Eadrom

After getting a nice night of sleep, I see that I totally misunderstood. I thought he was asking for the ability to bring science experiments to the science lab and then be able to transmit them home without transmission losses. I see now he just wanted a button to transmit the science instead of automagically getting the science added as soon as you load the lab. I prefer the automatic method myself. Having to transmit would be a pain if you have a large number of labs. Had 12 labs in one save and that was a pain just swapping around to collect science. If I had to also transmit, that'd take me twice as long, if not longer, to reap my science. Different strokes, I guess. The Methane engine is superb for launch stages. I'm looking forward to Fractal expanding this line of engines. I'd like to see a 1.25m flat lander-style methane engine so that I can make use of it for Duna missions. Plasma thrusters are in the ion engine range of performance with LF using a 1.25m fusion generator, but really take off as a great engine once you get to space and power it with antimatter. I have also had some success using plasma thrusters as upper stage engines on ships and space station modules equipped with 2.5m or 3.75m fission power systems using Argon as fuel. The Vista is indeed a nice launch engine, just keep in mind the radiation hazards if you have any crewed ground support vessels. Thermal nozzles can be tricky. They work well in space, but with the severe performance reductions in atmo, I've only had limited success with nuclear reactors. They can work decently as upper stage engines. Fusion reactors work fantastically for space plane. However, once you unlock antimatter power, and if you can fuel new ships on the launchpad with antimatter, thermal nozzles become VERY powerful engines for a wide variety of applications, not just launching. Another option you have with thermal nozzles is to build a microwave transmission network in orbit and at KSC. Lob a bunch of 3.75m fission reactor/generator combos into orbit such that you get some power everywhere in orbit. A bunch of rovers with 3.75m fission reactor/generator pairs parked at the space center. Then instead of attaching a reactor to your thermal nozzle, you attach a microwave thermal receiver. Get enough power and you can indeed launch. Power transmitters on the ground will get you up and going and the transmitters in orbit will provide the power to circularize. Keep in mind that Fractal has some tweaking and fixing on the microwave system that hasn't come out in 0.8.2 yet, so you may want to wait until the next bugfix patch comes out before setting up a vast microwave power system. Shouldn't be too much longer before 0.8.2 comes out TL;DR: Methane, Vista, and plasma thrusters using Xenon or Argon (with a large power source) work well before you unlock antimatter reactors.

The KSPI science lab is already insanely overpowered at generating science points. There's no need to make it even more so. lol

You can easily get the part names. Open ../KSP/GameData/WarpPlugin/Parts/.. Open each .cfg file under each folder and look at the top of the file for the following: PART { name = AntimatterTank125 module = Part author = zzz The part name would be "AntimatterTank125" in the above example. Just go through each part subfolder and grab the info from each .cfg. Do not just go by the .cfg file name. As I understand it, the actual part name is contained inside the .cfg, as shown above. I counted 62 part .cfg files total, so your list will have around that number (provided I counted correctly lol). Hope this helps! You can either mine more or you can launch new canisters and then dock with the vessel needing a fresh supply of fissionable materials. Just tested and while you are able to launch new half-filled UF4/ThF4 and dock them, you will still need a Kerbal on EVA to transfer the materials to a reactor. You cannot transfer fissionable fuels between canisters like you can with LOF or MonoPropellant.

I can see (and will do myself) people unlocking Fusion Power before Experimental Electronics to unlock the stock fusion reactors. So info on un-upgraded fission and fusion reactors would be useful to those that choose to go that path instead of unlocking the better generators first.

Will you be including tables for upgraded reactors with stock generators? I like the addition of the lifetime power info.

I can confirm for you that the radiation value is only flavor text. Fractal has stated he might add flesh and blood to the radiation system, but for now, it's just a fun readout that does nothing functional.

The quantum vacuum upgrade allows the plasma thruster to provide thrust with nothing but electrical power (MJ). Quantum vacuum provides same thrust and ISP as if you are using liquid fuel.

You don't need to refuel solar cells so it still has some uses. Fractal has stated that beaming solar power to a vessel in low Kerbol orbit (like around Moho) is a good cheap way to charge up warp drives. Power systems are on a reactor/generator pair basis. One reactor works with one generator and they should have matching stack sizes as well (2.5m reactor would want to be paired with a 2.5m generator).

You should find yourself well served with anywhere around 15-20 collectors at around 9,000 km at Jool. You should rarely find yourself with situations where you constantly need to run a 3.75m antimatter reactor for very long periods of time. You can even still set yourself up an antimatter powered microwave transmitter. Just leave the transmitter off until you find yourself needing the power. When it's not transmitting it will be happily collecting tons of antimatter. I think you can even still keep the transmitter on and it'll probably still provide a trickle charge of beamed power. With the high power of antimatter, it's probably still a goodly chunk of power. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how KSPI handles antimatter powered microwave transmitting when it's not loaded. You might even be able to get full reactor power all the time. Unless Fractal weighs in on this, some research on this definitely needs to be done. You can set up a geosynchronous constellation of satellites so they will always be in roughly the same spot. At an altitude of 2.868 Mm for an orbital period of 6.0 hours, the satellite will stay in the same spot in the sky relative to the surface of Kerbin. It is a technique commonly used with setting up comm networks for the RemoteTech mod. I also like spreading out points of failure. Lots of smaller nuke power sats helps do that. Although, there's nothing to say that you can't combine both systems and have both a big power farm at KSC as well as a bunch of nuke power sats that can both relay and transmit as needed. This would give you the best of both worlds.

Antimatter flux is in scientific notation. 6.64172E-003 is actually 0.00664172mg/s. You need 1,690 antimatter collectors to run your antimatter reactor at full power indefinitely at that collection rate. The reason I would lob the reactors into orbit is to minimize power loss during relay. I also like to keep the number of vessels around KSC to an absolute minimum. I can also dock with power satellites in orbit for maintenance. If I kept a massive reactor farm near the space center, I'd have to use KAS to easily perform maintenance. There are pros and cons to both approaches and everyone can pick the system that works best with their playstyle.

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Right click the part you want to upgrade on your ship. There should be a Science cost/current line as well as a retrofit button which you just click to instantly upgrade. I don't remember the cost off the top of my head. Edit 1: Found it. Upgrade costs can be found in the part.cfg files. The 3.75m fission reactor is labeled as 25-1500 under the NuclearReactor1Sphere folder. Upgrade cost is 180 science. Edit 2: Also keep in mind that you don't have to have a full 5 GW (I think that's the #) to make antimatter on a lab. Antimatter production in the science lab will scale with the amount of available power up to the cap. So by all means, start manufacturing antimatter as soon as you can get containers for it if you like. Another option is to throw a small collection station up at around 850k meters. By the time you unlock reactors you should have enough antimatter for a mission or two.

Fractal, thank you for the microwave transmission fixes. I was successfully able to launch a small one-crew test rocket into orbit, orbited around, then successfully de-orbited, solely under microwave thermal receiver power. Test rocket was 1.25m thermal nozzle, microwave thermal receiver, two FL-T800 LOF tanks, decoupler, mk 1 pod, chute. I had two rovers with transmitters at the launchpad and a satellite in geosynch orbit over KSC with a 3.75m fission reactor. Averaged between 1 GW and 3ish GW of thermal power during ascent. I can see launching a cluster of big power sats above KSC and getting some really nice launch power by being able to funnel the power of a bunch of big reactors for VERY cheap mass. Definitely going to be a goodly amount of work setting up a power constellation around kerbin, but once complete, can easily provide gobs of low mass thermal power. This whole microwave thermal power system is very KSPI and I love it! If any of you fellow users hasn't played around with it, I highly recommend it.

In regards to the fission reactor fuel swapping, I just tested this and was able to EVA and turn off reactor, time warped while it cooled off, EVA and swap out fuel to Thorium successfully. It took 8 canisters of fuel of both uranium and thorium to fully swap out my test 3.75m reactor since as Fractal pointed out, you need someplace to store the Uranium you are removing from the reactor in addition to a bunch of Thorium to fill the reactor with.

Woot! I will test out the bugfixes as soon as I get home. Thank you for the super fast patch!

Correct. Fractal has stated it is just flavor text at this point.

Fusion offers a nicely modest increase in power. Also, you can set up a tritium fuel station in orbit, toss a D/T tank on your ship, and top off on tritium before headin out on mission. One of the biggest perks for me for fusion reactors is that You don't need any additional hardware to pipe more fuel into the fusion reactors, a really big bonus on small/efficient designs. Very nice for small space probes on extended missions or compact manned vessels. This also carries over for refueling reactor mass. Instead of having to dock your fusion reactor powered ship with a manned station or a resupply ship with a refinery, you can send very small resupply ships with a small docking port and a full D/T tank. Basically, it's a more easily refueled, more compact, reactor with a little bit more power than similarly sized fission reactors. Edit: Fusion reactors are also GREAT for planes, both atmo and space designs.

I could help with this. Is there a list of needed updates or should I just run through each page? Edit 1: Updates/Questions: -Plasma Thruster: Need to separate nuclear reactors into fission and fusion and then add in Lithium as a fuel source. I assume vacuum fuel is the same values as LF; if so, should note this. -Electrical Generators: Need to update the table for different outputs. Also, need to check info regarding matching stack size for different reactor/generator combos. Also, need to note one reactor per generator. -Tritium breeding: Option still shows up on the new fusion reactors, however I cannot get this mode to work. Works fine on fission reactors. Is this a bug with the fusion reactors? Note converting lithium to tritium is a 1:1 conversion (10 units of lithium converts to 10 units of tritium). Note that larger fission reactors breed tritium faster. -Computer cores: No longer stores science. Note regarding science transmission is archaic. Update info regarding science generation of the AGI upgrade. -Atmospheric scoops: Need to note difference between the two different sizes other than size and power consumption. I assume the larger scoop collects more, but what are the values? Is there a difference between using a 2.5m atmo intake with a 1.25m scoop? 1.25 intake with a 2.5m scoop? Now that stock air intakes also provide atmo intake, are you still required to use an atmo intake with a scoop? -Antimatter collectors: Can a link to NA411's antimatter flux vs altitude charts be posted on this page? Maybe a note indicating that rarely do missions require a full tank so people don't feel like they need 10,000 antimatter just to take a quick warp trip around the system. Aluminum hybrid rocket: Update ISRU info. Aluminum still collected by lab or is this now handled by the refinery? Are Mun and Ike still only locations where aluminum can be collected? Alcubierre drive: Can use some tweaks for readability/understanding. Maybe a chart to show some info on top speeds for the different sizes. Some info on what upgrading specifically does might be good as well. GRS and DTM: need a page or some info on these. I've seen a lot of questions on what the values on the DTM mean, so some info on that would be good as well. Reactors: new tables looks good. The text on the page needs some updating to match the recent patch. Need some info on manual shutdowns (decay heat time 10%->0%). Edit 2: Just to be clear, above is not a todo list for you Fractal. lol Just wanted to get a list of stuff out for anyone that wants to help.

I logged all of my deposits on one of my .22 saves a while back and it was almost 15,000,000 liters of Kethane. That is *just* for Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus. That is *a lot* of Kethane just in Kerbin's SoI. If you take away the Kethane on Kerbin and just count Mun (~8 million liters) and Minmus (~4.5 million liters), I don't know if anyone plays so much that they could mine out and use all of the Kethane on Kerbin's moons. That's over 781 of the largest stock Kethane tanks (16,000 liters each) to mine out all the Kethane on Kerbin's moons. If you consider the TENS of millions of Kethane also available on all the other planets and moons, I would think that no one would ever need to worry about running out of Kethane to mine. I think even if you played on a KMP server with a bunch of other people, you probably still wouldn't need to worry about depleting the system of Kethane.

This was my first thought exactly! xD Such an excellent book and such a terrible movie. xD lol

Mk1 cockpit, LOF tank, 1.25m generator and reactor, hybrid thermal jet in a single stack. A pair of tail fins and delta wings for lift and basic control surfaces and a sprinkling of radial air intakes. Jump started the fusion reactor with a fission reactor that was detached prior to launch. Very basic and minimal design. Such a basic design needs some work to make it SSTO capable, but there is very much potential there.

I just built a small test plane using the 1.25m fusion reactor. Omg this is fantastic for SSTO's and space planes. I was getting almost 200 kN of thrust at one point burning in atmo mode. Given the incredible efficiency once in space, I can see these little fusion reactors as a space plane workhorse engine. With a bit of design work, I think I could make an SSTO that could visit Laythe and return on a single FL-T800.

I have had this issue once before whilst in optimum antimatter collecting orbit around Jool. Turning my plasma thruster off then back on brought my system back to life.

The fission reactors have new models. The model for the 1.25m fission reactor in 0.7.4 has been retasked to become the model for the 62.5cm and 1.25m fusion reactors. The new fusion reactors are unlocked by researching the fusion technology node (the node that gives you the Vista D/T engine).

I took a look at the .cfg for the refinery part and there I didn't see code allocating it to a tech node, unless that info is somewhere else. If you aren't seeing the part in career mode, you can add to the node Fractal said by placing the following code into the part.cfg file for the refinery: TechRequired = advScienceTech entryCost = 11000 Only 62.5cm and 1.25m fusion reactors for now. If I remember correctly, the part that ZZZ made that used to be the 1.25 KIWI fission reactor was designed to be a 1.25m part and didn't scale well up to a larger size part.