Mini Mod - More RTGs Dev

[oren]

I'm working on a mod that goes on top of Nertea's DecayingRTGs add-on from Near Future Electrical. It adds three new types of RTGs with different decay rates and power ratings.

- Polarium RTG (red) gives a staggering 190 ec/s, but decays with a half life of 0.03 years. (real-life analog: Polonium-210)

- Kerbium RTG (blue) gives only 0.15 ec/s, but decays with a half life of 40 years. (real-life analog: Americium-241)

- Boppium RTG (green) is cheaper than other RTGs, but has a half-life of 2.5 years and only gives 0.60 ec/s. (real-life analog: Strontium-90)

- For reference, the regular Blutonium RTGs give 0.75 ec/s and have a half-life of 8 years. (real-life analog: Plutonium-238)

These RTGs are just crude recolors of the stock model.

Download on CurseForge

Any comments questions are of course welcome!

Edited March 16, 2017 by oren
added link

[oren]

I've improved my recoloring a bit. Here's a screencap

[Zhetaan]

So far as licensing is concerned, you may wish to make your own rather than invite the messiness that may come of redistribution of stock assets, but given that these RTGs are simply recolourings of the stock model, you may be able to get away with explicit attribution in the same fashion as OhioBob did with Eve Optimized Engines or MOARdV did with RasterPropMonitor.

I would suggest, at least as a trial, that you recolour the end caps rather than the middle.  Admittedly, a round dot on the end is less noticeable than the current stripes in the centre, but I think there's a lot to be said for the subtle approach:  you can tell at a glance in the VAB whether your RTG is of a particular type, but when you lay them on their sides to install radially (as most people I've seen do), they don't break up the visual appeal of the ship with a too-highly contrasting colour.

I would also suggest that you avoid using blue for anything other than Blutonium in order to avoid confusion.

I see that you took the standard RTG and used that as a template to get very good conversions for the rest of your RTGs.  Nevertheless, I would suggest that you modify it further to push your Kerbium up to .15 EC/s, your Polarium down to 190 EC/s with a half-life of .03 years, and Boppium up to .6 EC/s with a half-life of 2.5 years.  These modifications are slight but I think they will encourage more varied use of RTGs along with their other helpful property of being slightly more realistic.  My reasoning is in the spoiler tag.

Do you have prices in mind, and have you given any thought to tech tree placement?  There's some realism in having the RTGs become available at nearly the same time (the major difference is in fuel pellets, and the different kinds of fuel all became available at about the same time), but then again, there's realism in a probes-first tech tree, too, so perhaps there's something to be said for making a cheap-but-awful Boppium RTG available earlier.  Differences in the amount of necessary shielding also would alter the mass, if you want to go that far.

 

Spoiler

These are the best values I could find for a given fuel pellet of each type, though 'best' is a hideously subjective judgement--that's why I am so careful to frame my suggestions as suggestions.

²³⁸Pu:  λ = 87.7 years  Power = .56 W/g

⁹⁰Sr:  λ = 28.8 years   Power = .46 W/g

²⁴¹Am:  λ = 432 years   Power = .11 W/g

²¹⁰Po:  λ = .378 years  Power = 140 W/g

In-game, by taking 9.1% of the half-life and multiplying the power output by a conversion constant of 1.34, this equates to:

²³⁸Pu:  λ = 8.0 years  Power = .75 EC/s

⁹⁰Sr:  λ = 2.6 years   Power = .616 EC/s

²⁴¹Am:  λ = 39.1 years   Power = .147 EC/s

²¹⁰Po:  λ = .0344 years  Power = 187.6 EC/s

I think they will be helpful to encourage more varied use of RTGs because they raise the power curves of the Kerbium and Boppium models.  This makes them more attractive for more mission types--it seems to me rather pointless to have four kinds of RTG available only for the players to say, 'I'll just use this one.'