Nertea

Thanks for the notes. The consistency is indeed a problem - the drag cubes not so much as they really only need to be overridden once, so one chunk of annoying work then it's over. I don't really like the idea of sticking a bunch of new fuel tanks with no advantages or disadvantages in for no reason though, which is a bit of a pain. I guess having boiloff would be the best differentiator to be honest. If there's a nice, player-friendly, transparent way of doing this, I'm all ears.

Ok, testing seems to show good results. I'm now down to the description fixing and number tweaking stage, so I can hopefully declare this NFE dev round complete. As usual, I'd really like to thank everyone who helped out. They made this possible. Apply some rep! I'd like to turn the conversation back to LH2, CryoEngines and AOYUNEM (As Of Yet Unnamed Nuclear Engines Mod), now that LH2 has been cut out of electrical engine balance this might be a little more manageable. CryoEngines "feels" nice to me right now, but there's always room for changes. The way it looks to me is that the mass ratio of LH2 tanks just needs to be friendlier. This will likely need some small downward revisions in CryoEngines Isp values, I'm fine with that. I'd like to aim for something slightly lower than LiquidFuel dry mass. The only annoying thing that I see is that the dry masses (and total masses) of some of the smaller LH2 tanks will be ridiculously small. It might be good to fudge the amount of LH2 going into a tank a bit more than it already does. This will still "nerf" the LH2 LV-N a little bit with a worse dry mass ratio, but I'm totally willing to buff the LH2 Isp up to a max of 900 and/or decrease the engine mass a bit. Or do nothing, really. The progression for AOYUNEM would indicate that the Nerv is really a bottom tier, entry level nuclear engine, and could be not the end-all be-all that it is in stock. The other thing to solve is some sort of differentiating factor for the fancy LH2 'orbital' tanks without implementing boiloff, preferably. I'm thinking minor advantages and disadvantages, mostly to discourage atmospheric use and encourage orbital use. Options might include that drag increase (doable for sure), increasing the LH2 volume compared to the basic tanks (but preserving the same mass ratio)... fiddly things like that.

Heh well, it's well deserved. I don't really look at people's threads much these days, but I had to say something when I looked at your galleries. I have to admit, I'm quite jealous at the level of detail in the piping and turbopumps, and will probably be using *you* as inspiration for some things myself!

Well, I did get this guy unwrapped and diffuse textured today due to happiness at NFE fix. Specular and normal to come, but it looks pretty nice at the moment. It's the ungodly love child of a Vinci, RD0120 and an RS-25. With a nuclear reactor on it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ap4qmcmm175z2l/NearFutureElectrical0_6_T6.zip?dl=0 Please work :(. I'm kinda at my wits end. This is a bad hack. For the first few seconds after loading a vessel the reactor is forced to generate no heat (while the stupid catchup occurs). This means there will be a big drop in temp suddenly and it will spool back up later. It seems to work in my limited tests and is I guess okay.... I haven't seen any overheats at least.

That last one is actually a pretty good idea. Well if only the bugs were all as easy to fix as that one :P. You probably mean these two, that are the models that came from those sketches. Also infinitely on hold until I get any motivation.

Those are some hugely top notch looking engines. Very nice work.

It would have some problems but it would be simple enough. I have a few more ideas to try tonight/tomorrow morning. However, it does look like all is good in terms of NFP, and I assume besides the low MaxTemps, HC is ok too. In fact I'm going to say that NFE, despite the reactor timewarp problems, is also ready to go. Yay!

Don't really have time unfortunately, and I know I'd be ill suited (I don't have the patience). But you do hit the nail on the head with the fact that most "balance mods" are seriously driven only by one person with their own specific and rather opaque view of how things should be balanced. This makes things very difficult for others to work with (one person's ego can get quite in the way, in either direction!) and harms adoption (having to wait for a single author to integrate a mod takes longer and is frustrating). If you concentrate on creating balance standards, like basic costing rules (engine cost = engine Isp * thrust * technology level * blabla), instead of balance specifics, it will be much easier to get people to participate. Anyone would be able to create integration patches without too much work.

Seems like that if you're trying to create a common framework for career balance, you'd be be better served focusing on things like cost and interpart balance numbers and setting standards for those rather than tech trees.

I can repro it 100% with great ease now. That's unfortunate but I guess not the worst thing, it would be bad if it was very hard to reproduce. Rover told me that stock ISRU does not suffer from this problem because the heat production is low at a stable goal temperature. Looking at the stock ISRU, this is somewhat true, but *some* of the NFE reactors have really low heat productions and still cause just as many problems.

Well, I'd love to finish them, but that bug of Psycho's is mod breaking in the extreme, and I can't figure out any solution so far, despite 3 hours of testing last night. Reactor loads, tries to play catchup, adds time*5000kW of heat in one frame, blows up the everything. Have tried many things to stop it. Few options left. Frustration sets in again.

Merged your commit. Will do a few tests but I'll probably add that to the pile of NFSolar and NFConst that are "done". Thanks, might be useful. What do we think about nuclear reactors producing small amounts of Xe? Since I have no plans for adding ISRU Xe production, it could be a decent way to help improve the economics of using Xe engines in the late game.

Thanks Streetwind - I'll accept the pull when it comes in. This makes balancing much faster Don't bother about the reactors. Talked with Rover and it's kinda expected behaviour for the way we're handling it, which sucks (reactor plays catchup upon reload, and if HeatProduction > low at equilibrium, explosion could happen). So I'll need to do a number of experiments to try to find a way around it.

:(. Can I get a shot of your test ship please?

I haven't forgotten about you, spaceplane mod. I'll get to you once NFE is good.

I think I made things work ok without the change so it's not needed, actually.

Thanks, it's appreciated NFE Test 5, with fixes to temperature scalars and the MX-4. Also fixes the high timewarp Ec generation bug.

Updated to 2.3, with tens of fixes to bad node locations.

No it will probably never happen again. I'm kinda done with cooling and heating and stuff. Max cooling is probably something like emissivity*sigma*radiativearea*maxtemp^4. So with stock radiators it'll be crazy high because they're silly large and have silly maxtemps. As you note the maxTemp of the new radiators is a lot lower so that T^4 is really going to be lower. The key thing is the Max Transfer number, that's the max a radiator will ever take from a CoreHeat module. This is very low for stock radiators, compared to their overall ability to radiate, these are higher. The net effect will be that stock radiators will be a little better at radiating overall vessel heat (higher max radiation) but not be as effective at cooling cores. This is probably the result of a bug that made the zero point for max temp a fixed number at 270K instead of the part skin temp, which it should be The MX-4, if you look carefully you will find an incorrect cfg line. I found a thing I didn't account for in smoothing transfers that caused significant dips in power production at high time warps and possible overheats (not enough power produced to run radiators for a few cycles). This should be fixed in the future but it would be nice to have solid repro steps.

NFP Test 4: Normalized Li tank masses/costs/temps. Fixed VASIMR atmospheric Isp scaling. Implemented revisions of balance numbers for engines (let me know if I typoed or missed anything). This appears to be (mostly) a working 1.05 version, so please report any minor bugs so I can lock it down. NFE Test 4: Fixed a few minor inconsistencies. Implemented a reactor fudging factor that should prevent reactor sticking at low temperature. Again, this is getting to the point where I think it's stable, so I guess you could report any minor bugs (please no "how about you change it to work this way") HC Test 1: Back from the dead! Now does not include heat pipe, heat exchangers, insulators (maybe later). All radiators have been re-specced as high temperature radiators more suitable for reactor operations than stock radiators (you will need less surface area/number). Includes universal, fixed, conformal and surface radiators. Functionality should be pretty close to 100%, but radiator heating animations need probably a small plugin to get them to work the way I want.

Thanks for the spreadsheet, I'll have a look. I'm tempted to say 1.75 offhand, but I'll tweak the numbers. Colossus could be tier 3.5 - it's supposed to be good. Oh interesting. Yeah I don't think I ever really tested that, I'll have to fix it. Pretty nasty bug. I couldn't get the throttling of the transfer to work, changing the value seemed to do nothing, so core temp now only scales the amount of power available to reactor consuming systems. Basically its heatTransfer = min (heat moved by radiators, (1- currentTemp/NominalTemp) * maximumCoreHeat). I do have an idea to fix this, but I'm not hopeful. If it doesn't work, I will need to get RoverDude to add some kind of override for 1.1 ;).

New NFP: Xe VASIMR effects, Li MPDT effects, fixed Xe mode VASIMR labeling, added 2 1.25m Li tanks. New NFE: Better throttling of electricity at lower powers. Actually works in timewarp now. Better stability/equilibrium points at low powers. Core damage is back (but may change). Still some bugs, but getting there (note that my flagship test is the 2.5m reactor, I don't really use the others for quick tests). They may need some changes to their stats. It's just a fuel swap right now. LH2 tanks are almost certainly going to come back as either part of a dedicated LH2 NTRs mini-pack, or as an optional addon to CryoEngines.

Thanks for the notes. New version of NFE which I'll deploy a bit later has the improved code, including frame smoothing out output and temperature scaling of power flux. Also core damage returns and many minor bugfixes. New version of NFP has a fix to that mode, 1.25m Li tanks, new FX for Xe mode VASIMRs, new FX for MPDTs. Adding proper engine light kinda has to wait for more plugin work - the multi modes and therefore multiple colours of light. You may have historically noticed that there was never any real engine emissive on those parts.

The behaviour you see is essentially expected, as the power depends on heat removed. If you zero out the throttle, the radiators will still try to consume as much heat from the core as possible until there's none left, so the transfer will be 100% until it is zero. I planned initially to make generator efficiency depend on core temperature, this would have the effect of decreasing the power output as the radiators cool down the core, but did not implement it for this version to simplify things (core damage effects are also turned off in this version). An alternate way to implement this would be to scale the maximum radiator transfer by the core temperature ratio, so that it goes to maximum at nominal and a somewhat lower number near "room temperature". If you're reasonably sure this actually works and makes sense, I will go ahead and complexify it.