KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[Arivald Ha'gel]

51 minutes ago, Infleto said:

What if I drunk a LOT for wine?  Would wine help?

Being patient will.

[jebalicious]

Hi, i'm running KSP 1.3 still and am wondering what the correct cfg is for the Vista engine.  When I first used it it was a massive 20m and could not go any smaller.  Looking at the cfg file for it I found that the rescale factor was 4 or 5 (I'm not sure which because I changed to 2 to keep it at 5m.  That fixed that problem and i had to play with the tweakscale side of things too however I am just wondering what the stats should be at my default 5m engine.  Currently its set as 

MODULE
        {
            name = FuelConfiguration
            fuelConfigurationName = D-T
        requiredTechLevel = 0
            fuels = LqdHydrogen, LqdDeuterium, LqdTritium, WasteHeat
            ratios = 1.38337941, 1.38337941e-3, 1.38337941e-3, 0
            amount = 20000, 20, 20, 0
            maxAmount = 20000, 20, 20, 1200000
            maxIsp = 15500
            maxThrust = 1200
            thrustMult = 1
            powerMult = 1

 

Is this right or should the respective resource levels be 160k, 160, 160?

[rodrommel]

I'm having a problem with beamed microwave power.

 

I've sent a ship out to the moons of Jool. It has a tokamak running on D-H3 fusion, hooked up to a direct converter. It produces plenty of power to run the microwave transmitter on the ship.

I have a separate lander that undocks from the large ship in orbit of whichever moon I'm landing on. It has an inline receiver and a thermal rocket nozzle using liquid fuel as a propellant. Once I activate the receiver, I'm able to see the 2.8 GW or so of power that I'm receiving in the power receiver interface. Once I activate the thermal nozzle, I start my deorbit maneuvers. Without fail, every time I get about 2.5km away from the mother ship that has the transmitter, the nozzle cuts off. The power receiver interface says I'm receiving the same amount of power. I've tried making burns of different deltaV's at different times to test different facing percentages. No matter what I do, at 2.5km the nozzle cuts off. I have lots of other mods installed, so I'm not sure if that could be an issue. Anyone else ever have this problem? Am I doing something wrong?

[samooo2]

17 hours ago, rodrommel said:

I'm having a problem with beamed microwave power.

 

I've sent a ship out to the moons of Jool. It has a tokamak running on D-H3 fusion, hooked up to a direct converter. It produces plenty of power to run the microwave transmitter on the ship.

I have a separate lander that undocks from the large ship in orbit of whichever moon I'm landing on. It has an inline receiver and a thermal rocket nozzle using liquid fuel as a propellant. Once I activate the receiver, I'm able to see the 2.8 GW or so of power that I'm receiving in the power receiver interface. Once I activate the thermal nozzle, I start my deorbit maneuvers. Without fail, every time I get about 2.5km away from the mother ship that has the transmitter, the nozzle cuts off. The power receiver interface says I'm receiving the same amount of power. I've tried making burns of different deltaV's at different times to test different facing percentages. No matter what I do, at 2.5km the nozzle cuts off. I have lots of other mods installed, so I'm not sure if that could be an issue. Anyone else ever have this problem? Am I doing something wrong?

KSPI reactors tend to have a problem with docking and un-docking. Causes all sorts of weird stuff, so as a general rule you should save and load the game every time you do that.

This is just a guess though, your problem may be somewhere else.

[ArmchairPhysicist]

Alright this has been bugging me and I must have answers.

Ive installed kerbal engineer recently and have been playing around with different combinations of thrusters and fuel types to get an idea of what setups get me the best DV, the best thrust, and the smallest tank size. 

But one thing I’ve noticed again and again, hydrogen is awful. From the low tech thermal “nerva”,  timber wind and closed cycle rockets all the way up to atillas vasmirs and MD plasma thrusters, hydrogen has awful d/v potential. The strange thing is that the low tech rockets are best with hydrogen, all other fuel types provide worse D/V. The Electric thrusters are wasted with hydrogen, and the Vista (although better than the rest) still needs a massive amount of hydrogen to have any appeal. By the time I’ve built the drive block for a Vista (fuel, heavy reactor, radiators) it ends up more expensive, less efficient, and larger than clustering MIFs, especially because MIFs don’t need a heavy reactor. I feel I’m missing something. Maybe I’m supposed to mine hydrogen from the moon? Maybe I’m expecting too much out of my rockets? Maybe I missed a fuel type that is the right one to use on the fission thermal rockets? 

 

 

Also, what’s the difference between the Charged particle direct generator and the magneto hydrodynamic electric generator?

Edited March 20, 2018 by ArmchairPhysicist

[Arivald Ha'gel]

5 hours ago, ArmchairPhysicist said:

Alright this has been bugging me and I must have answers.

Ive installed kerbal engineer recently and have been playing around with different combinations of thrusters and fuel types to get an idea of what setups get me the best DV, the best thrust, and the smallest tank size. 

But one thing I’ve noticed again and again, hydrogen is awful. From the low tech thermal “nerva”,  timber wind and closed cycle rockets all the way up to atillas vasmirs and MD plasma thrusters, hydrogen has awful d/v potential. The strange thing is that the low tech rockets are best with hydrogen, all other fuel types provide worse D/V. The Electric thrusters are wasted with hydrogen, and the Vista (although better than the rest) still needs a massive amount of hydrogen to have any appeal. By the time I’ve built the drive block for a Vista (fuel, heavy reactor, radiators) it ends up more expensive, less efficient, and larger than clustering MIFs, especially because MIFs don’t need a heavy reactor. I feel I’m missing something. Maybe I’m supposed to mine hydrogen from the moon? Maybe I’m expecting too much out of my rockets? Maybe I missed a fuel type that is the right one to use on the fission thermal rockets? 

 

 

Also, what’s the difference between the Charged particle direct generator and the magneto hydrodynamic electric generator?

Hydrogen does have VERY low density. If you'd count propellant MASS that would be quite different. You're comparing volume.

[kenjura]

I'm playing 1.4.1.2089 with KSP-IE 1.17.4, which I realize may not be fully supported at this time. But I'm having a game-breaking bug that has ground my current save to a halt, and I was hoping for some help.

The problem is simple: if I right click on a Solid Core Nuclear Engine and click Swap Fuel (as I accidentally did), the context menu spawns an infinite number of "Plutonium Fuel" resource indicators, which quickly crash the context menu, making it unavailable until I load a different craft. It seems like this might be a craft-specific issue, as I can make a new vessel with usable context menus, then reproduce this issue, then I can't use the context menu for that craft anymore. I'm not sure it's save-specific (thank goodness), because if I load a broken craft in a brand new save, the problem recurs. Whatever I did seems to be persisting in the craft file.

And therein lies my hope, that perhaps I can fix this by editing the craft file, rather than the code itself needing a change. Does anyone know what change the "swap fuel" button does to the craft file, and how to reverse it, if possible?

If it's helpful, this development comment seems to refer to the bug I'm working with (although, in my case, everything most certainly does not look ok when reopening the context menu, as it cannot be reopened ever again after swapping fuels).

Thanks in advance!

[Arivald Ha'gel]

2 hours ago, kenjura said:

I'm playing 1.4.1.2089 with KSP-IE 1.17.4, which I realize may not be fully supported at this time. But I'm having a game-breaking bug that has ground my current save to a halt, and I was hoping for some help.

The problem is simple: if I right click on a Solid Core Nuclear Engine and click Swap Fuel (as I accidentally did), the context menu spawns an infinite number of "Plutonium Fuel" resource indicators, which quickly crash the context menu, making it unavailable until I load a different craft. It seems like this might be a craft-specific issue, as I can make a new vessel with usable context menus, then reproduce this issue, then I can't use the context menu for that craft anymore. I'm not sure it's save-specific (thank goodness), because if I load a broken craft in a brand new save, the problem recurs. Whatever I did seems to be persisting in the craft file.

And therein lies my hope, that perhaps I can fix this by editing the craft file, rather than the code itself needing a change. Does anyone know what change the "swap fuel" button does to the craft file, and how to reverse it, if possible?

If it's helpful, this development comment seems to refer to the bug I'm working with (although, in my case, everything most certainly does not look ok when reopening the context menu, as it cannot be reopened ever again after swapping fuels).

Thanks in advance!

Swap Fuel problem is just a GUI problem. Once you click on the different part, once you get back it should be ok once again. If it's not going back to normal then it's good that the bug is already fixed on development. Please check issue on github:

https://github.com/sswelm/KSP-Interstellar-Extended/issues/131

Fix will be included in new version. If you want to have it now, let me know and I'll publish a dll with the fix for you.

[FreeThinker]

For those intrested, a BETA of KSPIE 1.18.1 for KSP 1.4.1 can now be found in the KSPIE development thread

Edited March 23, 2018 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

On 20-3-2018 at 5:23 PM, ArmchairPhysicist said:

 Maybe I’m supposed to mine hydrogen from the moon? Maybe I’m expecting too much out of my rockets? Maybe I missed a fuel type that is the right one to use on the fission thermal rockets?

 

On the moon, very little hydrogen can be found except inside polar craters.  Your best strategy the moon is to extract any aluminium and oxygen from the lunar regolith and used it in a metal-oxygen rocket.

Hydrogen indeed is often not ideal. The the main problem is its low density and difficult cryostorage requirements. It means you going to need large bulky cryo storage tanks. You need to use it either, when maximizing your deltaV or when you have access to Hydrogen refuel, like at gas planets where you can scoop it from the atmosphere or just above it. But granted if this does not apply, it usually a lot easier and cheaper to use more compact or high energy propellants like ammonia, hydrazine or methane which expand when heated to high temperatures. Of course, you need to have unlocked the higher storage tech to use it, but nothing comes for free.

What you should always take into account is that there is such a thing as too high Isp, the higher your Isp, the more energy you need to generate for effective propulsion. 

Edited March 22, 2018 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

On 17-3-2018 at 4:19 AM, jebalicious said:

 Currently its set as 

MODULE
        {
            name = FuelConfiguration
            fuelConfigurationName = D-T
        requiredTechLevel = 0
            fuels = LqdHydrogen, LqdDeuterium, LqdTritium, WasteHeat
            ratios = 1.38337941, 1.38337941e-3, 1.38337941e-3, 0
            amount = 20000, 20, 20, 0
            maxAmount = 20000, 20, 20, 1200000
            maxIsp = 15500
            maxThrust = 1200
            thrustMult = 1
            powerMult = 1

 

Is this right or should the respective resource levels be 160k, 160, 160?

 

looks alright to me except for a missing accolate

[Acvila]

Because 1.4.1 happened i start a new campaign and after researching first reactor, first turbojet, first transmitter, first receiver and so on, i managed to get from transmitters(laser diode, i think) only 30 MW from a 300MW reactor with 20tones(450MW dissipation) radiators which give just 60MW power? then the plane i made with mk1 receiver and thermal jet and the plane keep heating(worst with radiators) till explode? i thought thermal jets doesn't heat, is it normal? kspi 1.18.1 beta

Edited March 24, 2018 by Acvila

[Arivald Ha'gel]

4 hours ago, Acvila said:

Because 1.4.1 happened i start a new campaign and after researching first reactor, first turbojet, first transmitter, first receiver and so on, i managed to get from transmitters(laser diode, i think) only 30 MW from a 300MW reactor with 20tones(450MW dissipation) radiators which give just 60MW power? then the plane i made with mk1 receiver and thermal jet and the plane keep heating(worst with radiators) till explode? i thought thermal jets doesn't heat, is it normal? kspi 1.18.1 beta

Screenshot would be useful. But remember that thermal receiver WILL receive power (and generate heat). You need to have fixed non deployable radiators that can function in atmo.

[Acvila]

3 hours ago, Arivald Ha'gel said:

Screenshot would be useful. But remember that thermal receiver WILL receive power (and generate heat). You need to have fixed non deployable radiators that can function in atmo.

from what i know those engines consumes waste heat, they not generate, and for those 50MW i had enough radiators, but was worst than without. i made lots of spaceplanes in 1.3.1 and never need radiators for thermal engines, only for electric engines. receivers generate heat if you have electric consumers, but the only consumer was the engine itself, so he can eat all that waste heat.

Edited March 24, 2018 by Acvila

[Arivald Ha'gel]

31 minutes ago, Acvila said:

from what i know those engines consumes waste heat, they not generate, and for those 50MW i had enough radiators, but was worst than without. i made lots of spaceplanes in 1.3.1 and never need radiators for thermal engines, only for electric engines. receivers generate heat if you have electric consumers, but the only consumer was the engine itself, so he can eat all that waste heat.

My experience was that when not on 100%, thermal engines don't use all waste heat and radiators are needed always. Once again, screenshot will help.

[Acvila]

38 minutes ago, Arivald Ha'gel said:

My experience was that when not on 100%, thermal engines don't use all waste heat and radiators are needed always. Once again, screenshot will help.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aSkH8i5U0Qpbi_gi7-gCMUIMuG5A_mNp/view?usp=sharing

those radiators in vab show me 110MW dissipation but from picture they only dissipate 600KW? can't be usable like that.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iysd5LrOYFjUmvOtC-xjZA5-uFBTGlLI

look how big those radiators are for only 33MW power dissipation...

Edited March 24, 2018 by Acvila

[samooo2]

24 minutes ago, Acvila said:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aSkH8i5U0Qpbi_gi7-gCMUIMuG5A_mNp/view?usp=sharing

those radiators in vab show me 110MW dissipation but from picture they only dissipate 600KW? can't be usable like that.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iysd5LrOYFjUmvOtC-xjZA5-uFBTGlLI

look how big those radiators are for only 33MW power dissipation...

That's stock "Temperature" and not KSPI "WasteHeat". Not sure if it's intended but thermal engines tend to blow up in-atmosphere, radiators don't help. You can delay it by using a Heat Sink.

[Acvila]

5 minutes ago, samooo2 said:

That's stock "Temperature" and not KSPI "WasteHeat". Not sure if it's intended but thermal engines tend to blow up in-atmosphere, radiators don't help. You can delay it by using a Heat Sink.

at 60m/s? with only 80MW you don't reach speed to heat the plane... only about 150m/s... as i said, because i start new game i wished to see how the new low level reactor works, but it seems that you can't do anything with it...

Edited March 24, 2018 by Acvila

[Arivald Ha'gel]

2 hours ago, Acvila said:

at 60m/s? with only 80MW you don't reach speed to heat the plane... only about 150m/s... as i said, because i start new game i wished to see how the new low level reactor works, but it seems that you can't do anything with it...

Probably you're missing an intake pre-cooler.

Edited March 24, 2018 by Arivald Ha'gel

[AtilaElari]

Hello. I recal there was an engine capable of working during time-warp, but I can't seem to find it now. Is it still in the mod? What's it's name?

[Arivald Ha'gel]

12 hours ago, AtilaElari said:

Hello. I recal there was an engine capable of working during time-warp, but I can't seem to find it now. Is it still in the mod? What's it's name?

Pretty much ALL electric engines (like MPD, Atilla, Vasimir).

[Pixel of Life]

Do the mod's part modules (as in the stuff you put in a part's config file) have any documentation? I'd like to make a bunch of non-KSPI nuclear engines use KSPI's nuclear reactors. As far as I can tell, I'll need a reactor module (InterstellarFissionNTR or InterstellarFissionPB), a nozzle module (ThermalNozzleController) and, optionally, a generator module (ThermalElectricEffectGenerator) and a radiator module (FlatFNRadiator), but I have no idea what many of the variables do and how they affect the performance of the engine.

Edited March 28, 2018 by CaptainKorhonen

[FreeThinker]

Version 1.18.2 for Kerbal Space Program 1.4.1 is released can be downloaded from here

Released on 2018-03-28

• Compiled against KSP 1.4.1
• Added Open Cycle Gas Core Rocket (Model & Texture by @TiktaalikDreaming)
• Added Filter Extension Submenu Microwave split up into Transmitters and Receivers submenu
• Added improved NFE support: NFE reactors now feed Megajoule Power Management (credits by Arivald Ha'gel
• Added Double Cyclotron part, which can create heaver isotopes from lighter isotopes
• Added Low tech Fission Reactor (credits by Spacemouse)
• Added 3 Additional Photovoltaic technodes
• Added Oversized Thermal Microwave Transceiver
• Added improved Model for Muon Catalized Fusion Engine
• Added Made Upgrades in Tech screen have a green background, making them easier to identify from parts
• Added Daedalus, Bussard and Epstein Fusion engine thrust now depend on a wide range of high tech nodes
• Balanced moved more advanced Photovoltaic receiver higher into tech tree and improved their maximum achievable efficiency
• Balanced tech upgrade requirements of many reactors, which depending on their characteristics depend on different tech nodes for upgrades
• Balanced tech upgrades of thermal electric generator which higher efficiencies are now unlock by the new Photovoltaic technodes
• Balance: increase minimum tech requirement Molten Salt Reactor to Advanced Nuclear Power
• Balance: changed all Near Future-Electric nuclear reactors tech requirement to first nuclear power technode
• Balance: changed power divider in NF mode from 500 to 100
• Balanced: Made power upgrades Open Cycle Gas Core reactors depend on Thermal Management tech nodes
• Fixed UF4 Ammonolysis (credits by Arivald Ha'gel)
• Fixed in NF mode, VAB power output will be displayed at 1/100 scale
• Fixed Filter Extension submenu for Generator will now only show stand alone electric generator and Capacitors
• Fixed Filter Extension submenu for Reactor will now only show stand alone reactors
• Fixed size of Wasteheat buffers for generator and microwave receivers in NF mode
• Fixed Timberwind Black artifact exhaust problem
• Fixed missing textures (credits by Arivald Ha'gel)
• Fixed Molten Salt Swap Fuel issue (credits by Arivald Ha'gel)
• Fixed Solid Fission Reactor mass scaling issue
• Structural: Split parts inside Microwave folder into separate sub folders
• Structural: replaced internal PartModule configuration by Module Manager script (credits by Arivald Ha'gel)

[FreeThinker]

3 hours ago, CaptainKorhonen said:

Do the mod's part modules (as in the stuff you put in a part's config file) have any documentation? I'd like to make a bunch of non-KSPI nuclear engines use KSPI's nuclear reactors. As far as I can tell, I'll need a reactor module (InterstellarFissionNTR or InterstellarFissionPB), a nozzle module (ThermalNozzleController) and, optionally, a generator module (ThermalElectricEffectGenerator) and a radiator module (FlatFNRadiator), but I have no idea what many of the variables do and how they affect the performance of the engine.

No there isn't any documentation except how they are currently used by exiting parts. Notice there are less actual partmodules than the names suggest. The reason for different names mainly has to do how they are represented in the infobox and how they scale at larger or smaller size. If you have any particular question you should ask them in the dev tread

[Deckard]

I'm confused by the purpose of the graphene radiators.  The stock radiators seem superior in every way, even fully upgraded.  For example:  Compared to one Mk3 large Thermal Control System, two Mk5 Large Folding Graphene Radiators cost more than twice as much, weigh 20% more, and provide only a fraction of the cooling to a reactor (A 3.75 Molten Salt Reactor with a thermal generator at full power operates at less than 8% efficiency compared to about 30% with the single TCS), not to mention requiring much more tech to fully upgrade.  Is this working as intended?  I don't have Near Future Electrical or anything else that affects radiators (as far as I know), if that's in question.  Are stock radiators overpowered, or are graphene radiators underpowered?

Edited March 30, 2018 by Deckard