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

[spacegeek37]

So, I installed Near Future Exploration for the first time, and I have to say I absolutely love the part design as well as the reflectors and relay components.

But, after taking a look at the stats, even pairing transmitters with reflectors leaves them extremely weak. Am I missing something, or are these parts massively inferior to stock antennas?

[Streetwind]

21 hours ago, Vas said:

I'll try once more just to see if I can make it work, but ultimately its unlikely to be something I'll ever use in the first place. Even if I make it work. I just don't like it. Kinda makes my ships ugly and lopsided.

If you happen to also run ReStock, you can probably create a custom blacklist that unloads the reflectors. Otherwise, you can use a mod called Janitor's Closet to filter out things you don't want to see in the editor.

 

18 hours ago, SpaceGreer said:

I have some difficulty with the cluster mounts; 

Which KSP and mod versions are you running?

[SpaceGreer]

KSP 1.10, and the latest Near Future Launchers. R

[KeaKaka]

1 hour ago, SpaceGreer said:

KSP 1.10

That's your problem right there.

[SpaceGreer]

Fair enough. I'll just wait for an update! Works well enough in the meantime. 

[Virtualgenius]

 

21 hours ago, Streetwind said:

If you happen to also run ReStock, you can probably create a custom blacklist that unloads the reflectors. Otherwise, you can use a mod called Janitor's Closet to filter out things you don't want to see in the editor.

 

 

+1 for janitors closet you can do a permanent prune with it if you only want certain parts or can just hide stuff its awesome for finding stuff as well

[GJdude]

On 7/14/2020 at 2:14 PM, davidy12 said:

Got a bug in 1.8.1 Engine mounts aren't showing there shrouds

I remember having a similar problem, make sure you have the latest versions of B9PartSwitch and ModuleManager installed.

Even though they might not be listed as compatible with 1.8.1, they absolutely are.

[Vegvisir]

Heya.  I'm wondering how easy it is to revert the capacitor textures?  Or at least just the 0.625 one?  I poked around in the files and saw now they are on a single image sheet; couldn't really tell which bit to replace.  I'm really fond of the blue texture and how it looks making my probes' battery-and-capacitor "power core".

[adriangm44]

On 11/23/2018 at 7:28 AM, MaximumThrust said:

Just curious, why the Mk3B 'Pandora' have this flat part on top? This seems not really aerodynamic. 

And awesome work! I glad I was able to port everything to a 1.3.1 install.

Anyone knows what goes on top of the Pandora Pod? (right one)

[TBenz]

34 minutes ago, adriangm44 said:

Anyone knows what goes on top of the Pandora Pod? (right one)

AFAIK there is nothing special that covers that protrusion. In general I typically slap a shielded docking port or MK16-XL chute on top. Really any 1.25m part fits up there fine. I've never noticed any major aerodynamic issues with the Pandora, so I don't think that exposed section needs to be covered specially.

Edited July 22, 2020 by TBenz

[davidy12]

16 minutes ago, adriangm44 said:

Anyone knows what goes on top of the Pandora Pod? (right one)

They're the same thing and I usually put a docking port on the top.

[SpaceGreer]

Is there any chance you would consider increasing the heat tolerance of the NR-U1 Upper Stage Mount? It's currently 2000K and I use it on my starship-esq ship. Everytime I come back from the Mun it overheats, taking the engines with it but everything else survives.

I've tried airbrakes, ablative airbrakes, radiators attached radially. No luck...reaches 2052K and ...boom.

Great mods btw, love em! Thanks,R

Edited July 22, 2020 by SpaceGreer
Typos

[TBenz]

1 hour ago, SpaceGreer said:

Is there any chance you would consider increasing the heat tolerance of the NR-U1 Upper Stage Mount? It's currently 2000K and I use it on my starship-esq ship. Everytime I come back from the Mun it overheats, taking the engines with it but everything else survives.

I've tried airbrakes, ablative airbrakes, radiators attached radially. No luck...reaches 2052K and ...boom.

Great mods btw, love em! Thanks,R

It's pretty easy to make your own config file that does this. I whipped the following up in a couple minutes on my phone. Assuming I did get all the syntax right (again, on my phone so I haven't tested it at all), you should be able to use this to do what you want. Just copy this into an empty text file, move that file into the GameData folder that mods are installed in, then change the file extension from '.txt' to '.cfg'.

//Increase NR-U1 heat tolerance to 2500k
@Part[nflv-cluster-mount-upper-5-1]:AFTER[NearFutureLaunchVehicles]
{
 @maxTemp = 2500
}

 

[dlrk]

I'm looking for some help understanding the use of ion engines and capacitors. Capacitors discharge so much so quickly, I'm not sure how to use them, and ion engines seem to use so much electricity, that they'd either require excessively heavy batteries, solar panels or reactors. I'm pretty sure I'm missing a concept here.

[Nertea]

On 7/21/2020 at 2:36 AM, Vegvisir said:

Heya.  I'm wondering how easy it is to revert the capacitor textures?  Or at least just the 0.625 one?  I poked around in the files and saw now they are on a single image sheet; couldn't really tell which bit to replace.  I'm really fond of the blue texture and how it looks making my probes' battery-and-capacitor "power core".

Get an older version of the mod and get the old ones out. 

4 hours ago, adriangm44 said:

Anyone knows what goes on top of the Pandora Pod? (right one)

Anything you like :). 

44 minutes ago, dlrk said:

I'm looking for some help understanding the use of ion engines and capacitors. Capacitors discharge so much so quickly, I'm not sure how to use them, and ion engines seem to use so much electricity, that they'd either require excessively heavy batteries, solar panels or reactors. I'm pretty sure I'm missing a concept here.

Capacitors are 1/8th the mass of batteries. You can have a battery buffer and recharge it with capacitors for significantly less mass. It's in fact insanely overpowered, as an example there used to be full capacitor automation which made game breaking ships quite possible. 

If you want to be 'realistic', this capacitor method doesn't really work - you do need excessively heavy power generation. That's kinda how high power electric propulsion works.

[SpaceGreer]

1 hour ago, TBenz said:

It's pretty easy to make your own config file that does this. I whipped the following up in a couple minutes on my phone. Assuming I did get all the syntax right (again, on my phone so I haven't tested it at all), you should be able to use this to do what you want. Just copy this into an empty text file, move that file into the GameData folder that mods are installed in, then change the file extension from '.txt' to '.cfg'.

//Increase NR-U1 heat tolerance to 2500k
@Part[nflv-cluster-mount-upper-5-1]:AFTER[NearFutureLaunchVehicles]
{
 @maxTemp = 2500
}

 

Thanks for this - I'll give it a shot! I assume Nertea won't mind?

[Nertea]

I don't mind, you can do whatever you want to your install. 

[SpaceGreer]

12 minutes ago, Nertea said:

I don't mind, you can do whatever you want to your install. 

Sweet - I'll give this a go. 

I did discover that if it fly prograde on reentry, it takes the cluster out of the plasma stream and it's fine. However, this reduces the control I have on where I land, so this will be better.

Thanks! R

[DStaal]

2 hours ago, dlrk said:

I'm looking for some help understanding the use of ion engines and capacitors. Capacitors discharge so much so quickly, I'm not sure how to use them, and ion engines seem to use so much electricity, that they'd either require excessively heavy batteries, solar panels or reactors. I'm pretty sure I'm missing a concept here.

To expand a bit on what Nertea said above:

Capacitors give you burst power.  For your ion-powered ship, most of the time you are sipping EC, just coasting between burns.  You only need drive's full EC requirements during the burn.

So break it down: You need enough generation to power the ship when you're *not* doing a burn, plus a bit extra to charge the capacitors.  You need enough battery for normal use and to dump your capacitors into (if they dump faster than you need for your engines).  And then you need enough battery+capacitors to handle your longest burn.  So you save weight in power generation and/or batteries by using capacitors instead - but you'll have to plan how you do your burns, to make sure you have enough storage.  (And that they aren't to close together.)

[dlrk]

@DStaal

Thanks for the info. So, Im trying to design a probe as you describe, but what I keep running into is that the smallest capacitor discharges at 40ec/s, while my engine takes 29.99ec/s , and the burn I need it to do appears to take about 10 minutes. So it seems like I'd still need an enormous, heavy battery. Am I mistaken/missing something? It appears that a sufficiently large capacitor to handle the whole burn would discharge to quickly, even at the lowest setting.

[TBenz]

39 minutes ago, dlrk said:

@DStaal

Thanks for the info. So, Im trying to design a probe as you describe, but what I keep running into is that the smallest capacitor discharges at 40ec/s, while my engine takes 29.99ec/s , and the burn I need it to do appears to take about 10 minutes. So it seems like I'd still need an enormous, heavy battery. Am I mistaken/missing something? It appears that a sufficiently large capacitor to handle the whole burn would discharge to quickly, even at the lowest setting.

You still need a pretty big battery, but much smaller than you would need without the capacitors. As an example, if you had a battery that holds 9000 ec (enough for 5 minutes) and a capacitor that holds 9000 ec, you could burn through the battery, then dump the ec from the capacitor into the battery. This would weigh a good deal less than a battery with 18000 ec. You can optimize things even more by balancing battery, power use, and capacitors.

[DStaal]

7 minutes ago, TBenz said:

You still need a pretty big battery, but much smaller than you would need without the capacitors. As an example, if you had a battery that holds 9000 ec (enough for 5 minutes) and a capacitor that holds 9000 ec, you could burn through the battery, then dump the ec from the capacitor into the battery. This would weigh a good deal less than a battery with 18000 ec. You can optimize things even more by balancing battery, power use, and capacitors.

Yep. Worth remembering also is that you can charge one capacitor while discharging another as well - So if you have a capacitor discharging at 40 EC/s, and an engine using 30 EC/s, you can in theory route 10 EC/s to a different capacitor.  (Dependent on their charge rate, of course.)  So you could do multiple small capacitors here, and feed them from one to the other, and then re-discharging a capacitor you've filled or partly filled during the burn...

Here's an example craft I built recently:

You'll notice that it has three different sizes of capacitors, and only modest battery for the three ion engines.  A burn requires careful juggling of activating different capacitors at different points in the burn (sometimes letting the batteries run down first, sometimes keeping them full, etc.), but it stores a *lot* more EC for the same mass than you'd get with just batteries.

[RyGuy_McFly]

Hi there, having an issue with NFLV I've seen mentioned once or twice a long time ago here but never really addressed. All of the engine cluster mounts have no visible shroud when in flight, but appears in the VAB. Has no effect in game, but takes away from visuals. Updating B9 Part Switch was listed as a solution, but I have the highest available version for my game (using B9PS version 2.14.0 in KSP 1.8.1, all mods from CKAN). Any help appreciated.

[TBenz]

57 minutes ago, RyGuy_McFly said:

Hi there, having an issue with NFLV I've seen mentioned once or twice a long time ago here but never really addressed. All of the engine cluster mounts have no visible shroud when in flight, but appears in the VAB. Has no effect in game, but takes away from visuals. Updating B9 Part Switch was listed as a solution, but I have the highest available version for my game (using B9PS version 2.14.0 in KSP 1.8.1, all mods from CKAN). Any help appreciated.

The update to B9 that fixes the issue is 2.15.2. CKAN is limiting your version on B9 to 2.14.0 because that was the last version officially compiled for 1.8.1. You could either try updating B9 to at least 2.15.2, or updating KSP to 1.9.1. It's likely that 2.15.2 will actually work fine in 1.8.1, but there's no guarantee. Similarly, many mods should be updated to at least 1.9.1 by now, and many more that weren't may still work fine in 1.9.1, but there's also no guarantee that every mod you have will work in 1.9.1. 

Edited July 25, 2020 by TBenz

[coyotesfrontier]

On 7/23/2020 at 11:29 AM, DStaal said:

A burn requires careful juggling of activating different capacitors at different points in the burn

If you have the Breaking Ground DLC installed, you can use the KAL controller to automate it