GreeningGalaxy

I have five on my laptop, and at least four on my parents' desktop. Mostly, they're different combinations of mods; I don't think I have anything older than .23 on my laptop or anything besides .19 or .20 on the desktop. They take up more space than all the rest of the files on my computer combined, but I have a terabyte drive, so I guess that doesn't matter.

I've seen that too - part upgrading doesn't appear to be working, like many other features in KSPI. I just started a sandbox save, but this of course disables finding new science and the money system.

Eh, this would work, but not super well. The thrust and Isp of the engine will change not only with altitude but with speed, and will certainly be affected differently by different atmosphere compositions - for instance, you could run it on only liquid fuel low in Kerbin's atmosphere and use the local O2 as oxidizer, or, in some environment like Jool with lots of ambient hydrogen, run it on only liquid oxidizer. In places like Eve (maybe; Eve's atmosphere isn't reactive enough for rocket burning, is it?) or Duna, it'll need both fuel and oxidizer, using the ambient air only as a inert propellant mass. At the very least, this sounds like a cool idea for a mod, if one doesn't already exist.

So, just in case my previous vehicles weren't ridiculous enough, I've decided to sacrifice some functionality for looks and make my first movie spaceship. I present to you the Endurance, the ring-shaped ship from Interstellar! It weighs nearly 550 tons and has 504 parts, but it still manages to have 5-figure delta-V since all those tanks are full of fuel. Of course, it gets terrible framerates on my computer and it only has a TWR of 0.08 in Kerbin gravity, but it makes up for that by being able to dock four awesome landing craft. The two Rangers on the front are powered by hybrid thermal rocket/turbojet engines which let them fly in most environments. They certainly won't have the lift or thrust to make orbit from Kerbin or Laythe, but they could probably do Duna and certainly would be able to hop all over the smaller airless bodies with ease. The Landers docked to the sides would be pretty much useless in an atmosphere since they're not aerodynamically stable, but they have lots of fuel and thrust for exploring airless bodies. Both types of landing craft have near-perfect RCS balance as well, and more delta-V than anyone could possibly need. A top-down and side oblique view. Note the glowing radiators in these pictures; Movies often forget those, but KSP Interstellar does not, so I did my best to attach them without borking up the design too much. Burning the engines to show their location. Like the movie ship, there are four clusters of three engines each arranged around the ring. Note also the staggering acceleration of almost 750 millimeters per second per second, as well as, true to the movie, I'm currently attempting to escape Kerbin by burning along the radial vector. The main drawback of this design is that it's very hard to rotate about any axis. I also didn't put any crew cabins around the ring, so the kerbals can't enjoy rotational artificial gravity, but they probably don't really need it anyway. The framerate my computer gets with it is so low that I probably won't actually make it out to Vall before I go insane, but at least it looks cool.

>Obtain antimatter torchship >7-figure delta-V, hell yeah >SSTO from launchpad >likeaboss.flac >Not even a dent in the fuel supply >Decide to scram all that Hohmann nonsense >Start constant-burn brachistochrone trajectory for Minmus >Get up to 30 km/s at halfway point >Skew-flip takes longer than I expected >Ok >Minmus is getting a little big, speed is still really high >Not gonna slow down in time >Engine is getting pretty hot >Radiators are glowing very orange >Reactor goes out due to overheat >Engine flames out due to power loss >fuuuuuu.mp4 >Here comes Minmus at 10 km/s >POW >Torchships are hard

I'm utterly dependent on part clipping. I use enough mods containing parts with weird collision meshes that it takes mere seconds into the start of a build for me to have an RCS thruster block refuse to go where I need it, two perfectly-normal inline parts refuse to hook together at all, or, more rarely, to need a bulky part to merge into the hull a bit, such as a spaceplane's VTOL engine. Strangely enough, lots of particularly silly engine-through-tank clipping seems to be perfectly possible without actually turning part clipping on, while perfectly acceptable connections such as RCS thruster blocks on some tanks and nose cones on the tops of boosters just will not connect without part clipping enabled. More often than not, I just turn it on for consistency, since the set of rules for determining when a part is clipping and when it's not just doesn't make any sense. Well, keep in mind that the oxidizer is still behaving as reaction mass - you can imagine the LV-N treating the fuel/oxidizer mix as just liquid hydrogen (which is notably a lot less dense than kerosene, but whatever). The oxidizer still has mass and is still being fired forcefully out the back of the engine, so you can't just pretend it's not there. Personally, I have no problem with pretending that you've figured out some cool magic way of compressing the fuel into twice the density half the space, since the mass is still all there anyway, and mass is most of what makes ships challenging. (It's also a singleplayer game, so it doesn't matter what I think about your game anyway.) If you really want to be a stickler for accuracy about clipping engines into tanks, you can always just tweak the fuel in the tank down to half full, or just use a smaller tank.

>Go out on EVA from a ship under full sail >Engines are so pathetically weak, keeping up is easy >wheeee.svg >Misjudge distance >Accidentally fly through exhaust beam >KAPOW >Shooting off-structure at 100m/s >ohnoooo.wav >Try to catch up with ship >Run out of EVA fuel >Flop right into the exhaust beam AGAIN >whyyyy.psd >Kerbal loses too much speed, hits the upper atmosphere while unfocused, and is eaten by the kraken >oa >

Scattered and makes only very intermittent sense. 2/10.

In keeping with my tradition of truly colossal KSPI vehicles, I've outdone myself once again. Pictured here, hovering static over Minmus on its plasma/beam-core antimatter engine is the first prototype of my biggest ship yet, the Thalassa 5A. Note that not all the parts are casting shadows. Its engine puts out a maximum of 6667 kN of thrust at an Isp of 56,000s. Right now, it's only putting out a fraction of that thrust to hold itself up over Minmus's tiny gravity. That engine is 5 meters across, as shown here in relation to a kerbal. Resting the whole thing on that nozzle is probably not the best idea, but the kerbs don't appear to care, in much the same way that they don't care about standing around when the exhaust from a beam-core antimatter rocket is blasting into the ground at their feet at 600 kilometers per second. To prove his fearlessness, my kerbal stands on top of the antimatter containment unit and gives the reactor a warm fuzzy hug. Note the bizarre shadows showing through the antimatter reactor. Shadows are being really weird in my game. A later and even more colossal version of this ship holds an entire quad-engine fusion-powered lander inside a shuttle bay. The lander is really quite heavy and hard to maneuver, even with its clusters of three RCS ports. The ship still easily pulls 6-figure delta-V with the lander on board, though. The final version of the Thalassa 5A ditches the heavy fusion reactor in favor of all-antimatter power. It can accelerate at about 9.7 m/s2, which is a bit less than previous versions, but its gigantic fuel tank space gives it a total delta-V of over 500 kilometers per second, which is enough for very fast interplanetary missions. I'm not actually exactly sure where I'm going with this ship - I flew it to Jool today (on a standard Hohmann transfer), and the fuel gauge still hasn't even registered less than full. The biggest challenge will probably be getting the big heavy lander back inside that docking bay after it's done its surface stay.

I remotely drop the containment on a 300-gram antimatter vial that somehow found its way under the hill during its construction. The report is audible from hundreds of kilometers away, and the flash is clearly visible from orbit. A gamma-absorbent substrate surrounding the vial prevents much ionizing radiation from getting out, but does release substantial energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. Once the lava cools and hardens in the explosion site, I claim the resulting ring-shaped hill. My hill that is totally not a crater.

I slow the city down with a bit of gravity manipulation, bringing it to a hover above the terrain. I grab the next poster and push them off, flinging them out of the gravity bubble and down towards the surface below.

2076 - A small rogue Alcubierre bubble streaks in from interstellar space and disappears into the sun. The density of the solar plasma breaks up the bubble long before it reaches the core, but not before a significant volume of solar material is converted to energy from passing across the bubble wall, and the resultant gamma rays trigger a sudden surge of fusion in a large chunk of the convection zone. This creates a massive ejection of solar plasma of a magnitude never before seen, and the magnetic disturbance knocks out all electronics closer than the orbit of Mars.

I press a button from the cockpit of my torchship (which is still sitting on Duna, next to the awkward crater that used to be my hill), setting off tiny explosive charges at key locations around your monitor, hard disk, and RAM. Your cat video has been successfully purged. As the signal's propagation reaches Kerbin, a final, considerably larger ring of shaped charges is fired out in the desert, piling up sediments into a spontaneous hill. My hill, even though I'm not there to claim it.

Wait, was that thrust value in Newtons or pounds? Nah, it's okay, I'll just take a nap and let MechJeb do the circularization burn. It'll get it more accurately than I would anyway. You said this laser was how many gigawatts again? Hey, check it out! I got our intercept distance down to 0.0 meters! Wait, THIS switch controls power to the antimatter containment? Well, I'll be darned. I thought I was shutting off power to the coffee ma

I wrote an IRC bot that a few people love and everyone else hates. You jelly?

I call Jon's Law down upon you by directing the relativistic exhaust of my beam-core antimatter rocket towards your hill, neatly inverting it into a deep crater. Too bad you didn't have an atmosphere to protect you from that! The torchship attached to the front of the beam-core antimatter engine carries me along a brachistochrone trajectory for Duna, where I carefully land and establish a base on a hill, which is mine.

Alright, in light of what Fractal just said, I've decided that I like the Isp caps on thermal rockets after all. It makes at lot of sense in terms of accuracy, for one, and it also more or less un-nerfs thermal rockets smaller than 2.5 meters - they now have enough thrust to actually get places with sane burn durations (and to be used as lander engines too!). I'm keeping my antimatter torch drive in my game, but the Isp nerfs on thermal rockets do take a step back towards the stock design model in which your ship has to have a significant mass fraction to get a good amount of delta-V, which wasn't the case at all with 17000-second antimatter rockets. I also like the idea of using them for launch vehicles; I haven't considered that much.

When the entire bottom half of your rocket explodes and you still get to orbit anyway. 'swat I get for using a 200-ton-to-orbit launch vehicle on a 100-ton payload

Sounds like we need Dang It! integration here. Hmm, looks like if we take 40% of 405 gigawatts (162 gigawatts) and divide that out by 1.1 meganewtons (the thrust of the DT Vista), we get an exhaust velocity of 147,273 m/s or an Isp of 15027, which is slightly worse than the Vista. Guess we'll need to try something else for antimatter torch drives! (Related fun fact: this means that the the power output of the DT Vista's induced fusion reactions is about 165 gigawatts (15500 s * 9.8 m/s^2 * 1,100,000 N = 167 GW, minus the 2.5 gigawatts of electricity used to power the lasers = 164.5 GW)) One obvious thing to do here would be to use something closer to Project Rho's suggestion and make our 162 GW engine have an Isp of 200,000 seconds and a thrust of 82 kN, but at that point you might as well just strap a generator and a quantum vacuum plasma thruster to the antimatter reactor and enjoy effectively infinite Isp with even better thrust. I suppose we could switch a zero around and get an engine with 20,000 s Isp and 820 kN, which would be more respectable but still a little low-powered. That's why I'm in favor of a multiple-terawatt direct-injection system that doesn't muck around with something as weak as a 405 GW antimatter reactor. yes, I'm more or less aware of what I just said. o.o I guess the best thing for this to be is just the next step up from the DT Vista once you have antimatter power- if we go for twice the power (330 GW), we could have an engine with a thrust of 1,500 kN and an Isp of 22,500 s, which is as high as you'd ever need for a Hohmann-abiding planet hopper, but hardly a torchship to Jool. Add a zero and put it at 3.3 TW, and you could do 3,400 kN at 100,000 s (I messed up my math AGAIN, darnit, my engine config currently uses 20 TW, not 2). Now that I consider that, I think I'm gonna go take a zero off the Isp of my engine (bringing it down to 56,000 s @ 3750 kN) because 20 terawatts seems pretty unlikely. Anyway, I'm still not sure what exactly everyone else wants to see, but I think I'm getting closer to an antimatter engine I can love. 5 million does seem a little pricey for a cryostat. By, like, maybe two orders of magnitude. Although, to be fair, these cryostats seem to be somehow capable of keeping the hydrogen around with zero boiloff as long as they're powered, so maybe they contain some very expensive magic inside them to keep the hydrogen atoms from doing what they normally do and squeezing out between the atoms of the tank. (At least, H2 does that... does deuterium/tritium?)

Hmm... guess i can't say I know anything about that, then. You could always just add the megajoules to the solar arrays and leave the electric charge in, which could be construed as cheaty but probably wouldn't be too bad since, unless you're driving NFT plasma engines and KSPI ones at the same time, there aren't a lot of big users of electriccharge that would also be found on a ship using megajoules.

Right - that's why I like the idea of a 1,250kN 200,000s plasma engine: the power checks out to be easily within the capability of the 405 GW antimatter reactor, and it fulfills the niche of the endgame high-thrust high-Isp antimatter rocket. We really don't need another high-Isp low-thrust propulsion system; those are headaches to use (KSPI magnetic nozzles, plasma engines, and every ion engine mod ever, I'm looking at you) and we already have a whole bunch of them. You can theoretically just stuff more propellant through a plasma-core rocket to increase your thrust and lower your Isp anyway, so the physics check out. There's no need for a rocket with 800,000s Isp anyway with the Kerbol-sized solar system. The 10-meganewton figure given on Project Rho for the beam-core engine is the maximum theoretical that you could get from an engine made of matter. A rocket with an Isp of 10,000,000 seconds (exhaust velocity of 98,000,000 m/s) and a thrust power of 405 gigawatts would have a thrust of just over 4 kilonewtons, but I think you could get away with just injecting more antimatter and getting higher thrusts that way up to a point, but the real issue is not vaporizing your engine when >40% of the input power is turning into heat. The wasteheat generated by my torch drive is almost certainly several orders of magnitude too little, but I pulled some hand-waving that it's not thermalizing the gamma rays and most of the energy is lost that way. I'm not at all sure that's plausible. I wanted ships that use that drive to have to carry the next size bigger radiators than normal, but anyone who's tried to get the maximum possible power out of an antimatter reactor knows that 405 gigawatts is a lot of radiator, and my engine probably should put out close to that in waste heat. Once again, I encourage you to edit that file however you like.

I had an automated missile turret shoot off one of the runway lights, and my launch vehicles occasionally break the launchpad. And every time I try to land on top of the VAB, something very bad happens and I end up lying on my back staring at the building's skeletal frame burning away above me. Other than that, I haven't destroyed much; in fact, a lot of my focused attempts to destroy the R&D facility have failed miserably.

Honestly, this isn't so much a heavily-buffed plasma-core engine as it is a heavily-nerfed beam-core one. Project Rho suggests a beam-core engine having a thrust of about 10 meganewtons and an Isp of around ten million seconds, and at that point you might as well just turn on infinite fuel in KSP, because that would be totally ridiculous for any conceivable interplanetary mission. What I made is somewhere between plasma-core and beam-core, which was really conceived as a torch drive - I wanted to try to get places on a brachistochrone. I do like the idea of using the 405-GW antimatter reactor with the magnetic nozzles as a proper plasma-core engine, though. If you made an engine with about 1,250 kN thrust and 200,000 s Isp (a nice next step up from the DT-Vista), it would have a thrust power of about 257 gigawatts, just right for a 405-gigawatt reactor at 62% efficiency. I'm still fuzzy on what the 'charged particles' produced by a fusion reactor actually are, but it seems like you could just repurpose them for the plasma produced by a sufficiently-powerful antimatter reaction anyway. I'm not sure how you'd reconcile the charged particle/thermal power output balance, but I guess if all else failed you could just make an engine with those stats and use a magnetic nozzle welded to a big antimatter reactor as the model. This sounds cool!

When you have seven-figure delta-V.

I'd imagine they would, but I don't know for sure. I'm not quite sure how wasteheat production with solar panels works anyway, because it's not in the individual cfgs and I can't find KSPI's module manager patch for it. I'm not sure the NFT solar cells produce any wasteheat by default in any case.