KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread

[FreeThinker]

Yes it is intentional that FTL is now more chalenging. Just strapping on a warp engine on a vessel will not be enough, you need sufficient amount of Warp drive power and Electric power to get anywhere.

Currently for every ton of Warp Drive, it can pull 10 ton (or 20 ton for when upgraded) of vessel. To get faster or slower, you need either more electric power or more warp drive power. So initialy, your early Warp capable ships will need to be specialed ship. Later when Warpdrives can be upgraded, you can build, you can build you Warp capable Mothership, but it usage willl remains tricky. In the past, people complained that Light speed was too fast, for proper injection. The ability of going slower is therefore valuable. Instead of a abritraly hard limit, I wanted to create soft limits. The slower you want to travel with a warp drive, the harder it should be. Travel at 1% of the speed of light now requires 10 times the power of travel at light speed which has the lowerest power cost.

Note that I have plans make it harder by introducing gravity well effects. THe idea is the closer to a gravity well, the lower the maximum speed will be.This means you going to need a minimum distance from a gravity well before you can jump to warp. This should make it also imposible to warp into planets, moon or stars, as you would be forced out of warp before you get to close.

Edited February 8, 2016 by FreeThinker

[EnigmaG]

Found a minor annoyance, if i have any probe or remote guidance on the vehicle the stop charging button jumps to the end of the list. 

[FreeThinker]

49 minutes ago, EnigmaG said:

Found a minor annoyance, if i have any probe or remote guidance on the vehicle the stop charging button jumps to the end of the list. 

I think this is a exisitng issue. It is caused by the having seperate buttons for action, instead of statefull buttons that call a different method depending on it's state.

[FreeThinker]

Version 1.6.4 for Kerbal Space Program 1.0.5

Released on 2016-02-08

• Fixed Bug with Alcubierre Drive Charging not properly resetting after start
• Integrated KSPI-E with CTT 2.3
• Alcubierre Drive upgrade no longer requires science but instead requires researching Unified Field Theory

[EnigmaG]

Start charging also starts warp.

[etheoma]

13 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

I'm grad you brought up this issue. I agree with your analisis in general. Fusion reactors indeed are too Power dence for the space they occupy. Originaly, KSPI Fusion was positioned as a superior engine above, fission reactors, but in reality this is not the case. The big advantage of Fusion Power is their ability to efficiently generate charged particle with relatively little to no radiactive waste with low resource cost. When it comes to raw power, fission power is potentialy much stronger due to the higher power densities. Fortunatly change is in the air, CTT now allows more technodes for Nuclear technology. This is great as it allows me the differntiate fission and fusion technology better. As one of the first steps, I intend to decreate the mass and power of the magnetic confiement fusion reactor, thereby reduce their power density.

Well then a way you could differentiate Fission and Fusion reactors would basically make Fission reactors better at powering large spaceships, space stations and for beamed power generators in space or on the ground due to there large mass they would not be good at powering launchers, space planes or landers due to the said mass.

Where as fusion reactors would be good at powering space planes, landers, launchers and small / medium sized spaceships due to there efficiency and relatively small mass, also if your power requirements are not that high also be good for extra long missions which will not have re-supply runs.

As I see it if you were to go that route though when you get to 3.75m - 5m~ fusion reactors should gain  mass disproportionately to there smaller counterparts and become competitive or even beat fission reactors for power produced because as I said the more space fission had to take place the more energy you can produce.

Just a recommendation, but also when I come to think of it compared to current Fission reactors fusion reactors would be much more powerful due to the low efficiency of fission reactors today I think the efficiency of fission reactors is in the single digits there are proposals to make that near 14% where as fusion reactors are way up in the double digits for proposed fusion reactors for fuel efficiency and 1.5x~ for the amount of energy put in to the energy they produce to the amount of energy they put out and there are some super out there once which think they can get out even more but that wont be first gen, first generation fusion reactors will be 1.2 - 1.5x~ we are talking about.

So while yes the raw power put out of fission reactors is higher the actual energy you will get out at the end of the day will be higher for fission, I think its the required neutron flux needed for a critical fission reaction which wastes a load of energy. 

[ss8913]

5 hours ago, EnigmaG said:

Start charging also starts warp.

that should be.. impossible?  It's not charged at the point when you start charging.. or are you talking about right after a quickload of a save in which it's already charged?
EDIT: should be impossible, but isn't.  I'm having this problem too - it starts warp with zero charge, drops the frame-rate to about 1-2  FPS, and locks out the part menu so you cannot ever turn the warp drive *off*.  Cannot use the alcubierre drives at all until this is fixed, unfortunately.
Interestingly enough, I'm not finding anything even remotely relevant in my logs

Edited February 9, 2016 by ss8913

[FreeThinker]

7 hours ago, etheoma said:

Well then a way you could differentiate Fission and Fusion reactors would basically make Fission reactors better at powering large spaceships, space stations and for beamed power generators in space or on the ground due to there large mass they would not be good at powering launchers, space planes or landers due to the said mass.

Where as fusion reactors would be good at powering space planes, landers, launchers and small / medium sized spaceships due to there efficiency and relatively small mass, also if your power requirements are not that high also be good for extra long missions which will not have re-supply runs.

As I see it if you were to go that route though when you get to 3.75m - 5m~ fusion reactors should gain  mass disproportionately to there smaller counterparts and become competitive or even beat fission reactors for power produced because as I said the more space fission had to take place the more energy you can produce.

Just a recommendation, but also when I come to think of it compared to current Fission reactors fusion reactors would be much more powerful due to the low efficiency of fission reactors today I think the efficiency of fission reactors is in the single digits there are proposals to make that near 14% where as fusion reactors are way up in the double digits for proposed fusion reactors for fuel efficiency and 1.5x~ for the amount of energy put in to the energy they produce to the amount of energy they put out and there are some super out there once which think they can get out even more but that wont be first gen, first generation fusion reactors will be 1.2 - 1.5x~ we are talking about.

So while yes the raw power put out of fission reactors is higher the actual energy you will get out at the end of the day will be higher for fission, I think its the required neutron flux needed for a critical fission reaction which wastes a load of energy. 

Nuclear power is realy good in providing high amounts of thermal heat in compact sizes while fusion can provide electric power much more efficient and therefore electric propulsion.

One big disadvatage of Magnetic confinement fusion is that, the relactor needs to be big to be effective, therefore I'm thinking to make the inital minum size for Magnetic Fusion Reactor needs to be 3.75m

Edited February 9, 2016 by FreeThinker

[NateDaBeast]

This says it features the outer planets mod but I don't see them in-game. I installed Kopernicus too and still not there.

[FreeThinker]

6 minutes ago, NateDaBeast said:

This says it features the outer planets mod but I don't see them in-game. I installed Kopernicus too and still not there.

I doesn't contain Outer plannets, but it does add features to support it. In the case of Outer plannets, it allows you to harvest resource from the atmospheres from planets and moon added by Outer plannets. By default, this is not the case.

[NateDaBeast]

2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

I doesn't contain Outer plannets, but it does add features to support it. In the case of Outer plannets, it allows you to harvest resource from the atmospheres from planets and moon added by Outer plannets. By default, this is not the case.

Alright thanks, By the way, is it possible for me to disable RemoteTech, sometime I like using it and sometimes I don't so I would prefer keeping it disabled for now as I'm playing, I love all the other parts to this mod but I would like to disable RemoteTech, please if possible do tell me. Thank you.

[sliter]

Uh? I did something wrong? 

Spoiler

UPD1: After deleteing WarpPlugin folder and reinstalling the mod nothing changed.
UPD2: Fixed with removing CKAN installation and installing it by downloading from curse.

Edited February 9, 2016 by sliter

[Nansuchao]

2 hours ago, NateDaBeast said:

Alright thanks, By the way, is it possible for me to disable RemoteTech, sometime I like using it and sometimes I don't so I would prefer keeping it disabled for now as I'm playing, I love all the other parts to this mod but I would like to disable RemoteTech, please if possible do tell me. Thank you.

RemoteTech has nothing to do with Interstellar, but no, you can't disable Remote Tech, just uninstall it.

[ss8913]

is there anyway to start/restart a ThF4-powered molten salt reactor?  I'm trying to build a hydrazine refinery by using EPL to build it at a survey stake.  I need a long-lived reactor for this - the ThF4-fueled molten salt reactor is perfect, but when you build at a survey stake there are no resources on board - so I need to somehow transfer ThF4 into the reactor and start it from a dead state.  Can this be done?  IF so, how?

[ss8913]

hm just got kraken'ed with a new type of error I haven't seen before.  I built a fairly sweet 738t construction spaceplane to build that refinery I mentioned.  4.0m (TS) warp drive.  did a few tests, it charges, etc.  plane flies fairly well.  reverted to space center to make some slight changes... flew again.. KSP freaked out and I had to task-manager kill it.

Got back in, load the plane.  click save, asks me if I want to overwrite (made no changes).. that's weird.  Push launch, KSP locks up.  Look in the log and I find *thousands* of iterations of the following:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at FNPlugin.AlcubierreDrive.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename:  Line: -1)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at FNPlugin.AlcubierreDrive.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename:  Line: -1)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at FNPlugin.AlcubierreDrive.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename:  Line: -1)

 

@FreeThinker any ideas on this one?  going to try to build something else.  This is the first time I've used KSP since your most recent update btw.

[FreeThinker]

20 minutes ago, ss8913 said:

hm just got kraken'ed with a new type of error I haven't seen before.  I built a fairly sweet 738t construction spaceplane to build that refinery I mentioned.  4.0m (TS) warp drive.  did a few tests, it charges, etc.  plane flies fairly well.  reverted to space center to make some slight changes... flew again.. KSP freaked out and I had to task-manager kill it.

Got back in, load the plane.  click save, asks me if I want to overwrite (made no changes).. that's weird.  Push launch, KSP locks up.  Look in the log and I find *thousands* of iterations of the following:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at FNPlugin.AlcubierreDrive.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename:  Line: -1)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at FNPlugin.AlcubierreDrive.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename:  Line: -1)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at FNPlugin.AlcubierreDrive.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename:  Line: -1)

 

@FreeThinker any ideas on this one?  going to try to build something else.  This is the first time I've used KSP since your most recent update btw.

mmm, sounds like like an infinity variable, they cause Krakens. most likely some variable aren't initialised propelry after getting back from Space center. Were you in warp when switching to the space center

Can you consitently replicate it?  Also what type and how many warp drives are you using?

39 minutes ago, ss8913 said:

is there anyway to start/restart a ThF4-powered molten salt reactor?  I'm trying to build a hydrazine refinery by using EPL to build it at a survey stake.  I need a long-lived reactor for this - the ThF4-fueled molten salt reactor is perfect, but when you build at a survey stake there are no resources on board - so I need to somehow transfer ThF4 into the reactor and start it from a dead state.  Can this be done?  IF so, how?

ThF4 is created directly from a refinery. From there it should be transferable directly to a reactor vat. But I might be mistake ...

Edited February 10, 2016 by FreeThinker

[EnigmaG]

On 9.2.2016 at 4:55 AM, ss8913 said:

that should be.. impossible?  It's not charged at the point when you start charging.. or are you talking about right after a quickload of a save in which it's already charged?
EDIT: should be impossible, but isn't.  I'm having this problem too - it starts warp with zero charge, drops the frame-rate to about 1-2  FPS, and locks out the part menu so you cannot ever turn the warp drive *off*.  Cannot use the alcubierre drives at all until this is fixed, unfortunately.
Interestingly enough, I'm not finding anything even remotely relevant in my logs

Have the problem still in v 1.6.5 only not at  charging but at start warp.

[FreeThinker]

15 minutes ago, EnigmaG said:

Have the problem still in v 1.6.5 only not at  charging but at start warp.

Try to add some super capacitators and look it the problem still persists

[EnigmaG]

Super capacitators don´t help, is far faster as it should be and takes more power. Frame-rate is low and it do not stop on command.

[FreeThinker]

3 hours ago, EnigmaG said:

Super capacitators don´t help, is far faster as it should be and takes more power. Frame-rate is low and it do not stop on command.

It appears your are simply not producing enough power. It is supposed to only require 11692 MW for  warp, but it is sucking twise of that. This is clearly wrong.

[Mighty1]

Hello and thanks for a great mod. 

Search didn't give me any results so I will ask now. Recently I combined KSPI-ex and B9 aerospace and I ran into a problem. When I have a vessel with the B9 sabre engines and save then load it they exploded and the F3 said that they exploded because they overheated .

I created a clean install with B9 and FAR and everything worked fine. When I added KSPI-ex then the problem surfaced. This happens in 100% of the cases. It doesn't matter if the engine is active or shut down. Even if it didn't work at all in flight it still goes boom. 

What I understood from my test about this bug is:

1) it does not matter if it is in atmosphere or rocket mode,

2) rate of overheat is connected to altitude, not speed (can load saved game at 350 m/s at 1000 m, 10000 m but explosion at 11000 m)

3) overheat happens as vessel loads and control is given to player (first 0.5-1 second when you see your ship but cannot control it) 

4) Radiators (stock or interstelar) don't help

5) 17 kerbals died to bring you these results. Next time we will use probe cores or parachutes. 

[FreeThinker]

Updoaded KSPI-E 1.6.6 at Curse

* Fixed double consumption as continuous shaking and lag during Warp

* Warp drives are now affected by gravity well, forcing lower maximum speed, this effectively means it will be harder to go to warp near gravity well like platelets and makes flying into star at high warp impossible.

[FreeThinker]

3 hours ago, Mighty1 said:

Hello and thanks for a great mod. 

Search didn't give me any results so I will ask now. Recently I combined KSPI-ex and B9 aerospace and I ran into a problem. When I have a vessel with the B9 sabre engines and save then load it they exploded and the F3 said that they exploded because they overheated .

I created a clean install with B9 and FAR and everything worked fine. When I added KSPI-ex then the problem surfaced. This happens in 100% of the cases. It doesn't matter if the engine is active or shut down. Even if it didn't work at all in flight it still goes boom. 

What I understood from my test about this bug is:

1) it does not matter if it is in atmosphere or rocket mode,

2) rate of overheat is connected to altitude, not speed (can load saved game at 350 m/s at 1000 m, 10000 m but explosion at 11000 m)

3) overheat happens as vessel loads and control is given to player (first 0.5-1 second when you see your ship but cannot control it) 

4) Radiators (stock or interstelar) don't help

5) 17 kerbals died to bring you these results. Next time we will use probe cores or parachutes. 

Let me get this clear, your using no KSPI-E parts durring your test but it is installed? THe only thing I can think of is that some B9 parts could be augmented with KSPI-E partmodel which behave unexpectedly. What I do know is that many of the B9 aero parts are augmented with KSPI Radiators. Now these radiators are ment to be used in cimbination, with KSPI reactors. Without them, I'm not sure how they behave. Note that when the WAsteheat fills up, they are rigged to self explode. THis might be the havoc you are experiencing. To fix is, please remove the b9aero.cfg in the WarpPlugin\Patches folder

[EnigmaG]

50 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Updoaded KSPI-E 1.6.6 at Curse

* Fixed double consumption as continuous shaking and lag during Warp

* Warp drives are now affected by gravity well, forcing lower maximum speed, this effectively means it will be harder to go to warp near gravity well like platelets and makes flying into star at high warp impossible.

Good work Free, works fine.

[ss8913]

2 hours ago, EnigmaG said:

Good work Free, works fine.

I can't find it on curse.. their interface and pretty much their entire site is terrible design.  Anyone have a direct link to the curse download?  1.6.5 is unusable and CKAN and kerbalstuff don't seem to have 1.6.6
nevermind.. found the tiny secret link to switch from 'shareables' to 'mods' .. haven't used curse in forever.

19 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

mmm, sounds like like an infinity variable, they cause Krakens. most likely some variable aren't initialised propelry after getting back from Space center. Were you in warp when switching to the space center

Can you consitently replicate it?  Also what type and how many warp drives are you using?

ThF4 is created directly from a refinery. From there it should be transferable directly to a reactor vat. But I might be mistake ...

I can consistently replicate it.  It's only on one ship though, not sure if it's a mod conflict or.. something else.  Using the MarkIV spaceplane parts on that ship, although I've got other MkIV-based ships that, at least in prevous versions, didn't have trouble.

As for ThF4 - which  kind of refinery and how does one transfer.. using stock transfer? TAC-FB?  Also when I get the fuel into the reactor how do I start it?  reactor control window has no button for 'start' like an antimatter reactor does.

Edited February 11, 2016 by ss8913