Eadrom

Looking forward to being able to direct all available power to the warp drive! lol Also looking forward to advanced fusion reactor and fuel types. Fractal, how much trouble would it be to make part upgrades require an EVA action to perform? Would add a little more immersion for me to have to EVA a kerbal out to upgrade a part instead of doing it from ship view. If it's not a quick and easy change, I wouldn't be too heartbroken about it. I don't usually upgrade too often past late in my middle game.

I voted resources. I would really dig both. I just want resources to be completed first. With resources, people can set up off kerbin infrastructure and with the ability to use those resources, set up colonies and off-world shipyards. Then add in multiplayer and allow people to build colonies and fuel depots and shipyards and mining operations and so on together. I'd like to see something kinda like the following for next year: 0.24 Money in career and finish adding biomes to planets and moons 0.25 Resources - collection and per ship utilization (similar to how Kethane works, you can mine stuff to make fuel) 0.26 Resources - broad utilization: ability to construct vessels offworld, ship ore back to Kerbin and sell it for money, etc 0.27 Final mechanics implementation - primarily re-entry heat and life support; waste heat management and remote tech style comm systems would be nice (maybe make these optional via settings toggle so that beginners don't have all kinds difficulty up front) 0.28 Multiplayer

Just downloaded this mod today. Been reading up on which of the big three life support addons and finally decided on TACLS. Some thoughts... No noticeable performance decrease, at least that I could tell with all the other mods I'm using. I like the three resources to manage. I enjoy that I can set up facilities on Laythe to manufacture oxygen supplies for crewed expeditions. I would like to be able to get water from Laythe while splashed down in its oceans. Maybe add a splashed down conditional to the water purifier? Speaking of recyclers, it would be great if a note on how much the recycler parts extend supplies. I read a post a bit back in this thread that said they have 90% efficiency so 140 water would effectively work as 1400 water over enough time. It would be nice if this info was in the part info pane instead of in one post buried in the middle of this thread. I'm considering changing the water splitter's .cfg to making oxygen and liquid fuel instead of oxygen and waste. I play with the Interstellar plugin and LF is considered hydrogen for the purposes of mechanics. What are ya'lls thoughts on this? I'm assuming that the resulting H2 would be pure enough to be able to be cooled and used as liquid hydrogen. Maybe increase the EC usage to 1000 instead of 100 if I make this change? Increased EC usage to represent cooling the H2 from a gas to a liquid. I do like very much that units of resources have been standardized to 1 unit per day. This makes it very easy for me to quickly do math for missions in my head. I like that the game does the math for me in the background as far as the different masses per unit. I hope this stays that way. Hexcans containers work fine for me. I would rather mechanics and new features be the primary focus and better models come in as/if they do. I'd rather have a hydroponic system implemented than pretty water containers. Overall, great mod! Thank you for your work.

Ferram came out with a plugin that provides high levels of stability on your rocket stacks. Basically, the larger the parts, the tighter they stick to each other. I rarely/never have wobble issues since starting to use it. Here is a link: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55657-0-22-Kerbal-Joint-Reinforcement-v1-4-2-Properly-Rigid-Part-Connections Upgraded AM reactors generate absolute gobs of power, but if you want MOAR, you can set up a constellation of microwave beaming satellites, either solar arrays in low Kerbol orbit or large fission/fusion power stats. If you invest enough in setting up the infrastructure, you get get ridiculous amounts of power on your vessels. Are you referring to KSP Interstellar or just KSP in general? For KSPI, check out the FAQ and read the patch notes (see the OP). For general KSP news, read the patch notes and be sure to check out the KerbalKon streams from today and tomorrow.

Awesome! I'll have a job interview in the morning and get some to come home and unwind that night with KSP .23 and KSPI .9 while re-watching the KerbalKon vids.. The next 7 days are turning out to be pretty damn awesome! What kind of coffee do you like to drink? Cream or sugar?

So then. 0.23 next week (17th). Fractal, what are your thoughts on release schedule for KSPI? 0.8.3 bug patch to "finish" off KSPI for 0.22 or are you going to put out a 0.9 to go with 0.23? I imagine it's going to be a bit of work to get the tweakables implemented for everything.

I personally like the fusion generators as is. They fit in very nicely for me as small, moderate output, easy to fuel/refuel power sources, even after unlocking antimatter power. Fusion is definitely my go to solution for small designs or anything not requiring the high power of antimatter systems. At max tech, I generally utilize power systems like this: Small power requirement/long duration: Fusion Moderate power requirement/long duration: 2.5m & 3.75m Fission High power requirement: Antimatter I realize that obviously everybody has different takes on what works best for them. However for me, having 2.5m & 3.75m fusion reactors would just antiquate all the fission reactors in almost all cases. Fusion provides more power per mass and is MUCH easier to refuel than their fission counterparts. If we get all 4 sizes of fusion reactors, I can only really see using a 62.5cm reactor now then as an onboard fusion starter. I wouldn't have any use for the bigger fission reactors at that point. Anywho, just my take on the topic.

As lightwarrior stated, you need enough space to store the uranium you are taking out of the fission reactor before you can fill it with thorium. Easiest way to figure out how many canisters of each type of fissionable material you need, divide the fuel capacity by 0.4 and round up. The most you will need is eight of each type of fuel for a 3.75m fission reactor. These can be attached anyhere on the craft. If you can access the reactor at launch via Eva and ladders, you can just throw the fission fuel canisters in launch clamps. Or you can launch a small module with the fuel canisters and dock it with your ship in orbit. Swap out your fuel and then either deorbit the module and rain uranium down in the Kerbin atmosphere or crash it on the Mun or something.

MJ and KE will work just fine with thermal nozzles once you get into space and fire them to full throttle once. KSPI engines have variable thrust AND ISP in atmo, unlike stock engines that only change ISP. I believe that is why MJ and KE have issues predicting TWR and DV in the VAB and at launch. Plasma thruster has issues still because of the complexity of the engine. It too scales in thrust and ISP in addition to using a mod custom resource (megajoules). KSPI has its own resource manager for its resources, and I'm not sure if MJ and KE are able to hook into that very well. I do know that whenever the engine is running, MJ and KE should be accurate for whatever throttle % you are currently running at. I think. I haven't looked at plasma thruster's much since 0.8 came out. Also keep in mind that with the last research node, the plasma thruster is upgraded to be able to use quantum vacuum as fuel and thus eliminates the need for fuel. So as long as provide it with power (MW), you have infinite DV (assuming you can continue powering the drive).

These graphs by NA411 show the optimal altitudes to collect antimatter at all the bodies in the Kerbol system. http://imgur.com/a/g313g#0

No worries! For the application of the DTM, you want larger numbers on both sides. Remember that when dealing with negative numbers, "-5" is larger than "-12". For example, 2.9E-4 is larger than 5.2E-6. The number to the RIGHT of the "E" is the number of decimal places you move. A positive number means you move the decimal point to the right. A negative number means you move the decimal point to the left. In my example, those two numbers are "0.00029" and "0.0000052". Now I'm sure you can tell which number is larger. That's easy when dealing with small numbers of exponents (the number to the right of the "E"), but when dealing with lots of zeroes, like in 3,920,000,000,000 (3.92E12), it quickly gets very tedious to count zeroes. That's where scientific notation comes in handy. You can quickly compare and do math with very large or very small numbers. Hopefully this helps?

I think that in practice, the issues you guys are having with refueling the smaller fission reactors are not actually a problem. Think about it. I only use the small fission reactors on either atmospheric research planes or one way probes. Neither situation do I have the need to refuel them as by they will have finished their mission long before they run out of reactor fuel. On larger vessels, I likely have larger fission reactors, so including the small reactors in maintenance cycles is not a problem. Also, by the time I need to refuel early tech fission reactors, I will very likely have developed better power systems. In my mind, the fusion reactors take the place of the smaller fission reactors in many applications once you unlock them. Fusion reactors have higher power output and easier refueling as well than their same sized counterparts in the fission reactor family. So once I've unlocked fusion tech, I rarely find the need to include fission reactors as the sole power source on small vessels and probes. If I do use the small fission reactors after unlocking fusion reactors, it's usually for short duration missions (refueling not needed) or on larger vessels or stations (can just swap out reactors as needed or they have facilities for refueling/reprocessing). I know that just because I don't have the same issues with refueling small fission reactors that doesn't mean that the opinions that they are difficult or impractical to refuel are invalid. Just trying to point out that by the time you would need to refuel them, they are probably obsolete.

Check out this link. Many large numbers or very small numbers (as in the case of the DTM) are written in scientific notation. It is straight forward once you see how the numbers are written the way they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation

Very happy to hear this! I love the new fusion reactor. I like its fuel system and I like how you have to manage power consumption on board your ship such that you maintain enough spare power to keep the reactor firing. I look forward to being able to use them on my tiny probes again.

I added another stage with an additional 8 1.25m fusion reactor/generators. Brings my MJ capacity up to 45,000. At 10,000x time warp, MJ was fluttering just tiny bit below max. Once again, when I increased time warp to 100,000x, as actual time warp ramped up from 10,000x to 100,000x, MJ drained away and the ship lost all power. Per lightwarrior's suggestion, I added some RTG's. Two had no difference except EC stayed full from the RTG's. I observed no difference in how MJ behaved. I then launched with 8 RTG's. Same behavior up to 10,000x. However, when I went to 100,000x time warp, MJ drained down to around 3,500/45,000 and stayed there. I dropped down to 10,000x time warp and MJ filled back up to fluttering just below full. Toggled 100,000x time warp again and this time the ship lost all MJ just like in all previous launches. I think for now, I will just have to use fusion reactors only on vessels large enough to also equip a 62.5cm fission reactor.

I am still having a couple issues with the fusion reactor at high time warp. A simple test ship of a 1.25m thermal nozzle, 1.25m fusion reactor, 1.25m generator, small LOF tank, and a 1-crew pod. This actually works for me now at max time warp. Fusion reactor stays on and I get the expected behavior I've come to know and love from the fission reactors. My issue arises when I replace the crew pod with a 1.25m probe core and a comm dish (remote tech). At 10,000x time warp, MJ dips down a bit, then stabilizes at around 60% of max MJ amount. At 100,000x time warp, all power gets drained from the ship. I can't tell if this is because the reactor shuts down and the probe core and comm dish suck all the power or another issue. The speed at which I lose power might suggest that the reactor is consuming the 7MW it needs to stay turned on, but for some reason isn't generating power, so it just drains stored MJ until the reactor dies, then the generator consumes the last bit of thermal power for a little MJ with powers the probe core and comm dish for a brief period. At that point, the ship is then completely power dead. I have a sneaky feeling this might be related to RemoteTech. Maybe briefly losing communications with Mission Control is turning off the fusion reactor? Anyone else that plays with RemoteTech2 able to duplicate my situation? I have another install without RemoteTech. I'll give it a try and see if I get the same issue. Edit: Nope. Still having this issue without RemoteTech. Used an identical probe ship as above, minus a comm dish. At 1,000x speed, MJ flickered a bit then capped out. At 10,000x time warp, MJ drained down to exactly 3,000/5,000. When I accelerated to 100,000x time warp, MJ dropped down to zero, then all power died as the game ramped up to 100,000x speed. I'd say around 80,000x speed or so is when the ship died. I think what might be happening is that the time step change is too much for the resource manager. Even with just the probe core and a single fusion reactor I think I run out of MJ before the resource manager realizes what's going on and is able to stabilize the power situation. I'm thinking that if this is the problem, larger ships with more MJ storage capacity probably won't have this problem as they will have enough MJ left over after the time stamp scaling up to 100,000x to keep the fusion reactors online.

I have usually been able to get by on early and mid-tech ships using small amounts of solar power on short missions and not using radiators. You can solve the problem you had two ways. Either use stock RTG's or put one of those tiny radial radiators on your satellites.

Just turn them sideways and they will attach radially. You turn parts using the Q, E, A, D, W, S keys. Holding down shift will turning will turn them in 5 degree increments. Almost all my antimatter equipped designs utilize radially attached collectors.

I hope it's not "1413482E-547". That's A LOT of zeroes in front of that. xD For a basic antimatter system, the following parts will get you started. Antimatter reactor connected to a generator. Stick an antimatter tank on top of the generator. Throw on a handful of radial radiators (the red-ish ones that fold out) to either the reactor or the generator. Attach two antimatter collectors radially to the antimatter tank. Launch or hyperedit this setup into orbit around Kerbin. Around 850km is best. If everything is set up correctly, here is what will happen. The collectors will start gathering antimatter, but you won't see any antimatter building up in the tank. The reactor will burn all the antimatter you collect as fast as you collect it until the ship is full on MJ and thermal power. At that point, only then will you start building up antimatter in the antimatter tank. The antimatter reactor is still going to burn an itsy, bitsy, tiny amount of antimatter to provide the generator what it needs to keep the antimatter tank fully charged. At optimum altitude (~850km) for collecting antimatter at Kerbin, and even with only two antimatter collectors, you will still collect far more antimatter per day than the tin bit you burn to keep the tank charged. Try out the above configuration. If you are still having problems, please post a well-lit picture of the ship you are having problems with and I'm sure someone will be able to help you figure out what's goin' on. Edit: Ah, it sounds like you have a warp drive on that ship. Try either right-clicking the warp drive and stopping charging or timewarp until the exotic matter is full. Both of those options should immediately start you generating MJ and then thermal power and then antimatter. If there isn't a bug present, I believe what is happening is all the antimatter you are collecting is immediately being burned by the reactor, converted into MJ by the generator, and then the MJ are being consumed by the warp drive to produce Exotic matter (it's either 1GW or 1TW per exotic matter, can't remember off the top of my head).

KSPI's resource system and the Kethane resource system are different. KSPI's resource system is based on % abundance; you can find uranium almost anywhere, and it is infinite, but it is most efficient in regards to time spent mining if you mine at high concentration locations. Kethane is more of a binary system. Kethane is either present in a given grid or it's not. In addition, you can mine out deposits of Kethane. They are very different systems on the back end. There was a detailed discussion on this topic maybe 20 or so pages back with input from both Majiir and Fractal. They did a much better job explaining the differences and whatnot. Edit: Here are some relevant posts on the Kethane integration question that's popped up several times since 8.0. Be sure to skim through a few pages after each post if you want ever more info. I believe there were a few more posts on the topic by Fractal following the two posts I linked. Fractal's post Majiir's post

Scott stated early on in his interstellar quest series that he is using the texture reduction packs for the big mods he's using (stock, b9, kw reductions iirc). Another option you have is to remove parts form the parts packs you never use. Yet another option you have is to use this mod to reduce the memory size of all textures. A lot of people in the thread have been reporting amazing results. I am currently checking it out and it's working flawlessly so far with the bit of testing I've done. The most recent update will even tell you how much RAM it saved you by posting the difference between current texture RAM usage and pre-compression. Look in the debug log. In regards to waste heat, that is KSPI-specific mechanic, not a stock mechanic.

I want to say that this was done on purpose so that the science lab and now the refinery can produce aluminum without having to mess with reverse fuel lines like you do with kethane. That was my impression from previous posts Fractal's made. Either way, if you want to change it to work like LF and Oxidizer, like db48x said, it's a very simple change.

The behavior you are seeing is a result of aluminum being shipwide flow like xenon or monopropellant. The oxidizer in the AL hybrid rockets is just the stock oxidizer, so it is using the normal fuel flow model you are used to. Aluminum has been like this for a while now. At least 0.7.4 if I remember correctly.

He's using 8 of the fusion reactors (per previous post). Gives around 2504.6 MW. Between that and all the MJ he'd have stored up prior to making a burn, there shouldn't be any issues providing the Vista its 2.5 GW for the burn before the 8 fusion reactors drain the stored up supply of power to keep them running.

Yeah, I've heard that. The Kerbal Stock Expansion mod has a larger ion engine and xenon tank as well. I usually use Argon because when I've tried Xenon in the past, the plasma thruster just RIPS through the fuel soooo fast. Argon or even lithium can still provide some decent thrust while not burning through fuel tanks as quickly as Xenon. Though if you only need the thrust for a brief period, then Xenon would work great. There's a couple times where I've use radial clusters of Xenon tanks to great effect.