Ratzap

Ahhh, now the randomness of some of my ships/rovers getting pulled around and others not becomes clear. Thanks for posting this information as I've been wondering what on earth causes it.

It happens with a very light testbed setup (well, light is relative, not much payload). Make yourself the stack I had for the AM tests in my spreadsheet, throttle to full and watch it explode. Repeatable so you can do it till you feel you know what's going on. But my money would be on crashTolerance = 6 breakingForce = 400 breakingTorque = 400 in the config. Relatively low values and if the G force from the nozzle exceeds it, the reactor will vanish. Ok, that makes a little more sense. I understand getting folk to opt for the big one but the smallest 2 sizes of nuclear are just impractical as they stand. It's swung the opposite way, people will always take the bigger one as they are useful. BTW, I don't think lift weight is going to factor in much to be honest. People who use mods are going to know how to build rockets and get other mods. I have lifters saved for everything from smallest up to 400 tonnes to 120km in one go. I design whatever I feel like and launch it, the lift mass only factors into which build to stick it on.

Oh man, I left MC switched on while I designed, tested and launched a bunch of huge lifters (3600t+ on the pad). It thinks I owe it quite a large sum of krones now I think editing the .cfg may be in order.

Docking struts won't help I'm afraid. I build using nitropunches extra extra heavy struts and while they stay in one piece, the reactor simply implodes. Ditto on the probes, I love half meter parts but weight is utterly crucial to smaller rockets. I hefted my big ship in one piece, then chucked another one up after it. One round Jool, one round Kerbin. With this mod http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/48541-Welded-Thrust-plates-T8-Mega-Lift-Systems it's pretty simple to make huge lifters. If you want I can post you a craft that put's 375.5 tonnes of fuel and RCS into LKO with enough fuel left to take it to the Mun.

Heh, I saw that and wondered why the feel of using it differed so much, that's why I made a standardized test build to stick each one on. The ISP of the 0.625m parts is irrelevant really since you'll never build anything with a 6 ton nozzle and under 2t of payload to go somewhere with a TWR of 0 when you actually stick parts together and try to make it move. I think the difference between nuclear and AM is too high - eg at 1.25m 0.05 TWR vs 10, it's not even close. The smaller parts should also cost less than the larger ones to upgrade - that would encourage usage especially in clustered situations. The nuclear options are particularly poor when you consider folk will need to limp around with them for long enough to get some anti-matter. The plasma on an upgraded AM reactor is insane. It emptied the largest xenon tank available from any mod in 2.5s. Short term, if I had me druthers I'd bump the nuclear up a bit, tone down the AM, make upgrades scale with size and make the upgrades less hefty and make a low weight 1.25/0.625m nozzle.

Just a question Kospy but have you considered contacting Squad to see if they would like to bring KAS into KSP proper? I (and I'm sure many others) really feel KAS is a vital piece of KSP infrastructure and it would be well placed inside the official release.

Thank you, this will be dead handy Edit: You have a space in 'Game Data' so the mod will not unpack cleanly for people who don't notice

Most excellent news, sounds great. Did you see the spreadsheet of stats btw? I can knock it off if you don't want to go there or continue to look at balance playtesting.

Yes it does the SAS correctly, there's a fix for v1 flying around that does it to but v2 seems to work ok. I just got sick of launching sats, more sats, yet more sats I'll get back to it maybe after the next KSP release.

RT2 works fine but is missing some UI stuff. I gave it a whirl last week. Nice work Geckgo, I saw there was a new version and boy you've been busy. I'll stop playing around with the warp pack a while and trot through KIS again.

Spreadsheet here This went quicker than I expected - Hyperedit be praised etc. It's an Open Document Format file and the testbed build is to the right of the results. Some thoughts in no particular order: the 0.625m parts are pretty pointless. Not enough power to do anything useful, no jet nozzle light enough to use, basic has too low power to make MJ. Is anyone actually using them for anything? The upgraded 1.25m nuclear is ok to power science labs but costs the same to upgrade a 2.5m part so why bother? The 2.5m stuff shines, basic is useful so is the upgrade but it's a bit heavy. 3.75m is way heavy and drinks down fuel. AM parts are at least all useful-ish but seem rather overpowered if anything. Again the 2.5m part is the best. I couldn't get a thrust measurement for the 3.75m basic as the reactor simply exploded at full welly. I saw 10,500kN very briefly as it throttled up then blam. AM use on the upgraded 3.75m is eye watering. The plasma is amusing but 569 xenon per second? Really? With the upgraded reactor 4613 xenon a second, rather useless but very funny. The upgraded plasma (quantum thing) is completely different again but 2000 science is rather a lot for a low thrust engine even if it needs no fuel to run but will need AM since you'd need 160t of nuclear 3.75s to run one... A good effort getting the mod made and out there but these need a good looking at to give them all a use/niche

I flew all the way around Kerbin at Mach 9 with FAR... the instability is your design I'm afraid

I'm not talking about the storage part, just the irritating micromanagement. Human reactors don't run at full power constantly, they have management systems which match the power output to the demand (generator and/or thruster in this case). And flipping the things on and off manually is precisely what you wrote - instantly throttleable massive power generators - they go from 100 to 0 to 100 to 0 as I sit there flipping on/off so I don't waste anti-matter. Case in point, I took my 4 lab, 175t anti-matter ship from Kerbin to Jool (9000km orbit where the best particle density is) and it took less than 2,000AM but it was irritating to nurse it along. That's what computers are for Thank you. Ah now I was hoping this was how you dealt with it because I carefully turn the sats and get them optimal before I flip back to KSC. One other question though, how do you handle the attenuation? I have a bunch of sats around Kerbin and a few now orbiting just outside Eve. Is the attenuation calculated for each sat to receiver or a mean value? I wasn't saying they should be, I was pointing out badly that it's a bit exploitable. With thermal in particular, it's basically free AM fuel. Something I'd love to see is a change to the generators. Make only 2 sizes, one to fit 0.625 and 1.25 and the other for 2.5 to 3.75 but radially attached. Then you could pick the amount of MJ gen you wanted on a ship by ship basis by having more or less generators hanging off it and it wouldn't muck up the look or wobbly factor of trying to fit an undersized generator with a large reactor. Ships without warp drive or labs really have no great use for much MJ but it looks daft with a small generator on top of a big reactor. Anyway, back to what I was doing. I'm trying to benchmark all the various sizes and tech levels with an appropriate payload and get it into a spreadsheet. I'll post it when it's done.

One other odd thing is the way it doesn't use megajoules or anything if you switch away from the ship then time warp. Whenever you go back to any vessel it's topped up on MJ again. But that probably could be addressed at the same time as doing something about the reactor fuel usage.

Some things that I'd like to see at some point: 1) The reactors and generators should act like the kethelectric generator from the kethane pack. Roughly put, if the resource they produce is over 75% do nothing, if under start producing until 90%ish then try to balance the draw with production. Basically this lets you just turn the things on and they only burn what you actually consume - no more micromanaging the on/off switch to save fuel. 2) Off switches on everything and controls working. The receiver dish for example cannot be switched off and closed, it would be good to be able to switch them off and let only 1 ship receive energy. Transmitter dishes switch on soon as you launch and off again when switching to their vessel - annoying. How does the transmission system deal with the facing of the satellites? There's no station holding so does it just see if they are in sunlight and broadcast whatever the sat has for full sun power gen?

I've had a lot of trouble with this recently. Delete all the plugindata .cfg files and try again. It seems to be saving garbage in the files or something.

Hehe, you're just getting started... I was up to 38 installed mods but the game was constantly hitting 3.7GB memory used and crashing. After some weeding I got down to 22 but it's rising again :-/

Although horribly spelt and grammatically butchered, this is a very accurate statement I think it can easily be said that without KAS several other mods would be impossible and a good dozen others a lot more difficult to use. I won't lie, I'd love to see KAS in KSP proper, it's so important and useful it needs to be a core function in the official game.

Hmm, I put up 10 new bigger sats tonight - 300KW each in 3000km Kerbin orbits. The ship with the receiver has dropped efficiency down to 7% for some reason now that 12 sats are connected to it and still gets around 200KW. Is there a limit per receiver or something? Also the transmitters open on the launchpad, then every time I switch to one in orbit it closes again and I have to re-activate it. Maybe they are deactivating when I leave them? BTW: Did you see the PAX video? 0.22 has science in it, with luck the mod author can piggyback on the official science stuff and put it into the tree. Save himself a lot of time/effort.

Oki, I only chucked up 4 sats last night, I shall fill the sky and see how it goes It would make sense though yes.

A picture says a thousand words etc... No warp drives though as I'm trying things out in order, nuclear then AM. By warp you mean the Alcubierre right?

Oh you naughty tease you. That looks fabulous.

Oddly enough the receiver is no longer filling with megajoules after I undocked from another ship. I still can't upgrade the computer core either, it changes it's name but science remains and nothing else changes. I threw up a little satellite with a reactor and generator connected right under the transmission beamer too but there's no MJ being sent, just charge.

I know, you have no idea how fast I clicked on that mofo as my precious 10,000 AM went schluuuuurp Still, this is all good design experience for the next ships. One question, I have a receiver dish attached to the reactor but it's not taking in megajoules. Does it need to be connected to the generator? Ah Nvm, fixed it. I switched back to the space center then to the ship again and it's working for both now. Bug there perhaps.

Minor bugs - reactors out of UF6 say 'anti matter deprived' and AM reactors out of AM say 'UF6 deprived'. One other thing that would be nice, only consume resource (or only really run/activate) when megajoule or thermo needs topping up. The AM consumption rate is a shock when first switching on the AM reactor and then noticing it never stops eating even when all bars are full.