Haarlock

I don't post very often because, frankly, forums confuse and infuriate me! (Just kidding, I just typically suck at navigating them and stuff.) However, your mod is absolutely awesome. It needs to be said, and said alot. I downloaded this mod one day out of boredom along with a few others to try to get the most out of KSP after I'd played vanilla to death. I didn't really know what to think of all the robotic parts at first. I thought, "sure, this is neat, but what can I even do with it?" So the mod stayed installed but I never really made use of the parts. Occasionally I'd experiment with them a little, but ultimately decided that they were just toys and had no real practical use. As time went on, I eventually got KAS and Interstellar, and Kethane, and started a 'mining base' on Moho. Then I thought of Descent, and how they had robots doing alot of the mining in that game, and thought, "Huh. I could build a mining robot with Kethane drills on it's arms and use the robotic parts to make it." Sure, not very practical still, but very cool nonetheless. It wasn't until ARM that I realized just how essential this mod is to me. I've struggled with how to get rovers onto other planets for a while now. I mean, sure, I could just build it into the rocket in a clunky ugly way and land it down. I have made drop harnesses as I call them several times. However, I do like to try to keep my rockets aerodynamic and somewhat plausible, and eventually I thought, "How did they get the rover onto the moon IRL?" It freakin' folded up. So I thought, "Holy crap! I could use the hinges from Magic Smoke Industries to make the wheels fold up and I could probably stuff it in one of the stage covers from KW! Oh... MSI is incompatible at the moment. Oh well, no matter, I can do with out..." I have checked the forums every day to see if this mod works yet, and I patiently wait for the day that it is fixed up, and each day without it I think of a few more ways I can utilize the parts within. In summary, this mod is epic, and you are a boss for dedicating your time to giving use the privilege of enjoying it. Please, please, please ignore the ingrates, the flamers, and keep this mod going. KSP just would not be the same without it. Thank you, Sirkut, for making this mod.

Ah, good to know that I can place them anywhere on the vessel. As for overheating, I think that's sort of what's happening. I have found that four medium-sized deployable radiators when upgraded keeps the reactor cool enough, but when warping everything goes wonky. So to that end, I think what is happening is that at some point the reactor does get ticked as being overheated, but there's been no consistency to it so far. I haven't been able to reliably replicate the circumstances that have made it happen each time. The AM collector that died at 700 days made it to 880 days more recently. Alternatively, I have also noticed that thorium reactors lose efficiency as actinides build up, and I'm wondering if my reactors are perhaps getting below 10% and thus being 'too cool' to stay active. Regardless, if I do manage to rule out human error, I will defintely write up a report. As for the antimatter, Lightwarrior, I haven't yet used an antimatter reactor, or the alcubierre drive, but I mostly wanted to gather a bunch of it and store it in orbital silos that can be docked with... Yea, mostly I wanted to gather it 'because'. But either way, thanks for the tip. : )

Thanks RadHazard. That's what I'd thought, but it doesn't actually seem to work for me. Does the fuel in the reactor have to be completely empty? Or can there be some thorium/uranium left in there and still be refueled? Regardless, I did a test prior to seeing your reply. I placed a reactor with a generator on it, some radiators, and a pair of thorium pods directly mounted on the sides of the reactor. I placed a ISRU module on the top, and a capsule somewhere so I'd have a kerbonaut on hand to maintain the reactor. I accelerated time to zip to skip several days ahead, after enabling Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in the ISRU. Actinide build up stayed low, depleted fuels began to appear, and uranium (despite being sure I was using thorium) began to appear in the reactor. After some time, I shut the reactor... *goes back to make sure he did it right* Alright, so I actually managed to refuel the uranium reactor. Will test thorium later. So now I know how to refuel a reactor. Thanks! However, I still have another issue. I'd built an unmanned vessel to go to Jool to collect antimatter in anticipation of the alcubierre drive's power requirements, and it is equipped with an ISRU refinery to keep actinide levels down so as to maximize it's life span (Ideally, it fills up it's AM holds and returns to Kerbin orbit where a maintenance crew would refuel it), but it seems that despite having fuel in the reactor, and actinides not anywhere near full, it shuts down after a semi-fixed amount of time. After about 700 days Elapsed Mission Time, the thorium reactor choose to shut down on it's own. At first I thought I'd messed up and failed to clear actinides, but the meter wasn't even a third full. So naturally I checked the thorium levels and the levels in the reactor seemed to be fine, too. This has happened on many of my vessels, and one of the few times I'd had kerbals on board such a vessel, manually restarting the reactor immediately resulted in it going into it's decaying period, and refueling it with on board tanks (as described above) did not seem to work. Mind you, now that I think about it, the tanks WERE mounted on I beams, the ones that don't have fuel crossfeed. They were connected with fuel lines, though, and were receiving depleted fuels from ISRU reprocessing. Should that make a difference? Do the pods have to be directly mounted to the reactors in order for EVA kerbals to refuel them? Or do they just need a crossfeed connection? Well, either way, you've helped me with refueling the reactors enough that I can get around that second issue for now. So for that, thanks again!

Firstly, I'd just like to say that this is a great mod. It's become one of the core mods that I use with KSP. However, I do have an issue with refueling my nuclear reactors. I've looked around on the wiki, and here to a degree (but 500+ pages is alot and I can't seem to find what I'm looking for with the search function). Despite having access to more uranium and/or thorium on any given ship, and having a reprocessing plant actively working to remove actinides from the reactors, they all seem to just 'give out' after a long time. I understand that in order to fire a reactor back up, you have to go EVA, wait for it to cool, then right click and Restart Manually. However, no matter where I seem to place the uranium/thorium pods on a ship, I can never actually get the reactor to use up the fuels in there. They will receive 'depleted fuels' from the reprocessing plant, but even then the reactor never takes from the pods themselves. I've tried attaching fuel lines in and out from the pods to the reactor, I've tried docking ports, I've even slapped pods onto the sides of the reactors themselves, and no matter what the thing never seems to use the pods' fuel. So I guess to sum up my question... how do I use a uranium and/or thorium pod to refuel a reactor? Thanks in advance, and apologies if this has already been covered in this thread, but I couldn't find anything detailed on how to do it.