Deredere

You get a certain % of total available power based on the angle your receiver is to the closest network node. What I've done is put 7 (and counting) large upgraded nukes into high orbit, and enough relay nodes to ensure one is at least obliquely in sight of a receiver at all times. There are ways to do this with precision to ensure uniform high degrees of reception, but that's 2 much autism 4 me, so I just spammed relays. With the ~ 30GW of power in the network, even a poor connection is giving thrusts of over 2000kN with the 1.25m plasma thruster. The thermal engines paired with the thermal receptors are giving some ridiculous multiplier of that, like 10MN. I had a probe hit 5000 m/s under 10000 meters before it ran out of fuel. It was like a gun. Fun stuff.

Now you see it... Now you don't! Thanks, Novapunch. (and B9)

Here's an idea. How about heat sinks in addition to the radiators? Something engineered with a mind towards total heat capacity rather than high radiative emission. Could be either something like a tank of molten salt that remains intact or a tank of water that empties as steam into space. Or even a block of diamond - why not, KSP has an infinite budget, might as well bling out our ships. This would be useful in applications where the size of effective radiators is prohibitive and/or where heat load is transitory - for instance when using microwave or antimatter power to launch or maneuver. One could then either just sit on the heat or eject the sinks.

Harder, for the most part, but a lot of people who use FAR also use Real Fuels and other realism mods which, when used properly, can make things much easier by giving you control of larger rockets and more powerful and versatile fuels.

Just adding to the chorus of voices saying we need these parts in our cold, miserable lives. Nothing like flying something that looks like some kind of huge Halo battleship to warm a frigid soul.

Yes. The KAS connection is the same in all practical regards as a docking port connection, including breaking things if the combined frame is stressed.

Turns out I was playing with textures on maximum. Turning them down solved the crashes relating to SE and everything else. Now the textures look like a dog peed on them, but my VAB sounds like a Final Fantasy 6 magitek factory and that is awesome.

Seems to be contributing pretty heavily to out-of-memory crashes. Replacing .wavs with .oggs helped considerably, but not enough. Not SE's fault, of course. Playing a bit heavy on the mods.

G l o r i o u s

This is all criticism, again, which I feel bad about, but I really like your mod and it would be awesome if it wasn't so confusing for new players and convoluted for casual players. That isn't a problem. That's completely logical from a game-design perspective. Doing things that aren't viable or practical just because you can does not appeal to the majority of people. KSPI is already severely underdocumented - for instance, nowhere anywhere in the thread or wiki or game is it mentioned that only upgraded fusion reactors can swap fuels. I had to go into a sandbox game to find that out after trying in vain to figure it out for half an hour. Adding more complexity that will need annotation to the effect of "Doing this at the initial tech level is a gigantic waste of time" to prevent people from excitedly building antimatter infrastructure only to find it completely worthless isn't a good direction to be going in. Make ISRU actually viable. I know you probably don't want to hear this, but this will likely involve acknowledging that Kethane exists and a lot of people use it and giving ISRU some advantages over Kethane - the methane engines are a good example, but KSPI resources need to work with modular fuels because having one randomly shaped tank that works with each specific KSPI resource is depressing. Make fission reactors burn fuel a little faster so there's actually some chance you'd need to refuel them eventually, that gives uranium/thorium mining a shot, and make refueling them not totally pointless. I'm pretty sure flying a new reactor out from Kerbin is more practical than refueling no matter where you are in the Kerbol system. Any nuclear reactor designed to be refueled in space would simply eject its reaction assembly into space. Refueling shouldn't require weeks. Make fusion reactors burn fuel a lot faster and make tritium/He-3 available in pre-filled tanks. I said it before recently but tritium and He-3 synthesis isn't realistic OR fun. Antimatter is the only resource that should require infrastructure because that's both realistic and the huge advantages antimatter offers make it very worthwhile from a fun perspective.

Would be nice to have a way of filling Helium-3 and Tritium tanks in the VAB without TAC Fuel Balancer. Not really realistic to make a space program produce this stuff when there are lakes of 'em kicking around in the real world. Antimatter, on the other hand, would probably be produced by the space program or a contractor. What else has a use for ultimate energy density at insanely poor efficiency?

Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with the KSP file system; there's a lot of modules here and I'm not sure what most of it means. Also not sure what to swap them with... the .craft file? But I was able to rescue this mun lander by decoupling the offending part, which was a fuel drop tank. Lost some DV but Jeb will make it home.

I am getting the same thing as evilphish, yes. I'm not at all certain it's MFS's fault, but given EF's research and the fact it involves strange mass distributions and COM rocketing off into space sometimes, it seems likely. It seems to happen whenever a craft is re-loaded from a quicksave or a revert to launch. Going back into the VAB fixes the launch issue but a quicksaved/loaded craft seems boned.

So can you use real fuels without realism overhaul? I'm scared of altering the game dynamic too heavily but I do like the sound of real fuels, but I can't get a grip on how exactly RF and RO overlap.

Yeah, s'not working, and tanks edited with MFS are back to default volumes. I was dying trying to figure out why my rover was suddenly busting its wheels like saltine crackers until I realized the tank I was using as a structural element was back to 100 tons.

I can't seem to enable tritium breeding since .23. I thought it might be a problem with an outdated version of KSPI, so I updated - still nothing. I have every configuration of lithium and tritium tanks on this thing I could think of, with some He-3 just for fun. Wat happen

I'm sure if you thought about that you'd realize it's not true. A solar panel doesn't absorb any more heat energy per unit area than any other material; in fact, it absorbs less, because some portion is converted to usable energy and transported elsewhere. If an asteroid won't overheat, neither will a solar power system. Closer to the sun, this is less true, but even then whether something overheats has nothing to do with solar power.

Registered to weigh in on this really quite awesome mod. Before I tl; dr this, are there any good examples of working refinery setups posted anywhere? I checked the last 20 pages but didn't see much. Specifically I'm at a loss of how to get fuels and stuff from a refinery to ships that need it reasonably conveniently. I also wouldn't mind some examples of good refinery ships. I have absolutely no clue how I'd even make that thing in the first post fly. Okay, so. Good parts - reactors and resource management. Having the option to put heavy and occasionally inconvenient reactors on a spaceframe instead of light and convenient (but limited) solars is fantastic. Radiators, very cool. I like awesome looking things that look even more awesome when I press buttons. Nice also to have varied propulsion options that don't suck. NASA wishes they had this mod. Bad parts - it's complicated. First of all, scientific notation - get rid of it with maximum prejudice. It may seem cool to you if you're a math or physics or whatever major but to the rest of us, it's incomprehensible and sucks, like having someone tell you the temperature outside is 303 Kelvin. What does that mean? I have to think about it. Thinking sucks. And I'm a postgrad student in something that ISN'T (very) math-related, so I'm not a dumbass. I think I speak for most people here. If you have numbers too large or small to conveniently express in real people numbers, use different units. Second, it would be neat if you could clean up the megajoules/heat system and integrate it into electric charge somehow. I see where you're coming from - battery capacity is totally inadequate to deal with the levels of power reactors put out, and you don't want people running warp drives with their cheap imported Chinese solar panels. I don't have a solid suggestion on how to do this. It's just that having 3 or 4 bars expressing basically the same resource - readily usable energy - is confusing and offputting. Also it would be nice if my solars COULD run relatively low-power KSP stuff, like the refinery and the lab, even if very slowly. Third, I know you had at least one other person complaining about this, but managing all the reactor stuff is silly. Nobody is ever going to refuel a fission reactor except to say they did. I'm sorry, but uranium and thorium need to either go or be made super more convenient to play with - like giving the reactor a small internal storage for all the fuels and byproducts, allowing it to switch available fuels manually and automatically upon exhaustion, and having one (small) container that can hold useful amounts of all radioactive stuff. I guess that's it. Obviously that was a lot more complaining than complimenting, but we all spend a lot more time in life thinking about the things we don't like than the things we do.