Why are my radiators being useless?

[Grumman]

I have a spaceplane in orbit that has a nuclear rocket, a large stationary radiator and a small deployable radiator all connected to the same fuel tank.

Despite having not one but two radiators, the rocket does not cool down at all, even over multiple orbits. Why?

[sal_vager]

Are you absolutely sure about that?

Press alt+F12 to enable the debug menu, select the physics tab, and then thermal, click the checkbox to enable thermal data in the action menu.

Now open the action menu on various parts of your craft, you should see a lot of heat being radiated from the thermal control panels, in fact we can see exactly this thanks to the colour overlay.

You should also see a very high heat level in the tank and engine, higher than the thermal control systems can deal with presently, as indicated by the brighter colour of those parts.

Heat levels should be dropping, but if you're as hot as you look to be, it will take some time.

[Grumman]

Heat levels are not dropping. The surface temperature rises and falls with the sun, but the core temperatures are not changing at all on any of the parts - not on the nuke, the RAPIERs or on any of the other parts.

[sal_vager]

Okay then this is a bug, not a gameplay question, so I'll move it over, it may be that KSP is using the old physics values, how do you start KSP ?

[Grumman]

Okay then this is a bug, not a gameplay question, so I'll move it over, it may be that KSP is using the old physics values, how do you start KSP ?

I run the game by running KSP.exe from the main Kerbal Space Program folder.

Looking at Physics.cfg, the values for skinSkinConductionFactor, skinInteralConductionFactor and shieldedConductionFactor are all 0. Would this be the cause of the problem?

[sal_vager]

Yes that could be it, was the file ever deleted ?

Also where is KSP installed?

[Grumman]

Yes that could be it, was the file ever deleted ?

The file was last modified on the 29th of June, the same day it was created. Beyond that, I could not tell you.

Also where is KSP installed?

It is installed in my Program Files (x86)/Steam/SteamApps/Common/ folder

[sal_vager]

Okay, please try the file here, it should work.

[Grumman]

Thank you, that did fix the problem. Heat is now flowing correctly through the ship, and the nuclear rocket quickly dropped from its almost-exploding status.

[sal_vager]

Great! Keep a backup of that file in case this happens again, I'd mark it read-only as well, though it can be edited from the debug menu (can't be read-only for that).

[Grumman]

Great! Keep a backup of that file in case this happens again, I'd mark it read-only as well, though it can be edited from the debug menu (can't be read-only for that).

I will keep the backup, as I do with all mods and whatnot. Last time, I might have deleted the config file to force the game to rebuild it - I know that I've done this for ModuleManager, and the recommendation to do the same thing for one of KSP's config files seems familiar, but I cannot say for certain, since it's been a month and a half since it happened, if it did.