Nertea

Unfortunately, I'm vary occupied with my overly large roster of projects at the moment and don't really have time to start another. Sorry!

Nope, I have made my views on tweakscale quite clear at many points. It's up to tweakscale or an end user to add support, and that support will not be supported by me at all.

Adding sound is not too hard, but I wouldn't really want to do it on that kind of basis (because capacitor charge time is so variable). If I did this I would do a simple "play sound when charged" thing.

You seem fine. It might not be the best idea to risk this in your career game right now. It's not very balanced, and may have nasty bugs. First pass at the fusion reactors seems pretty good. A reactor requires a startup charge that functions much like the chargeable engines. Once the reactor is on, it always generates full heat output, but scales its power usage and fuel consumption to whatever is needed by the ship. Fuel consumption will not drop below a 10% threshold though while the reactor is on (maintaining the reaction). No fuel in stored in the reactor, you must add fusion fuel tanks. Typically this low level consumption will get you ~1 year of reactor life on a small tank. If you turn off the reactor of course nothing will be generated, but you'll have to charge it up again. Both reactors have two fusion modes, a low-efficiency one (Deuterium-Deuterium) that is about 40% efficient, and will get you similar power to mass ratios as the top-level NFE reactors. A high-efficiency mode using D-He3 is very expensive to run, but pushes that power to mass ratio to very nice levels, ~1.5-1.75x the best fission reactors. In general this means that fusion reactors are very good at providing a very high amount of power, particularly in a 'peaking' configuration. They are not so good for baseload though.

... badumpsh. In all seriousness it's getting fairly close. Just a few bugs to solve.

Might be a good time to learn how MFT works and contribute a patch then! Two days later than it was before.

Probably copied them from some other part of mine with low numbers... Will address it at some point.

Absolutely not. That sounds hideously boring, and I've totally made all the interesting bits in my various mods. As a rule I don't make replicas. You seem to request an awful lot of modders, why not learn and contribute instead of draining?

@RedParadize: Most of the engines that use the ChargeableEngine method are intended to be 'tap' engines, that is, they use some method (perhaps MHF backpush effects on the magnetic nozzle, perhaps heat collection from the radiation shield) to turn some of the engine energy into the power needed to run the engine. The smaller amount of power needed to maintain the engine's ancillary systems could easily be supplied by solar, with the delivery of the startup charge being the only very high power operation that needs to occur - and even then the system can be supplied by a trickle charge. Lots of things yet to do, including setting the tech nodes. Cutting the heat by 2/3 and the actual mass by 1/4 is an effective buff by about 2.5x to the TWR. I'll think about it but no promises. I am working on a first pass at the fusion reactor plugin, which might take a while, before I release it.

I might have a lot more patience for burns than the average player Considering how much I've changed the engines in the last couple days you might want to hold off on that. Here's a list of changes with rationales so far. Increased thrust of Z-pinch fusion engine to 375 kN from 160 kN Reduced constant power usage of both Z-Pinch engines by 50%, now 50/65 kW from 100/125 kW Increases their attractiveness and useability without an aux power reactor Reduced constant power usage of tokamak fusion engine from 125 to 75 kW More attractive compared to lower-length versions of Fresnel Reduced mass of magnetic ICF to 20 from 25 t, reduced heat generation by 2/3 More competitive vs AbICF Reduced mass of Casaba to 11.5 from 15.82, increased Ablator to 8500 Compensate dry mass for propellant mass, realign the volume of Ablator between the two ablative engines Tweaked propellant ratios of Casaba so that the consumption of all the Ablator requires exactly 1 full antimatter storage ring and 2 large full fission pellet tanks Easier to calculate tank usage Increased Isp of Microstar to 90950 from 60950, increased thrust to 150 kN from 60 kN Thrust was super low, and AM wasn't giving great benefits in Isp Tweaked propellant ratios of Microstar so that 1 full 3.75m fusion fuel tank takes very close to 1 full antimatter ring to consume Again, easier planning Tweaked Ablator use of ablative ICF so that the engine burns through exactly 1 full small pellet tank with its ablator supply Usability improvement Reduced dry mass of ablative ICF to 20 from 30 t, increased Ablator amount to 16000 from 15000 Need to compensate for fuel being part of the engine, wasn't accounted for before Increased power usage of mirror cell fusion engine by 85 kW per segment Highest length versions takes a dry mass hit Decreased specific impulse of NSWR to 5650 from 6730 Small nerf, makes it a bit less great. More changes coming. I haven't yet looked at The Dirac engine, which probably needs a bit of help competing with midrange fusion engines The Cochrane, which seems fine in most cases More options for the Heinlein, which probably to some extent means increasing the fuel cost.

You can actually refurbish it with Ore and the nuclear smelter. However I should indeed calibrate it, the design goal is that it's depleted about the same time as the large drum and I think the small drum for the AMCF. In addition I'm fairly sure that I didn't account for the mass of the ablator in balancing either of those engines, I'll have to do that. Thanks for all this feedback though, it's really helpful.

That is a very useless bug report.

By the time you can build any kind of fusion drive, you know how to make a magnetic nozzle, trust me. It's then a design decision to use an ablative (higher propellant flow, more thrust at the cost of Isp) vs a pure reaction product nozzle (higher Isp, lower thrust). It's not ablative in the sense of a chemical engine, its really more of a tradeoff.

Fusion Power Small Fusion Reactor Exotic Fusion Reactions Ablative ICF High Density Fusion Reactions Magnetic ICF Mirror Cell fusion engine Fusion Rockets Magneto Inertial Fusion Engine Advanced Fusion Reactions Tokamak Fusion Engine Z- Pinch Fusion Large Fusion Reactor Antimatter Power AMCF/AIM Unified Field Theory Beam Core AM Plasma Core AM Experimental Nuclear Propulsion Z-Pinch Fission Exotic Nuclear Propulsion NSWR Fission Fragment Engine Colossal Rocketry Metallic H2 @RedParadizeyou've got it a bit backwards, the two Z-pinch engines are lower tech than the ICF ones. Here's the structure in the CTT at the moment. @Mekan1k There's an infinite antimatter cheat, check the changelog file for the keycode.

Plume damage is limited to directionally along the thrust transform unfortunately. This ease of use question is something I always think about too. That's why I haven't gone overboard with fusion fuel types and things.... It would be very easy to balloon rapidly. I hope I hit a good compromise with essentially a "fusion" fuel type, an antimatter fuel and the pellet fuels. The single use fuels (mtlh2 and nsw) are single-purpose and uncommon which to some extent decreases the usefulness of the fuel.

NF Spacecraft 0.7.3 Updated MM to 2.8.1 Reexported normal maps Reduced lookup radius of 3.75m service tank's occlusion checker (was 2x too high) Updated B9PartSwitch to 1.9.0 Added Russian translation courtesy of Dr. Jet NF Launch Vehicles 1.1.1 Fixed a missing texture for the NR-AD-K1 Adapter Just NFC left to fix the maps for then I can get to fixing the maps for... everything else :|.

It's pure software work, and when my work at is pure software (has been for the last 8 months) I don't have much desire to do this in my spare time. Maybe whenever I get back to it. I would like to finish it for sure. Ever since I set up a full build and deploy pipeline via Jenkins this became a bunch easier. The trick though is really to have a carefully calibrated steady flow of craft beer and high quality coffee. Without those I would be lost. That's fairly expected and I'm considering those numbers in the balance equations at least. I'll try kicking up the amount of power needed per added segment, so the low thrust ones will be similar but the highest power ones are a little worse.

I'm actually using the specs for low-enrichment... hehe. High enrichement is ridiculous. It really should be at the end of the tree though. It is simple (except the materials engineering which is extremely not simple), but tree location != measure of simplicity, it's a gating thing. Best engine kinda has to be at the end of the tree. Fuel storage is also technically simple as well (comparable to ZBO cryogenics). So I have this other mod called Glowing Reputation that I'm working on that creates reputation, science and cost hits for exploding or operating parts in sensitive areas. Obviously that will make a lot of these engines very bad for launch engines in kerbin and in other "sensitive" places. Mod's not ready yet, but it can help a bit when the time comes: eg. @PART[nswr-25-1]:FOR[GlowingReputation] { MODULE { name = ModuleReputationDestruction SafeUntilFirstActivation = true BaseReputationHit = 25 } MODULE { name = ModuleReputationEngine EngineID = MainExhaust BaseReputationHit = 15 } } // ---------- // NSWR Tanks @PART[nsw-25-1]:FOR[GlowingReputation] { MODULE { name = ModuleReputationDestruction SafeUntilFirstActivation = false BaseReputationHit = 20 } } @PART[nsw-25-2]:FOR[GlowingReputation] { MODULE { name = ModuleReputationDestruction SafeUntilFirstActivation = false BaseReputationHit = 10 } } That is one factor.

Yep, no, keep the feedback coming. I have no idea what I'm doing with balance right now, so... I appreciate all opinions! I definitely need some way to get the NSWR to be less useful, and it would be better to not do it by chopping numbers off Isp. Glad you like the ICF lasers, a little unrealistic as they would be invisible, but I couldn't resist.

It's important to note that heatProduction is a really weird number and unless you know how it works, don't go by it. The VAB EngineHeatDisplay one should be real. Also note that for the variable length engines, the parts list shows the highest length engine's stats. As to what you need well... It's hard to say. I've noticed I can get by with significantly less than HeatProduction/CoreHeatTransfer, but need more than HeatProduction/MaxCooling. I think MaxCooling is a theoretical max that the radiator can dump (eg, proportional surface area *emissive*T^4), but there is a limit to the rate at which heat is transferred to the part. Plus the engine itself radiates. For example theoretically a Vector produces 1.5MW of heat, but can easily burn almost forever without multiple heat panels. The point is hard to find.

I don't maintain that config. There's a lot of patches in these mods that are unattributed - I would like to attribute these as I would prefer not to maintain a patch for a mod I don't use.

CoolingCost is in units of Ec/1000 units, so wouldn't it work out of the box?

Potential fix was shipped in the last NFE version, which is where that code existed (it affects NFE reactors too).

Point to note, I haven't really touched costs, except maybe fuel costs. And are we all using the options provided by HeatControl here, and not the stock radiators? I can practically say that using the stock radiators will not provide good results... These are the two endgame engines. At the moment, the NSWR is probably too good, but if you compare the other engines to them, they'll suffer for sure. NSWR is at the end of the fission tree, gasdynamic mirror is at the end of the fusion tree basically (beam core AM is at the end of the AM tree too). Is the doubled Isp compared to the fission not helpful? Both these engines might get their constant power drain cut by ~50% to the 50/75 Ec/s range to make them better. Doesn't that just make it more or less the same as the z-pinch fission at 2x the Isp? It's more like "just" reaction products. Eg the ablative ICF uses reaction products plus vaporized ablator. No effective difference for heat generation. This tank is the bane of my existence. I always manage to ship half the fixes it needs... I'll think about some of these things.

Not sure it's too complicated. Just target them the way you would any other set of nodes in MM. But I do appreciate feedback on balance...