KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread

[okder]

Version 1.5.13 for Kerbal Space Program 1.0.4

• Thermal Nozzle gains the ability to run in Ramjet Mode
  
• Fixed Slowdown in VAB when adding many upgradable parts (like radiators).
  

editor and flight does load much faster, thanks,

thermalNozzle in ramjet mode do works better(30-50%) than ATTILA on speeds 800-2150+ (i run out of atmosphere on 2100, so did not check what's better there)

problem if there was no changes from summer, you can't put several thermal engines on one vessel and use full power for one of them (i.e. power distribution is STATIC)

i.e. you can't efficiently combine turbojet and ramjet if they are separate engines,

and ATTILA still better than turbojet on takeoff.

so best combination now is ATTILA for getting 800m/s and thermalNozzle (in ramjet mode) for 800-2000m/s and for getting more (than 2500m/s) from atmosphere best is plasma (too high ISP for atmosphere).

so i still would suggest boost turbojet with ramjet perfomance, and add lowisp (but high thurst) mode for takeoff,

than adding ramjet ability for thermalNozzle, which can't have support for airflow (i.e. expected to give good thrust for fuel in liquid form)

capacitors is very buggy(that's expected for initial version), they initiated in non existed mode (fully charged but without charge or discharge),

when they are charging they takes more priority than reactor support field (i.e. could shutdown reactor, at least warning message appears, when ATTILA engines online)

when they are discharging they don't support ATTILA i.e. electric engines can't use them as power source.

Edited October 18, 2015 by okder

[FreeThinker]

capacitors is very buggy(that's expected for initial version), they initiated in non existed mode (fully charged but without charge or discharge),

when they are charging they takes more priority than reactor support field (i.e. could shutdown reactor, at least warning message appears, when ATTILA engines online)

when they are discharging they don't support ATTILA i.e. electric engines can't use them as power source.

The current super capacitors are mend for starting the fusion reactor and feed the computer core and the super reaction wheel which run on megajoules. I intend to improve the charging and charge usability.

Edited October 19, 2015 by FreeThinker

[Profit-]

@freethinker Those super capacitors look fantastic. props to you and your artist.

[FreeThinker]

problem if there was no changes from summer, you can't put several thermal engines on one vessel and use full power for one of them (i.e. power distribution is STATIC)

i.e. you can't efficiently combine turbojet and ramjet if they are separate engines,

Actualy they partially are. Every time you activate or deactivate an engine, the distribution of power is recalculated. This fewature was added to allow you to switch between VTOL engines fitted underneat a vessel and inline eninges.

- - - Updated - - -

@freethinker Those super capacitors look fantastic. props to you and your artist.

Yes, silversilver did a fine job

- - - Updated - - -

This time I made it big (still in progress)

http://i.imgur.com/NKzy7dZ.png

Intresting design, but why didn't you include thermal generators? Notice that only 46% of the Dusty Plasma charge particles can be used for energy production while the remaining 56% can only be converted to power using thermal electric power generators

Edited October 19, 2015 by FreeThinker

[Nansuchao]

It's still in testing phase. Usually I prefer to use charged particle generator cause they're shorter. The plan is to have a little more of the 5 GW requested by the two 3.75 VISTA.

[okder]

Actualy they partially are. Every time you activate or deactivate an engine, the distribution of power is recalculated. This fewature was added to allow you to switch between VTOL engines fitted underneat a vessel and inline eninges.

the test prove that wrong, when i changed from ATTILA to turbojets for take off, main thermal nozzle/ramjet is no more using 100% of reactor (40% actually and depends on speed), at least at speed more than 1300m/s, there still plenty atmosphere intake for him,

i.e. or disabled turbojets still ?reserves? intake air for themself, or they reserves reactor power.

update:

well it looks more like intakes reserve problem, i.e. when i changed propellant for disabled turbojets reactor returns to 100% usage, and ramjet thrust begin to grow.

i.e. bug: when offline turbojet engine set to atmosphere it reserves atmosphere intake for himself, so preventing using that atmosphere by other engines.

testcase: go with turbojet+ramjet high enough then switch turbojet off, and rotate it's propellant (you will see changes in reactor usage, if ramjet is active, and ramjet thrust too)

still buggy: if reactor set to non thermal output in editor all thermal engines (turbojet/ramjet) will give 0 thrust until fuel mode of reactor changed to thermal output, after it reactor be set to initial fuel, and thermal engines will use it properly.

Edited October 19, 2015 by okder

[FreeThinker]

still buggy: if reactor set to non thermal output in editor all thermal engines (turbojet/ramjet) will give 0 thrust until fuel mode of reactor changed to thermal output, after it reactor be set to initial fuel, and thermal engines will use it properly.

How can the reactor be set to non thermal mode? Are you refering to a fusion reactor in He3 / p-B mode?

Edited October 19, 2015 by FreeThinker

[okder]

How can the reactor be set to non thermal mode? Are you refering to a fusion reactor in He3 / p-B mode?

yes, the mode where only energy is charged particles, set in editor, i did report that week or two ago.

[Nansuchao]

Also Intake Build Aid doesn't sees the KSPI engines

[SciMan]

@okder: That's probably not a bug.

Thermal engines run on "ThermalPower", electric engines run on Megajoules.

If a reactor is outputting 100% of its power as ChargedParticles, by definition there will be no ThermalPower left for the thermal engines.

Perhaps there's some quite inefficient process to turn ChargedParticles into ThermalPower, but I'm not aware of it.

It would make sense, as just stopping the charged particles would probably result in a lot of heat.

@FreeThinker:

Just wanted to give you a friendly reminder that you were going to add the IsPropellant switches to Lithium tanks.

Accidentally sending a ship's Lithium supply out the exhaust of your VASIMR or Plasma thrusters really sucks.

As a frequent user of the Deuterium-Lithium6 fusion reaction, I get hit hard by that unless I side-mount the VASIMR or Plasma thrusters and disable crossfeed on the Lithium tank. Then the engines will still try to switch to Lithium, but it won't be able to flow to them.

Oh, one more thing. Were you going to allow the generator parts to act as "perfect" transmitters of ThermalPower using that ThermalPowerTransport module?

RE: Lag;

Is ~4 megabytes considered a "large" save file? I run KSP from a HDD, and just grabbing most things that have a KSPI module in them resulted in a few seconds of lag. Radiators were actually one of the things that didn't cause too much lag. Plasma thrusters being attached in symmetry were the worst.

I'm upgrading to 1.5.13 now, as soon as I saw that this lag issue was fixed I started downloading it.

Edited October 19, 2015 by SciMan

[okder]

@okder: That's probably not a bug.

Thermal engines run on "ThermalPower", electric engines run on Megajoules.

You need to switch reactor to ThermalPower and back to ChargedParticles only, by doing so you will get 100% reactor usage on Thermal Engines. (they would got thrust corresponding full reactor output).

i.e. one of those behavior is the bug anyway.

[Shively]

- - - Updated - - -

So, this is probably not the right place for this, being the development thread, but could I get a little help troubleshooting my ship, here?

Built a mission to Duna using a new (fat) orbiter and one of my old landers intended for visiting multiple sites. Got both modules docked, secured, and sent out to Duna's SOI no problem.

Propulsion for the mission's being provided by a thermal engine, drawing power from a gas core reactor (which I'm now finding may not have been the wisest choice, but that's what future missions are for) that's been tweakscale'd up to 3.75m.

Arrived at Duna, began circularization burn at 60 km above the surface. Apart from the incredibly slow burn, everything went fairly well, until the engine crapped out on me. It's now no longer producing any thrust, and has no fuel flow, despite my ship containing some extra ~5000 m/s delta-v worth of fuel than needed for the mission. Seeing as this is my first attempt taking anything with tech from the mod out of Kerbin's SOI, the error here more than likely lies with the user. Can someone help me spot that error? I've manually pumped fuel toward all the tanks that the engine seems to like to draw its fuel from first, so I'm not fully certain that fuel flow is the actual problem here, as everything's been more or less reverted to the point before "flame-out" so far as I can tell, regardless, it should have been able to automatically draw from forward tanks anyways.

Sorry for the huge screenshot, but here's my reactor control panel and my engine highlighted.

Edited October 19, 2015 by Shively

[FreeThinker]

I do not fully understand what is going wrong here. Seems you are using an old version of KSPI in here where Liquid-fuel is still produced soot, but it can only suffocate the nozzle only up to 50% (in the past this might have been 100%). Soot can be removed using CO at low thrust. According to the status the reactor is 100% active, this will produce a lot of thermal power and Wasteheat. Which looking at the amount of radiators available should not be a problem. If correct the amount of enriched uranium should slowly decrease while the amount of Infanticides should steadily increase (if not, the data is not properly updated). Only think I can think of is switch propellant to pure liquid fuel or install latest version which might at least limit soot suffocation

[Shively]

This was with 1.5.12 (though it's possible a bad installation may be causing some issues), have since upgraded to yesterday's update, but haven't messed around with the game anymore since. Will keep fiddling with it, may just eventually scrub the mission and mess with it in sandbox until I figure out what's going wrong. Thanks, FT.

[FreeThinker]

I did some further code checking and it appears I was wrong. The soothing does cause suffocation, causing you to lose all power (which is not intended). To fix it, you could apply several hacks. The easiest would be open the ThermalTurbo.cfg and change sootHeatDivider to 150. (what is supposed to be) This should at least give you back 66% of your thrust back.

[Shively]

I did some further code checking and it appears I was wrong. The soothing does cause suffocation, causing you to lose all power (which is not intended). To fix it, you could apply several hacks. The easiest would be open the ThermalTurbo.cfg and change sootHeatDivider to 150. (what is supposed to be) This should at least give you back 66% of your thrust back.

I'll give that a shot, then - thanks. Thankful (and a bit surprised) you were able to diagnose the issue with such little to go on from my end.

Confirmed: we have thrust! Thanks again for the help, FreeThinker. Will probably use a different fuel in the future (and am running on LF now) to avoid soot buildup, at least, but glad we've got the soot accumulation-power suffocation problem under control - I had checked all the wikis last night trying to figure this thing out to no avail!

Edited October 19, 2015 by Shively

[secondcircle]

Anyone have a problem with the nuclear engines? You should be able to change the fuel type they use but I can't seem to do it. When i click next propellant it doesn't do anything. They only seem to work on hydrogen and it's annoying me. Anyone knows how to fix this?

http://puu.sh/kQzY7/83fab0705b.jpg [1]

[astroknot]

I've searched far and wide with no luck. Radiators seem to be disabled when I have a microwave receiver activated on my ship. I have to disable the receiver(s) for the radiators to light up and dissipate waste heat. Is that a feature or a bug? It is frustrating, especially when i timewarp.

[FreeThinker]

Radiators do not work at all with microwave receiver activated? Or only to a limit?

[astroknot]

Radiators do not work at all with microwave receiver activated? Or only to a limit?

They don't work at all. 0.0 Megajules and the temp sticks around 267K. As soon as I turn off the receiver, they light up orange and start working. If I turn the receiver back on, they immediately turn back to normal color and stop working.

[FreeThinker]

Sounds like an unintended interaction

[secondcircle]

Anyone have a problem with the nuclear engines? You should be able to change the fuel type they use but I can't seem to do it. When i click next propellant it doesn't do anything. They only seem to work on hydrogen and it's annoying the .... out of me. Anyone knows how to fix this?

http://puu.sh/kQzY7/83fab0705b.jpg [1]

I'm just not understanding how or what you use this nuke for. It also has a million other stats that i'm not clear on. I can't find any information on this particular part in the wiki.

[Profit-]

They don't work at all. 0.0 Megajules and the temp sticks around 267K. As soon as I turn off the receiver, they light up orange and start working. If I turn the receiver back on, they immediately turn back to normal color and stop working.

I have this exact same bug on occasion. It is almost always after a revert or save-reload.

[FreeThinker]

Anyone have a problem with the nuclear engines? You should be able to change the fuel type they use but I can't seem to do it. When i click next propellant it doesn't do anything. They only seem to work on hydrogen and it's annoying the .... out of me. Anyone knows how to fix this?

http://puu.sh/kQzY7/83fab0705b.jpg [1]

I'm just not understanding how or what you use this nuke for. It also has a million other stats that i'm not clear on. I can't find any information on this particular part in the wiki.

In Carreer mode, with only Nuclear Propulsion technology unlocked, you are supposed able to use only LqdHydrogen or LiquidFuel, but it appears LiquidFuel still has the improved propuslion tech requirement. My bad

[keys72]

Hi FreeThinker, I just have a question about how much energy the reactors are supposed to be putting out... The 2.5m antimatter reactor says in game that it only outputs 240MW, of power and the fusion generators, put out even less with both kinds of electric generators attached, and sufficient cooling according to the vab, whereas I think it should be putting out 240GW. The DUMBO reactor outputs BY FAR the most power out of any of them too... Any idea what's going on here? I installed using ckan

Thanks!