KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[Lordmaddog]

3 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

@Lordmaddog Understand that people that want to have multiple resources in their vessels, either use mods that allow them to customize their tank with multiple of resources or they can use  KSPIE Universal Hex storage tanks or KSPIE Universal Storage Tanks which were specifically added to allow you to handle along a multitude of resources. But perhaps there are some that don't want to bother and simply want a single tank containing everything. 

It's not so much that we don't want to bother (though it did take me over 2 hours to figure out what I need to make uranium nitride) it's cpu usage each tank has polygons, textures, physics, and are constantly checked by script when ruining any ISRU process.

There is 75 resources from IFS alone witch you can often need more then one of for logistics and that's not including any other mods like EL, MKS, or TAC.

You can easily end up with 60-160+ tanks on a single base add this to the 100+ other parts a station or base needs and your machine just dies any time you load it in.  

[maranble14]

Downloaded and installed the latest version of KSP Interstellar yesterday, but was getting an error where KSP would stop loading all together when it was loading the PartRecipe modules from the mod. Suggestions?

 

Edit: figured out that it was a compatibility issue with OSE workshop. Odd, because OSE was compatible with my current version of KSP.

Edited April 11, 2018 by maranble14

[FreeThinker]

Version 1.18.6 for Kerbal Space Program 1.4.2 pack can be downloaded from here

Released on 2018-04-12

• Added improved VAB Context menu for Daedalus/Bussard/Kerbstein fusion engine
• Added improved support for Kerbal Engineer/ MechJeb with Daedalus/Bussard/Kerbstein fusion
• Added Part module info for Daedalus/Bussard/Kerbstein fusion engine
• Balance: added wasteheat, power and isp scaling advantage for Kerbstein
• Balance: made isp power/wasteheat efficiency of Daedalus/Bussard/Kerbstein fusion engine dependent on throttle
• Fixed non scaling wasteheat buffer size (by Arivald Ha'gel)
• Fixed Null reference exception of Daedalus/Bussard/Kerbstein in flight

[Sweetie bot]

On 2018/3/12 at 6:50 PM, Sweetie bot said:

 

Second idear is about Chemical combustion reactor. You can think it as a close cycle rocket engine or reactor but power by chemical. When run it produce TP by combining chemical fuel and re-collection Combustion product（Like Water, CO2, etc） . Can link to TEG for cover to MJ, or link to Thermal nozzle. Core Temp Decide on combustion type, can have a cap on 3200K (Not on MHD)

If this Link to Thermal nozzle that can be a new evolution of chemical engines！You get the engine power by Chemical combustion but Isp and propellant same as Soild NTR! 

 

Ex：

Let burn H2 to get heat

H2+O2=H2O（recovery） + Heat（3200+K）

Recover water then heat propellant directly through heat exchanger ;

propellant+Heat(3200+K) = thrust with high Exhaust velocity

get thrust and isp same or even higher than NTR， and not lossing much propellant

ideal to handel some low △DV orbital transfer

 

 

If you like you can even burn a coal (Carbon) to power your Steam Rocket ！！

By burn some soild fuel and heat propellant directly through heat exchanger.

C + O2= CO2↑ + Heat 

it also recover that carbon to some product that is easy to handle.

 

 

After some long time thinking , I re-think about what I'm going to say.

 

The way to improve that  Chemical rocket efficiency (in weight way) is reduce oxidizer.

 

To do that, first we need make sure  that  "fuel" are way more than "oxidizer", and then we don't use oxidizer as a propellant, because it high in molar mass will reduce ISP for engine. I think that a jump out the box to thinking.

How to do that? By reuse that oxidizer again. burn fuel and oxdizer in a close system and them let Heat heat up propellant (normally fuel) by pass heat exchanger. Result high Exhaust velocity and low mass follow. Get lot thermal Power to use, and  byproduct like water Steam and CO2 need storage, and electrolyze that to get back oxidizer in idle time.

 

Overall:

①A engine that Isp and TWR similar as solid core NTR but it a chemical! It mean no need of rad shied and Eco-friendly, and no special resources are needed.(because nuclear fuel are rare.

②Reducing the risk that fission fuels are easily owned by civilians, it might be use to trade in black market and be use to make a bomb in some secret place.

③Burning time are limited(by how many oxidizer and byproduct storage  can use in one time ). So It might burn muti time rather than one burn to finish orbital transfer.

④Low in Technical, rare resoure requite.

⑤tradeoff to reduce Overall power to get mass saving.

⑥ In theory it can use any propellant ! （ rather them few combustion for chemical rocket）

[FreeThinker]

19 hours ago, Sweetie bot said:

After some long time thinking , I re-think about what I'm going to say.

 

The way to improve that  Chemical rocket efficiency (in weight way) is reduce oxidizer.

 

To do that, first we need make sure  that  "fuel" are way more than "oxidizer", and then we don't use oxidizer as a propellant, because it high in molar mass will reduce ISP for engine. I think that a jump out the box to thinking.

How to do that? By reuse that oxidizer again. burn fuel and oxdizer in a close system and them let Heat heat up propellant (normally fuel) by pass heat exchanger. Result high Exhaust velocity and low mass follow. Get lot thermal Power to use, and  byproduct like water Steam and CO2 need storage, and electrolyze that to get back oxidizer in idle time.

 

Overall:

①A engine that Isp and TWR similar as solid core NTR but it a chemical! It mean no need of rad shied and Eco-friendly, and no special resources are needed.(because nuclear fuel are rare.

②Reducing the risk that fission fuels are easily owned by civilians, it might be use to trade in black market and be use to make a bomb in some secret place.

③Burning time are limited(by how many oxidizer and byproduct storage  can use in one time ). So It might burn muti time rather than one burn to finish orbital transfer.

④Low in Technical, rare resoure requite.

⑤tradeoff to reduce Overall power to get mass saving.

⑥ In theory it can use any propellant ! （ rather them few combustion for chemical rocket）

Alright, let's make it, this can be achieved by defining a near reactor fuel type which uses basic resources as input and output. The hardest part is making reactor definition for the new chemical reactor part. We need to find the exact energy produced by a reaction, for instance, 1 kg (Hydrogen + Oxygen) => 1 kg WaterVapor + 142 MJ ThermalHeat and convert it to a reactor definition. Could you come up with a list?

We might have to introduce a new resource called WaterVapor which would be the waste product of the Hydrogen + Oxygen reaction.

WaterVapour should also be added as the propellant, allowing you to use the exhaust of the Hydrogen + Oxygen reaction directly for propulsion, like in a Hydrogen + Oxygen engine.

I think we could use the old ISRU reactor as a good model, which looks like a big chemical reaction chamber.

The part should be put in the same tech nodes as the thermal nozzle is which is in experimental rocketry.

A disadvantage of the whole system is that it is quite complex as minimum working configuration would be

large lqdHydrogen tank  +  LqdOxygen tank + chemical reactor + thermal nozzle  + WaterVapor gastank +  liquid water tank + ISRU processor + ISRU Refrigerator +   large solar array/ rectenna.

Alternatively, connect the reactor to a thermal generator to power Electric Engine for much higher isp.

The ISRU processor +  ISRU Refrigerator  + large solar array/ rectenna would continually convert water back into Hydrogen + Oxygen and refrigerated into  LqdHydrogen + LqdOxygen.

 

 

Edited April 13, 2018 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

Thinking about it further I think it would make more sense to add a High power Fuel Cell like the Molten carbonate fuel cell which which would operate like a reactor with an integrated 60% direct energy converter and can optionally be connected to a thermal power generator for improved efficiency at the cost of increased mass. This would allow you to generate high amount electric power on demand.

Edited April 13, 2018 by FreeThinker

[ss8913]

the kerbsteins seem to be behaving a lot better in the update, @FreeThinker   something's still weird with the scaling though.. for a given ship X, a 20m kerbstein produces better acceleration than a 30m kerbstein, all other factors being equal.  Going from 20m to 30m seems to add around *five thousand metric tons* to the weight of the craft, and that might be the problem right there.

[FreeThinker]

12 minutes ago, ss8913 said:

the kerbsteins seem to be behaving a lot better in the update, @FreeThinker   something's still weird with the scaling though.. for a given ship X, a 20m kerbstein produces better acceleration than a 30m kerbstein, all other factors being equal.  Going from 20m to 30m seems to add around *five thousand metric tons* to the weight of the craft, and that might be the problem right there.

Sounds like there is a problem somewhere else

[ss8913]

1 hour ago, FreeThinker said:

Sounds like there is a problem somewhere else

maybe in tweakscale?  I'm not sure what else would govern mass scaling of parts?  I haven't *noticed* any other parts (even within this mod) exhibiting this behavior though. (which doesn't mean it's not happening; I just haven't noticed) ... maybe I should grab the tweakscale source and see what it's doing...

[jasontift]

how come the anti-matter fusion generator only produces 399kw and goes down every second until it hits 0 when it says it can make 180MW?????

[jasontift]

KSP says the newest KSPI is not for 1.4.2. but is out of date and meant for 1.4.1. what the hell?????????????????

info, I deleted ALL mods before putting KSPI_Extended_1.18.6 into game data folder and it still says it's out of date. Also the reactor puts out KW power not MW at all i have 8 of them linked and am getting 800 kw power to beam

Edited April 14, 2018 by jasontift

[FreeThinker]

3 hours ago, jasontift said:

info, I deleted ALL mods before putting KSPI_Extended_1.18.6 into game data folder and it still says it's out of date. Also the reactor puts out KW power not MW at all i have 8 of them linked and am getting 800 kw power to beam

Sounds if you are in KSP Stock Near Future mod, which will cause it to produce 100 times less power, but also consume 100 times less.

3 hours ago, jasontift said:

KSP says the newest KSPI is not for 1.4.2. but is out of date and meant for 1.4.1. what the hell?????????????????

Ah, seems I had forgot to update online AVC registration of KSPI version, it should be fixed now

Edited April 14, 2018 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

3 hours ago, jasontift said:

how come the anti-matter fusion generator only produces 399kw and goes down every second until it hits 0 when it says it can make 180MW?????

Beam core antimatter reactor power output for power production in limited to 4%

The reason for this is because proton antiproton reaction is very messy and create a lot of hard gamma radiation.

Still that 4% is much more than most other reactors

Edited April 14, 2018 by FreeThinker

[jasontift]

2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Beam core antimatter reactor power output for power production in limited to 4%

The reason for this is because proton antiproton reaction is very messy and create a lot of hard gamma radiation.

Still that 4% is much more than most other reactors

Thats not the one i was using.  this is.

">">Album  will appear when post is submitted

Antimatter initiated micro fusion reactor.

took near future elec. out. am now pushing 0.102 kw'

down to 0.00 to 0.080

">">Album  will appear when post is submitted

turning off the cp generators meant to convert the cp these reactor's create pushed me to 0.347 kw

But is it near future electrical or all near future mods?

I'm trying to build a power station both on ground and in space so i have power to all the crap i might want to do, but so far i've spent 4 days just trying to get the damn things working and transmitting power above kw

Edited April 14, 2018 by jasontift

[jasontift]

i got 10 of these and am getting 4.7 gw now, using the mhd generator.  Though it has the deuterium and helium 3 listed on this tab, i had to put more storage on the rig or it said it was depleted. 

">">Album  will appear when post is submitted

Edited April 14, 2018 by jasontift

[kerp]

How exactly are stock heat and waste heat supposed to work together?

- "Stock heat" appears to be a flat temperature value for a part. Which means "mass" doesn't matter?
- "Waste heat" appears to be treated like a form of energy - but I can't tell if it has any relation to part mass or if it somehow translates into stock heat?
- Radiators appear only to work while they collect waste heat? Or do they secretly work for "stock heat" all the time?
- No idea what to do about stock heat. In vanilla I guess I'm supposed to attach radiators directly to the parts, but that's kind of impractical with engines...

I can't figure out how to use the "KspiLightbulb"...

- Is it supposed to require very long pauses to cool down? When I don't see any "waste heat" - anywhere - at all?
- Is that engine really supposed to have such a high heat production / higher than all others?
- Also, using tweakscale appears makes it much much worse - so I have to strap lots of small ones together, or can I make it work somehow...?
- Should "baseHeatProduction" even scale with tweakscale? Heat production already scales with generator / engine power I think...  and since stock heat appears to be rather "flat", shouldn't it stay constant no matter the size of the engine? Which would mean: scale it down instead of up, so it doesn't go up with engine power etc....?
- Radiators are too big (graphically. I don't see my rocket any more. It's just a black tube now. )
- And radiators don't scale that well either.

I failed to build a "booster-less Lightbulb-Rocketship" for many hours (judging only from the description, stats and documentation, that should be inefficient but possible?). It failed NOT due to any of the expected & manageable problems (the enormous "waste heat" or the low thrust or the high price), but only because the engines overheat and blow up for no apparent reason . So I played around with the configurations a bit:

TWEAKSCALEEXPONENTS
{    
    name = StackFNRadiator
    radiatorArea = 2.7
    maxEnergyTransfer = 2.7
    {
        name = ElectricCharge
        rate = 2.7
    }
}

TWEAKSCALEEXPONENTS
{
    name = ThermalNozzleController    
    radius = 1
    exitArea = 2
    partMass = 3
    baseHeatProduction = -0.7
}

Some numbers / mechanics ingame began looking much saner for a while, and the Lightbulb worked a bit better, but building a rocket with it was still very hard and it still explodes spontaneously before I can even begin to figure out how "waste heat" works. Also tried changing the engine's heatConductivity from 0.01 to 0.06 and its heatProduction from 2000 to 1000... still blows up, maybe I made it worse again. I was hoping that I'd be able to build an (inefficient yet working) booster-less rocketship with that engine (without it being imbalanced), but even when it comes to normal use, the heat that thing collects just seems unmanageable. Any way I look at that engine, it turns out much worse than its (career mode) predecessors, even when fully upgraded.

So... what am I doing wrong?

 

P.S.: I tried the "heat-exchanger" from "Heatcontrol". I hoped it would convert stock heat into waste heat or at least make the problem more transparent, but it didn't do that. It didn't seem to do anything at all noticeable.

[FreeThinker]

5 hours ago, jasontift said:

I'm trying to build a power station both on ground and in space so i have power to all the crap i might want to do, but so far i've spent 4 days just trying to get the damn things working and transmitting power above kw

This might not be obvious but where is your antimatter?

If you supply it with antimatter it can generate up to 8 GW of power which when converted microwave power  has a mas effective Wall to Beam power of 6 GW

Edited April 14, 2018 by FreeThinker

[jasontift]

20 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

This might not be obvious but where is your antimatter?

If you supply it with antimatter it can generate up to 8 GW of power which when converted microwave power  has a mas effective Wall to Beam power of 6 GW

whats that on the bottom holding it up? and are there 2 generators on there?  (i got antimatter added on it as well. using 10 reactors and 1 generator.

 

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, kerp said:

I can't figure out how to use the "KspiLightbulb"...

- Is it supposed to require very long pauses to cool down? When I don't see any "waste heat" - anywhere - at all?
- Is that engine really supposed to have such a high heat production / higher than all others?
- Also, using tweakscale appears makes it much much worse - so I have to strap lots of small ones together, or can I make it work somehow...?
- Should "baseHeatProduction" even scale with tweakscale? Heat production already scales with generator / engine power I think...  and since stock heat appears to be rather "flat", shouldn't it stay constant no matter the size of the engine? Which would mean: scale it down instead of up, so it doesn't go up with engine power etc....?
 

Alright, I did some test of my own and the overheating issue is indeed a valid point. To fix it, all you need to do is change heatProductionMult in ThermalNozzleController from  1 to  0.3 (default), making it produce 70%  less stock thermal heat. This should make the heat at least manageable.

Edited April 14, 2018 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

5 hours ago, kerp said:

I failed to build a "booster-less Lightbulb-Rocketship" for many hours (judging only from the description, stats and documentation, that should be inefficient but possible?). It failed NOT due to any of the expected & manageable problems (the enormous "waste heat" or the low thrust or the high price), but only because the engines overheat and blow up for no apparent reason .

 

Well the trick is to maximize the strength of the Lightbulb, which is a combination of High Isp and Average High power and importantly it ability to use other propellant than just Hydrogen.  Hydrogen maximizes Isp but during start you need more thrust. One of the best methods is trade in some isp by more thrust using Hydrazine

we have loaded 4 ton on Hydrazine and 5.5 ton of hydrogen. It launches on Hydrazine with TWR of 1.61 accelerating to 2.2 when above 15000 m. Once  in orbit, we can switch to lqdHydrogen. Overal DeltaV is about 9 km/s which is enough to get into earth orbit. The fins act a both as launch stabilizers and space radiators

Edited April 14, 2018 by FreeThinker

[kerp]

3 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Alright, I did some test of my own and the overheating issue is indeed a valid point. To fix it, all you need to do is change heatProductionMult in ThermalNozzleController from  1 to  0.3 (default), making it produce 70%  less stock thermal heat. This should make the heat at least manageable.

Yes, that does the trick, thanks!

 

2 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Well the trick is to maximize the strength of the Lightbulb, which is a combination of High Isp and Average High power and importantly it ability to use other propellant than just Hydrogen.

Did you manage to scale that up somehow?

I found no reliable way to reach a stable orbit before the Light-bulb explodes from stock overheating - or at least only with a very small payload. Sometimes I just made it out of the atmosphere, turned the engines of, quickly turned on loads of "umbrellas" (hoping that might help, which it probably can't) but all the Lightbulbs still went *boom* 3 seconds later (it continues to generate heat for a bit after you turn it off.. also I think an air cooling multiplier or something might fall away suddenly, which also can kick overheat over the edge at that point). The one time I managed to get out of the atmosphere with a big ship + engines intact, the "stock heat" went down so slowly that I didn't mange to stabilize the orbit and crashed back down after a long fight with gravity + heat. It's almost a totally different game xD

 

Anyway: With heatProductionMult set to 0.3 on the other hand, I got into a stable orbit without any problems with a decently sized rocket-ship.

heatProductionMult 0.3 leaves plenty of room for errors - on Kerbal at least. 0.4 - 0.5 would probably already have been hard , I'll try that another time. Anything above 0.8 is probably close to impossible - unless you don't have any luggage and can afford to make something with a really high TWR.

The waste heat output of the Lightbulbs on the other hand looks either too low -  or rather the waste heat storage looks too generous (maybe due to tweakscale?). My current vessel somehow ended up with 400k waste heat storage maximum which I probably couldn't max out if I wanted to with that vessel. Is that how waste heat works? Still haven't really seen it in action yet. The recommended amount of cooling for my vessel was ~100GW. Because I planned to do mostly short bursts with those engines I brought "only" ~10GW. But getting to a stable orbit only generated 4-5k waste heat... if I interpret the numbers correctly, 400k storage means I could just leave the radiators at home and carry all waste heat with me forever?

 

[FreeThinker]

8 hours ago, kerp said:

The waste heat output of the Lightbulbs on the other hand looks either too low -  or rather the waste heat storage looks too generous (maybe due to tweakscale?).

What you can do is set wasteheatEfficiencyLowTemperature to a value lower than 0.99 (default) it determines the factor of thermal heat converted into effective energy for propulsion. Meaning a factor 0.01 or 1% is converted into wasteheat. Therefore setting wasteheatEfficiencyLowTemperature  = 0.98 will double the amount of wasteheat generated.

Edited April 15, 2018 by FreeThinker

[MrBaccano]

I have a station with nuclear reactors that transmits in far extreme UV, a simple ship that can receive the power and that works. But I wanted to create a network and so I launched a ship with a "Double Pivoted Light Mirror". And I got it in the situation where the ship with the mirror had line of sight to both other ships, but nothing happened. Am I missing something?

[FreeThinker]

5 hours ago, MrBaccano said:

I have a station with nuclear reactors that transmits in far extreme UV, a simple ship that can receive the power and that works. But I wanted to create a network and so I launched a ship with a "Double Pivoted Light Mirror". And I got it in the situation where the ship with the mirror had line of sight to both other ships, but nothing happened. Am I missing something?

Yes you are. Extreme UV cannot be reflected with aluminum or gold mirrors, it simply fall outside it effective spectrum, therefore it is not relayed. Instead use you could use 2 multi wavelength dishes which use dielectric dishes. One to receive the beamed power (in linked model) and a second to focus and the beamed power (inlay mode).

Edited April 15, 2018 by FreeThinker

[MrBaccano]

1 hour ago, FreeThinker said:

Yes you are. Extreme UV cannot be reflected with aluminum or gold mirrors, it simply fall outside it effective spectrum, therefore it is not relayed. Instead use you could use 2 multi wavelength dishes which use dielectric dishes. One to receive the beamed power (in linked model) and a second to focus and the beamed power (inlay mode).

Does that mean the first post is outdated? It has the " UV Light Mirror" listed with a range of "10 nm -700 nm". Now, the "Double Pivoted Light Mirror" is a slightly different name, but because its description says:

"This is an advanced pivoted Mirror capable of relaying beamed power in the UV and Visible light spectrum. Use it to create an UV light beamed power network."

I assumed that part was meant, since it's a mirror intended for UV. And since Far Extreme UV is 13 nm, I figured it'd fall within the range? Since I guess my reasoning is incorrect somewhere, what's the highest form of UV that the Double Pivoted Light Mirror would work with?