[HELP/QUESTION ] intakes and Duna's & Eve's and maybe Jool's atmosphere.

[Eskandare]

I'm making a nuclear turbine. The premise is that the engine uses the heat from a nuclear reactor to rapidly heat up gases passing through a heat exchanger, thus it can use any gas medium as propellant.

I'm trying to find a simple way to make Duna's, Eve's and Jool's atmosphere useable in this context.

Does anyone have any ideas? I was thinking of making a resource called atmosphere or something and have it collected as you fly. Would that work?

[DV-13]

In 1.0 custom resourses can be defined in configs, as far as I know. BTW, IntakeAtmosphere resourse was in some mod. Intersellar or B9.

[NecroBones]

Actually I think a custom energy resource might be better.

I don't know how you'd define a custom "atmosphere" resource to be generated/collected in specific environments. I suspect IntakeAir is hardcoded to do this.

The stock "IntakeAir" might be OK to use, though I haven't tested to see if it's only viable in oxygen atmospheres (Laythe and Kerbin). I could swear there used to be a setting in the stock jet engines to tell them to require oxygen atmospheres specifically, but I don't see it now. So they may have IntakeAir hardcoded for that now. It may require some experimenting.

You could create a resource for nuclear power that the reactor puts out, and have the engine use that as a non-ISP propellant (massless resource, like ElectricCharge), and rely on the intake air for the reaction mass.

Here's what the stock basic-jet has for propellant settings:

		PROPELLANT
		{
			name = LiquidFuel
			resourceFlowMode = STAGE_PRIORITY_FLOW
			ratio = 1
			DrawGauge = True
		}
		PROPELLANT
		{
			name = IntakeAir
			ignoreForIsp = True
			ratio = 23
		}

As an experiment, it might be worth removing the "ignoreForIsp" setting from the IntakeAir, and replace the LiquidFuel requirement with ElectricCharge (adding the "ignoreForISP=True" value to this one), and see if it'll provide thrust in places like Duna and Eve. If that works, then I'd switch the energy source again, but to a custom "NuclearPower" resource modeled from ElectricCharge, with something like this:

RESOURCE_DEFINITION
{
  name = NuclearPower
  density = 0
  unitCost = 0
  hsp = 0
  flowMode = ALL_VESSEL
  transfer = PUMP
  isTweakable = false
}

[Starbuckminsterfullerton]

You may be right Bones, but I remember there being a "checkOxygen = true" or something like that in the definition that I can't find now, but there is a way to do this, I remember because I made a resource just like that, just give me time to find it.

Edit: Found it! This is definitely possible!

So here's the deal, the resource definition just sets the physical parameters for a nameable fluid resource, like density and pumpability. The actual use/behavior of the resource comes from somewhere else. In this case, it's the intake itself that makes intake air behave like intake air.

Here is a thread that explains air intake function.

So in your case you want to do two things: define a new resource, and create a new intake.

Make the resource the same as IntakeAir, just with a different name.

Pick one of the stock intakes, find the resourceintake module, and replace IntakeAir with yourResourceName, and then set checkForOxygen to false

rename the resource storage module below it too.

Edited June 6, 2015 by Starbuckminsterfullerton