xfrankie

So I found two bugs, first: active warp drive doesn't show a trail - merely a cosmetic problem. Second: I can't get the Telescope to work, I have LqdHelium on board, fuel lines work (helium levels lower), but Telescopes show no G-lens, no efficiency, no science. Note that I'm far enough, 1511 AU should be three times the minimal distance... Edit: ignore the second part, I'm being stupid...

Well if you compared a "storage" craft with supply of let's say ~2k Tritium vs. a harvestor with only a couple of Scoops, then yes, you are better off with the first thing. Also the former (landed) would allow you 100k timewarp... Instead of 4x... While not having to worry about autopilot malfunction and losing hours-long progress... Yes, the decay process definitely looks more useful now to me. But the harvestor looks way cooler, you can't deny that!

You can "physical timewarp" up to 4x unless your craft shakes itself apart. Also if you have MechJeb (or simillar) installed, you can set the ship's heading and pitch (with a thousandth or more accuracy, I mean 0.001 etc), or actually tell it to hold a certain altitude, and it will keep your craft flying = allowing you to get afk for a while. Other than that, I have to confess to not really using He-3 at all. Antimatter is uncomparably easier to get and until then, D-T fusion is usually good enough. Nevertheless, it is a nice variegation(?) to try to actually acquire the Helium, instead of just orbiting several hundred times around Kerbin and automatically get all the AM.

You can use Vistas to get decent TWR for harvesting purposes. You can set one of your Scoops to harvest Hydrogen to collect fuel for them, one small Scoop is enough for 4 Vistas. However you need to use the large Scoops, since the small ones don't actually extract any He-3 (as shown in the pic). edit: it might have been the resource bug of the older version not working correctly with 0.23... damn, I should repeat my experiments more often...

Just found out this: for anyone who absolutely can't live without the stock Accelerometer but also wants the Impactor, install B9 ( with the fixes to make it work ), it has the "sensor bay" thingy with all the stock equipment (Thermometer, Barometer etc.), there the Accelerometer has its original properties.

Awesome, thanks! Didn't know that one

Well I originally didn't think I would post that pic anywhere, I took it only because I never got so much in one run, so I was quite surprised. Also the Magnetometer isn't that overpowered, sure you get about 100-200 from each reading but you also can't use while landed/in atmosphere etc. Aaand it might have as well been a bit higher final number, because I forgot to put antenna on the ship, so only one crew report instead of ~14

you don't have to use impactors to get those amounts... I used only stock science + Magnetometer, on my last trip to Jool (scouting its moons except Laythe, using Vista engine) a while ago and it got me this:

I think it is possible. IIRC, the thermal nozzles drain both WasteHeat and ThermalPower (they used to in 0.9.2 - I haven't used them since, so not 100% sure). And if you're using Brayton/KTEC generators then you need thermal power to get energy for your Vista. Try launching it again and watch your resources bars in the top right corner, no thermal power = no megajoules.

Thanks for clarifying the tritium-breeding for me. However, it doesn't matter if you use both generators or just one; it needs MJs for running whether they are generated from Charged or Thermal power. The transmitter will take anything and everything, with two gen. it is 150% (somehow), and with only one as seen in the pic, 101.722%. The 100% is taken by transmitter and the additional 1.7% (those -184MW) is taken to heat the reactor. This would be very elegantly solved by having adjustable Transciever throughput and telling it to send only 95-98% total power, so that the surplus is used to run the fusion. But as it stands now, fission reactor seem better for microwave despite having less than half power. I'm not sure why I'm still typing this if it's a known bug (it wasn't to me, now it is)... Maybe it will help someone who's wondering why their reactors are going out like candles. edit: Or did you mean that the reactor shuts down during timewarp because of the two generators, while with only one it would survive? (it's very much possible I misunderstood you, my bad)

Alright, microwave power once again... 2x 3.75m Fusion reactor, each with their own pair of generators (one direct conversion + one thermal), Transmitter on the top. How it manages to drain 150% of produced power is beyond me, however that doesn't concern me as much as the fact that the Transmitter will actually shutdown the Reactors, because it drains simply everything and that causes loss of power to heat the reactor plasma... After I set up my first powerplant (in the pic is 2nd, 1st one was recovered) I flew a 500 days mission to Dres. When I came back from Dres, I went to see how much He-3 was produced, only to find dead powerplant with absolutely no power - MJ and EC depleted. When the message turned up for the first time (on 1st vessel), I suspected some shenenigans so I watched the powerplant for another moment. It was happily transmitting, not bothered by 0 MJ, probably because the priority-system worked fine. So, my tip goes on high time-warp & focus on other vessel causing the problem. Anyone had simillar problems? edit: just to clarify, the second powerplant was launched after the Dres mission, after recovery of the 1st one

Thank you for the fixes Fractal, the impactors work great now. You are awesome!

So the impactor problems seem to go unnoticed. Here, have some screenshots. And please, please tell me why the Minmus probes don't do anything when the one on Kerbin works just fine... Here's my KSP.log https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxSUXWRJIwcOdDlXN0ZyT0ZRbW8/edit?usp=sharing

How do you guys use the impactors? I can't make them work. I have six probes (each probe carries Accelerometer) placed over Minmus' surface in sort of tri-axial star. All of the accelerometers are activated, pop-up window confirms that they monitor the surface for impacts. But when I crash another ship into surface, nothing happens. There was this message saying I got some science (which doesn't show in RD center) when I deorbited the carrier which flew the probes there. But since then they don't work regardless if I crash within the physic range or not. I tried it multiple times using both completely new vessels and quickloading, but nothing helped, not even restarting the game made any difference... I can't provide screenshots so here's my ksp.log https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxSUXWRJIwcOUGFiNnNLZkloZ1k/edit?usp=sharing

I asked the same thing two pages back. It can't calculate the right number of radiators because if you set the Transciever to "recieve", the thing can get anything between 0 and max power of your network (like, 200GW). The problem is you also recive according amount of WasteHeat along with the power, and the helper cannot really predict this. Maybe someone said this before, but a nice thing to implement in the future would be a tweakable maximal amount of power recieved. As in, relay option would be still relay, transmitter would still send 100%, but the reciever would be limited. Even the transmitter power might be tweakable, but separately - for mothership/lander pairs in outer Kerbol system. Reason being if you have some small probes/landers with scanners that use microwave only for SAS or instead of RTGs, you don't really need hundreds of GW there and they also don't have enough radiator capacity to dissipate 100sGW of WasteHeat. And on the other hand, if you launch heavy vessels using microwave, you would set that particular reciever to get 100% without having to worry that you have only a low-power network for your probes. Correct me if I'm talking nonsense, but I think such option would be useful. Also it would require some user-thinking, "Hey, I have 540GW power available. I'll be using five Vista's for the launch. How much power (percentage) do I need to set the reciever to?"

Oh right, microwave, totally slipped my mind as a possible cause... It does make sense to me now, however. Thank you!

Has anyone else experienced odd behavior of the Thermal helper? I've put two of the Flat Radiators on my spaceplane (because they are awesome for this kind of use) but the Thermal helper seemed very confused. Here's what I mean: (second image shows that the plane had more than enough radiating capacity)

Can it not be mined? "Although lithium is widely distributed on Earth, it does not naturally occur in elemental form due to its high reactivity.[3] The total lithium content of seawater is very large and is estimated as 230 billion tonnes, where the element exists at a relatively constant concentration of 0.14 to 0.25 parts per million (ppm),[38][39] or 25 micromolar;[40] higher concentrations approaching 7 ppm are found near hydrothermal vents.[39] Estimates for the Earth's crustal content range from 20 to 70 ppm by weight. .... At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust,[43] lithium is the 25th most abundant element." According to wikipedia article, it should be much more common in earth than in seawater.

It depends on orbital period of your relay (how high the orbit is, if you want), I have mine on 1 hour orbit (semimajor axis = 1.05055Mm) so I have enough time to launch. If the relays fly too quickly for you to catch up, shift them into higher orbit - or launch more of them so you have better coverage.

Scoops and Intakes are two different things. Atmospheric scoops take part of atmosphere (lets say Oxygen) and put it into your fuel tank (in this case refueling Oxidizer). You need to have Air intakes (Ram Intake or other types) to produce IntakeAir and IntakeAtm for the engine. In other words, if it produces IntakeAir for vanilla turbojets, it can also produce IntakeAtm for the thermal engine/jet/whateveritiscalled. Atmospheric scoops won't help you. (Please post pic of your plane for others to help if I'm misunderstanding something.)

I don't see any fuel tank (unless it's playing hide-and-seek with me). Try putting some LFO tank there and you should be able to select between Liquid and LFO.

I'd say the limiting factor here is your air intake (IntakeAtm). The engine isn't very fuel-efficient - Isp only 148, so it takes a lot of air and only one intake isn't producing enough "fuel" to run on full power (the engine eats everything but it's not enough). Try spamming more intakes around the plane and I think it should get better. more intakes = more air running through engine = more thrust (until you hit the ceiling where it has enough air but doesn't get enough energy)

Yes that is a bit odd, but they are spaced 90 degrees apart, so if I point it prograde it should "see" only the one relay that is before it, the other one connected might be the one that is behind. But since it is behind the reciever, it should not contribute any power. And the fourth is obviously on the other side of the planet. Also that is the reason why there are four of them, at this altitude only three (120 degr. apart) wouldn't have line of sight – I think... Interesting is that it retains full power even when turned upwards, that's why I was so sure there is that magical cone. edit: Also the power input drops rather rapidly when it gets out of the cone, easily achieving 0MW input at higher angles (like, about 80-90ish - not completely sure) edit 2: Just tested it, the relay stops getting any power over 90deg. However the cone might be there only because they are so close together, as in if one was close to Sun/Kerbol and the other at Jool, there might not be any simillar behavior (but don't take my word on this one)

Thank you for your help

I tried that again, works within the "cone". Four identical relays in orbit, 90degrees apart. Here is what happens when I set one of them to "recieve power" a wiggle it around a bit. <iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/k3jSc/embed"></iframe> in case my attempt on embedding the album doesn't work, try this: http://imgur.com/a/k3jSc#8 please ignore that fail, someone tell me how the heck do I embed albums here? pretty please?