KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[Ciro1983811]

@FreeThinker I don't understand how the conversion from solidhydrogen to liquidhydrogen works.

I made a plane with solidhydrogen cryotank, liquidhydrongen cryotank, and compressed hydrogen gas tank, and a refrigerator.

Solidhydrogen cryotank is missing the solid/liquid slider (like liquid/gas slider for other resources). Refrigerator is missing solidhydrogen... so when my engine consume all the liquidhydrogen, with solidhydrogen tank full, i cannot convert it to liquid .....

 

How it works?

 

Bye!

[Quetsche]

Hi, i have trouble with a few features of interstellar.

First, is it normal that i can't cool down my pebble bed reactor? i've tried different models of radiators, nothing seems to work (strangely it works on the launchpad...)

Second, could someone give me the design of a simple microwave powered ship? So far i've got a ship with a reactor, a generator and a gyrotron, and another ship with an inline thermal receiver and a generator. What am i missing?

Thank you

 

edit: it seems my radiators don't cool KSPI parts, works fine for stock parts (ISRU)

Edited September 25, 2017 by Quetsche

[danielboro]

11 hours ago, Mandella said:

Is this something that must be upgraded?

yes

[Mandella]

8 hours ago, danielboro said:

yes

Thanks. That's not terribly clear in the description text, but I see now looking up the tree where it must be.

[kremonia]

Hi guys! Did anyone seen new Fusion Engine from one of last updates? Kerbstein Fusion Engine, looks like Epstein Engine from The Expanse. Did anyone get it to run? It needs a huge power to produce any trust.
https://imgur.com/ggSnPRP

Thanks a lot for upcoming answers. Cause, you know. everybody want Rocinante.

Edited September 26, 2017 by kremonia

[Dave1234]

Resource collection seems to have been bugged bad by the latest patch. Antimatter collection utterly fails--no matter what collectors I use, or what they say they're collecting, nothing appears in whatever I'm trying to store it in. Only the big science module seems to produce any, but several days' production yields only about 195 money-units (whatever they're called) worth of the stuff, and I can't get it OUT of the darn thing to actually use it on my ships. I'm also really missing the Large Radial Atmosphere Scoop; I'm guessing you got rid of that because it was separate from the regular air intake system, while ISRU refrigerators make use of regular air intakes. Either that or somehow it's bugged and missing from career mode. Problem is, ISRU refrigerators mostly freeze my game. Lol

More specifically, whenever they're running, the game halts for a split second every couple of seconds. It drives me batty, so I can't stand to use them, which means I just don't get that safe feeling I get from my ships being able to scoop their own hydrogen at Kerbin or Jool.

Unsatisfying or not though, the hydrogen production I can do without, even in career mode, since it's cheap. Antimatter, on the other hand, is more annoying; I can only use it in sandbox now because putting even a tiny bit on any ship is prohibitively expensive.

Is there already a fix for these issues out there? Anything I can tweak to make it work for myself?

[FreeThinker]

7 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Resource collection seems to have been bugged bad by the latest patch. Antimatter collection utterly fails--no matter what collectors I use, or what they say they're collecting, nothing appears in whatever I'm trying to store it in.

 

 

Notice Antimatter collectors now require power and they need to be activated to function.

7 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Problem is, ISRU refrigerators mostly freeze my game. Lol

More specifically, whenever they're running, the game halts for a split second every couple of seconds. It drives me batty, so I can't stand to use them, which means I just don't get that safe feeling I get from my ships being able to scoop their own hydrogen at Kerbin or Jool.

1

Weird, this is the first time I hear this. exactly what process is causing the problem, is it the Atmospheric Processing?

[Dave1234]

1 hour ago, FreeThinker said:

Notice Antimatter collectors now require power and they need to be activated to function.

Weird, this is the first time I hear this. exactly what process is causing the problem, is it the Atmospheric Processing?

I'll try to find a way to "activate" them. No luck yet; there doesn't seem to be an 'activate' button anywhere. I'll look again though. Thanks for telling me that much, at least it gives me something to look for. Time to dust off my antimatter farming build. Edit/update: I just launched a collector ship and checked, there's no 'activate' button anywhere. They say there's a magnetic flux, they say I should be getting .1mg a day... nothin'.

Re-edit: Ok, it IS working after all. It just isn't registering the weight of the stuff, which is what I was going by, but when I gave it some time the unit-count started ticking a bit. I guess the amount of mass is too small... what unit of measurement is five decimal places to the right of 'picograms' for pity's sake? Lol. Still, it's working, and SOMEday I might actually have enough antimatter to use some of it.

Yes, atmospheric extraction. That's not new though, it's been that way since I first downloaded KSPI-E.

Edited September 26, 2017 by Dave1234
More information

[FreeThinker]

4 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

I'll try to find a way to "activate" them. No luck yet; there doesn't seem to be an 'activate' button anywhere.

 

Its a button switch called "Collecting" , which is  in either "off" or "on" mode

4 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Yes, atmospheric extraction. That's not new though, it's been that way since I first downloaded KSPI-E.

 

Could you please verify your logs and see if they are continuously spammed with messages?

[raxo2222]

Why propellant efficiency of electrical engines reduces power demand just like thermal efficiency of engines?

https://imgur.com/a/CAGRt

 

Most of reactors have lower raw power output in heat manager than in part (right click) menu.

For thermal only fusion reactors raw power is listed to be 1000 times lower than actually it is!

TORY nuclear engine is listed under wrong size in tweakscale - while connection size is for example 1.875m, part itself says that its size is 3.75m.

cant upload screnshoots now - imgur broke

Imgur still broken, uploaded them there:

https://www.photobox.co.uk/my/photo?photo_id=9971659149&album_id=5034912960

 

 

Edited September 26, 2017 by raxo2222

[Ciro1983811]

On 25/9/2017 at 12:40 AM, Ciro1983811 said:

@FreeThinker I don't understand how the conversion from solidhydrogen to liquidhydrogen works.

I made a plane with solidhydrogen cryotank, liquidhydrongen cryotank, and compressed hydrogen gas tank, and a refrigerator.

Solidhydrogen cryotank is missing the solid/liquid slider (like liquid/gas slider for other resources). Refrigerator is missing solidhydrogen... so when my engine consume all the liquidhydrogen, with solidhydrogen tank full, i cannot convert it to liquid .....

 

How it works?

 

Bye!

@FreeThinker, maybe you missed it, is there a way to use solidhydrogen storage to feed liquidhydrogen to engines as propellant, or it only works as reactors fuel? It would be great to use the improved fuel density to store hydrogen.

[Dave1234]

11 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Its a button switch called "Collecting" , which is  in either "off" or "on" mode

Could you please verify your logs and see if they are continuously spammed with messages?

I found the log file. Took me awhile to figure out where it was. It does have a lot of messages like this one: "[WRN 17:14:30.363] Cannot create config from file 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Kerbal Space Program\GameData\InterstellarFuelSwitch\Patches\IntegrationLiquidFuelOxidizer.cfg'."

There is another thing I should mention, while looking for the logs you wanted I started looking into the crash dump logs first, before realizing that couldn't be what you meant, but I realized there was something else I should mention. the game is stable enough in vanilla mode but your mod crashes about six times per serious ship build (sometimes I can get through a little single-pilot jet flyer without a crash, but not usually) and at least three or four times per flight; it is especially prone to crashing when switching situations, such as launching a ship, switching to space center, switching ships, saving the game, loading saved games, etcetera, but it can crash at any time. There was some small improvement with the patch for 1.3, mainly that it no longer crashes just from hovering the mouse over a fusion reactor in the VAB or SPH. I have, as I mentioned, looked at the crash dump logs, and the problem always seems to be an "access violation". Is there something wrong with my settings? It just occurred to me to try running it as administrator, I'll try that and see if it helps but I doubt it.

Edit: Also, no, there is no 'collecting' switch. The collectors seem to always be active; on the bright side, they ARE working after all. It turns out that most of my problem was that you extended the condensation mechanic to antimatter; I was using a dimagnetic trap to collect anti-hydrogen, and the collectors only produce base antimatter now, so I have to have one of the electrostatic antimatter tanks as kind of a staging point and I hadn't realized that. Before, they just dumped it into whichever kind of tank was available.

While discovering this, I also realized that the price on the large electrostatic tank is bugged: the empty tank seems to have the price set at about ten billion credits or something. This was why I thought the price of antimatter was absolutely prohibitive; now that I know, can get by just using the smaller electrostatic tank until your next patch. Or until I find it myself in the game data files and tweak it... actually that's going to be sometime in the next five minutes...

Docking seems to cause both ships to completely halt all energy production. Megajoules, electric charge, everything runs on stored power until that's gone, then it's dead. The reactors and generators don't show that they're shut down; they just produce no power. Is this your mod? I'd say it could be a base game bug, except that megajoules are affected too. What gives?

Edited September 27, 2017 by Dave1234
Forgot something. More edit: added more problems.

[FreeThinker]

7 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

Docking seems to cause both ships to completely halt all energy production. Megajoules, electric charge, everything runs on stored power until that's gone, then it's dead. The reactors and generators don't show that they're shut down; they just produce no power. Is this your mod? I'd say it could be a base game bug, except that megajoules are affected too. What gives?

Yes this is a known problem. The work around is to quick save and reload after docking

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Dave1234]

1 minute ago, FreeThinker said:

Yes this is a known problem. The work around is to quick save and reload after docking

"Known" to the extent that you know what causes it? Am I lucky enough that I can go edit a CFG file and fix it for myself instead of having to beg you for a patch? XD

[FreeThinker]

13 hours ago, Ciro1983811 said:

@FreeThinker, maybe you missed it, is there a way to use solidhydrogen storage to feed liquidhydrogen to engines as propellant, or it only works as reactors fuel? It would be great to use the improved fuel density to store hydrogen.

The main purpose of Solid hydrogen is as dedicated fuel for Fusion and antimatter reactors. Notice the Solid Hydrogen has the same density as antihydrogen, which will make it easier to match an amount of antihydrogen with hydrogen.

You cannot use Solid Hydrogen directly for thermal engine propulsion, you first need to liquefy it first.  The Cryotank (that stores the solid hydrogen) has is a solid hydrogen to liquid hydrogen converter.

Edit: It appears to be missing altogether. It must have been fallen off after patch manager was implemented. I will add it in the next patch

3 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

"Known" to the extent that you know what causes it? Am I lucky enough that I can go edit a CFG file and fix it for myself instead of having to beg you for a patch? XD

Yes I have a reasonable idea what is causing it but it quite hard to fix it. However it something I'm working on gradually cleaning up

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Dave1234]

8 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Yes I have a reasonable idea what is causing it but it quite hard to fix it. However it something I'm working on gradualy

Rats, I'm guessing that "quite hard to fix it" means three things: one, writing an epxlanation for me would probably be harder than fixing it yourself, two: even if you did explain it, I probably still couldn't fix it because I'm not that good, and so three: I'm at your mercy. Soooo thanks.

Meanwhile, any idea what's causing all this crashing crashing crashing? Like sometimes I have to restart the game five times just to build one ship, crashing? I haven't seen too many other people moaning about that level of instability, I suppose that doesn't necessarily it isn't there since I haven't looked all that hard, but still, maybe it's some setting or other on my end?

[FreeThinker]

6 minutes ago, Dave1234 said:

Meanwhile, any idea what's causing all this crashing crashing crashing? Like sometimes I have to restart the game five times just to build one ship, crashing? I haven't seen too many other people moaning about that level of instability, I suppose that doesn't necessarily it isn't there since I haven't looked all that hard, but still, maybe it's some setting or other on my end?

 

I'm afraid that this is an inherent memory leak problem in KSP and the best advice I can give you  (besides running in 64 bit mode) is to follow @Maelstrom Vortex example by minimizing the number of installed parts that eat up your memory.

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Dave1234]

1 minute ago, FreeThinker said:

I'm afraid that this is an inherent memory leak problem in KSP and the best advice I can give you  (besides running in 64 bit mode) is to follow @Maelstrom Vortex example by minimizing the number of installed parts that eat up your memory.

So that's NOT the mod? Hmm. It hadn't occurred to me that I WASN'T in 64 bit mode. My system is definitely a 64-bit system. I'll go figure out how to switch and see what that does.

[FreeThinker]

9 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

While discovering this, I also realized that the price on the large electrostatic tank is bugged: the empty tank seems to have the price set at about ten billion credits or something. This was why I thought the price of antimatter was absolutely prohibitive; now that I know, can get by just using the smaller electrostatic tank until your next patch. Or until I find it myself in the game data files and tweak it... actually that's going to be sometime in the next five minutes...

 

The cost is indeed bugged. This tank temporarily served as the storage mechanism for diamagnetic storage which allows much higher density storage than electrostatic storage. But This functionality was replaced by a brand new part and I gave back this part original functionality except forgot to fix the adjusted cost. It will be fixed next version.

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Dave1234]

1 minute ago, FreeThinker said:

It is indeed bugged. This tank temporarily served as the storage mechanism for diamagnetic storage which allows much higher density storage than electrostatic storage. But This functionality was replaced by a brand new part and I gave back this part original functionality except forgot to fix the adjusted cost. It will be fixed next version.

Cool. Meanwhile I managed to tweak it to a useable level... not that using it is necessary for me atm since I've gotten far enough to have the anti-hydrogen tank anyway so all I need electrostatic tanks for is a stopover till the AH tank can compress the stuff.

[FreeThinker]

20 minutes ago, Dave1234 said:

Cool. Meanwhile I managed to tweak it to a useable level... not that using it is necessary for me atm since I've gotten far enough to have the anti-hydrogen tank anyway so all I need electrostatic tanks for is a stopover till the AH tank can compress the stuff.

In the next release, the large ElectrosticAntimatter tank will have three times the volume and cost of a flat electrostatic antimatter tank. Notice that in the future you will need a combination of antimatter production (Cyclotron producing positrons) and Antiproton collectors to create antimatter (which is technically a mix of antiprotons and positrons) that can be used in antimatter reactors.

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Dave1234]

2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

In the next release, the large ElectrosticAntimatter tank will have three times the volume and cost of a flat electrostatic antimatter tank. Notice that in the future you will need a combination of antimatter production (Cyclotron producing positrons) and Antiproton collectors to create antimatter (which is technically a mix of antiprotons and positrons) that can be used in antimatter reactors.

So... no more scooping it out of Jool's magnetosphere? Well, at least I hope there's a way to produce a useful amount of it. I'm starting to create larger and larger trawler ships to bring back the stuff even as it is.This is really getting too complicated for the virtually nonexistent levels of automation in the game. It'd be great if I could assign a group of Kerbonauts to go do this, and they'd take care of it, come back, and I'd get the results, but with me having to manage every single flight (at least all the parts where they're not just coasting...

Anyway. Am I right that you deliberately took all the atmosphere scoops out of career mode? And have you had any thoughts on that freezup when I use the refri... I bet that was the memory leak. 64 bit mode seems to be working well--that gives the game more access to system RAM right? I'll try the ISRU processors again, maybe I can use them smoothly now. But, atmosphere scoops?

I like being self-sufficient, even if there's no reason to. Since a hundred kilograms of hydrogen will last a ship for, oh, years and years and years.

Update: Nope. The refrigerator and ISRU all-in-one are still really freezy when used for atmosphere extraction. So I guess it wasn't just the memory leak.

Edited September 27, 2017 by Dave1234
Update

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, Dave1234 said:

So... no more scooping it out of Jool's magnetosphere? Well, at least I hope there's a way to produce a useful amount of it.

 

No, you still can scoop it out of Jools magnetosphere, but only the antiprotons, which make up 99.86% of the mass of antimatter, the remaining 0.054% needs to be fabricated artificially, which requires some effort but is still 1836 times as easy of creating all antimatter from scratch.

1 hour ago, Dave1234 said:

Anyway. Am I right that you deliberately took all the atmosphere scoops out of career mode?

 

Yes, but I have some plans to bring them back in a specialized atmosphere scoop mode with integrated refrigeration, making them similar to the old scoops, just better as you no longer have to select a specific resource.

1 hour ago, Dave1234 said:

freezup when I use the refri... I bet that was the memory leak. 64 bit mode seems to be working well--that gives the game more access to system RAM right?

3

Yes, it allows KSP to make of all system memory, which is a lot better than the 32 bit mod which limited memory to 3 GB, which can easily be crossed after installing a few mods and playing KSP. especially switching between scenes appears to cause memory leak which results into the infamous "access violation" crash

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, Dave1234 said:

Update: Nope. The refrigerator and ISRU all-in-one are still really freezy when used for atmosphere extraction. So I guess it wasn't just the memory leak.

 

Weird, the only thing I can think of is exception are generated because you haven't properly installed/updated other mods like CRP (Community Resource Pack). You need the latest version 0.7.2 from GitHub, not the obsolete 0.6.5 found on Spacedock.

Edited September 27, 2017 by FreeThinker

[Maelstrom Vortex]

10 hours ago, Dave1234 said:

So that's NOT the mod? Hmm. It hadn't occurred to me that I WASN'T in 64 bit mode. My system is definitely a 64-bit system. I'll go figure out how to switch and see what that does.

This is going to be 90% of your problem. I woudln't be able to use half the mods I do in 32 bit. I'm on an I5 system with 600 MHZ dr3 16 gb of ram, I can operate 3 hours without crashing (on average). Frequent screen switches will also increase the rate of degrade. Minimize them. One way you can do this is getting the mod that lets you access mission control anywhere. Unfortunately am at work as of this post and I forget its name offhand. CPU is still so old I do have performance issues around particularly large vessels, cannot wait to upgrade.

Edited September 27, 2017 by Maelstrom Vortex