Fractal_UK

The distinction between reactors and generators is not something I would ever consider changing, for the record. In my opinion, it's critical to maintain a distinction between the raw form of energy that is being generated by the reactor and the electrical power that comes out. There is a world of difference between a spacecraft designed to use a nuclear reactor as a heat source for a thermal rocket and a bimodal rocket that can generate electrical power from that reactor as well. When I started work on Interstellar, I did it with modularity in mind. Most people will use reactors and generators as a pair and generally just think of them as one combined unit that does something useful, I do most of the time too, but the point is that you don't have to and that you can save mass by doing something different if you can live with the more constrained design. I also think it's valuable to take a more realistic approach with the techologies that are closer to real time than the more advanced technologies, generally it's tough to get the physics spot on for technology that hasn't been invented but I also want to bear in mind that people play in Interstellar for different things. The people who really focus on the very near future possibilities in space exploration are probably also more interested in having a moderately believable potrayal of that technolgy. As the tech scale advances, an increasingly rough portrayal is perfectly adequate. I have been working on writing a new set of back-end code for the reactors but this is all about increased reliability and providing more information, rather than fundamentally changing the way they work. In fact, functionally, you shouln't really see a difference aside from the increased reliability of more well designed code. I am, however, away on work business at present so expect any news of future development to be slow for at least the next week or so.

It depends if you're talking about before or after upgrades. Unupgraded, the Sethlans/Akula reactors are a lot more complicated in the way they behave than the other reactor types because you can control their temperature by changing the amount of radiators on the ship - they lose power output with increasing temperature but provided you get the balance right you can get improved specific impulse performance compared to the other unupgraded fission reactors while saving on radiator mass as well. Their performance as a rocket in atmosphere, however, is pretty poor because convection will keep the temperature low. I find those reactors with thermal rockets really useful for early ships on longer range voyages, that might be one area to consider taking a look at them in.

That's pretty much intended, they are the kind of thing that should be in a fairing.

Your maths is correct, yes. It's 0.1% efficient at converting electrical power into mass and half of that mass is antimatter, so the total result is 0.05% efficiency at antimatter production.

It looks to me based on the numbers like you're testing on the launchpad. Interstellar thermal rockets handle atmospheric Isp more realistically, by reducing thrust instead of the flow of fuel into the engine. The result of that is that in atmosphere, you have substantially less thrust than you do in vacuum.

My assumption is that, like Pluto, the surface is not covered by water ice but other, often less interesting, types of ice. One of those is Methane, so there is a possibility that in future you will be able to extract that there.

If you want to receive power, you need to be in receive mode, not in relay mode. Relays take power and transmit it onward but the amount that goes through a given satellite is variable depending on where the receiver is so activating relay mode does nothing until you have a receiver that can receive something.

That's possible considering nuclear resources used to be in m^3 but were later changed to litres. I may have missed something in that conversion. Yeah, the current consume/return system is a rubbish fudge from the days when reactors were much simpler, I'm going to do a total rework of the reactors (actually that work is already half-done) for the next version to improve the architecture.

Not everything is a mission that goes somewhere and comes back, the value of the reactor in those lower power configurations is really in the deployment of fixed reactor infrastructure that you can use to power refineries, antimatter factories, etc. Often you won't want to be powering those down but running a fusion reactor at the minimum power in DT mode can mean you are wasting a lot of fuel producing amounts of power that you don't need unless you're in flight.

The Sethlans and Akula reactors aren't of a higher tier than the original molten salt reactors, I don't really see one or the other as being better, just a bit different. The MSRs are really focused on prolonged lifetime and ease of use while the others are a bit more complicated with the passive heat safety features and variable Isp performance of the engines. I see the choice between them as a matter of preference, I'd be interested to get a feel for what other people prefer though.

I'm not sure it's guaranteed to be 2* delta time, there may be combinations of part configurations that lead to different numbers. I'll have to check the permutations.

It's always going to depend on physics delta time with electric charge because the reactor is trying to supply the resources in an unmanaged fashion until the fusion reactor can take over to supply itself with megajoules. Battery capacity is critical with stock resources. It's much more reliable to use a microwave receiver as a start up power system because then you just need to be able to receive enough power to satisfy the reactor power requirements and toggle the reactor to active. Then you can shut down the receiver and use internal power. Using electric charge is an option there for convenience but you'll need to test your battery capacity yourself and make sure it provides enough for your needs.

I did actually think about moving it because I don't really understand the justification for such a late placement of the RTG in the tech tree. They were being regularly used back in the 60s and consequently seem like they should be an early-middle tech, I haven't done this because it opens a can of worms in that there are many ways that the game's tech tree isn't very sensible from a realism perspective and I don't really want to totally redesign it.

Do you find that this occurs when you are focused on the vessel with the fusion-reactor running and then dock with the non-fusion powered vessel? There is some background housekeeping going on with the resource managers when vessels dock and when they seperate. When you dock, one ship's resource manager has to take precedence and when they seperate a new resource manager should be created for the new vessel. The ships should be able to accomodate small breaks in power supply but maybe the code that handles that should be improved.

Plasma engines don't currently have a different Isp for atmospheric and vacuum but Thermal rockets vary thrust rather than mass flow. If I add atmospheric isp to plasma engines, they will do the same.

The number of units is irrelevant, they're a totally arbitrary unit and don't necessarily represent anything. Electric engines burn through xenon because those engines provide the least Isp and stock xenon containers have very poor mass ratios.

It's because stock parts don't respect conservation of energy, there is no way an ion engine and a couple of solar panels can produce the thrust that they do. Realistically, those ships would have micronewtons of thrust but since the stock game doesn't have parts that supply large amounts of power as KSPI parts do, things are done differently. My rework of electric engines that is in progress will address this.

Yes, it's one of my attempts to be a bit sparing with valuable texture memory. The tiny white square simply means that Vall has lots of water everywhere. The other resource maps do vary in size depending upon how much detail I'm going for.

Is it confirmed there will be a cost for resources, do you know?

I make the current market price around $11million/kg. The only viable source for that Helium-3 is thermonuclear weapons, which contain supplies of tritium and over time that tritium decays to Helium-3 and needs to be replaced with fresh tritium. The US consumes about 8kg of Helium-3 per year and you really need many many kilograms for a viable reactor. Essentially their entire supply could provide a little start-up fuel for one fusion reactor. It would be nice if there were some kind of quota system for resources, so you'd have some global pool in the VAB for each resource and that global supply would regenerate at different rates depending upon how rare the resource was. Maybe that's something I should investigate.

Tweakable resources in the refinery, full Uranium and Thorium tanks, etc are my way of abstracting Kerbal civilisation. NASA, for example, does not conduct mining operations on Earth to get the resources it needs, it simply buys them like every other company that needs particular resources. So yes, you can just gather resources in tanks and send them up over and over again, launching repetitive resupply missions. That's fine for operations in Kerbin orbit, even on the Mun or Minmus but if you want to build a base on Laythe or Duna, do you want to have to fly 9 month or year long supply missions every time your base needs something new? It's easier to extract those resources with infrastructure you have locally and then you don't need to keep going back to Kerbin. The only time that resource availability in the VAB actually matters is when the resource is actually in short supply or impossible to find on Kerbin. For example, you don't get Helium-3 or Antimatter in the VAB because they simply aren't available in useable quantities. Tritium is the iffy case because it is available but it's very rare and expensive, which is why it comes in small doses. In theory, you can just launch lots of parts with the little doses and combine them all together but since you have nuclear reactors it's probably easier to take the intended approach and use Lithium to breed it.

Indeed, you can use stock generators to generate as many megajoules in the resource bar as you like but the megajoule resource manager will know nothing about them, so they amount of use they'll be is 0. Interstellar (or rather ORS) managed resources are similar to stock resources only in that they use the resource bar to display information. If they were straightforwardly compatible and you could do everything required by Interstellar with ElectricCharge, there wouldn't be any need for Megajoules as a resource.

It's very much intended, before Direct Conversions generators were around there was no ChargedParticles resource because there was no need for it. But yes, if you don't take advantage of a reactor that would let you collect the charge particles directly they just create heat which you can use instead, it's less efficient but extra energy is worth having.

Most mods don't actually need trees anyway. Most mods simply define their position on the stock tree, in which case, TreeLoader will put them in the right node on the Interstellar tree as well.

The rare resources are already not available in the VAB, the only resource I can think of that could really be more restricted is Tritium but that undergoes radioactive decay into Helium-3, so you'll need to carry supplies of Lithium to breed more Tritium already. The things that are available in the VAB are designed to be things that should be available on Kerbin.