[1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (September 6)

[Streetwind]

15 hours ago, Three_Pounds said:

What actually is the purpose of the capacitors? I have never used them before.

Think of a battery that stores eight times the amount of Ec for the same mass. This enables extremely mass efficient spacecraft power solutions. Stock solar panels do something like 90 Ec/s/ton, NF Solar's high-tech panels do 120 Ec/s/ton, and NF Electrical's best reactors may do just over 200 Ec/s/ton in return for huge monetary investment. But with capacitors and a small trickle charging solution? As long as your burns don't exceed a certain length, you can easily get over 400 Ec/s/ton, and it isn't even expensive.

Does that sound a bit overpowered? If it does, that's because it is This is why capacitors must be manually discharged into a regular battery buffer to make the energy usable, and cannot be customized for specific discharge rates below a pretty high cutoff point. That's the tradeoff you must accept for deploying such a powerful solution.

Edited March 13, 2017 by Streetwind

[Supercheese]

I've actually had some problems with capacitors, where if I go to the capacitors panel and adjust the discharge rate mid-flight, it bugs out and only allows discharge settings between 4 and 8 EC/s.

[Nertea]

Confirmed, there's a bug with the capacitor panel, it's not reading the fixes that I made in properly. This bug will be resolved in the next version of NFE, probably in a week or three. 

[FreeThinker]

10 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Think of a battery that stores eight times the amount of Ec for the same mass. This enables extremely mass efficient spacecraft power solutions. Stock solar panels do something like 90 Ec/s/ton, NF Solar's high-tech panels do 120 Ec/s/ton, and NF Electrical's best reactors may do just over 200 Ec/s/ton in return for huge monetary investment. But with capacitors and a small trickle charging solution? As long as your burns don't exceed a certain length, you can easily get over 400 Ec/s/ton, and it isn't even expensive.

Does that sound a bit overpowered? If it does, that's because it is This is why capacitors must be manually discharged into a regular battery buffer to make the energy usable, and cannot be customized for specific discharge rates below a pretty high cutoff point. That's the tradeoff you must accept for deploying such a powerful solution.

Notice that IFS now contains a Super Capacitator that is fully automated, you only set the desired electric-charge percentage and it will be care free charge and discharge

[Streetwind]

51 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Notice that IFS now contains a Super Capacitator that is fully automated, you only set the desired electric-charge percentage and it will be care free charge and discharge

And anyone looking for that kind of thing is encouraged to give IFS a try.

[ChrisF0001]

Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but I notice that there is no entry for the 1.25m Short reactor (USI_Nuke_125_S) in NFElectricalUSI.cfg.  I don't know if it's a new addition, but it confused me a lot when all the other reactors use the shiny NFE interface and that one just has an on-off switch...

 

[DStaal]

8 minutes ago, ChrisF0001 said:

Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but I notice that there is no entry for the 1.25m Short reactor (USI_Nuke_125_S) in NFElectricalUSI.cfg.  I don't know if it's a new addition, but it confused me a lot when all the other reactors use the shiny NFE interface and that one just has an on-off switch...

It's a new part - added in the most recent MKS release.

[Wyzard]

On 3/12/2017 at 5:14 PM, Nertea said:

Yup some of them are certainly easier than others. However you know that as soon as I open the gates with that implementation, I'm going to start getting a bunch of requests to do the rest which are considerably less trivial

Heh, fair enough.

On a related note, I'd like to suggest one other thing that should be pretty easy and probably won't generate any tougher follow-on requests: a "construction port" version of the special octo-truss docking port, for use with RoverDude's "Konstruction" mod (see the video in that thread's OP).  It'd be the same model, a trivial change to the texture (adjust levels to make it brighter), and an additional module in the config.

(I'm willing to create the part and submit a PR if you'd like, but I'd be starting from the DDS-compressed version of the texture, so there might be a slight quality loss compared to editing the original.)

3 hours ago, ChrisF0001 said:

Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but I notice that there is no entry for the 1.25m Short reactor (USI_Nuke_125_S) in NFElectricalUSI.cfg.  I don't know if it's a new addition, but it confused me a lot when all the other reactors use the shiny NFE interface and that one just has an on-off switch...

I'm planning on submitting a patch for that sometime soon, probably next weekend (unless someone else does it first).

[FellipeC]

I just notice the PPD-1 Heavy Module have it's Life Support duplicated.

So I open the NFSpacecraftUSILifeSupport.cfg and found this

//PPD-1 Heavy Command Module
@PART[inlineCmdPod]:NEEDS[USILifeSupport]
{
	MODULE
	{
		name = ModuleLifeSupportRecycler
		CrewCapacity = 6
		RecyclePercent = .5
		ConverterName = Life Support Recyler
		StartActionName = Start Life Support Recyler
		StopActionName = Stop Life Support Recyler

		INPUT_RESOURCE
		{
			ResourceName = ElectricCharge
			Ratio = 1
		}
	}
}

//Mk4-1 Heavy Command Module
@PART[inlineCmdPod]:NEEDS[USILifeSupport]
{
	MODULE
	{
		name = ModuleLifeSupportRecycler
		CrewCapacity = 7
		RecyclePercent = .5
		ConverterName = Life Support Recyler
		StartActionName = Start Life Support Recyler
		StopActionName = Stop Life Support Recyler

		INPUT_RESOURCE
		{
			ResourceName = ElectricCharge
			Ratio = 1
		}
	}
}

Just need to change the second one to @PART[mk4-1pod]:NEEDS[USILifeSupport]

Edited March 14, 2017 by FellipeC
Typo

[Benjamin Kerman]

Created a pull request into the "dev" branch on GitHub for you, @Nertea, following @FellipeC's instructions above. 

Hope that helps!

[Hardcard]

On 12/3/2017 at 6:05 PM, Nertea said:

This is intended behaviour to stop people from using capacitors as really long term trickle batteries.

 

On 13/3/2017 at 9:09 AM, Streetwind said:

Does that sound a bit overpowered? If it does, that's because it is This is why capacitors must be manually discharged into a regular battery buffer to make the energy usable, and cannot be customized for specific discharge rates below a pretty high cutoff point. That's the tradeoff you must accept for deploying such a powerful solution.

 

Well, the whole point of technology is to make things easier/better/possible, so what's the point of having humongous capacitor banks and power hungry xenon engines if they end up being impractical?

Anyway, only being able to power those hungry xenon engines for 3 minutes or less doesn't seem that OP to me, it's still a nuisance 

In any case, I was able to locate the cfg file involved (capacitor-25.cfg) and lower the discharge rate from 3200 to 320 Ec/s, so the UI slider would let me go down to 160 Ec/s 

Hey, if Kerbals are smart enough to build nuclear rocket engines and all that, I say they are perfectly capable of using capacitor banks to temporarily power those xenon engines  

Edited March 14, 2017 by Hardcard

[Streetwind]

23 minutes ago, Hardcard said:

Well, the whole point of technology is to make things easier/better/possible, so what's the point of having humongous capacitor banks and power hungry xenon engines if they end up being impractical?

Impractical how? In that you have to open a menu and click a button as a resource depletes? That doesn't seem out of place in a game like KSP at all, which is a lot about hitting a button when a resource depletes (we call it "staging"). And all things considered - especially the extreme cheese factor possible - being asked to mount a 200 kg buffer battery while you're busy saving several tons and over a million funds on power generation equipment is a fairly minor downside. Heck, if capacitors weren't so underused because almost nobody understands their true potential from the part info available in the editor, I'd lobby to have them nerfed more! They're crazy as heck!

 

But hey, you succeeded in tweaking things for yourself, so more power (literally) to you

[Guest]

Capacitors are VERY useful.

You need battery buffer as large as largest capacitor, and you need to manually discharge them one by one, but as emergency power source they are indispensable.

[Sassenach]

if you want automatic discharge/recharge I expect you could rig something with kOS no?

[smotheredrun]

Capacitors are great for when you break your solar panels and need a charge while you wait for your reactor(s) to spool up.....

[Guest]

KOS is kinda painful subject to me, because this lazy one never summoned enough will and strength to learn how to use it.

Cats ...

[Nertea]

15 hours ago, Wyzard said:

On a related note, I'd like to suggest one other thing that should be pretty easy and probably won't generate any tougher follow-on requests: a "construction port" version of the special octo-truss docking port, for use with RoverDude's "Konstruction" mod (see the video in that thread's OP).  It'd be the same model, a trivial change to the texture (adjust levels to make it brighter), and an additional module in the config.

 

Wouldn't it be better to have a custom model for that? It's something I've been planning to support, but it's out of scope for < 1.0 stuff for sure. 

4 hours ago, Hardcard said:

Well, the whole point of technology is to make things easier/better/possible, so what's the point of having humongous capacitor banks and power hungry xenon engines if they end up being impractical?

We had fully automated capacitors at one point. The thing is, at that point they're just 8x mass efficient batteries, which is fairly boring...

 

In other news, I completely rewrote a huge chunk of the NFP plugin for better everything. This moves us closer to a release on this version of NFP. 

In other, other news I finished the models and effects for the 3 new 2.5 m engine models. Check out the album! 

[DStaal]

2 minutes ago, Nertea said:

Wouldn't it be better to have a custom model for that? It's something I've been planning to support, but it's out of scope for < 1.0 stuff for sure.

If you want to do a custom model, fine (your models are always gorgeous), but RoverDude uses the stock model for his and I'm using the normal KPBS models for them in my KPBStoMKS pack.  (I didn't even recolor...)  Honestly, even a four-line MM patch version would be fine in my opinion.

[Wyzard]

2 minutes ago, Nertea said:

Wouldn't it be better to have a custom model for that? It's something I've been planning to support, but it's out of scope for < 1.0 stuff for sure.

If you want to make one, sure, but RoverDude's construction port models are just the stock docking ports with brightened textures.  You could start with that, and then maybe add a custom model later when time and priorities permit.

2 minutes ago, Nertea said:

In other, other news I finished the models and effects for the 3 new 2.5 m engine models. Check out the album!

Looks great!

[Nertea]

I don't like doing kinda half baked models like that

[Benjamin Kerman]

Did you take a look at the pull request by Benjamin Cronin (me!) on github?

[EDIT] Never mind, turns out I was an idiot. I forked your code and then created my own pull request... for myself...

[EDIT 2] Figured it out... pull request created. Changed one line, per issue raised earlier.

Edited March 14, 2017 by Benjamin Kerman

[smotheredrun]

Well, the new models look great!  Will they be ship breaking? No big deal if they are, we all just have to remember to retire our active ships and delete the old parts before upgrading......

[Streetwind]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

In other, other news I finished the models and effects for the 3 new 2.5 m engine models. Check out the album! 

Hrrrnnnggggghhh~~!

 

47 minutes ago, smotheredrun said:

Well, the new models look great!  Will they be ship breaking?

If they are inline with something - in other words, both top and bottom node connected to something - there's potential for screwyness in case the model length or node position changes.

For engines that are simply stuck to the back of something? Shouldn't be negatively affected.

[Nertea]

1 hour ago, smotheredrun said:

Well, the new models look great!  Will they be ship breaking? No big deal if they are, we all just have to remember to retire our active ships and delete the old parts before upgrading......

There won't be any part name changes or anything, but because the zero points and attach node positions will change, some of your ships might look a little weird. 

1 hour ago, Benjamin Kerman said:

Did you take a look at the pull request by Benjamin Cronin (me!) on github?

[EDIT] Never mind, turns out I was an idiot. I forked your code and then created my own pull request... for myself...

[EDIT 2] Figured it out... pull request created. Changed one line, per issue raised earlier.

Yeah I'll take a look at it eventually. No promises on when though!

[Nertea]

Here is a small preview of the revisions to the reactor window:

Essentially, most readouts have been iconified and cleaned up. Additionally, you can now persistently choose an icon and rename your reactors in the UI interface (a sometimes-requested feature). No more losing your backup power reactor in the mess of other reactors.

There's also a new timewarp limit feature, which you can activate to auto-shutdown a reactor past a certain timewarp level (off by default).

There's still some positional tweaking required but it's looking pretty nice I think. The capacitor window is getting a similar revisit.