ss8913

Think I may have found a bug.. took a starship that I had previously flown.. it's been docked at a space station where it refueled.. took it to Moho... was getting a critical power failure at 1.000c, but it could go 0.100c just fine; normally 1.000c has the lowest power requirements of any speed... thought that was odd. Can't get it over about 0.300 - on its first mission it went *100.00c* no problem with everything else being equal; what I can't remember is if this mod has updated between those 2 missions. Tomorrow I'm gonna try a new launch of the same type of craft and see if this is a "degrades over time" problem or if this is new/broken behavior with the warp drives... (Yes, all required fuels/etc are present. It's running off plasma beam core antimatter reactors and I believe one 3.75 and one 5.00m alcubierre ring. (large size).

This seems to... not work at all in 1.3.1 ... I think I may have had another mod in 1.3.0 that adds a patch to put ejection seats in all cockpits(?) but I'm not sure... what does one need to do in VAB/SPH to add ejection seats manually?

so I'm still baffled as to why/how my craft's thrust can't be balanced when I use hydrazine, but can when I have the engines in atmospheric mode.. if I monkey around with the thrust % with TCA off, I can manually balance it, so it's not that the craft is designed in a way that thrust balancing cannot be achieved... this seems like recent behavior, too, I could swear I didn't have this problem a few months ago.

in VAB/SPH... push the TCA button, "select modules," then "enable all". Assuming you have all the required tech nodes unlocked.

I believe kspie is incompatible with realfuels since kspie already adds a ton of new fuel types...?

not having all the mods enabled will do that. You can also see this if you dock with something that was launched without all the mods enabled.. you dock and undock and now poof both your craft have the lowest common denominator of the modules that they had before the docking... I think it's being worked on(?) but in the meantime, turn all TCA modules on, on your space stations, before you launch them

how is that thing not overheating almost instantly? you should need some extremely large radiators to handle that QSR's power output...

so.. I think I'm just noticing this now due to the weights of the craft I'm making today but... with the KSPIE thermal engines... TCA seems to work fine in atmospheric mode, in Kerbin gravity... works fine in closed-cycle hydrazine mode on the mun, due to the low thrust torque due to the low gravity, but... using hydrazine (closed-cyle) on Kerbin, the craft just pitches up uncontrollably even with full pitch-down command. Looking at the engines, it's got the front engines at 100% and the rears at about 65% (roughly all 4 are balanced around CoM). If I turn off TCA and manually mess with it, the rears should be at about 89-90% for level hover... TCA is just .. not understanding this. But only when hydrazine is selected as a propellant.. for atmospheric mode it works, and I'm baffled as to why that would matter..? Using KSP 1.3.1, TCA 3.5.0, KSPIE, FAR.. think that's all the relevant stuff...

I believe with kspie the solar panels generate heat and get less efficient as they heat up...? Try adding some radiators.

attach charged particle electric generators to the reactors. between the fuselage and the reactor, not between the reactor and the engines. That should be enough to power... well, dare I say it, all of Kerbin. The EC needs of your ship should be no problem. If this causes weight/balance issues, add a cargo bay and tuck a small reactor/generator combo in there.. like even a 1.25m or smaller antimatter/charged particle generator should be enough to power everything.

I'm going to post some tips here that I've discovered over years of using this mod.. things that confused me at first, but which now make sense, and also I'm going to ask a couple of questions about some features which I've never used and don't fully understand the behavior of, in hopes that someone else knows... The stuff I do know: 1. In VAB/SPH, always open TCA and enable all the modules (in the last few versions this is necessary, at least) 2. If you're building a space station which your ships will dock with, ensure that the space station itself has the modules enabled, or sometimes docking/undocking a ship will disable the TCA modules for the ship. 3. Make sure to set your RCS thrust limiters back to 100%, if your RCS modules have thrust limiters (KSPIE RCS do), when you turn off TCA; Allista has said that this behavior will be fixed next update. 4. You may notice at times that if your engines are in "thrust and maneuver" mode, invoking a maneuver causes a loss of altitude, sometimes catastrophically. This is because the induced torque for the maneuver is causing the aggregate thrust of the engines to drop below that which is required to maintain altitude. The solution is more/larger engines. 4a. For KSPIE engines, thermal engines at least, they make a lot more net power in Atmospheric mode than in closed-cycle mode. Make sure to do your VTOL tests with both to make sure your engines are large enough. EDIT: 5. KSPIE and TCA work really well together now, thanks to Allista making some changes in the past to interact with KSPIE's engines better. 9000t heavy cargo SSTOs are now a thing you can do by combining these 2 mods. I have a craft that can literally drop a 3500t payload at any given lat/lon in the known universe, provided that lat/lon is on reasonably flat and solid ground. And return to KSC without refueling. and now the stuff I do not know: 5. VTOL mode - not VTOL assist - what is this for? I've never touched this button. 6. Cruise/fly-to destination - sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. Even when the craft has massive reaction wheels and tons of torque plus a lot of thrust balancing, sometimes it just sort of... doesn't operate the controls. 7. Bearing control/maneuver control - a lot of the time, the amount of torque applied to execute an orientation change is.. minimal. Far less than what is possible manually or through other autopilot systems. I'm assuming there are PIDs and other values that can be tuned to increase the maximum applied torque, but I'm not sure how to do that. May be related to #6

two things - 1, "next propellant" is how you switch them to closed cycle, yes. 2, you'll need some radiators to operate on closed cycle mode. You'd have noticed this problem sooner if you had attached generators to the reactors. I recommend the edged radiators, clipped into the wings, or just above and below them.. that should solve your issue. For the person asking about how to use the thermal engines for VTOL, yes, they must be attached to a reactor still. What I do is just use the rotate and offset tools to rotate an antimatter reactor 90 degrees to vertical, attach the engine, then offset/clip the entire thing up into the fuselage or wings. Works great, and things like TCA (which you'll probably need) understand the orientation change.

when you get to a certain altitude, there's no more air to use as ejection mass for the reaction, so you have to switch to closed cycle mode, either using liquidfuel or hydrazine or something else. I recommend hydrazine. I assume you have antimatter on this thing somewhere as well, and that you have enough electric charge from that single(?) solar panel to run the confinement tanks for the antimatter (since I don't see any electric generators connected to the reactors)? edit: if you want to use hydrazine/etc with non-KSPIE fuel tank parts, such as B9 fuselages/wings, install Modular Fuel Tanks (MFT). I think configurable containers can do it too, but the interface is different and I'm not sure it covers as many different mods' parts. Maybe it does, now. I do know that MFT and CC are incompatible with each other, though, so install one -or- the other.

um... you still need ejection mass or you aren't going anywhere...

So.. any news on some larger parts? I read a few posts ago that planetary warehousing "isn't for ongoing use" and this compounds the overall problem that I have with MKS, which is that you need a LOT of parts to build a base, which kills framerates, esp. when you have to land a 80-100 part starship near it to resupply/crew transfer. I often find that my SSTOs that deliver personnel and cargo to a base are actually bigger than the actual base, and that due to hab/home timers, I can only put about 10-15 kerbals into a base that seats 100, and this 10-15-kerbal-supporting-base has close to 80 parts itself because they're all so small... I know RoverDude has said he doesn't like tweakscale, and that larger parts are "coming" but I haven't heard anything on this in a while since the last pre-renders of the 3D models a few months ago. As for planetary logistics, one solution I came up with to the lots-of-small-parts-cause-performance-issues was to put several bases all over the mun (or wherever), and an equatorial supply base where I can drop supplies and other materials so that it can inject into planetary logistics and feed the other bases farther away without me having to bring a supply craft within physics range. This seems to work, but if planetary logistics aren't intended for long-term, not sure how long it'll last In my last save, I tried putting all the components within physics range of each other to use local logistics with.. after 2 or 3 components my frame rate was unusably slow due to the 200+ parts within physics range, so that wasn't a good way to go.

This mod eats ram, not because of any problem with the mod, but with the sheer scope of how many new stars, planets, and moons it adds. I've thought about stripping it down manually to just TRAPPIST-1 and Thallo, but I'm waiting for a 1.3.1-compatible version. Unfortunately there are terrain/biome issues with the planets which, at least in 1.3.0, prevented colonization of them, but hopefully that will be resolved in the update as well.

so... with engines like the Kerbstein, which can accelerate during timewarp to a measurable fraction of c... KSP and its various autopilots only allow for calculation of hohmann transfers. These engines imply a "burn and turn" methodology, where you accelerate to the halfway point, flip, and brake. How can you calculate the vectors to do this? I can't imagine winging it or doing it on paper is particularly productive? I'm also wondering if there's a good calculator for FTL orbital insertion, as I am still having trouble figuring out a [reliable] way to do that.

Typically you don't need to configure them... just only activate the engines you want... what engines are you using? TCA doesn't always like non-stock engines, but the stock stuff and anything else that uses stock fuels (such as KW rocketry, at least with instant response mode) usually are fine, as are the KSPIE engines (mostly)... I haven't used every mod's engines with it though, so please tell us which engines you're using?

yes,... yes, I was.

Oh, I thought we were talking about konstruction... for building stuff, what I said above is exactly how I've observed it to work. Yeah, converters are different.

well, it's (number of kerbals * skill)... ie, if you have 2 level 4 engineers, that's "8 skill" as opposed to 1 level 4 engineers which would be "4 skill".

I think I've found a bug... using RCS thrusters that have thrust limiter capability (KSPIE's do this, others might)... TCA wants to change the thrust limiter values (not sure why, these are RCS).. I suppose that's kind of ok, but the "bug," in my opinion, is that when you push Y to turn TCA off.. it doesn't reset these back to 100%. So now I've got TCA off because I'm in space and I have inline thrust that doesn't need it, but my left front and right rear RCS are not set to 100% (it seems random as to which get touched) and this unbalances the craft... could TCA perhaps put everything back the way it originally was when TCA is turned off?

hydrazine is amazing <3

Could it be possible in three future, or odd it possible now, to manually transfer resources from planetary logistics? Like for machinery.. i build a base on site, no machinery in it.. i have a container on the base for machinery, empty, set to planetary logistics.. i want to transfer machinery to it from the planetary stag and then load it into my modules, but I don't see a way to do that? Muy overall goal is to drop resources to one spot, and have logistics distribute to all my bases on that celestial body... to avoid high part counts in any given physics bubble, etc...

Timberwinds are kind of weak, and I don't think they work in atmosphere at all. By far the 2 best engines in KSPIE are the thermal ramjet nozzle and the kerbstein. A sufficiently large ramjet nozzle (well, more than one) with sufficient plasma beam core antimatter reactors... 40,000 ton SSTOs are a thing.