Martian soil). Anyway, this baking process requires quite a lot of energy - just over 1/4 of the energy required to perform the electrolysis, which means the process will be a little slower on Duna but still very achievable. I've also upped the amount of power that the science lab can make use of while electrolysing, which should speed up the process if you have the extra power available. It works the same way as normal - producing about 8x the amount of oxidiser as it does liquid fuel just a little slower than in other locations.

That is not actually the case. 100 science is the maximum that you can send with one click but you should be able to send packets of less than 100 if that is all you have. Quite a few people have reported some problems with transmitting science but it consistently works perfectly for me which makes the problem very hard to diagnose, it's possible that there is some interaction with another mod going on. What mods do you have installed?

In game terms it could carry on burning indefinitely. Of course, microwave power does drop with distance so the further you travelled, you'd have increasingly small amounts of thrust to work with. Kethane fuel is rarely the best option with thermal rockets unless you need an extra thrust boost for some reason. Isp is quite a bit lower with Kethane and the extra thrust is usually unneccessary, especially with the bigger reactors. It's really more of a compromise fuel if you can't get access to something else. Liquid fuel is the best longevity option but it's by far the hardest to refuel (electrolysis gives you far far more oxygen than hydrogen). Not even close. You can probably continuously power some small electrical demands but certainly not engine burns. It has the same thrust properties as LiquidFuel.

It's theoretically possible, you could read the state of the kethane scanner from the save file. Then, if you had some code that you could execute every frame or every few frames, you could check the position of the vessel with the Kethane scanner (the position of the vessel itself is one of the few things that is actually loaded when a vessel is a outside of physics range) then update which cells have been scanned accordingly. Not really sure what the calculation overhead would be on this approach, I can't imagine it would be too bad but it might be a lot of effort to go to for a relatively minor change.

Yes, the code isn't limited to detecting via attachment nodes so provided you stick them directly onto each other with nothing in between it should work fine. Different order of magnitude, most likely. What are the numbers after the "e" ?

You can't, you have to use one generator per reactor. I have thought about including this but it gets rather awkward if you mix and match, say you have two reactors of different power outputs and different core temperatures attached to one generator. It's not especially difficult to code but the results would probably be confusing when you have something attached to one upgraded reactor and one basic one and I think it's an extra complication that we don't really need. Keep it simple and have one generator for each reactor.

Its thrust will go up a bit in the next update as I'll be rebalancing the reactor outputs, with 2.5m reactors you will see thrust rise by over just over 60%. You could add more reactors to add more thrust as well as using up some science to upgrade the reactors. That said, a nuclear electric rocket isn't going to be speedy no matter what you do with it though. If you're having to use xenon, you're probably better off switching to a thermal rocket because you're seeing only 50% better specific impulse but losing a lot of thrust in the process. It's probably a good combination to use for tweaking your orbit but not for a journey to the Mun.

I have it fixed it but you're not going to see any changes until a new version comes out... Apparently computer cores have no persistence code at present so they won't work... I thought I added this ages ago but nevermind, I'll do it now. You didn't open them on the launch pad did you? Flying with them deployed will make them fall off, this is intended behaviour like the deployable solar panels breaking off if you do the same thing.

No problem! I've also added a warning message to the upcoming version of the mod that will automatically warn users if they've installed it to the wrong place when they try to make use of the rockets. Hopefully that will be some help to other users.

Are you sure you have installed the mod properly? Can you check your installation and make sure you don't have something like 2 GameData folders inside each other. It should be [Kerbal base directory]\GameData\WarpPlugin and then you should have a bunch of files and other directories in there. I'm pretty sure the only way that that can happen is if the game can't find the propellants file.

Yep and he could have read that for himself if he'd carried on reading the article he posted.

I know for a while we've been having a problem with 3.75m radius parts not being very nicely attached, now I've managed to reconfigure the breaking force and breaking torque cfg values to produce something a lot lot better. Some of you may remember I built a 3.75m antimatter powered craft back a few pages ago and showed how to strut it up to hold it together. With the new changes, I decided to test them to the limit by removing all of the struts. I also thought, why not make it even more difficult and fly at max throttle? It barely even wobbles.

You could imagine having dishes that could function as either transmitters and receivers depending upon how you configured them. Not just in terms of receiving microwave power either, there are others you could imagine doing with large microwave dishes. One thing I'm considering is adding a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature experiment, where you attempt to measure tiny differences in the CMB temperature across the sky in order to generate science. For now though, I'd rather stick to the simplest arrangement. I already have a list of features as long as my arm to implement and I also need to get these bugfixes out.

You always want a bigger receiving dish than a transmitting dish if possible. The beam doesn't just travel in a straight line, it has some spread so by having a bigger receiver dish you have the possibility to recover more power.

Something I just thought of, are you by any chance running windows 8? If so, is KSP installed in your "Program Files" directory? If the answer to these is yes, KSP will have some permission issues and you should move the game to a different place - otherwise not only will it pose a problem for mods but when 0.22 comes out, the game won't have downloaded the patcher and you won't be able to update the game.

Strange. Are you waiting a long time before clicking to receive the science? Once you transmit it, you have 30 minutes of ingame time to receive it somewhere else. Upgrades are done by component, so each time you do an upgrade, you'll need that amount of science. It's a good idea to get some large research complexes going on some far away planets/moon, that way you'll be able to do a lot of upgrades. Moho, Eeloo, Laythe, Tylo and Vall are all good places for science complexes.

I've changed the VacuumPlasma engines as per K3|Chris' suggestion. In future, they will only operate outside of atmosphere but will flameout immediately while within the atmosphere. I have restored the other toggle propellant options to the engine, so if you do want to use the upgraded plasma engine within the atmosphere you can just switch over to internal supply of argon or something to fulfill your requirements until you're ready to return to space.

There we go: another day, another conservation of energy bug fixed!

That's quite a lot of mods, I'd guess you're hitting the near ~4GB RAM limit that KSP is curtailed by as a 32bit application. If you want to keep all of the mods, I'd recommend deleting some of the parts that you need infrequently or never.

I've only just fixed the antimatter problem so I haven't uploaded a new version since I fixed this problem. Nuclear fuel reprocessing won't work while the vessel is unfocused because there is no code for that at present - I don't consider this a major priority because it doesn't have an indefinite timespan, it's something that doesn't take particularly long. I've identified problem and thank heavens there is nothing wrong with the resource manager - running two antimatter factories with one reactor and two generators will only give you the one lot of power. It's solely a problem with the plasma engines. Hopefully I can get this fixed later today. The resource manager is fairly easy to interface with, send me a PM to remind me to get back to you about this. The code you need is really simple. Yeah, I'm certainly considering options for things that can go wrong in future when you don't dissipate your heat. It would be nice (and logical) for bad things to happen if you fail to prevent your nuclear reactor core from seriously too hot - interior melts, melts a hole in your spacecraft, oh dear oh dear. I'm still figuring out the basics of how this whole system is going to work so far though. The only thing I'm really set open so far is I want the cold bath generator temperature to be dependant upon your radiator temperature, which means that the hotter the radiators get, the lower efficiency your production of electrical power becomes. I do also want some safety systems to turn off/down reactors that are on spaceships that are getting too hot - so the biggest danger to deadly overheating might indeed be fission reactors that can't be throttled below 30%.

Yes, that's a key distinction I wanted to make between the thermal rockets and the plasma engines. The thermal rockets need to be connected to their heat source, you can't easily get access to the heat of your reactor core on a different part of your spaceship, so that's why I have those direct attachment rules there. The plasma engines though, they're just powered by electricity. You can run some nice chunky wires over to your electric generator and it no longer matters where you put the engine. If you have multiple generators, why not plugin them all in to your plasma engines? The plasma engines will constantly recalculate their supply too, so you could build a large spaceship with a set of forward and reverse engines if you wanted, turn off the engines at the back and the ones at the front would get all the power, etc etc. There are loads of neat things you could do with this, I'm sure. I quite enjoy messing about with the plasma engines, seeing what I can do with them. To try and put it fairly simply, quantum mechanics says that a vacuum isn't really empty, it is actually full of particles that are continually being created and destroyed. The vacuum also has some energy associated with it and therefore some mass associated with that energy, so the quantum vacuum plasma thruster, instead of carrying a plasma propellant, it treats the quantum vacuum itself as a plasma and exerts forces against it in order to propel the spacecraft. A spacecraft with this type of engine doesn't need any internal propellant, all it needs is some fuel to power a large electric generator because the amount of thrust you get from doing this is really tiny. It is a speculative concept and it remains to be seen how well it works in reality and whether it is practical as a propulsion system but it's definitely an interesting theoretical concept. I haven't had chance to look at the model myself yet, I will try and do this sometime soon. Attaching two generators to one reactor will definitely give you double resources until the reactor is drained - that's not a problem. Once the resources are drained though, you should see either both generators at 50% or one at 100% and the other at 0%. I'll check this out. Yeah, I want to do this based on size again, so I can make the smaller plasma thruster less heavy than the bigger one rather than having the difference being purely cosmetic.

There are different reasons to use it at different times. Before you get upgraded antimatter reactors/generators, it's a good method of having excellent specific impulse on an antimatter rocket for long range, low thrust travel. After the reactor/generator upgrades, it doesn't really compete on thrust or specific impulse but it does retain flexibility through the propellant options - fully upgraded you can toggle that propellant to move between a 4MN argon liftoff engine albeit with lower Isp and a 950kN respectable deep space engine with plenty of Isp. When you upgrade the plasma engine itself, it gets even better.

Thanks and no problem! Do make sure you collect up all the science you transmitted straight away though, it only remains in the transmitted state for 30 minutes of in-game time so collect it all up now and save it in a lab or a computer core for later.

You need another science lab or a computer core, when you switch to a different ship with one of these two parts, right click on the part and the option to "Receive Scientific Data" should appear. Edit: Fixed ready for next update.