ss8913

it's more expensive but takes less time. With a kerbstein drive system with 275km/sec or better of dV, I'm not really concerned about efficiency. also if you do the burn and turn, how do you account for minmus moving in its orbit during that time? wouldn't you undershoot the target if you pointed straight at minmus and did that?

yeah, that's an 18 day round trip by hohmann transfer. My kerbals have stuff to do, this gets them there and back in time for dinner @FreeThinker did some tests on the new version + TCA (Throttle Controlled Avionics - thrust balancing/VTOL autopilot mod) - using thermal turbojets on atmospheric mode, it now has proper control authority for precision VTOL ops, so your changes to integrate with VTOL balancers/other autopilots seems to be working well. Still need to see if it works with mechjeb landing guidance on mun/minmus (TCA also has a similar mode which I will test). Nice job!

@FreeThinker tried the beta... antimatter + CP electric generators are generating a lot more wasteheat than they were in 1.14.6; but i think they were heating abnormally low in .6 ... one of my hyperspace craft had to come back from minmus on only the kerbstein since charging the warpdrive was overheating the whole thing (in the .7 beta) - whereas it got *to* Minmus just fine in .6. Is this intentional?

@FreeThinkerI'm having a similar but not quite the same issue.. with that spaceplane that I posted a picture of on Thallo a couple days ago... it has a thermal ramjet nozzle for horizontal thrust and 2 thermal turbojets for VTOL.. the only .. huh.. how can I explain this.. on the runway, engage thermal ramjet nozzle, gets 0.3 m/s/s of acceleration... at full thrust. in the prev version it gave 4.0+ m/s at a standing start.. anyway thrust works fine if i toggle the vtol engines on and off. Same works in space on closed cycle (hydrazine). have to solve it the same way. The VTOL engines by themselves produce insufficient (but nonzero) thrust landing on.. wherever... if i don't toggle the horizontal engine. The % of throttle at which I toggle the inactive engines determines how much thrust the one I want will make. It's by far the weirdest way that thermal engines have ever been broken.. does seem to be a fuel flow problem... will wait and try the next version that's fixing @Chase842's issue.

I use these engines in almost every design as well, and I have not had the problem... are you sure the engines are producing no thrust (as opposed to "the craft isn't moving" which with KSP can be a completely different issue)? shows 0.0kN in the engine's right-click window? If you open the reactor control window on the plasma beam core, does it say "<X> deprived" anywhere? Reactor isn't disabled? Crossfeed rules aren't prohibiting your propellant mass from getting to the engine? if there are couplers or docking ports in between the fuel tank and the engine, you may have to manually enable crossfeed. some parts don't allow crossfeed at all.

are you using the right version of kopernicus for 1.2.2? trying to use a 1.3.0-compiled kopernicus could easily explain it...?

I used warp drives... 10c on the way there, 100c on the return since the craft was lighter.

@FreeThinker I second Ciro's suggestions about limiting unavailable speeds. Also if the maximum tonnage/warp-to-mass ratio for the alcubierre drive could be displayed in VAB/SPH like it is in flight, that would be convenient, albeit non-critical

sure. I get that, but the 1.2.2 version works fine (for me) in 1.3 without a recompile, hence my question of what's functionally different...?

what kind of reactor? If you have hydrates available in the biome you're in on the moon, you can use the MKS hydrates to water converter.. then use the ISRU to do water electrolysis, this will give you an unlimited supply of hydrogen which you can use for a QSR fusion reactor. If you're talking a fission reactor, you can harvest uraninite and refine it with the MKS refinery, not sure if the KSPIE ISRU will reprocess this particular resource (probably does?)... don't think you can do anything else with what's easily available on the mun, but I could be wrong.

Glad to see this is still getting updates. In the meantime, here's some pics from my recent mission to Thallo - roundtrip there and back, 8 days. Uses B9, KSPIE, FAR, Kerbal Foundries, and of course stock parts... and on the ground... the spaceplane docks with the other thing and then lands vertically wherever.. can also land on the KSC runway. Neither module needs refueling at any point during the mission. Spaceplane propulsion is 1x horizontal antimatter-thermal ramjet nozzle plus 2 downward facing antimatter-thermal turbojet VTOL engines.. using hydrazine as ejection mass. Stardrive section has 4x Kerbstein advanced fusion engines powered by lithium hydride, and a 10m alcubierre warp drive capable of 100x the speed of light. Landing site is on the western shore of the inland sea on the sunward side of Thallo, near the equator.

If you want the old SCANSat resource scanning behavior (which feels a lot more reasonable/realistic than the Baby's First Orbital Scanner by Fisher Price(tm) feel that the stock one has), then yes, 'disable stock scanning'.

what is the difference in behavior between this and the 1.2.2 one that I have loaded in 1.3? I can't see any functional difference between its behavior in 1.2.2 and 1.3.0...?

don't. IR joints are too weak to handle thrust. The only way to make them not that weak is to use KJR. Which conflicts with IR and makes everything super weird. I'm still looking for a use for IR. You can't put docking ports on any of the IR parts, you can't put engines on them, and I can't for the life of me figure out what else it could be good for. You want VTOL? put a couple of antimatter reactors and thermal turbojets, facing downward, just on either side of your CoM, and use TCA to balance the thrust. Doesn't work so well in open cycle mode, but in closed cycle mode, yes.

i'm not sure about normal saving.. i'm not sure if it even does that (autosave) or if it thinks there's .. things going on and it can't. anyway... In orbit over Thallo: and landed on Thallo: ... and we made it all the way back to the runway at KSC... 74Tm round trip. Didn't need to refuel either the stardrive module or the spaceplane, either. One go for both. there's still well over 100km/s dV in the stardrive module thanks to the 4 Kerbsteins

please consider the differences between stock aero and FAR when implementing this - if you can't make it FAR-aware, please make this feature something we can toggle on/off or.. weird/bad things will happen.

So I tried that Thallo mission again.. it was OK this time. I think the one thing I did differently was not try to quicksave while traveling faster than light. That seems to matter, somehow.

IRONICALLY, that's exactly what KJR is supposed to prevent.. let me see if i can get quantum struts recompiled for 1.3.0, and use that instead of KJR..... and re-test this.

Further update - something about this craft... a long string of saves/reloads, even persisting across invocations of KSP in general.. I don't know. something was weird. every time I hit the time warp even a little, the part joints "skew" a little bit and go back to normal at 1x, but... anyway, so I turn the thing around and limp home at 1x timewarp.. disconnect the spaceplane, land it, but notice there's a ton of ground textures missing on the way in... something got hugely corrupted here and I don't know exactly what. I'm wondering though if KJR might be having some kind of a problem with KSPIE in some way? I'm not seeing anything in the logs, but.. i don't know. i don't see anything that KSPIE is doing that would really affect anything KJR is doing..?

This is because in the last update, the mod was updated so that antimatter reactors need LH2 as well as antimatter. If you're not using antimatter reactors, do you have any ejection mass? like hydrazine? you need reactor fuel *and* ejection mass. you'd think, right? @FreeThinker - update: 1. I have part G force limits OFF 2. F3 shows *nothing*. just a big explosion with nothing logged 3. F3 does show "maximum g force tolerated: 0.1g" 4. it seems somewhat dependent on the ship - some ships can go at much higher time warps than others. not sure what the deal is. any time I have 2 ships docked together, though, the problem is far worse than if it went up as a single launch 5. I do have KJR installed, otherwise the docking thing doesn't work at all, it just flops around and that's obviously bad. 6. That pic that I posted - that's not midway-through-exploding, the parts shear apart like that and it *stays like that*, in the edge case. Usually that doesn't happen. Usually it just explodes in a huge fireball.

I'm pretty sure I have part G force failures turned off but maybe not... let me verify that.

@FreeThinker - my exploding-with-FTL-plus-timewarp thing is the gift that keeps on giving. I have some new information. it gets worse the more timewarp is used, the longer timewarp is used, and how many times I've done an F9 reload in the same session. ie: Attempt/Result pairs: 1 = get from 37Tm down to 35Tm towards Thallo (orbiting Trappist-1), at 1000x timewarp, 10.0c FTL speed. Drops out of warp fine. Push F5. ok. 2 = get to 500Gm from Thallo, drop out of warp, *boom* massive explosion 3 = try only going to 15Tm, drop out of warp, *boom* 4 = try only going 1 extra Tm, at 100x timewarp instead of 1000x. No explosion, but the craft skews apart yet somehow stays 'connected' even though there's huge gaps between the parts - which is *really really bizarre* and I took a picture (see below). Again, the problems happen when exiting TIME warp. everything goes south as soon as the Timewarp scale hits 1x.

@linuxgurugamer I have what I think is a patch for FAR, but it seems like only one of my directives works at a time...? Here's the patch code, please tell me what I did wrong: @PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleKrEjectPilot]]:NEEDS[FerramAerospaceResearch] { @MODULE[ModuleKrEjectPilot] { %deployHeight = 700 %deployedDrag = 1000 } } This sets an appropriate amount of drag for a soft landing, but it makes deployHeight not work. In this configuration, it deploys at 200 like before. I also need to speed up the deploy time, but first things first... could it be because I'm also using the addejectiontoall patch which also overloads the %deployHeight and sets it to 200?

has anyone attempted a recompile of the plugin? I might try it, but if anyone already has... does it work? I really want the electric fan engines back can make a nice VTOL with those, using TCA and a ThF4 reactor from KSPIE ConfigurableContainers will allow fuel replacement in these parts, but sadly CC conflicts with Interstellar Fuel Switch, and IFS is an absolute must-have, so... maybe if we can get a MFT patch, that'd work, since MFT can coexist with IFS.

1. TCA is, by default, toggled with the Y key. 2. Planes/other craft with multiple 'horizontal' engines that are far enough apart can sometimes induce some yaw/pitch oscillation. Turning off all the 'helper modes' and turning TCA ON, can in fact stabilize that and balance thrust around CoM, so I'd disagree with allista that it's not useful for plane-like horizontal flight - spaceplanes in orbit can benefit greatly from TCA - it's not really necessary in atmosphere, as the aerodynamic forces will dampen the oscillations induced by slightly-off-balance engines (this is more of an issue with certain engines than others) .. but I've found TCA to be useful when getting spaceplanes up out of the atmosphere in closed-cycle mode (above 20km altitude or so).