ss8913

There's a lot of features in KSPIE parts that need to be unlocked. ATILLA engines can't operate in atmospheric mode until you unlock a fairly high tech node either, which stumped me at first. Also, antimatter reactors are not nearly as powerful when you first unlock them as they are after you've toppled the tree. @FreeThinker please tell me if I missed something here but I've either found a bug, or it's a feature which actually makes quite a bit of sense. 1. VTOL spaceplane using ATILLA thrusters, plasma core antimatter reactors, atmospheric mode, Davon throttle control systems and Diazo's vertical velocity controller (highly recommend these mods for VTOL spaceplanes btw)... 2. Take off at 2 m/s vertical speed, get up to about 100m AGL, zero vertical velocity 3. Watch wasteheat build up in radiators 4. After the craft gets hot enough, the thrust starts declining until it can't maintain altitude even at full throttle (hopefully you've left the gear down, cuz it's going to hit the runway fairly hard) 5. Doesn't happen if you use hydrazine fuel instead of IntakeAtm, but that's because using hydrazine generates less heat and doesn't hit the heat threshhold I could swear this didn't used to happen; if it's a feature, bravo, this is pretty cool, and if you add more radiators to the craft, it *can* maintain hover indefinitely, as you'd expect. If this is a bug, please figure out why it's happening and keep it there as a feature

awesome I really miss this mod. Idea, though; perhaps you and the maintainer of Adjustable Landing Gear should compare notes? I'm sure you're both running into a lot of the same problems, and both this mod and that one are sorely missed by many

any chance of KSC2 flight plans? I really like the ones you've made.. even the weird approach to Kerman Lake with the .. nontraditional glideslope. It's like a precision GPS+WAAS approach which we don't yet have on Earth

so I'm not entirely sure how this integrates with MKS... what supplies do I need to provide to a station for it to produce kerbalism 'food' and 'oxygen', and how to deal with 'crap'? I notice that the MKS kontainers aren't capable of holding "Food," either (yes I have the UKS Kerbalism patch installed).

For propulsion, the thermal rocket nozzle/thermal ramjet, attached to a plasma beam antimatter reactor, and using hydrazine as the ejection mass, seems to be the best thrust and ISP, especially at the 3.75m size. I haven't found anything more efficient than that. I do like the ATILLA arcjets for VTOL operations, however, but for long range sublight propulsion, can't beat antimatter and hydrazine with those thermal ramjets.

have to say this adds a whole new dimension of realism and difficulty.. I like it. Any good tutorials on putting up an L5 station? I'm still learning the Principia flight planner as well, but the L5 station is one of my goals... Just glad that this thing seems to have no apparent incompatibilities with KSP Interstellar

wow.. ok.. *alternate question then* - do the UKS reactors work when unfocused?

I will be satisfied if 1. this mod can function properly again with 1.2, and 2. if I can actually use brakes to stop a plane again not expecting iRacing in KSP, for sure

so are they (Squad) definitely for sure fixing wheels in 1.2 and not "pushing it out" so that they can, pardon the pun, reinvent the wheel on RemoteTech for this release? We already have a fully functional antenna/comms system (RT), what we don't have, and what the mod community can't fix, are the wheels Looking forward to proper ground friction modeling, rovers, and not having to put parachutes on all my spaceplanes because there's not enough wheel friction to stop a 200+ ton plane on the runway even with all the sliders maxed (hence the drag chutes).

Is this mod still being maintained, like.. from a source code perspective? If so, one thing this mod REALLY needs is an indicated-airspeed hold. ground speed in m/s is practically useless with aircraft since stall speeds and approach speeds are in KIAS, not m/s ground speed... since things vary with altitude. Being able to use the FAR airspeed units with this would help a lot; as it is the speed hold is *useless* except in level cruise.

maybe a compromise... add a checkbox for "assume KSPIE nuclear reactors are working as intended" and force them to 100% EC in the background. This is essentially the behavior that you'd get if it was properly implemented anyway, and seems like it's much easier to code. Of course it's not fully realistic and it misses some edge cases, but it solves the 95% case for this problem.

Is this planned for a future release? I'm not sure that some of these vessels can handle solar panel charging, some of them need more power than that.. for things like antimatter containment, at least on my crewed vessels. I'll see what I can do. If you need a tester for KSPIE background processing, I'll volunteer - I use KSPIE reactors on darn near everything

so... my satellites keep running out of power when not in focus. they each have a ThF4 nuclear reactor plus 2 of the large size batteries.. in focus they stay solidly maxed on electric charge, but they lose charge unfocused. Is this something to do with the KSPI-E ThF4 reactors or something to do with how Kerbalism is calculating this? I'm not sure.

works fine for me in 1.1.3, if you have Konstructs updated.

possibly dumb question but.. when do the kerbals eat? I sent them up with oxygen and food... had them up there for several days.. didn't use any food. Also, is there any integration with Kerbal Planetary Base Systems? ie, food containers/O2 containers that fit in those little storage slots, or anything like that?

So far I haven't found a more efficient (in terms of ISP and thrust) combo for sub-light travel than the hybrid thermal ramjet/rocket engine with hydrazine and a plasma beam antimatter reactor. Is there something else that might be better? ie, something with the arcjet thrusters that would yield better performance? I usually use the ATILLAs for VTOL thrust, although this generates a *lot* of wasteheat, especially using atmospheric ejection mass...

Have you guys made any further progress on the KSPI-E integration?

@FreeThinker - new... something.. going on, not sure what. I set up a ship that should have been able to cool itself just fine, but it overheated within seconds... so I look in the VAB and notice that all my graphene radiators are showing up as Mk2 not Mk5. I have the entire CTT unlocked, and this hasn't been a problem until today.. any ideas? I don't see any errors in the log regarding this part (Umbrella radiator or the large aero radiators, using both on this ship). I'm also curious as to why the propellant type matters - even on a ship where VAB/SPH say 'green' on maximum dissipation... running, say, an ATILLA on Atmospheric or LiquidFuel, (2.5m engine, 2.5m charged particle gen, 2.5m antimatter reactor), will cause the ship to overheat. Using hydrazine, it does not. Not sure I understand what's going on there. UPDATE: Looked in the part configs, double verified that all of the required science nodes are unlocked for Mk5 - since they're all unlocked. logs show it checking for all 5 levels successfully too. but on this particular ship i'm only getting 0.5gw per 100%-scale winged-edge radiator and that clearly isn't right. UPDATE: It's the molten salt reactor. I'm not sure why or how, but I did the following experiment: 1. set up a craft that's just an AI module and a fuel tank. attach 8 winged edge radiators at normal (100%) scale. VAB thermal helper claims total dissipation = 43.5 GW 2. add a 2.5m (normal) molten salt reactor fueled by ThF4 3. Radiator max dissipation drops instantly to 3.72GW in the thermal helper window am I missing something here? Antimatter reactors don't do this. will check the others.

@FreeThinker I've got to say you've taken this mod far far beyond the original version.. the amount of attention to detail that goes into this iteration of KSPI is amazing. Keep up the good work

The way I typically build my ships is a delta-wing spaceplane design similar to the US space shuttle but not exactly... I use thermal ramjets attached to antimatter reactors for main propulsion since their ISP is really high. I sometimes use thermal turbojets for extra boost at low speed or higher thrust when needed, but they waste a lot of fuel. I use ATILLA for VTOL engines though, because they respond instantly. Mods like Diazo's vertical speed control, TCA, Davon Throttle Control, etc, have a VERY hard time working with the TTJ/TRJ from KSPIE as they don't respond instantly, and so they are not a good choice for VTOL. ATILLA will generate a lot of heat however. In fact, @FreeThinker that heat problem I reported a while back.. it's.. weird. It only happens on some craft. Some seem to be consistent, some will generate no wasteheat until you save/reload and then they generate a *lot*. I thought it was due to the presence/absence of a warp drive, but that doesn't seem to be it either. I'm not sure what the difference is between ships that do this and ones that don't. In either case however I'm still having overheat issues with an ATILLA running my reactor at about 70% utilization, thermal helper in SPH is fully in the green, but wasteheat builds faster than I can radiate it, with radiators all extended. Not sure what all factors into that or if I'm doing something wrong. Anyway, the "formula for success" above has let me build SSTO VTOL spaceplanes anywhere from 50t to over 1500t - it's a very effective design and I've based pretty much my entire space program on this basic design philosophy

This mod is especially helpful when using KSP Interstellar, as you can slow down to 1/8th time to get as close as possible to a planet with the alcubierre drive. This can shave hours or days off of your trip since the circularization burn and establishing orbit takes far, far longer than the actual interplanetary transit does - the more precise your jump, the more efficient your trip is, and this mod is SUPER helpful for that. Thanks for the update!

so has this mod just.. been working.. with no updates or maintenance, since KSP 0.25 / Sep 23 2014? That's pretty impressive if so... is the source code available / is anyone still maintaining it at this point?

@FreeThinker - update on the thermal issue - redesigned craft to be well in the green in the Thermal Helper. After a quicksave/quickload, it builds heat faster than it can be dissipated, even with all radiators extended. Before the quicksave/quickload, WasteHeat stays at 0. I'm going to try uninstalling DRE. That's the only other mod I have that does.. heat things. Will post an update. UPDATE: It's not a DRE thing. behavior is the same with or without it installed. Using the ATILLA thruster is running the electric generator and the antimatter reactor at full output, but with the thermal helper in the 'green', it shouldn't be building wasteheat at all should it? it'll overheat in probably 1 minute or less. And again, before loading a save, it sits at 0.

does it let you slow down to below 1x? I need this for alcubierre jumps, which is why I started using TC to begin with.

it's clearly not... at first launch wasteheat stays around 0, ie, it's dissipating it faster than it can be generated and it never builds up. After an f5/f9, it builds up super fast and if I use my ATILLA vtol engines for any length of time, the whole system overheats. only reason I can still make it back to Kerbin at this point is because i can deorbit, brake, and turn off the engines with about 80% wasteheat buildup, radiators glowing red hot, and then glide it to the runway. If I haven't done an F5/F9, the whole thing stays cool throughout the entire mission, even with using the hyperdrive/etc. And the other issue is still .. an issue... 100x timewarp doesn't change the rate of dissipation. ie, it dissipates X wasteheat per *real second* and ignores timewarp, or so it seems.