Deredere

More information: Generators were attached to thermal receivers, and it wasn't possible to revert the flights from the launchpad. The option was ghosted with no explanation why. I don't want to be like "Your damn mod broke all my stuff! How dare you!" It's not impossible it's a conflict with a third mod or something. I guess. I have no idea. But if it's something reproducible and easily fixable that'd be neat.

But this mod is, for a reason I can't begin to fathom, breaking KSPI generators. With this installed they all read "Power available: NAn" and indeed there is none. Tested both with and without K3 parts on the vehicle.

Can't say *** on a Christian forum, eh? Science lab version will be consensual heterosexual intercourse in the missionary position for the purposes of procreation.

Posting to say this is 10/10 work. This is going to make some badass manly ~50 kerbal colony ships even more badass. Waitin' on that science lab version, that will be ***.

Yeah but that guy is wrong, mostly. If a generator produces both thermal power and charged particles (Fusion reactors running D-T or D-He3 or upgraded particle bed fission reactors) then attaching two generators, one thermal and one direct conversion, will have a benefit. Regular fission reactors and antimatter reactors produce only thermal power and only benefit from a sterling/Ktec generator. Pure He3 fusion reactors produce only charged particles and only benefit from a direct conversion generator.

Things I would do to simplify KSPI and/or improve it from a gameplay perspective: 1. Remove generators, incorporate their functionality (and weight, if necessary) into the reactors themselves. MAYBE allow switching between thermal and charged-particle generation as a VAB tweakable, but I would just presume both types of generator are present in the reactor, and scale power level to balance if necessary. 2. Scale the power of the smaller reactor types up to match the TWR of the larger reactor/thermal rocket combos. As someone just mentioned a few posts back, it is extremely disappointing to get access to badass manly nuclear reactors and find out that the only one that isn't wholly inferior to the LV-N is the giant massive one that's bigger than your mom and not going anywhere fast anyway. Sometimes you just want to land a dude on Minmus, not arm-wrestle an asteroid and win. 3. Roll thermal power and charged particles into KJ. KSPI has three different types of what is basically usable energy, and that's ridiculous, especially considering we already had a usable energy resource in the stock game. I appreciate there are reasons for megajoules to continue existing, but there really aren't any for TP and CP. Get rid of them with the generators. 4. Remove the need to correctly orient microwave receivers. Power reception should be based on distance (and line of sight re: planetary bodies) to the transmitting relay/source, not the position of the receiver on the craft. Trying to maintain usable power levels in every orientation leads to part creep and unwelcome surprises when it turns out that the direction you need to burn to prevent a high-energy rendezvous is the one direction your receivers aren't pointing in. Also frustrating for new players to figure out. OR 4. Consider removing or massively reworking the microwave system. Right now there is no incentive to carry reactors on craft, because with even a moderate microwave infrastructure in place, a receiver will "produce" a zillion times the power of most reactors with a fraction of the weight. Launch enough fusion reactors around and you can produce 10 times the power of the largest fusion reactor with a 1 ton part. This makes a lot of stuff superfluous, like - radiators, fissionable/fusionable ISRU, lab reprocessing, having 20 different reactor types in the first place, etc. There is no incentive to gather resources when it's easier to just build stuff on Kerbin and beam energy from there. But, of course, if you're going to fix the microwave system, the reactors would need to be buffed. I would very, very happily mine some fuggin Thorium if a nuclear reactor could give me launch thrusts from Eve without being 85% of my lander weight. This would also be nice because I wouldn't have to hope relays are in the right position to send the Kerbin/Jool power to that part of Eve's surface. 5. Remove Tritium. Roll it into Deuterium as D-T fuel. 6. Either remove or massively boost Helium-3. 7. Argon doesn't really need to be a thing. Methane needs to either get a full set of engines/tanks, or be removed. Same with Aluminum. The AlO2 rocket is too unwieldy a piece of crap to care about. Uranium Nitride? Doesn't need to be a thing. Just call it Uranium. Hydrogen peroxide doesn't need to exist either. It is itself a monopropellant. Just go straight from water to monoprop. It's crap compared to hydrazine but this is a gaaaaaaaame. We also have liquid hydrogen that never boils off and RTGs that never lose power. Just do it. 8. Let us melt down reactors to self-destruct stuff because that would be AWESOME. 9. Unupgraded radiators need to not completely suck nuts. Make them tungsten filament or something if you want. Similar operating temperature, higher weight? Maybe? I wouldn't do the calculations even if I knew how to. There's no need it's a gaaaaaaame. 10. A smaller version of the DT Vista would be hot. There's a niche for that kind of high isp decent thrust thing that doesn't require microwaves in the lander weight class. "But Dere, muh SCIENCE, this isn't accurate!!!??"

Legalities and implied intents aside, it would bother me if I'd worked as much as Fractal seems to have and someone came along and went"You know what this needs? *Windows_Recycle_Bin_Empty.wav* "There! Fixed!" Still the small matter of it being largely useless.

Is butchering KSPI something Fractal is okay with you doing? I haven't read back in the thread. If so, please do. It is in desperate need of a little bit of butchery.

The problem with power requirements is either a player is not using KSPI or an analogue, in which case 40-90 kW is extremely high, or they are, and it's a drop in an ocean of energy.

I do wish that ability was available; the inability to takeoff and land horizontally oriented VTOL craft in high gravitational fields without a considerable amount of caution and precision engineering is frustrating. With the amount of power available in KSPI via microwave networks and/or antimatter drives, a multi-axis high-energy thruster system to simulate an inertialess drive should be possible. But I imagine that kind of adaptive propulsion system to hold potentially asymmetric craft motionless in an atmosphere would be quite the programming task, it's not as simple as just making a new engine.

Since endless "why is muh stuff not working" posts are far more entertaining, right? Of course they are. You're right. Speaking of which... It sounds pretty accurate. The highest amount of power you'll get out of a 3.75m fusion reactor, which is what it sounds like you're using, is around 60% of its total energy output, if I recall correctly. You're losing 20% to charged particle generation (unless you have two generators attached, one of each type, which is generally impractical) and then losing another 50% or so of your thermal power to generator inefficiency, leading to a total output from each fusion microwave sat of about 30 gigawatts.And even one should be more than enough to blow any kind of spaceplane right out of the atmosphere and on its way out the solar system. Try using Xenon fuel if you're using plasma engines. Liquid fuel isn't going to cut it for a large craft unless you have the maximum size plasma engine and enough power in the network (which it sounds like you do). If you're using thermal rockets I can't help you, you should be getting accelerations in the km/s range. I use thermal rockets as ghetto-rigged mass drivers.

Impulse engines in Star Trek, including the ones on shuttles, are fusion-powered electro-rockets. i.e the exact same thing as a plasma engine. You could assume the exhaust doesn't emit in the visible spectrum if it bothers you.

Oh. So he did. I don't know how I missed that. Maybe because it sounds exactly like a fission shutdown scenario.

Sounds like at some point your reactor overheated and shut down. Even if it didn't, turning off a fission reactor leaves it off until the core burns out. A shut down fission reactor will still produce energy - 10% at first, then decreasing until at 0% you can finally refuel and/or restart it.

It's a function of the physics behind the two fusion reactor types. The smaller ones are laser-initiated, the larger two magnetically contained. He-3 apparently isn't ideal for magnetic bottle type reactors. Another example of too much realism murdering gameplay. I mean realistic simulations are fun, but you have to draw the line somewhere or actually launching a rocket in KSP would be a 140 million dollar DLC. I think that line is being drawn a little too far north of fun.

6x laser fusions running a vista is precisely what I used He-3 for. Novapunch has some awesome 3.75m-7x 1.25m adapters that are perfect for the task. Makes a cool-looking and practical engine assembly. And it's not bad, I guess. But then you learn that thermal microwave receivers with a developed microwave network (probably running on D-T) hooked up to a generator can produce a literal hundred times the power with no waste heat and that idea is super out.

I'm not saying this guy is right, but this guy is right. I'm pretty sure I less eloquently said the same a few months back. I like radiators, however. They look cool.

No worries! And I'm sorry if I've ever given you grief with my complaining.

Not necessarily! I'm quite liking designs that use a thermal receiver to power a generator to power the plasma engine. The system suffers from inefficiencies, of course, but the amount of power in the network more than makes up for it and makes large radiators unnecessary. The generator still produces an extremely small amount of waste heat and has no capacity itself, so a small radial radiator or a B9 cargo bay or something is still required.

So is there a workaround to cancel a build after you've started it?

I mostly care about aesthetics, to be honest. Generators don't always look good and sometimes add distressingly to the overall length of a craft or assembly. Part count hasn't been a big deal since I threw in a newer gpu. I rarely find myself in situations with more than 300 parts present, and it handles that much just fine. Also, very few stock parts and parts from other mods are prepared to handle KSPI's power output, so a few percentage points of the potential would serve well in many situations. I mean, if you think about it, that's basically all the smaller reactors are good for. Save the antimatter, they never develop sufficient power density to handle propulsion, and even the ISRU refineries are beyond the ken of the .6m reactors. But running a kethane refinery or life support machinery? That they do wonderfully.

Maybe include a small thermocouple in the reactor assemblies themselves? Even 1% output absent a generator would be useful.

Oh. Oh dear. Well, I'd been meaning to try out a life support-enabled save anyway. I'm going to have to skip most of the tech tree however, I'm totally over lunar landings unless it's a kethane juggernaut.

So... radiators sometimes experiencing load times in excess of 30 seconds, especially when placed in 6 or 8 fold symmetry. Has this been addressed?