Nertea

I've identified about how much more time I want to spend on this mod, and targeted a number of possible parts for that time. So... vote in the poll to decide the last two KA parts. http://www.strawpoll.me/12769123 Don't suggest nuclear ramjets or anything like that. Here's some further information on each choice. 2.5m or 3.75m thrust-optimized closed-cycle GCNR - aerospike or low-expansion nozzle, some loss of Isp, a good boost in TWR. Something that might run the GCNR Liberty Ship. 2.5m liquid-core NTR - somewhere between the Poseidon and the Liberator in performance, extendable nozzle 2.5m thrust-optimized solid-core NTR - aerospike or low-expansion nozzle, perhaps based on the nuclear DC-X SSTO. 0.625m mini solid-core NTR - based off the small MITEE engine, small footprint, extendable nozzle If you posted other, write a comment here.

If I can make it work without more texture space, I'll do it. The new normals and better meshes should make the isohedral tanks look better too :). In addition it may not be clear, but there's quite a hue shift from orange-peel orange to goldish in this update for the foil tank.

Yup that is a good summary of the problem, and exactly why there's no good way to fix it. Near Future Tech Development Log #3 This week was a bit low on the content side. First, I did some more work on localization and propagating balance values from spreadsheets to cfg files. Boring, but has to be done. Some code revisions were also made to the reactors in order to overcome some minor bugs. These improvements are primarily targeted towards the use of the Kerbal Atomics-NFElectrical patch but should provide some more stability in some edge cases for NF Electrical itself. Currently, I'm really looking to improve the functionality of the KA/NFE integration, so if you're used it, or use it, and can think of bugs you've found, please raise them in the Kerbal Atomics thread. On the art front, much more boring. I have been planning a big rework of the CryoTanks package, fixing many balancing problems, converting the plugin to use new methods I developed for FFT, and improving the tank art considerably (was getting a bit dated). A main design goal is to make each tank structure be toggleable so that you can use them radially or inside trusses. In addition, new 5m tanks! This has taken a very large amount of work and far more time than expected, but this week I got all 4 inline sizes unwrapped and have almost finished their textures (only the 5m model remains). Here is a draft render showing off all the variants for the largest tank size in each category. As for quality, well, all these parts have considerably improved foil textures and normal maps. I'm looking to show them off ingame relatively soon!

Well the radiators are the power use there... so there's your drain. You're running to the age-old KSP resources problem. Let's break down the steps: Reactor adds 400*(time step) Ec (let's call it P) P Ec is added to the reserve Radiators subtract 3x0.125x(time step) Ec (let's call it D) D Ec is removed from energy reserve (let's call it C) Let's check the test cases: At 1x timewarp, D is 0.015 (0.04*0.125*1), P is 8. So if C > D, it's ok. You have 850 Ec of storage... so it's cool. I assume you placed the radiators last, so they are handled after the reactor. If you placed the reactor last, you would see no visible drain. At 10000x timewarp, D is 150. So if your test case, you have enough C to take the draw, but there is a delta of some number (~125). At 100000x timewarp, D is 1500. So in your test case, you... don't have enough Ec for this to work. C < D at this timewarp level. So zero. Basically, it's the direct results of a subtractive/additive resource system that doesn't handle flows. It gets even worse because some KSP modules count their Ec changes at different times. So some parts (resource converters, like the reactor) reassess the rates at the selectable timewarp intervals (ie at the end of the spoolup/down) and others do it for every timewarp level. So that is why you are seeing the error that accumulates in this period. There's very little I can do to solve this other than rewrite every stock Ec draining module to be managed by a vessel-wide power controller... which has its own problems plus is a very lot of work. The only thing that universally solves this is that you must ensure that you have enough battery capacity to take 100% of your drains at max timewarp. So typically draw*0.04*100000. That's why reactors have such a large battery storage in them in the first place. It might not be a bad idea though to baseline that buffer storage to be sufficient to manage the drain for enough radiators to fully cool the reactor. It used to be, but some things changed since then.

If Kerbalism is responsible that's probably not my problem anymore... @ShotgunNinja, could you elaborate?

Considering that this is not a known issue, and very easy for me to test (I don't see it), I'd have to say some kind of mod conflict is occuring. A full mod list is a great first step, plus more detail... does the reactor shut off, do you have enough radiators, etc?

Check the NFT thread for the devblog tomorrow!

Issues aren't usually hard to fix. It's fixing issues and then new, independent issues appearing that's extremely frustrating. If we could figure out what is non-optimal right now for me to fix then we at least have a roadmap that I can work towards. You can control the final heat in any reactor with the slider. In this case it's just a number used for scaling. Cosmetic.

Well if you've used it, you might have opinions, so you can speak up if you like :).

I looked into this a bit today and didn't find anything obvious. My best guess is that the cross sectional area of these parts must not be handled correctly so there is not enough conduction between the cockpit part and other parts on the ship - like the service bay and drone core are both insulators somehow, each of them is not quite enough alone but with both of them together there is enough insulation to isolate the cockpit. Not easy to debug, that's for sure. The thing is that the only more obscure thing than the aero system in ksp is the thermal conduction/convection transfer system :|.

By what does the state look like I meant screenshots of the reactor menu, window and stuff at each of those time points. I actually don't do anything with the fuel consumption, that's all handled by stock resource converter code. I don't know how BetterTimeWarp would disrupt this, perhaps the current maintainer @linuxgurugamer could chime in?

Eh... I'm just frustrated with it. It would be nice if interested parties, like you, @AmpCat, @Tau137 few others who I know have used it extensively, would come together here over the next couple weeks and hash out what needs to be done to fix the existing problems. The current piecemeal thing is that I fix one thing, don't hear anything for months, then wake up to a bunch of other new bugs and things. The user base is very small so it's been in a state of "well it kinda works" for so long that it's very annoying. I really want to be able to promote it to stable Here's what I *know* needs to be fixed: Reactor startup can't be forced on an engine (stages the engine) so a solution needs to be found An exclusion needs to exist to stop engine roll control turbopumps from cooling the entire reactor Exhaust conflicts with radiator cooling and won't allow other radiators to cool engine part's Internal heat store (Core is fine) Solid core reactors should get more realistic core temperatures Can we try to figure out where all the problems are?

This mod would be fairly stable without it, that's for sure. 95% of the questions I field are tracked directly to that bit.

It sounds like you're describing resource catchup behaviour, but your screenshot isn't clear in showing this. What did the reactor state look like right before you entered warp? How long did you warp for? What did the reactor state look like before you exited warp? What did the reactor state look like after you exited warp?

Sigh, just don't use the patch anymore guys. There's obviously a lot of issues and I'll take it out of the extras next version. Until an indefinite time.

The Hex ones probably need more options, like a 2.5m to truss adapter for example. Whether this will happen is really up in the air as it isn't on the 1.0 roadmap. I have plans to add fuel components to the two larger hex trusses (https://github.com/ChrisAdderley/NearFutureConstruction/issues/21), and POSSIBLY the larger of the two remaining octo-trusses. It's not so much that the complexity is high but that it's effectively many new models to do this. Each truss that gets fuel tanks is... 11 new models, 11 new unwraps, 11 new textures except where I can re-use them. That's like... at least 1.5 weeks of modding time right there. I can tell you I don't do the 5m truss tanks for sure, and it's quite unlikely I will do the square ones.

No, no support... patch is still too experimental. It's not a cooling engine, it's the roll control turbopump exhaust. It shouldn't even cool much, guess that's something to look at. Read the conversation between me and Ampcat a bit up. You can use the patch file i provided in one post to reduce this.

If you make a PR to CryoTanks actually, that's where all the mod-agnostic LH2 stuff goes.

Thanks, will help when looking into this. That would be very helpful :). That's a good find. Should be fixed in the whole rebalance thing, but I'll make sure to look into it! 3DS Max and Photoshop

I'll ask my audio buddy to have a look, they might not be perfectly looped... I don't have much knowledge here. Nah, probably something to look at. I'm not looking forward to revising that pack...

The old parts are all under CC-BY-NA-SA 4 actually. I won't be redistributing them because they are hella ugly - with all this effort to add consistency and quality to my stuff I don't want the old bits coming back to haunt me. Does the LF patch for NFSpacecraft not more or less replicate that engine for you? The mean heights of the engines are fairly similar... I still think the best option is just a curated list of NEEDS. I mean, the number of mods can't be that high. The 5m version certainly does, and the rounded version... might. Maybe a bit. The Mk4 lander has the medium size lets, I want to say LT-1 but I'm not sure of the name.

Why not MM patch the water in optionally? Like IF TAC or MKS then Patch2 else Patch1? Near Future Tech Development Log #2 This week was full of activity due to work illness. So... localization (:P). KIDDING. Ok, in all seriousness, localization of all config file strings was a main goal this week for NFT, but I won't talk about it that much. I finished the strings for the entire NF suite plus Heat Control, Kerbal Atomics and CryoEngines. It's been pretty nice having the strings all in one place so I can easily see inconsistencies and such. Still, it took too long and was a pain - not looking forward to doing this for MkIV and SSPX. I still have to adjust the plugin components, but that will have to wait. I probably won't do that until 1.3 officially drops so that I can make all the necessary changes to the plugins at once. On the art side, work has continued on visual improvements to NF Solar and NF Spacecraft. For NF Solar, I completed modeling and unwrapping work on the two newest solar arrays - the OKEB-125 and OKEB-100 models. These are based, respectively, on the NASA Asteroid Tug concept and the SpaceX ITS concept. The latter array has become the only retractable blanket array in NF Solar, which is a nice differentiator. It's been a struggle to get these panels to look "right" in the texturing department, so while you'll see the OKEB-125 in the following screenshots (I'm 50% happy with it), you'll have to wait until next week for the -100. In addition, texturing of the shrouds for the retractable version of the two smallest solar panels was completed. It's looking increasingly like I will have to re-rig and re-animate the giant OKEB-500 to get the array shaders looking right, which sucks, will take forever, and pulled me a bit away from working on this pack. So I dedicated the remaining time to the planned improvements to NF Spacecraft. After reexporting all of the normal maps, things were much improved on parts like the monopropellant fuel tanks, but I didn't stop there. Repainting the entire textures for the Mk4-1, the Mk3-9 and the PPD-1 took a while, but was totally worth it - they're now up to spec and I'm very happy with them. In addition, I spent a lot of time building revised 2.5m and 1.25m "station parts" common endcaps. This will pay large dividends when revising the Stockalike Station Parts Expansion mod. The new caps are much higher quality but keep most of the same visual elements as the stock ones. These model bits, along with new common "station parts" EVA hatches, really bring the NF Spacecraft crewed parts together. Of course, the Itinerant utility pod, which is quite possibly the oldest model in NF Spacecraft, was also totally revamped, and I used the opportunity to test out new texture techniques that will also be applied to 2.5m SSPX parts. I'm going for a thermal blanket-like aesthetic and after tons and tons of work, I'm happy with the result. I hope you all are too! Here's a link to the update album. The remaining NF Spacecraft parts to be overhauled are now down to the service module hybrid tanks and the textures on the landing legs. These shouldn't take too long, so we're almost there!

No enough information to diagnose issue. Mod list, screenshots of craft with relevant icons open, etc etc etc. Nope, and they're gone gone next update. That's pretty sweet! You can probably make a patch that adds that reaction as an option; those cells are just resource converters as I recall. If you make it I will add it to the extras (in CryoTanks probably)

Everything is wrong in stock about EC, so there's no real point in saying that 1EC = 0.12823 J or something like that. No matter what you choose you'll be wrong somehow depending on what you baseline off of. Therefore it makes most sense to be arbitrary and standardized, so that's what NFT and friends do, where 1 EC = 1 kJ, 1 EC/s = 1 kW.

Oh, I thought you'd modified the cargo bay radii. That's fine then. I'll test those changes on my end then.