Activate Radiator Panels?

[Zosma Procyon]

Why do the flat radiator panels have to be activated now? They were much better as passively functioning parts.

[Wyzard]

Hmm, I hadn't noticed that.  Interesting.  They do draw power, and they're not always needed, so it makes sense to be able to turn them off; it's just a little strange that they're off by default when they draw so little power and they used to be always on.

FWIW, you can turn them on in the editor and they'll be on at launch.

[Snark]

The fact that they were always on was a hole in 1.0.5.  It meant that they were always sucking power with no way to turn them off.  It's why I wrote this mod: 

...1.1 fixed this oversight, and the behavior was made stock (which means my mod's now obsolete).  A lot of people are very happy about that.  (However, others aren't, as this thread shows!)  Unfortunately, it's not possible to please everyone.

 

10 hours ago, Wyzard said:

it's just a little strange that they're off by default when they draw so little power

It may not seem like much, but if you have a ship with a lot of them, it adds up.  It caused a lot of problems for people.

If you want them to be on by default, it would take only a little snippet of ModuleManager config to do that.  Assuming you have ModuleManager installed (which you almost certainly do, if you're running any mods at all), all you have to do is make a file anywhere in your GameData directory that has the ".cfg" extension, and do something like this:

// this first line means "all radiators, except the folding ones"
@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleActiveRadiator],!MODULE[ModuleDeployableRadiator]] {
    @MODULE[ModuleActiveRadiator] {
        @IsCooling = true
    }
}

...I'm not in front of my KSP machine at the moment, so I can't test it right now, but I think that ought to do the trick.