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[1.12.x] Heat Control - More radiators! (August 18, 2024)

Nertea

By Nertea
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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Horus

Horus

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I need some help with NRE reactors,

Using MX-L "Excalibur" reactor for high EC gain generator. After a short period of time its' "Core Health" dropped down to 80%, so I've decided to repair it with an engineer. However, it says that the reactor temp need to be below 325K. Ooook. Shut it down and waiting for cooling. Getting its' temperature down to 350K was OK (quite a long time, but got that), but then it takes like forever to cool it more. Several in-game hours passed while temp fallen down by additional 0.7K.

I'm using Heat Control mod for heat panels. And using 4 GR-1 High Temperature Heat Radiators which should be quite enough to cool down this reactor.

Where could be a problem there? How long does it take to cool down the reactor to 0K (well, if it's possible)?

 

P.S.: sorry, a bit wrong, but realted thread

Edited by Horus
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Starbuckminsterfullerton

Starbuckminsterfullerton

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1 hour ago, Nertea said:

1.1 update is almost good, just putting the finishing touches on the heat animations for these guys...

Cool! How very Atomic Age of you, looking forward to seeing the emissives.

Edit: My puns are always intended.:cool:

Edited by Starbuckminsterfullerton
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Smorfty

Smorfty

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On 2016-04-06 at 1:37 AM, Nertea said:

1.1 update is almost good, just putting the finishing touches on the heat animations for these guys...

Now where have I seen that heat sink before? Hmmm.... :wink:

aOiZ2ac.png

Edited by Smorfty
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Nertea

Nertea

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New version, with 1.1 prerelease compatibility. Only minor changes otherwise.

  • KSP 1.1 prototype
  • Added part search tag fields to all radiators
  • Added VS-3750 and VS-1000 fixed heat radiators
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Nertea

Nertea

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On 4/20/2016 at 2:20 AM, Gryphorim said:

Say I wanted to upscale the new static radiators to double their current size, would they radiate 4x heat?

Yeah that should be correct. 

On 4/20/2016 at 4:01 AM, SmarterThanMe said:

Will this (and your other work) be going up on CKAN? :)

Streetwind handles the CKAN for my stuff - don't bother him, he'll do it in some time. 

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Psycho_zs

Psycho_zs

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Perhaps masses are a bit off, some rebalance is needed. Look at volume and structure of XR-3750 (largest foldable radiator), VS-3750 (largest fixed radiator), and gigantic stock foldable radiator:

Being carbon-based and small in size, HC radiators are very overweight compared to stock.

VS-3750 is much more bulky than XR-3750. XR-3750 should weight less and VS-3750 should be called VS-4500 (and perform accordingly).

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Psycho_zs

Psycho_zs

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@Streetwind, This one is for you. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FFKRwfcMRprqKmmsDyNBAH9sdqizjFWQ8IQTI7nvoN4/edit?usp=sharing

This table shows radiator stats, relative to their relative area (pun intended) and how much radiators needed to cool NFE reactors. Points of interest are marked in yellow. The whole idea is to balance between two points:

  1. sane quantity of radiators per reactor
  2. core heat transfer to radiator area ratio.

 

Grey fields are stock/current/calculated values do not change them.

Reactor inefficiency levels in the table are not current, but close.

Area is calculated in pixels on the screenshot, so it has only relative meaning confined in the table.

The area plays main role in derivative value 'Core transfer/area'. It greatly varies in stock radiators with average value at 0.08. If this value goes up, it means that radiator gets more saturated with heat from the core.

Given that HC radiators are supposed to be hi-temp active refrigerating, their 'new' core transfer vaues in the table are approximated around average stock 0.08 multiplied by two. Fixed radiators (except flush ones) got a small bump on top of that.

I did not refine any of this yet, just averaged around that value.

Also I think that XR-300 is too small for its role, XR-1500 is too large.

I know, table is not very pretty, so any questions are welcomed.

P.S. by sane quantity of radiators per reactor I imagine Excalibur being cooled by 2 or 3 VS-3750s and everything else proportional to that.

Edited by Psycho_zs
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Streetwind

Streetwind

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On 25.4.2016 at 9:31 PM, Psycho_zs said:

I know, table is not very pretty, so any questions are welcomed.

Okay, had some time to look at this today. First thing I notice is that I keep struggling to look up which radiator is which in the table - I have to keep going back to the picture, count through the radiators, then count through the table. An extra row with the names would greatly help this spreadsheet.

Second, the "Core Ex." value - what's that supposed to represent? Do you mean core transfer there? The math seems to suggest it, but I'm not sure why you renamed it?

What do you mean with the bit about reducing surface radiator area by 2? ...2 what, square meters?

For the reactors, what does "waste heat coefficient" mean? It looks like you're multiplying it with Ec output to... get the heat output? But that's not how much heat the reactors output at all. Those are off by like five times. Why not just directly take the reactor heat output for the purpose of the math? It's displayed in the VAB...

...wait. Don't tell me Nertea tweaked something in the plugin in response to that bug report I made a week or two back, and now all reactors suddenly produce five times as much heat? I tested the configs I made in my own game before making the pull request, but I didn't actually test the latest download. :confused: Anyway, the Excalibur should generate 2000 kW waste heat, not 9600, and need exactly 2 stock large thermal control systems, not ten of them. If that's borked up ingame, it would be one heck of a hilarious miscommunication.

 

Anyway, all criticism aside, I like that you've approached this systematically. I'm not entirely sure that core transfer per area is a useful measurement, though, because they are in no way related. You might think that it makes sense to build a radiator with a heat pump that is roughly sized in relation to the amount of area it has, but the thing is... they already are. The core transfer rate has nothing to do with how quickly a radiator pulls heat into itself. All that is governed by the normal heat system. The core heat system is completely separate, and just outlines an additional capability that the radiator performs on top of its usual "actively cooling the entire ship" duties. Core heat is specifically set up so that the heat removed from the core doesn't even really end up in the radiator; it's just handwaved away in order to ensure that things don't explode at high timewarp. You could basically give the tiniest radiator in the entire lineup the core transfer of the largest one, and fully load it, and it would barely grow lukewarm.

So I personally see the core transfer value entirely separate from the radiator's normal thermal properties. I understand that that is a matter of opinion, and perhaps you disagree. But in practical application in the game, the core transfer rate is literally just a value that says "inform a part that implements ModuleCoreHeat that this amount of heat-which-is-not-actually-real-heat is magically taken care of, so it can simulate its function properly". As such, basing the core transfer rate on its area is something you could do, if you really wanted to, but which doesn't end up having any actual game mechanics foundation. Like, there is no practical minimum size a radiator must have in order to be able to deal with x core transfer - technically it is there somewhere, but it's an absurdly low value.

...if that made any sense :P  Unfortunately I only have view access to the spreadsheet, so I cannot play with the numbers; but once I get home later today it'll be easy for me to set up something similar.

Edited by Streetwind
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Psycho_zs

Psycho_zs

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You can download it and play with it.

I've added a line with names.

Disregard my previous comment about waste heat coefficient. Yes, it is a multiplier for Ec production and has meaning inside the table.

Surface radiators area divided by 2 (as one size faces toward space).

I made the whole Core/Area metric just as a way to visualize correlation between part size and core heat transfer it can provide. Sanity check against small things making big accomplishments. And as you can see there is a quite large spread on that.

I did not know that radiators just magically destroy core heat, I thought they absorb it. Damn, that is stupid. :huh:

Edited by Psycho_zs
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Streetwind

Streetwind

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18 hours ago, Psycho_zs said:

I did not know that radiators just magically destroy core heat, I thought they absorb it. Damn, that is stupid. :huh:

It was apparently the only way they could safely let the simulation catch up with "background activity" like ISRU when loading a vessel.Or something. I'm not fully 'in the know' :P

In the meantime, if you really want to propose new stats, I recommend that the first step you do is looking up potential heat sources and comparing them to potential heat sinks. For instance, just taking stock KSP and Near Future into account (along with the USI->NFE compatibility config), we get a table somewhat like this. Coloring in by some slightly fuzzy rules about what radiators match what core heat sources (no more than 6 of a kind, straight multiples or fractions also match up to a point, minor over- or under-cooling allowed), you can get a rough idea of where radiators perform perfectly (green) or adequately (yellow) or poorly (uncolored).

Based on this informatiom, you can make informed decisions about which radiators appear to have few real use-cases, and which use-cases have few solutions available. This helps when trying to come up with numbers to propose as changes. For example, you'll see here that a core transfer of 36, which you proposed based on your math for one of the smallest Heat Control radiators, would be a poor choice because there is almost no use case for which it matches. Only one square would be colored in for it, namely the 100 kW case, and that merely yellow. On the other hand, for another radiator you suggested 2000, which would score at least one green box and several yellows here, and therefore would be a acceptable value to implement.

Since you usually want to be able to attach radiators in 2x or 4x symmetry, it makes sense to try and identify numbers which are halves or quarters of poorly supported use-cases, and find radiators that look suitable for that amount of core transfer. For example, a radiator at 350 core transfer would look very useful in the table above.

And, obviously, if you know any core heat sources from other mods, you can take them into consideration as well.

 

Edited by Streetwind
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