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Radiation-induced cataracts.

That'd be a great thing to put into the code as a comment.

See https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/Reactors, but basically you eva and do a manual shutdown, then wait for the most dangerous daughter products to themselves decay away (a 9hr half-life), then you can refuel or swap fuels. Make sure you have enough room to put the uranium after it comes out of the reactor; the larger reactors need more than one tank's worth of space.

Indeed, they could hit the 1 Sv career dose limit in just over a month (which I guess is four kerbal months? something like that). Perhaps you shouldn't park in the middle of a radiation belt? Fractal_UK: we ought to have a science payload for measuring radiation, so we can plan ahead for these sorts of things.

The radiation is currently just cosmetic. I don't have anyone in orbit right at this moment (lots of science probes in flight though), but I saw someone mention a dose level of micro-sieverts per hour. That's pretty low; the average background dose is about 10 micro-sieverts per day (.4µs/hr) here on Earth. The dose limit for radiation workers here in the US is 50 millisieverts per year, or 50,000 microsieverts per year (~5.7µs/hr continuous). I need to send some folks to to Jool orbit and see how much they get. BTW: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Not really. The waste heat is handled by the dll, which also handles most everything else. You could install it and then remove the parts you don't want, leaving just the radiators. You would also get the updated solar power production curve as well.

It's an editor bug in KSP, not specific to the mod; you can see the same problems with the HubMax connector on the structural tab. Apparently it affects parts where the attachment points aren't vertical. It helps if you place the refinery on top of something first, then attach other parts to it. I recommend using the Select Root mod to let you build things like this; first build the leg with the refinery on it, change the root to the connector you've attached to the refinery, then pick up the leg by the connector and attach it with radial symmetry.

That's a great observation. I'll add that to the wiki.

See https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki#technology When you research Fusion Power at the R&D center, any thermal turbojets that you construct are automatically upgraded to Hybrid Thermal Rockets, able to use internal fuel in addition to atmospherics. Any thermal turbojets that are on craft already in flight are not automatically upgraded; you can right click on them and upgrade them individually. You can use KAS or docking ports, whichever you prefer.

Ah, I guess that's one way to do it. It's annoying to have to do that though. And yes, I've noticed the problems with links in the preview, but in this case it was broken in both cases Thanks BTW, I put up a first draft of a guide to nuclear aircraft. https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/Long-duration-nuclear-airplanes I'm not very experienced with aircraft in KSP, so I don't get into any real details. I welcome everyone's suggestions. I've got a craft I designed a while back which I'll take a screenshot of, but feel free to add your own. The more we have the better the page will be.

I tried to improve the organization of the main wiki page by adding a table of contents, but the links don't work. Does anyone know how to do a proper link to a named anchor? Currently it's mangling the fragment identifier so that it doesn't match the named anchors on the page. The result is a properly-formed link that doesn't go anywhere.

This is actually a core bug. It's been reported many times since this mod got started, and it can even happen with just stock parts. Fractal_UK has tried several ways of fixing it, and it is better than it used to be. I will try to explain why it happens. Imagine a craft with a single small stock solar panel on it which is producing 2 electric charge per second. The game divides this rate up by your frame rate, and adds that much to your electric charge per frame. So if you are running at 30fps, then it adds .06666 charge to your batteries every frame. Likewise, if you have some device that requires power, such as a command pod, it divides the power usage rate by your frame rate, and deducts that much from your batteries every frame. For the sake of explanation, let's assume the command pod requires 2 electric charge per second. This means that every frame the solar panel adds .0666 ec and the pod deducts .0666 ec, and the total stays exactly the same. Now you want to time accelerate. The game still adds and deducts once per frame, but each frame represents a longer period of time. At 10x, each frame represents not one thirtieth of a second but one third of a second, and the game must add and subtract 0.666 charge each frame. At 100x it must deal with units of 6.666 charge, at 1000x 66.666 charge and so on. At some point the amount deducted each frame goes above the amount you can store, and the pod shuts off because it doesn't have enough power; you don't really notice this because you cannot control your craft in time warp. The fusion reactor, on the other hand, must consume 7 megawatts per second in order to produce any power. At some point the amount deducted per frame will be more than you have stored, and the reactor will produce no power that frame; it couldn't run the lasers that compress the fuel pellets. At 100,000x it needs to deduct 23,333 megajoules per frame (at 30 fps, it's higher if the fps is lower), and you don't have that much available. I don't think Fractal_UK has ever said so explicitly, but I suspect that the reason reactors come with a free 1000 megajoules of storage is so that you can timewarp at the lower levels.

There's already a .625 meter fusion reactor, the GEKKO. Similarly, there is a small thermal rocket nozzle which is .625 meter.

It's a KSP bug. In fact, the hubmax exhibits the same bug. Apparently it can be easier to use the side node if you first attach the refinery to your rocket using the bottom node. I also recommend the Select Root mod; it lets you change which part is the root node which can help quite a bit with tricky builds.

A warp ship does not require a science lab. However, a science lab can consume electrical power (and a lot of it) to produce antimatter. The other method is to launch a ship with antimatter collectors into orbit inside the magnetic field of one of the Kerbin system's many fine planets or moons. Remember, the stronger the magnetic field is the more antiprotons it will trap and the faster your collectors can collect. Use the Dual-Technique Magnetometer to measure the magnetic fields of various planets or moons in order to find the best orbits around the best bodies for collecting antimatter.

That works.

Ah, I see. I'm happy to help either way. Is there anything I can take off your plate?

In fact, I'd be happy to help in other ways as well. Are you writing this in the wiki?

Not at all.

It uses scientific notation, which is a concise way of printing very small and very large numbers. 1.23E4 represents 1.23 × 104. 104 equals 10,000, so this evaluates to 12,300. Small numbers are handled the same way, but with a negative exponent: 1.23E-4 represents 1.23 × 10-4, which evaluates to 0.000123. Scientific notation is used in science and engineering because you are less likely to make an error when reading or writing with them; you can't leave out a zero or add too many by accident. The magnetometer is measuring first the strength of the magnetic field that you are in, and then the rate at which it encounters antiprotons (the rate at which you encounter particles is called 'flux'). Now, magnetic fields have a direction as well as a strength (measured in Tesla, or "T") at every point, so it's not good enough to report just how strong the field is. Instead the magnetometer reports the absolute strength (labeled "|B|", B for the magnetic field, with the absolute value operator around it), the strength radial to the planet (labeled "B_r"; presumably that would be Br if there were scope for better typography in the game), and the transverse strength ("B_T", or BT). Now, most magnetometers measure the magnetic field along directions relative to themselves; if you twist or turn the thing in the air the values will change. The game magnetometer does some of the work for you and computes the radial and transverse values relative to the surface of the planet below, which makes things easier for you because you never have to care about which way your ship is pointing. The funny thing is that in the end you don't much care about the magnetic field. The magnetic field is necessary because it traps the antiprotons that you want, but what you really care about is how many antiprotons there are. The magnetometer measures this directly, so you can ignore the magnetic field; it's just there for flavor! The antimatter flux is presented in micrograms per second (mg/s). This is handy because the capacity of your tank is measured in micrograms. All you have to do is multiply the rate shown by the magnetometer by the amount of time you are going to wait and you can compute how much antimatter you will collect. For example, at about 100km above Kerbin on one of my craft: 1.586057E-006 mg/s × 6 hours = 1.586057E-6 mg/s × 21600 seconds = 1.586057E-6 mg/s × 2.16E4 s = (1.586057 × 2.16) × 10(-6 + 4) mg = 3.42588312E-2 mg = .0342 micrograms of antimatter, after waiting one Kerbal day. You can probably find a better spot; just remember that a larger magnetic field traps more antiprotons, and traps them for longer. BTW, magetometer is an easy word to spell; just think of it as magnet-o-meter and you can't go wrong. Oh, and I don't think Fractal_UK ever specified what the magnetometer is measuring transverse to, so that could be north-south, east-west, your current velocity vector, etc. It's just flavor text though, so I'm not concerned

That's like saying that gasoline is useless as a fuel source; you have to vaporize it first, then mix the vapor with air. I figure there's probably a neutron source in there that you can unblock when you want to throttle up and produce power. Americium+beryllium sounds like a good choice to me; the americium produces alpha particles which strike the beryllium that it's mixed with resulting in neutrons. Gently apply the neutrons to the thorium and you've got your U233.

It has to be megajoules, because you couldn't carry that many ordinary batteries. Also because most parts that deal with megajoules can only deal with megajoules, not the ordinary electric charge. This is to prevent cycles where the mod converts megajoules to electric charge and then converts it immediately back to megajoules.

Yea, my thoughts exactly.

You can fix this fairly easily. Open GameData/WarpPlugin/Resources/ResourcesNuclear.cfg in your favorite text editor (I use emacs). Then find the Aluminum resources and change the flowMode from ALL_VESSEL to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH.

Here are some graphs for a hypothetical craft, created using graphviz. First with the science lab turned on: Second with both the science lab and the thermal nozzle active: Last, all power to the thermal nozzle: digraph second { graph [outputorder=edgesfirst bgcolor=transparent]; node [style=filled fillcolor=white]; edge [tailclip=false]; rankdir=LR reactor -> radiator [color=orange penwidth=0 style="invis"]; reactor -> generator [color=red penwidth=12]; generator -> radiator [color=orange penwidth=8]; radiator -> space [color=forestgreen penwidth=16]; generator -> "science lab" [color=blue penwidth=4]; "science lab" -> radiator [color=orange penwidth=4]; reactor -> "thermal nozzle" [color=red penwidth=12]; "thermal nozzle" -> radiator [color=orange penwidth=4]; "thermal nozzle" -> space [color=forestgreen penwidth=8]; }