KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread

[Laethen]

Hi all,

Looking for some help in troubleshooting my problem. I'm new to this mod, but I watched the video

in order to ensure that I got the right setup and I am still getting 0 thrust out of both the thermal nozzle and thermal jet. I'm on KSP 1.04. Any ideas? I am nearly 100% certain I installed the mod correctly.

Thanks,

L

[Profit-]

Make sure your reactor is running and you have air intakes.

[Hazelnut]

I'm having trouble getting a craft which can generate the 2.5GW required by the vista engine, dusty 3.5m will do it until it heats up and throttles the power. Is there any way of avoiding/mitigating this thermal throttling, because the otherwise the full power is only seen just after switch on for a very short time which seems a bit useless really. This is the most advanced reactor I've unlocked so far and the other 3 can't generate enough power because the upgraded efficiency of the thermal generator is <50%.

I tried the magnetic nozzle but could only get 8 kN thrust from it with dusty, guessing the stated max thrust will only be seen with antimatter reactors maybe?

EDIT: Well I figured out that you need radiators attached directly to the reactor, now with 16 of the largest stock rads on there (clipping though each other and looking very ugly) I can get 5 mins full 300kN thrust, going down to 200kN after 6 mins and slowly decreasing. I can live with that. I tried shutting down the reactor but couldn't figure out how to switch it back on, no options after letting all the heat dissipate.

Edited July 10, 2015 by Hazelnut

[Laethen]

Make sure your reactor is running and you have air intakes.

Yup, reactor is running and I have air intakes... Regardless, I thought you didn't need air intakes for the thermal nozzle? Any other ideas? Is this mod known to not run with another mod? I have KIS and KAS running right now even though they are out of date for 1.04.

[Laethen]

Well... Update to my previous post. Looks like I get thrust for a fraction of a second, then it goes to 0 thrust.

[Profit-]

Yup, reactor is running and I have air intakes... Regardless, I thought you didn't need air intakes for the thermal nozzle? Any other ideas? Is this mod known to not run with another mod? I have KIS and KAS running right now even though they are out of date for 1.04.

Ohh the nozzle not the jet.... Double check and make sure it is not using something like lithium or something your spacecraft does not have. Just a sec and I will whip up a small one for you.

.... ANd on checking, I am running into a problem with the reactor-thermal nozzle combo as well.. It does not work with liquid fuel, and it is not producing as much thrust as it should be for the MSR or the Gas Core, I do believe you have found a bug.

You can still use the thermal turbojet to good effect currently.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22126744/Little%20Nuke.craft

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I'm having trouble getting a craft which can generate the 2.5GW required by the vista engine, dusty 3.5m will do it until it heats up and throttles the power. Is there any way of avoiding/mitigating this thermal throttling, because the otherwise the full power is only seen just after switch on for a very short time which seems a bit useless really. This is the most advanced reactor I've unlocked so far and the other 3 can't generate enough power because the upgraded efficiency of the thermal generator is <50%.

I tried the magnetic nozzle but could only get 8 kN thrust from it with dusty, guessing the stated max thrust will only be seen with antimatter reactors maybe?

EDIT: Well I figured out that you need radiators attached directly to the reactor, now with 16 of the largest stock rads on there (clipping though each other and looking very ugly) I can get 5 mins full 300kN thrust, going down to 200kN after 6 mins and slowly decreasing. I can live with that. I tried shutting down the reactor but couldn't figure out how to switch it back on, no options after letting all the heat dissipate.

Dusty Plasma, Charged Particle generator/NO THERMAL GENERATOR, huge radiators that deploy.

Fission reactors currently cannot be restarted, in any manner that I can find. They use to be able to be restarted with a kerbal on EVA. (oops just rechecked and you CAN restart them now with a EVA Kerbal again)

Edited July 11, 2015 by Profit-

[Profit-]

I successfully overcame some issues and managed to land one of my interstellar explorer vessels I made on Eve. I am also in a good position to return to kerbin as well. Have plenty of Thrust to weight and delta V.

*Side note: Landing and launching again takes nearly 20 grams of anti-matter, but the ship holds about 1120 grams so it can land and launch a few times.

Edited July 11, 2015 by Profit-

[Nansuchao]

Landed on EVE with Plasma Thrusters???

[includao]

I have a question. Once my molten reactors are cooled completely, they can be refueled or have their fuel type swapped. Do I need something like TAC Fuel Balancer to do that once I have my ship docked to the reactor?

[Profit-]

Landed on EVE with Plasma Thrusters???

Well technically a plasma thruster, singular but Yes, AND I took off again with a TWR of about 2, reached orbit, and had about 83% of a full tank of reaction mass. Nitrogen works wonders, and you can collect tons from eve's atmosphere, or carbon dioxide if you prefer.

Ships weight is about 1100 tons, about 200 of that is nitrogen. Power supply is about 560 Gigawatts from a anti-matter generator and I have the heat dissipation in the atmosphere to counteract it with the radiators the ship is sitting on.

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I have a question. Once my molten reactors are cooled completely, they can be refueled or have their fuel type swapped. Do I need something like TAC Fuel Balancer to do that once I have my ship docked to the reactor?

Kerbal EVA. Just make sure you have enough room in a fuel container to put it all in, and a way to reprocess the reactors.

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In case anyone wonders Molten Salt reactors by design are supposed to be able to be reprocessed and refueled while hot and in operation in real life, they just cannot be in this mod.

Edited July 11, 2015 by Profit-

[Nansuchao]

@FreeThinker, what do you think about this?

http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=09068562&IDKey=77B1702803AB&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO1%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526d%3DPALL%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsrchnum.htm%2526r%3D1%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526s1%3D9%2C068%2C562.PN.%2526OS%3DPN%2F9%2C068%2C562%2526RS%3DPN%2F9%2C068%2C562

[Profit-]

@FreeThinker, what do you think about this?

http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=09068562&IDKey=77B1702803AB&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO1%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526d%3DPALL%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsrchnum.htm%2526r%3D1%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526s1%3D9%2C068%2C562.PN.%2526OS%3DPN%2F9%2C068%2C562%2526RS%3DPN%2F9%2C068%2C562

In operation it is technically indistinguishable from the arc-jet already included.

[Profit-]

Just was noticing along with other fun, the ISRU still does not correctly convert Ammonia and Uranium-Tetraflouride to Uranium-Nitride.

It does mine uranium and thorium but I am unsure it does anything else.

[Alkahest]

Something in the new version of this mod locks up the buttons in my VAB I'm not sure why.

[Cosmonauth]

Just was noticing along with other fun, the ISRU still does not correctly convert Ammonia and Uranium-Tetraflouride to Uranium-Nitride.

It does mine uranium and thorium but I am unsure it does anything else.

Indeed, it mines only uranium and thorium. I think reprocessing part works almost fine, but it is really disappointment that i cant extract some water. Maybe i did something wrong, but ISRU (biggest one) has no options to extract water on the surface of Mun, despite the fact that water is present on the Mun according to Fractal's wiki, as well as my ingame resource survey.

UPD: just landed my refinery on Minmus. Water extracting works fine, so I can refuel my interplanetary ships with Liquid Hydrogen =)

UPD2: I got a bit confused with resource configuration in CRP. It seems that Mun has all stuff I tried to harvest, so I need to figure out how to find it. I did orbital survey and landed my refinery in right place according to it results, but it didn't work. Why?

Edited July 12, 2015 by Cosmonauth

[FreeThinker]

Just was noticing along with other fun, the ISRU still does not correctly convert Ammonia and Uranium-Tetraflouride to Uranium-Nitride.

It does mine uranium and thorium but I am unsure it does anything else.

Notice Uranium TerraFloride is replaced by EnrichedUranium.

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In operation it is technically indistinguishable from the arc-jet already included.

Actually, what they appear to describe is a Uranium augmented Inertial Fusion. The big advantage is that you would need a lot less power to initiate the inertial fusion process. In the game, we could implement this by allowing different kinds of fuel for the Vista Engine. This also reminds me about (Deep Space Exploration Vessel (DSEV) Fusionpellets which also uses pulsed inertial fusion. They are both kind of like micro fusion bombs. The difference is that DSEV uses a Deuterium + Helium4 mix while this design uses a pellets with Uranium + Deuterium + Tritium mix. This allows inertial fusion to be achieved much easier, and not requiring the high amounts of power when you just blast it with lasers. The Disadvantage is that it would require a lot more mass and therefore reduce effective Maximum Isp. Still it would be interesting as a more primitive, yet effective method of fusion propulsion, that would not require Giga watts to operate.

Edited July 12, 2015 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

In case anyone wonders Molten Salt reactors by design are supposed to be able to be reprocessed and refueled while hot and in operation in real life, they just cannot be in this mod.

Interesting, but I bet it's a kind of tricky with all the radiation and heat still being active. We could make it so that skilled engineers would be better at it than unskilled engineers. An unskilled engineer would have to wait until the the reactor is fully cooled down(like its currently). A one star engineer might be able switch and activate the reactor at 90% cooled down. This would make a highly skilled engineers worthwhile to bring along.

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I tried the magnetic nozzle but could only get 8 kN thrust from it with dusty, guessing the stated max thrust will only be seen with antimatter reactors maybe?

Well this might seem useless untill you take the high Isp into account. If you convert it the the same Isp of a chemical rocket, it would be 400 kN ! Notice, that once you can accelerate time warp (which I'm working on), you will notice that 8kN will be incredible powerful. Allowing you to reach very high speeds over time, enough to escape the solar system at real scale and travel to nearby stars. Something impossible with chemical rockets due to the terror of the rocket equation.

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*Side note: Landing and launching again takes nearly 20 grams of anti-matter, but the ship holds about 1120 grams so it can land and launch a few times.

Just where were you able to collect so much antimatter and how to you transport it?

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Indeed, it mines only uranium and thorium. I think reprocessing part works almost fine, but it is really disappointment that i cant extract some water. Maybe i did something wrong, but ISRU (biggest one) has no options to extract water on the surface of Mun, despite the fact that water is present on the Mun according to Fractal's wiki, as well as my ingame resource survey.

UPD: just landed my refinery on Minmus. Water extracting works fine, so I can refuel my interplanetary ships with Liquid Hydrogen =)

UPD2: I got a bit confused with resource configuration in CRP. It seems that Mun has all stuff I tried to harvest, so I need to figure out how to find it. I did orbital survey and landed my refinery in right place according to it results, but it didn't work. Why?

Possibly the scans and visual representation are out of sink. We need to replace the whole resource mining somehow and replace it with something more reliable.

Edited July 12, 2015 by FreeThinker

[includao]

Interesting, but I bet it's a kind of tricky with all the radiation and heat still being active. We could make it so that skilled engineers would be better at it than unskilled engineers. An unskilled engineer would have to wait until the the reactor is fully cooled down(like its currently). A one star engineer might be able switch and activate the reactor at 90% cooled down. This would make a highly skilled engineers worthwhile to bring along.

I love this idea. Making highly skilled engineers even more relevant.

[FreeThinker]

Thanks for looking into this some more. This is the same behavior I've recently observed.

I was activating all 4 tranceivers as receivers via groupings on a plasma engine relay satellite until I could switch to relay mode when I got my craft into position. I disabled 3/4 manually and I was able to manage the heat. As soon as I enabled 2 receivers it overheats in seconds even with 200+ GW of radators. This is true whether I'm parked on the launchpad, in atmosphere or in space.

I've started digging through source on GitHub, but I have a long way to catch up on the whole mod. Maybe I'll get lucky.

How much power were you actually sending? Also why don't you use the receiver slider to tweak maximum received power?

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I love this idea. Making highly skilled engineers even more relevant.

Indeed, something similar could be done for electrical power generation. A skilled engineer might be better at rerouting heat to cool the generator more efficiently and therefore increase power output

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I'm having trouble getting a craft which can generate the 2.5GW required by the vista engine, dusty 3.5m will do it until it heats up and throttles the power. Is there any way of avoiding/mitigating this thermal throttling, because the otherwise the full power is only seen just after switch on for a very short time which seems a bit useless really. This is the most advanced reactor I've unlocked so far and the other 3 can't generate enough power because the upgraded efficiency of the thermal generator is <50%.

I tried the magnetic nozzle but could only get 8 kN thrust from it with dusty, guessing the stated max thrust will only be seen with antimatter reactors maybe?

EDIT: Well I figured out that you need radiators attached directly to the reactor, now with 16 of the largest stock rads on there (clipping though each other and looking very ugly) I can get 5 mins full 300kN thrust, going down to 200kN after 6 mins and slowly decreasing. I can live with that. I tried shutting down the reactor but couldn't figure out how to switch it back on, no options after letting all the heat dissipate.

Dusty plasma excel in higher burst power, but they require very efficient cooling with sufficient radiators or used with direct thermal nozzles/turbojets or magnetic nozzles. Their main disadvantage is the Heat throttling, which makes them not very effective for electric power generations. You much better of using Gas Cores for this purpose.

[Profit-]

Just where were you able to collect so much antimatter and how to you transport it?

Jool, 24 antimatter collectors at 1.25m. The smaller size is a little less powerful, but per ton they harvest a bit more antimatter.

Storage is done by 4 Radially mounted 3.75m Antimatter storage containers. I could probably haul 10x as much and gather 3x as much without issue, but this covers all I need.. You can even gather enough above kerbin for low power trips, and the microwave receivers are a fantastic backup.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Profit-

[Profit-]

Interesting, but I bet it's a kind of tricky with all the radiation and heat still being active. We could make it so that skilled engineers would be better at it than unskilled engineers. An unskilled engineer would have to wait until the the reactor is fully cooled down(like its currently). A one star engineer might be able switch and activate the reactor at 90% cooled down. This would make a highly skilled engineers worthwhile to bring along.

(As per Wikipedia, it is meant to be integrated into the reactor systems)

"Removal of fission products is similar to reprocessing of solid fuel elements, without the need to remove and rebuild the fuel cladding. As the fuel of a LFTR is a molten salt mixture, it is attractive to use pyroprocessing, high temperature methods working directly from the hot molten salt. Pyroprocessing does not use radiation sensitive solvents and is not easily disturbed by decay heat. It can be used on the highly radioactive fuel directly from the reactor.^[33] Having the chemical separation on site, close to the reactor avoids transport and keeps the total inventory of the fuel cycle low. Ideally everything except new fuel (thorium) and waste (fission products) stays inside the plant.

On site processing is planned to work continuously, cleaning a small fraction of the salt every day and sending it back to the reactor. There is no need to make the fuel salt very clean; the purpose is to keep the concentration of fission products and other impurities (e.g. oxygen) low enough."

I have no idea of the weight involved, but it is one of the major advantages of thorium power, no refueling outages and onsite reprocessing, with nearly 100% fuel burnup rates. (Rather than 0.7% )

Maybe a second reactor that weighs more and is longer or something would be realistic thorium continuous fuel cycle or if you have an ISRU you can do reprocessing even while hot or something. Or.. No changes whatever, it is a game and does not have to be realistic, just was mentioning it.

Edited July 13, 2015 by Profit-

[FreeThinker]

Well something like this is already implemented, which is called Uranium Burnup. It can be switched even while active. It allows you to reuse anticides for 80% at the cost of 50% less power output.. This allows you to run on on a standby reactor for many decades. I though this was only possible with Uranium, but thorium as well? Also would this be usefull with Gas Core reactors as well, or is this a Molten Salt reactor feature?

[Profit-]

Not exactly from this mod but... After Several... Embarrassing Failures of ship design on my part (4000 tons of metal and Ores is rough on ships, even on minnimus) I have my mining operations started and completed my first Exoplanetary Construction of one of my ships.

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Well something like this is already implemented, which is called Uranium Burnup. It can be switched even while active. It allows you to reuse anticides for 80% at the cost of 50% less power output.. This allows you to run on on a standby reactor for many decades. I though this was only possible with Uranium, but thorium as well? Also would this be usefull with Gas Core reactors as well, or is this a Molten Salt reactor feature?

I believe it is a molten salt feature because there can be vacuum distillation of the salts. This is for a LFTR but a MSR breeder would be nearly the same.

(There is technically no need for 238 reduction, just keeps it from being weapons grade u-233)

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Anyone else having radiators occasionally overheat and explode on switching to a ship? I dunno what is going on but sometimes they will just all blow up with heat levels less than 10%

Edited July 13, 2015 by Profit-

[Sacnoth]

Anyone else having radiators occasionally overheat and explode on switching to a ship? I dunno what is going on but sometimes they will just all blow up with heat levels less than 10%

I've had it happen once when i did a rendezvous. As soon as the other craft entered physics range there was an explosion and all the radiators on the other craft were gone. I'm guessing waste heat does weird things in timewarp.

[Nansuchao]

Beware, it's probably a stock bug exacerbated by mods, as discussed in the FAR thread.