KSP Interstellar Extended Continued Development Thread

[Profit-]

For some reason my Molten salt reactor is not transferring it's heat correctly. (it does say it is supposed to be able to transfer it to anywhere on the craft)

In an related thing, for some reason my fusion reactors are experiencing a charged particle falloff that I cannot explain yet.

[Profit-]

* just figured out where my charged particle falloff is occurring, when a fusion reactor runs out of thermal, for example through a thermal nozzle, it uses up its charged particles.. This may be intended behavior, just causes my ships to fail as the direct conversion ends and the reactor can no longer run =)

oh, BTW did you catch this? You asked for screenshots a while ago for this bug I sometimes get. It seems to be when I am receiving microwave power with any of the antenna's so far. (For some reason the forum eats the images on this post, but if you go back to the original one you can click on them and get larger sizes.)

Here are screenshots of the radiators acting weird, and topping out earlier than they should.. Most of the time they work but, here are 2 times I caught them getting stuck. 1584.2K seems to be the magic number.

http://s30.postimg.org/xrzvncmot/image.jpg

http://s30.postimg.org/6sw0s707x/image.jpg

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I have one other breadcrumb... When these craft have their microwave receivers on, they have the bug, as soon as I press the hotkey to switch them to relay's it goes away. If I activate the receivers again the bug immediately reappears and the radiators jump to the lower temperature and lower heat dissipation.

Receiver on -> Capped at 1584.2

Relay on -> Acts correctly

Receiver back on and relay off-> Capped at 1584.2K again and heat dissipation falls significantly

Edited May 29, 2015 by Profit-

[ss8913]

So I was thinking last night... I like this mod a lot. It enables me to build big starships and take them places. In a straight line. a 1000t starship does NOT like to turn. Why? Torque. What is torque? Force times distance. Distance isn't a problem - ship is big, I can put RCS ports far from the CoM... force, however... then I thought, "wouldn't it be grand if I could get RCS ports that operate like thermal rockets and can route thermal power from my antimatter reactors to produce RCS thrust?

I suppose though I could just clone the RCS stock part and have it consume chargedparticles as well as monopropellant and give it higher ISP and more thrust? But it's still an idea for an official add-on to KSPI-E in the future, since this mod is what makes Kerbal starships possible in the first place.

[The Pav]

Hi Free Thinker

I have a question. I just designed a ship using Thermal Rocket Nozzles which uses Liquid Fuel since I already having mining operations in place for that. The soot builds up so fast that it tends to nerf the engine right away. That would be ok if there were a way to deal with it. Are there plans to allow an engineer on EVA to clean it after it has cooled or something similar?

[The Pav]

Now that I've unlocked some of the higher techs playing this in career, it's pretty much nerfed. The switch from liquid fuels to liquid hydrogen has made the idea of a microwave power network pointless. Before, the purpose was to build a network so you have have small light craft that enjoyed that power without having to carry heavy reactors. Now, liquid fuel almost instantly clogs a thermal rocket forcing one to use liquid hydrogen. But... the hydrogen tanks need large enough amounts of electricity that you'd have to have a reactor and generator for that anyway. The thermal microwave receivers are pretty much pointless now. You HAVE to put a reactor on a craft even with the microwave network. THEN, when you do use the liquid hydrogen, the rocket has such low thrust that it's inferior to the In game Atomic rocket motor which can run off liquid fuel and doesn't need a reactor to power a generator. It's like doing all this work for high end technology that's garbage and not playable.

[Profit-]

Hi Free Thinker

I have a question. I just designed a ship using Thermal Rocket Nozzles which uses Liquid Fuel since I already having mining operations in place for that. The soot builds up so fast that it tends to nerf the engine right away. That would be ok if there were a way to deal with it. Are there plans to allow an engineer on EVA to clean it after it has cooled or something similar?

The soot mechanic is a little strange, however if you want to clean it, shutdown all your reactors and switch to CO2 cleaning mode (assuming you have some) and run at full throttle. it will produce 0 thrust but it will eat away the soot for no fuel use.

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Now that I've unlocked some of the higher techs playing this in career, it's pretty much nerfed. The switch from liquid fuels to liquid hydrogen has made the idea of a microwave power network pointless. Before, the purpose was to build a network so you have have small light craft that enjoyed that power without having to carry heavy reactors. Now, liquid fuel almost instantly clogs a thermal rocket forcing one to use liquid hydrogen. But... the hydrogen tanks need large enough amounts of electricity that you'd have to have a reactor and generator for that anyway. The thermal microwave receivers are pretty much pointless now. You HAVE to put a reactor on a craft even with the microwave network. THEN, when you do use the liquid hydrogen, the rocket has such low thrust that it's inferior to the In game Atomic rocket motor which can run off liquid fuel and doesn't need a reactor to power a generator. It's like doing all this work for high end technology that's garbage and not playable.

I would recommend nitrogen, you can fuel shark it from kerbin, and just tweak scale a molten salt reactor to the 65cm size for power.

[cicatrix]

I've unlocked antimatter power and collected several large containers of it. Now, a question. What's best combination of propellant / thruster in terms of thrust (not dV) given I have an AM reactor. Now I use LqCO2 + Plasma thruster - this combo lifted a single stage (no drops) from Eve (~22 km/s dV). Is there a better combination?

And another question - is there a way I can obtain LqCO2 from ISRU module?

[Khalkion]

Now that I've unlocked some of the higher techs playing this in career, it's pretty much nerfed. The switch from liquid fuels to liquid hydrogen has made the idea of a microwave power network pointless. Before, the purpose was to build a network so you have have small light craft that enjoyed that power without having to carry heavy reactors. Now, liquid fuel almost instantly clogs a thermal rocket forcing one to use liquid hydrogen. But... the hydrogen tanks need large enough amounts of electricity that you'd have to have a reactor and generator for that anyway. The thermal microwave receivers are pretty much pointless now. You HAVE to put a reactor on a craft even with the microwave network. THEN, when you do use the liquid hydrogen, the rocket has such low thrust that it's inferior to the In game Atomic rocket motor which can run off liquid fuel and doesn't need a reactor to power a generator. It's like doing all this work for high end technology that's garbage and not playable.

Try hydrazine. It doesn't require cryostates, is quite dense (smaller crafts) and have high enough isp. But don't use it in the atmosphere, it is very toxic.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Khalkion

[ss8913]

@Profit- I tried the Co2 cleaning... that was.. kind of a disaster. Not only did it throw my craft forward at 12G of acceleration, it barely cleaned the engine at all.. like 0.3% in the 10-20 seconds of burn. Yes I had the engine (thermal turbojet) on "CO2 Cleaning" not "LiquidCO2" mode. Does this technique not work for this engine...? was expecting 0 thrust and a clean engine

... Then later we crashed to desktop with no crash report or log trying to circularize at Duna. strange. Probably unrelated. EDIT: maybe not unrelated. reloading KSP and switching back to that ship in flight caused an instant no-message no-error CTD. output_log shows this right before the crash stacktrace:

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

InsterstellarFuelSwitch parseDoubles: invalid float: [len:0] '']

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

InsterstellarFuelSwitch parseDoubles: invalid float: [len:0] '']

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

InsterstellarFuelSwitch parseDoubles: invalid float: [len:0] '']

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

InsterstellarFuelSwitch parseDoubles: invalid float: [len:0] '']

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

Crash!!!

Edited May 29, 2015 by ss8913

[FreeThinker]

is there a way I can obtain LqCO2 from ISRU module?

IRSU might only produce CO2 from other processes (which are currently not implemented), you need to bring along an atmospheric scoop if you want to collect CO2 from the atmosphere. Both KSP equivalant of Mars and Venus have a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere which makes an excelent propellant for Plasma Emgines.

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Now, a question. What's best combination of propellant / thruster in terms maximum thrust (not dV) given I have an AM reactor.

stock Xenon is King of thrust, it has an isp multiplier of 0.1234 and an efficency of 69%, making is very effective for thrust in plasma thrusters. Note if you want more thrust, I would advice Arcjet with Hydrazine/Monopropellant, they got enough power to lauch large amounts of cargo into space. Of cource they also consume a lot of propellant and can't run on CO2.

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Try hydrazine. It doesn't require cryostates, is quite dense (smaller crafts) and have high enough isp. But don't use it in the atmosphere, it is very toxic.

Yes it Toxic but only significantly in the lower atmosphere. The reputation penalty isn't that high considering the amount you can collect in a basic mission.

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@Profit- I tried the Co2 cleaning... that was.. kind of a disaster. Not only did it throw my craft forward at 12G of acceleration, it barely cleaned the engine at all.. like 0.3% in the 10-20 seconds of burn. Yes I had the engine (thermal turbojet) on "CO2 Cleaning" not "LiquidCO2" mode. Does this technique not work for this engine...? was expecting 0 thrust and a clean engine

CO2 Cleaning is constant, the (chemical needs time to work), meaning to do it most effectively, use as low as thrust as possible. In the future I will integrate it with normal CO2 mode, meaning, depending on your thrust is will either clean or deposit Soot.

Edited May 29, 2015 by FreeThinker

[Profit-]

@Profit- I tried the Co2 cleaning... that was.. kind of a disaster. Not only did it throw my craft forward at 12G of acceleration, it barely cleaned the engine at all.. like 0.3% in the 10-20 seconds of burn. Yes I had the engine (thermal turbojet) on "CO2 Cleaning" not "LiquidCO2" mode. Does this technique not work for this engine...? was expecting 0 thrust and a clean engine

It is kinda a bug I noticed, but you need to shut down your reactors, obviously this does not work with fission ones unless you can restart them but shutdown every source of heat and then run the thermo turbojet. It should not create any acceleration or use any co2 assuming you completely isolated your engine from heat sources.

[FreeThinker]

Now that I've unlocked some of the higher techs playing this in career, it's pretty much nerfed. The switch from liquid fuels to liquid hydrogen has made the idea of a microwave power network pointless. Before, the purpose was to build a network so you have have small light craft that enjoyed that power without having to carry heavy reactors. Now, liquid fuel almost instantly clogs a thermal rocket forcing one to use liquid hydrogen. But... the hydrogen tanks need large enough amounts of electricity that you'd have to have a reactor and generator for that anyway. The thermal microwave receivers are pretty much pointless now. You HAVE to put a reactor on a craft even with the microwave network. THEN, when you do use the liquid hydrogen, the rocket has such low thrust that it's inferior to the In game Atomic rocket motor which can run off liquid fuel and doesn't need a reactor to power a generator. It's like doing all this work for high end technology that's garbage and not playable.

Microwave Power is actualy very powerfull, it technically allows you to have more energy on a vessel than can be generated by antimatter reactors! The main limiting factor is cost and wasteheat, as it will be expansive to build a large amount of reactors on the ground and microwave receivers generate a lot of waste heat, which forces you to install a lot of ratiators on the ship

Also understand, although Hydrogen gives the maximum amount of ISP, you don't need it! Due to ability of plasma thusters to shift gears, propellants like Ammonia can reach the same Isp as LiquidFuel did in the past (in plasma thruster). If you still want higher Isp, you should look at Helium which can even been scooped just above the atmosphere for free! There are a lot of possiblities, you just need to be curious enough to discover them.

Edited May 29, 2015 by FreeThinker

[Nansuchao]

If a player has good patience, as I had in a old save, Microwave Network it's the best way to make energy. I launched 30/40 reactors in Kerbol, Kerbin and Eloo robot and I had not less than 3/4 GW in every part of the Kerbol System. If you use that energy to moving from a planet to another with a Quantum Vacuum Thrusters, you don't need reactors and fuel tanks too...

[FreeThinker]

The soot mechanic is a little strange, however if you want to clean it, shutdown all your reactors and switch to CO2 cleaning mode (assuming you have some) and run at full throttle. it will produce 0 thrust but it will eat away the soot for no fuel use.

I give it you this solution is pretty ingeniuos but it is an exploit and not as it is intended. They way it is intended is that you use CO2 at low amount of thrust, allowing the CO2 to react with the Carbon deposited on the Heat exchangers.

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Hi Free Thinker

I have a question. I just designed a ship using Thermal Rocket Nozzles which uses Liquid Fuel since I already having mining operations in place for that. The soot builds up so fast that it tends to nerf the engine right away. That would be ok if there were a way to deal with it. Are there plans to allow an engineer on EVA to clean it after it has cooled or something similar?

You can either use Water or CO2 to clean the Soot. Allowing an Kerbal Engineer to clean the heat exchangers might be an option in the future but only for non radioactive powered thermal noozles as the radiation of nuclear/fusion reactors would kill it after a very short exposure.

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So I was thinking last night... I like this mod a lot. It enables me to build big starships and take them places. In a straight line. a 1000t starship does NOT like to turn. Why? Torque. What is torque? Force times distance. Distance isn't a problem - ship is big, I can put RCS ports far from the CoM... force, however... then I thought, "wouldn't it be grand if I could get RCS ports that operate like thermal rockets and can route thermal power from my antimatter reactors to produce RCS thrust?

I suppose though I could just clone the RCS stock part and have it consume chargedparticles as well as monopropellant and give it higher ISP and more thrust? But it's still an idea for an official add-on to KSPI-E in the future, since this mod is what makes Kerbal starships possible in the first place.

I have some plans to create Arjet RCS thrusters, it will allow you to generate high amount of RCS thrust at relatively high Isp at the cost of high amount of power. Technically you can create them yourself already in limited format by adding MegaJoule resource requirement to a basic RCS part. Balancing them will be the tricky part as they either use too much power or too little. KSPI Thrusters make their thrust depend on available power, not a static value.

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For some reason my Molten salt reactor is not transferring it's heat correctly. (it does say it is supposed to be able to transfer it to anywhere on the craft)

http://s21.postimg.org/omxfzobo3/image.jpg

In an related thing, for some reason my fusion reactors are experiencing a charged particle falloff that I cannot explain yet.

It's not possible yet to connect Thermal Electric Generator radialy, they currenly only function in stack mode

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I want to install this mod but don't have the memory left to run the entire thing, so I would like to use just the redone seismometer experiment from this mod. However the definitions and configurations for it seem to be spread between multiple places in the WarpPlugin folder. What files need to be kept in order to use the experiment?

I'm also interested in using the solar sail, what files do I need to keep for it?

Will I still have to deal with the WasteHeat mechanic with just the folders necessary to run the seismometer and sail?

And finally are any of the other included plugins (FilterExtensions, Community Resource Pack, etc.) necessary to use these two parts of the mod?

Sorry for all the questions, but I really want to get at least part of this mod in my career! Great work by the way, lots of really impressive additions to the game in this mod!

The solar sail is going to be phased out of KSPI-E, instead I advice to use mrsolarsail mod, which has improved the KSPI Solar sail and added a specialised navigation tool

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* just figured out where my charged particle falloff is occurring, when a fusion reactor runs out of thermal, for example through a thermal nozzle, it uses up its charged particles.. This may be intended behavior, just causes my ships to fail as the direct conversion ends and the reactor can no longer run =)

Yes, this is the reason why you currently want to have a secondairy power source to power just the Fusion Engine energy requirements. In the future, I intend to add the ability to limit thermal power to availabe thermal energy and not convert charged particles into heat, startving the direct energy converter, allowing you to maintain full electric power

Edited May 29, 2015 by FreeThinker

[Aghanim]

Is it normal that all fusion reactors stops producing energy at timewarp? Because of that I cannot make a small probe using magnetic rocket because as soon as I timewarp everything stops producing power and cryostat starts to boil its LH2 contents, and dusty reactor cannot be downsized to 1.25m

[KerbinDriveYards]

The solar sail is going to be phased out of KSPI-E, instead I advice to use mrsolarsail mod, which has improved the KSPI Solar sail and added a specialised navigation tool

Ok, thanks! What about the impactor seismometer experiment? Is it possible to keep just that?

[FreeThinker]

Ok, thanks! What about the impactor seismometer experiment? Is it possible to keep just that?

I f you strip the mod of all parts (except the seismometer), it should still work

[Profit-]

Is the relay depth now limited to 1? I cannot seem to get my relay sats to hop with each other anymore. Or is the mechanic just been changed and I am missing how to do it right now.

[FreeThinker]

Is it normal that all fusion reactors stops producing energy at timewarp? Because of that I cannot make a small probe using magnetic rocket because as soon as I timewarp everything stops producing power and cryostat starts to boil its LH2 contents, and dusty reactor cannot be downsized to 1.25m

No, it's not normal (intended). Are you using a small fusion reactor? what was the rest of the vessel equiped with, specificly power generator and radiators. Also have you tried the molten salt reactor?

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Is the relay depth now limited to 1? I cannot seem to get my relay sats to hop with each other anymore. Or is the mechanic just been changed and I am missing how to do it right now.

No it should be much higher (I believe 16) it might be broken now. Note that in the past you could beam microwave power through Kerbin itself, making the relay network virtually useless. Not sure how long this was an issue, but the Line of sight function was broken when I verified it.

Edited May 29, 2015 by FreeThinker

[Profit-]

Actually on further investigation the relay mechanism does not work appear to work any longer.

img hosting

When I switch to the relay ship that should have an LOS with the generators, the panel pointing directly down to Kerbin at the generator shows this (which is the way it always has been but shows it is in relay mode)

screenshot windows 7

(I just checked and made sure that relay had an LOS with the generators by disabling the relay and activating the receiver on the phased array. It connected to both of my generators so it does have a good LOS)

image hosting free no registration

Edited May 29, 2015 by Profit-

[KerbinDriveYards]

I f you strip the mod of all parts (except the seismometer), it should still work

I've been trying to do this for a couple hours now, and can't get the seismometer to work. I know for sure I need to keep the WarpPlugin/Resources/ScienceDefs.cfg that defines the experiment and the WarpPlugin/Patches/science.cfg that adds the FNSeismicProbe module to the seismometer, but past that I don't know. I used a program to open interstellar.dll and saw that it contained a module related to impactors, but I don't know C# so I couldn't gather anything specific there, and even if I also include interstellar.dll with the two configs it still doesn't function. Also, there doesn't seem to be anywhere in the configs that actually removes the stock seismic experiment and replaces it with the defined Interstellar experiment. Do you know what files other than the two .cfg's and interstellar.dll I need to use it? Or am I just stuck?

[Profit-]

The interstellar.dll file actually is used to report to the device that an impact has occurred, and then how to handle the device so it is necessary... However I dont know what it needs, it may need a lot to run.. There are two area's in there dedicated to it, and they seem to reference at least something external -> "ConfigNode config = PluginHelper.getPluginSaveFile();" If that is not present obviously things could start failing.

[KerbinDriveYards]

The interstellar.dll file actually is used to report to the device that an impact has occurred, and then how to handle the device so it is necessary... However I dont know what it needs, it may need a lot to run.. There are two area's in there dedicated to it, and they seem to reference at least something external -> "ConfigNode config = PluginHelper.getPluginSaveFile();" If that is not present obviously things could start failing.

Ok, thanks for the help with that. I'll continue trying different combinations of files and maybe I'll hit a working version.

[The Pav]

Thank you. Is the CO2 resource compatible with the CO2 resource from TAC Life support? I already use that and it would give me a reason to have a CO2 waste tank instead of jetting it into space.

[FreeThinker]

I've been trying to do this for a couple hours now, and can't get the seismometer to work. I know for sure I need to keep the WarpPlugin/Resources/ScienceDefs.cfg that defines the experiment and the WarpPlugin/Patches/science.cfg that adds the FNSeismicProbe module to the seismometer, but past that I don't know. I used a program to open interstellar.dll and saw that it contained a module related to impactors, but I don't know C# so I couldn't gather anything specific there, and even if I also include interstellar.dll with the two configs it still doesn't function. Also, there doesn't seem to be anywhere in the configs that actually removes the stock seismic experiment and replaces it with the defined Interstellar experiment. Do you know what files other than the two .cfg's and interstellar.dll I need to use it? Or am I just stuck?

Yes off cource, I told you only to remove the parts, none of the resource files, they are required

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Thank you. Is the CO2 resource compatible with the CO2 resource from TAC Life support? I already use that and it would give me a reason to have a CO2 waste tank instead of jetting it into space.

Not by default, you should add a converter module which can convert CO2 to LqdCO2

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Actually on further investigation the relay mechanism does not work appear to work any longer.

http://s18.postimg.org/g4oqhwvy1/image.png

img hosting

When I switch to the relay ship that should have an LOS with the generators, the panel pointing directly down to Kerbin at the generator shows this (which is the way it always has been but shows it is in relay mode)

http://s15.postimg.org/im0cqjbrf/image.png

screenshot windows 7

(I just checked and made sure that relay had an LOS with the generators by disabling the relay and activating the receiver on the phased array. It connected to both of my generators so it does have a good LOS)

http://s4.postimg.org/5d6cor8el/image.png

image hosting free no registration

Thanks, I checked the code and found the problem in the Relay network, it was using the active vessel instead of the active relay vessel to determine line of sight.

Edited May 29, 2015 by FreeThinker