KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread

[FreeThinker]

13 minutes ago, Nansuchao said:

If I can make a little suggestion, I would not allow the QSR to be activated on the surface a atmospheric world.

1

It already supposed to be impossible to start the SQR at the surface but I believe there is still a backdoor allowing people to start up even at the surface.

13 minutes ago, Nansuchao said:

. The idea to use a dense material seems very good, but at that point, you can in theory create some Osmium, the densest known material.

1

Yes I know Osmium is more dense but it is also incredibly rare. We going to need at least a 20 Ton (1 m2) of it to create a miniature black hole

Besides that it would require the introduction of another ISRU chain. For using an existing waste product of Uranium enrichment is a whole lot easier.

Edited April 5, 2017 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

42 minutes ago, Nansuchao said:

About the G-Force, it should give less energy during acceleration, but not too much less, otherwise you risk to loose control of the BH and completely destroy the ship (at least).

 

The hawking energy output of a black hole is purely a function of its mass. Constraining the black hole is just a matter of creating a stong enough magnetic field. The power cost is influenced by g-force and the mass of the black hole. If the field is not strong enough, the black hole will hit the walls, grow and suck up the vessel and anything too close. So putting the vessel under high acceleration for too long will end badly. This is the nature of the beast.

But look at the bright side, a warp vessel powered by a SQR that transferred itself to another location is able to correct it orbit using a magnetic nozzle for a few minutes

Edited April 5, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Jumberlack]

well then @FreeThinker, if you have plants to make the QSR harder and more resource intensive to start, you should definitely try to prevent random random stoppings. for example, I was doing 100c doing some testing, and I didn't have enough power in the qsr alone to maintain that speed, so I also had the one fusion reactor that has the particle generator built in making the last bit of power I needed. anyways, I deactivated the fusion reactor and not only did I fall out of warp, but the QSR went out as well. out in interstellar space it would have taken forever in a half to start up the QRS again and I could barely make 1c with the fusion reactor. an all around inconvenience.

[FreeThinker]

46 minutes ago, Jumberlack said:

well then @FreeThinker, if you have plants to make the QSR harder and more resource intensive to start, you should definitely try to prevent random random stoppings. for example, I was doing 100c doing some testing, and I didn't have enough power in the qsr alone to maintain that speed, so I also had the one fusion reactor that has the particle generator built in making the last bit of power I needed. anyways, I deactivated the fusion reactor and not only did I fall out of warp, but the QSR went out as well. out in interstellar space it would have taken forever in a half to start up the QRS again and I could barely make 1c with the fusion reactor. an all around inconvenience.

 

 

 

A fact of Fast Than Light travel is that it creates a lot a Hawking radiation (equal to the power requirement of warp travel), which needs to be absorbed by a shield which end up as wasteheat. The faster you go, the more hawking radiation is generated, the more waste heat is generated. If the wasteheat isn't properly dissipated, a SQR reactor will overheat, triggering automated shutdown. What I might do during warp travel is automatically reduce warp speed it the system becomes too hot, preventing the situation the SQR needs to be shut down.

Edited April 5, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Jumberlack]

13 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

A fact of Fast Than Light travel is that it creates a lot a Hawking radiation (equal to the power requirement of warp travel), which needs to be absorbed by a shield which end up as wasteheat. The faster ypu go, the more hawking radiation is generated, the more wasteheatis generated. If the wasteheat isn't properly disaparted, a SQR reactor will overheat, triggering automated shutdown. What I might do durring warp travel is automaticly reduce warp speed it the system becomes too hot, preventing the situation the SQR needs to be shut down.

I mean I have 2x10m deployable circular radiators, so I have a huge well of extra wasteheat, during operation wasteheat wouldn't get past 20%, unless I left it on and going max speed for longer than it would take to go far beyond the galactic neighborhood star group.

[FreeThinker]

10 minutes ago, Jumberlack said:

I mean I have 2x10m deployable circular radiators, so I have a huge well of extra wasteheat, during operation wasteheat wouldn't get past 20%, unless I left it on and going max speed for longer than it would take to go far beyond the galactic neighborhood star group.

 

 

 

Ah, I understand now, you ran out of power before the Warp engine had a chance to reduce speed, causing the QSR to lose containment. Your vessel should have re sucked into the black hole, but instead it acted like a fusion reactor, quitting operation and causing the warp field to collapse stranding you in normal space. So what needs to be done is that warp engine should reduce power before running out of power completely.

Edited April 5, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Thorbane]

Keep in mind that at this size a black hole wouldn't so much suck in your ship, as much as blowtorch through it.

[FreeThinker]

30 minutes ago, Thorbane said:

Keep in mind that at this size a black hole wouldn't so much suck in your ship, as much as blowtorch through it.

Yes, the black hole would travel in the opposite direction of the force, which in most cased would be downwards towards the engine. That should still create quite a mess.

On a planet it would fall straight through the center of the core, sucking in matter on the way

Edited April 5, 2017 by FreeThinker

[raxo2222]

I think this feature must be new:

I noticed that fusion reactor has core temp of 32000 K while generators hot bath temp is 3200 kelvins.

Here is list of core temperatures for all reactors and engines with builtin reactors.

All parts are fully upgraded, as I play sandbox.

 

Quantum Singularity Reactor - 320 000 K

Plasma Beam Core Antimatter Reactor - 220 000 K

Magneto-Inertial Fusion Engine - 135 000 K

Open Cycle Gas Fission Reactor - 58 910 K (could be rounded to 59 000 K)

Dusty Plasma Fission Fragment Reactor - 37 000 K

MFC Spherical Tokamak Reactor - 32 000 K

Stellarator Fusion Reactor - 25 000 K

Antimatter Initiated Fusion Reactor - 20 000 K

Closed Cycle Gas Core Engine -  20 000 K

TIMBERWIND Engine - 3750 K

Magnetized Target Fusion Reactor - 3200 K

Tri Alpha Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor - 3200 K

IXS Magnetic Confinement Fusion Reactor - 2500 K - Isn't this one redunant? Also tweakscale size is different than actual size.

Pebble Bed Reactor - 2500 K

TORY Nuclear Ramjet Engine - 2500 K - tweakscale size button shows number 2x too big and useless two buttons.

CANDLE Engine - 2492 K  - could be rounded to 2500 K :p, also this has redundant switch mode/swap fuel buttons.

Direct Cycle Nuclear Turbojet Engine - 2250 K - same useless button are here too.

Solid Core Nuclear Engine - 2240 K (could 2250 K - not too much difference :p) also needless buttons here too.

Molten Salt Reactor - 2000 K

 

Edited April 5, 2017 by raxo2222

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, raxo2222 said:

I think this feature must be new:

I noticed that fusion reactor has core temp of 32000 K while generators hot bath temp is 3200 kelvins.

 

Yes, It is something in progress, but in essence it allows the MCF reactor to function like the super nova, allowing high Isp propulsion. This already works with the Plasma nozzle but I want to make the core temperature adjustable (between max and min) , effectively allow you to increase and decrease  Isp like in the current Magnetic Nozzle. Effectively what you do is increase/decrease the amount of propellant flow through the reactor blanket.

 

Edited April 5, 2017 by FreeThinker

[raxo2222]

I made craft for mass test of all reactors.

CANDLE and IMF Engines can't use generators.

QSR, Tri-Alpha and IXS reactors have built in generators.

Here is craft with all 19 reactors sometimes with engines. Reactors are sorted my increasing base core temp - all parts have all upgrades. All reactors have size of 2.5 meters where its applicable.

and craft file: http://www88.zippyshare.com/v/laxjSF6K/file.html

Glued plutonium tank (this material has highest density of all ingame materials) to one side, now test craft has balanced thrust.

 

On unrelated note can we have waste heat thermoelectric generator?

When temperature goes well over 1000 K in WH plumbing, you could reuse it to get back energy.

Such part would have waste heat to electricity generator depending on wasteheat amount and radiator, that only cool downs said part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat_recovery_unit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator

This is what happens, if you have wasteheat in fairly one place.

Once wasteheat leaves ship as radiation/convection its truly lost.....

unless you stick your small hot radiator at solar panels ;^)

 

 

Edited April 5, 2017 by raxo2222

[Profit-]

On 4/5/2017 at 4:07 AM, FreeThinker said:

the SQR has an emergency shutdown fraction of 0.9, meaning that at 90% waste heat buildup it shuts down. This allows it to shutdown safely because otherwise the heat spike would cause the whole system to crash catastrophically.

The funny thing about black holes is the smaller they are, the higher their temperature becomes. An evaporating black hole will generate huge amount of hawking radiation which tops just before it disappears. That's why shutting down an SQR reactor is such a tricky endeavor and you need some safety buffer room.

I have been thinking on how make them more realistic. One Idea is to mate maintenance cost variable based on experience G-force. The reasoning is that the main maintenance cost is keeping the charged black hole located where it is, and prevent it from swallowing the vessel. This should make high acceleration, or placing it in a permanent gravity field, (like on the surface of kerbin) a very bad idea.

The upside is that, the black hole will create 2 charged particle streams, which at least one side can be used for magnetic nozzle propulsion. This would allow you to use it effectively use as a Kugelblitz engine, allowing reacing high percentage of the speed of light.

Besides variable maintenance cost, I want to make the startup of a QSR cost a significant amount of mass to create a miniature black hole in the first place, currently it only cost a lot of power which can be charged over time. theoretically anything could be used for this but technically you want the material to be as dense as possible. One of the densest material available in large quantities is depleted uranium

At their size and output it ironically would be very hard to get material INTO the black hole from what I understand.. I always assumed the maintenance costs in energy were the requirements of the magitech to be able to thread a stream of matter, into a singularity around the size of a double bonded oxygen molecule wide, that is expelling more energy than the largest nuclear reactors.  

I don't know about holding it in place, as the ability to make a black hole assumes tech that holding it in place would be a trivial matter even in higher gravity, with the inertia not being excessively large for one that is producing as much power as these are as they would have to be fairly small. 
Loss of black hole containment would simply cause it to leave the ship.  Except for the fact it is producing the energy on par with a small atomic bomb every second it could go through you and you would never feel it nor would it harm you. (if it was going fast enough for example it would fly right through)  
*Also means emergency shutdown would be just shoving it with some speed away from the ship to make for a really hot little star in orbit for a bit.

Most black hole formation techniques I have seen are centered around using photons not any material being crushed, so I always assumed your "just using a lot of power" idea was right on.  

 

Edited April 6, 2017 by Profit-

[raxo2222]

You can actually calculate properties of BH here: http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/

For black hole producing 420 GW of power (your QSR reactor) you would need 29 MILLION TONS of matter.

If you want to power today civilization (energy usage is 17 TW), you would need only 4.6 million tons of matter (weight of black hole).

Such black hole still would have size of 6.8 nanometer.

Also these black holes have over thousand billion kelvins producing gamma radiation.

Such mass would mean, that conventional engines are useless - only black hole powered engine could probably move it.

 

100 ton black hole would produce extreme power - around 3.5 *10¹⁶ MW - 8.5 MILLION MEGATONS per second to just promptly disappear in around 0.08 seconds.

Also its temperature would be around 10¹⁸ K - waaay past hard gamma radiation replacing your ship with subatomic particles.

 

If you wanted to have black hole with event horizon of 1 cm (its bigger than that in QSR reactor), it would weight as much as whole Earth, while having temperature around 0.01 kelvin and having power of 8*10^-18 W, also gravitational forces would destroy your ship into subatomic particles.

 

If you wanted core temperature of 220 000 K like in your QSR reactor, black hole would generate much less than 1 W of power and weight only 5*10¹⁴ tons.

This means your QSR reactor is crime against physics.

 

If you wanted good black hole reactor, it would have to weight around 10 million tons and it would have to resist hard gamma radiation of around 850 MeV per photon. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10^13+K

Gamma ray is photon of around 1 MeV energy.

[FreeThinker]

@profit  All valid points but I'm trying to create a balanced experience. If I'm going to allow it to be used for direct propulsion, their needs to be something that balance this huge advantage. Since I already required it to be starting in a zero G environment I though I could extend this logic to active operation.

@raxo2222 yes I'm aware that in reality they need to be a lot heavier and more powerful, but it would not really fit in the game.  Also note there are some really weird things going on in the Kerbal universe. Like for instance the super dense Kerbin and Kerbol that should be a red dwarf at it size.

Edited April 6, 2017 by FreeThinker

[raxo2222]

2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

@profit  All valid points but I'm trying to create a balanced experience. If I'm going to allow it to be used for direct propulsion, their needs to be something that balance this huge advantage. Since I already required it to be starting in a zero G environment I though I could extend this logic to active operation.

@raxo2222 yes I'm aware that in reality they need to be a lot heavier and more powerful, but it would not really fit in the game.  Also note there are some really weird things going on in the Kerbal universe. Like for instance the super dense Kerbin and Kerbol that should be a red dwarf at it size.

I'm using RSS, so planets and stars have proper sizes.

[IuliusCaesar]

Hi guys! I've been creeping a lot, however I have to ask something now.

I'm trying to set up a refinery operations on Laythe where I want to extract the sea water and electrolyse it. However, when I splash down, the All-in-one Refinery does not have an extraction option and the refinery which has sea extraction does not allow me to do so. I have also tried drills and atmospheric scoops, however they didn't work either.

How do I extract the water from oceans in the currect version?

Thanks a lot!

[Profit-]

I am not 100% sure on this but I believe you land on the shore and use the drills..  Could be wrong though. 

 

1 hour ago, IuliusCaesar said:

Hi guys! I've been creeping a lot, however I have to ask something now.

I'm trying to set up a refinery operations on Laythe where I want to extract the sea water and electrolyse it. However, when I splash down, the All-in-one Refinery does not have an extraction option and the refinery which has sea extraction does not allow me to do so. I have also tried drills and atmospheric scoops, however they didn't work either.

How do I extract the water from oceans in the currect version?

Thanks a lot!

 

[ss8913]

I've always noticed that there is no water mine able on land on lathe.  There are "hydrates" however which you can convert to water with the MKS agriculture helper part... but that does require crew.

[IuliusCaesar]

Wait a moment. I can analyse the ocean of Laythe with the refinery and it has an ocean extraction option and you're telling me there is no way to extract water  from this waterworld?

[FreeThinker]

2 hours ago, IuliusCaesar said:

Wait a moment. I can analyse the ocean of Laythe with the refinery and it has an ocean extraction option and you're telling me there is no way to extract water  from this waterworld?

Yes you can, just drive/splash a vehicle into the ocean, submerge a air intake or use a drill to pump lntakeLqd and convert it into chemicals properties (at an ISRU refinery), which at Laythe will be mostly waster

[IuliusCaesar]

1 hour ago, FreeThinker said:

Yes you can, just drive/splash a vehicle into the ocean, submerge a air intake or use a drill to pump lntakeLqd and convert it into chemicals properties (at an ISRU refinery), which at Laythe will be mostly waster

Thank you! It's working!

However, in the meantime I had deleted all associated mod files and had reinstalled Interstellar Extended. And now my refineries and reactors have empty control windows (the one that you open after you right-click the part and hit "open XY window". How can this be fixed?

Sorry if I'm being stupid here

[FreeThinker]

No it a fresh bug Which I already fixed. I intend to upload an new release this evening.

Edited April 7, 2017 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, IuliusCaesar said:

How can this be fixed?

 

Open ResourceDefs.cfg and add the following:

RESOURCE_DEFINITION
{
	abbreviation = Ne
	name = LqdNeon
	density = 0.001207
	unitCost = 2.1453
	flowMode = STAGE_PRIORITY_FLOW
	transfer = PUMP
	isTweakable = true
	volume = 1
}

RESOURCE_DEFINITION
{
	abbreviation = Kr
	name = LqdKrypton
	density = 0.002413
	unitCost = 1.0298
	flowMode = STAGE_PRIORITY_FLOW
	transfer = PUMP
	isTweakable = true
	volume = 1
}

 

[raxo2222]

How to gather compressed air? I slapped stock intakes and tanks containing compressed air and nothing is collecting.

 

[FreeThinker]

@raxo2222 the gas tanks contain a IntakeAtm to Compresed air auto converter