DrCeph

Could you elaborate on the power production and fuel consumption not matching the thrust? Do you mean compared to the production/thrust levels of the liquid/H2 engines? If so, thats a good point - there should be a ~66% increase in both compared to the values for the LV-N in Nertea's patch. The question remaining: do you also increase uranium capacity to keep the 1 kerbin month flight time, or not? Your point in the irrelevance of fuel consumption is something I've been thinking about too. On one hand, I like the heat management aspect as it makes the use of more efficient engines more of a challenge. But yeah, refuelling (uranium) is currently pointless. I think the problem is the time between burns: you actually only need the reactor running for very small windows. I wonder if having the uranium always being consumed (whether reactor is running or not) would be a gameplay balance that would make it more challenging for multiyear trips to distant systems/ or for vehicles on remote outposts. EDIT: Actually, I just saw this by Nertea on the KA thread, in response to your post Tau137: I think the lifetime being an order of magnitude lower would be a good way to deal with it, and a much simpler change than making the reactor always on. I based the current lifetime on the 1.25m 'dual-mode' engine in KA (~6.5 kerbin days). An OoM less would make it just shy of 4 earth hours flight time. If I base it closer to the efficiency of the LV-N in KA, that would be from ~8 days to just shy of 5 hours flight time. I've not extensively play tested this engine on remote bases or around kerbin, etc. Any thoughts on what a sensible timeframe would be? I feel like I can easily get 5+ hours with a standard liquid fuel plane - is the benefit of being able to use non-oxygen atmospheres enough for the hassle of nuclear? Or would we want a much longer flight time? I guess if you have an engineer and a bucket of uranium this flight time in the field actually becomes much higher, albeit needing to stop to transfer material.

Yeah that's a really fair point to make. I was looking through the USI-LS thread and it seems that the method hasn't been without its implementation problems. The MIA/KIA option is also something that would be great for advanced games. I'd also like to give my personal thanks to you for updating this mod to 1.1.2!

Yeah I was thinking about how to make it fit in better with NFE, the proportional increase is what I wanted too, and I don't think it is possible without a mod/plugin. Luckily, @Nertea has already done the work for us! I found the KerbalAtomics mod that you posted in your second post. It has a patch in the extra's folder that adds NFE compatibility to its Nuclear Engines (https://github.com/ChrisAdderley/KerbalAtomics/blob/master/Extras/NearFutureElectricaNTRs/KerbalAtomicsNFE.cfg) Looking through it I realised that NFE already has the functionality we need: Namely the FissionEngine and the FissionFlowRadiator modules. The former ties engine thrust levels to FissionReactor core heat, and the latter exhausts heat core as a factor of thrust (think an inverse version of the Alternator module, but for heat instead of EC). However, I needed to do a bit of balancing, the key reason was that the NJE has variable thrust as a factor of its speed and available atmosphere and the examples given for the KerbalAtomic engines require full thrust for cooling. In practice it is pretty much impossible to gain max theoretical thrust on a jet engine. That meant it had an unfortunate tendency for the core to overheat often and quickly. I've changed the radiatorCoolingFactor to 3 (from 1). This means that your core will be fully cooled by a third of max theoretical thrust or greater. (~35 kN) This means that you will need to watch your reactor's core temp when landing/slow maneuvers or at higher altitudes. This change also means you need less radiators should you wish to fully cool the core without thrust, which I think is an OK compromise seeing as we are talking atmospheric flight here and don't want too much drag introduced. I've updated my MM patch to give the NuclearJetEngine (NJE) this new behaviour. I like the behaviour of the KerbalAtomics plugin, but the engines from the AtomicAge plugin. I quite like the NFE patch on the KA engines, and I also like the conversion to LiquidHydrogen as a fuel source (Which Nertea awesomely provides an AA patch for). However, I really love the flavour of the AA engines. My current thinking is that I will make a NFE patch for the AA engines using the NFE patch by Nertea for KA as a base (I'll leave the small RTG engine as is, due to it not using a reactor).This will result in me keeping the CryoTanks, AtomicAge and NFE mods, and probably not keeping the KA mod (I think it is excellent mind - but I MUST have the Nuclear Jet and want to keep my mod list to a sane size :P). TL;DR: I'll be providing KA-style integration with NFE and Cryotanks for AtomicAge engines! Once I've made the full patch and am happy with it (I'll need to do the lightbulb and LANTR in addition to the NJE above), I'll share it here.

A neat idea from the USI-LS system is the idea of hungry Kerbals turning into tourists (and hence uncontrollable) until fed again. This is the behaviour of USI-LS that I think is great, but I otherwise much prefer the simplicity and partless nature of the Snacks! LS implementation. Thinking more on it, this idea essentially makes Snacks! behave like a fuel resource for Kerbals - they only run if they have their fueltype available, which I think would bring the Snacks LS module to being the most stockalike LS module out there.

Hi all, I've been playing career mode with Atomic Age (AA) and Near Future Electrical (NFE). In terms of AA, I love the nuclear thermojet, especially the size of the damn thing: it is a nuclear reactor after all! I was less enthused by the literally unlimited running time of the engine however, so I modded it through a module manager config to make it consume EnrichedUranium in a manner similar to the NFE reactors, but way way less efficiently for gameplay balance regions. Currently there is enough fuel for 1 kerbin month (~36 earth hours / 6.5 kerbin days) of running time. Why a kerbin month? Mostly gameplay balance regions. If I made the reaction last for 4-7 years as per the NFE reactors, it may as well be unlimited. I also wanted to chose a meaningful timeframe from an in-game perspective. I figured this length of time would hopefully make fuel management an issue for a long-term flyer sent to a planetary base. I worry that it might actually be too long, rather than too short - any considered opinions would be appreciated! (one alternative is that it lasts longer, but is 'always on' from launch time, making refuelling needed after long trips to distant planets). The changes are as follows: The engine has 9 units of EnrichedUranium. The nuclear reaction must be activated (and maintained) in the content menu (or by action groups) before the engine will start The generator will provide constant EC power (when reaction is running) Consumed uranium will convert to DepletedFuel If you have NFE installed, you can: Carry more fuel (and indeed more weight) with you in uranium barrels Reprocess spent fuel back into uranium, or convert ore into uranium However, you will need a qualified engineer to manage and transfer these hazardous materials! The only requirement for the changes is the CommunityResourcePack (and, of course, AA) for the Uranium and DepletedFuel resources. I recommend using NFE to compliment this great plugin! Here is my Module Manager pack text below, put this somewhere in your GameData directory in a file ending with .cfg (I have a sub-folder called 'Local' and this is in my localmm.cfg file). I've also edited the entry and part costs to be inline with NFE - just comment them out if you want the original pricing! How does it work? The reactor module uses up EnrichedUranium to create a resource called ThermalLoad. This resource is stored in a small buffer (the rest is dumped). This allows for a consistent usage of uranium independent of thrust or engine state. A small part of the thermal load is turned into EC, and some is consumed by the engine. If the reactor shuts off, the engine and generator will quickly eat through the thermal load buffer (less than a minute), after which both the engine and generator will shutdown, until the reaction is restarted.

I like the integration with RemoteTech, mods that play nicely are great! Any thoughts on integration with AntennaRange as well? It has a simplified LoS and remote control model than RT, for us softcore types.

Banned for obscure Dr Who reference in profile

I've been really enjoying the current glimpse into what will be a full career mode, it has encouraged me to develop scientific programs to break into the 'next tier' of stuff with projects such as science probes and rovers. The one thing that hasn't sat well with me is the amount of science to be done on Kerbin itself - there is too much. I appreciate the upper atmosphere, orbital experiments and EVA reports above the various biomes. On the flip side, surface EVA reports and samples from some beach on Kerbin? That doesn't seem in the spirit of a space program.

That's a great point, I hadn't thought about this. One would expect the larger lander would store more samples. It would definitely make a larger science exploration team worth the investment. I think this would need to be additional to some sort of added bonus for returning physical samples - the current consensus seems to be that the amount of science returned by transmission matches recovered samples, eventually. A one-off 'bonus' to sample recovery would be sufficient I feel.

What Crush said. Consider adapting your lander to have solar, radio and a few batteries and you should be sorted. It does mean you will have to take a greater number of samples, but on the plus side you don't lose it all in a botched takeoff or landing