KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[Snoman314]

9 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

You are correct that they are currently identical except in cost and mass.  The reason is simply they aren't finished yet. The  Plutonium-238 is supposedly the premium type of fuel with better performance compared to the (20% enriched) Uranium. However, plutonium fuel was never intended for the Candle engine which is based on the Traveling Wave Reactor design which is supposed to breed its own fuel and only use plutonium as a flame that would start the candle. 

OK, so no in-game difference currently. Thanks.

[RabidSmurf]

On 3/31/2019 at 3:00 AM, FreeThinker said:

Good to hear. I'm curious, how are you using the NSWR in KSP? I'm always interested in how players use KSPIE parts in their campaign.

I'll just start by saying I am a total newb at this mod, only just beginning to figure out how to use everything and my biggest problem is figuring out applications for various engines and Isru's and what not, it's pretty overwhelming, but that's part of why I like the idea so much.

I am using it to power a Jool ship that can fit about 12 kerbals, has on board lab and life support, can bring landers and other things with it. It's mostly a modular design that I've been using for manned Jool exploration. Up until now it's used the solid core nuclear and liquid core nuclear engine. The NSW came in for me as a pre-fusion upgrade to the liquid core nuclear engine (better isp), it also just looks freakin cool and after I read about the general concept of how it works I wanted to try it.

I had to turn the thrust down as the thing is just too insane for most ships, for some reason thrust limiter only available in VAB (not sure if that's intentional). Also due to the limited options of tank types for nuclear fuels I am using the fabricator to convert liquid water to nuclear salt water. This allows me to use radial spherical tanks for the bulk of the fuel storage so I can condense the engine stage length significantly. What I initially wanted to do was store the fuel as iiquid hydrogen and oxygen and then use ISRU to convert to liquid water, but that process was not available.

The drawback of the design is I only have about 1800 dV at a time, (about 18k total with no landers attached) so I am not sure if it's really practical for what I am doing, but damn does it look nice.

https://imgur.com/a/fduN6jl

Note that KER cannot calculate the dV accurately at all.

Edited April 3, 2019 by RabidSmurf

[davidle]

I have space station producing positrons powered by a Open Cycle Gas Core reactor. As it begin to run out of fuel, I flew up a container full of UF4, powered it off and sent up a Kerbal engineer to refuel and restore power. However, the reactor isn't responding to commands, it won't refuel or power up. This has persisted across the current version of KSPI and the one before it, so I can't tell if this is a bug or a feature.

 

Thanks!

Edited April 3, 2019 by davidle

[mbaryu]

1 hour ago, davidle said:

I have space station producing positrons powered by a Open Cycle Gas Core reactor. As it begin to run out of fuel, I flew up a container full of UF4, powered it off and sent up a Kerbal engineer to refuel and restore power. However, the reactor isn't responding to commands, it won't refuel or power up. This has persisted across the current version of KSPI and the one before it, so I can't tell if this is a bug or a feature.

I've noticed that several of the reactors (not that one in particular, but I haven't tested it) get corrupted in the save file if they run out of fuel.  For example, I created a ship with a molten salt reactor using Extraplanetary Launchpads.  I didn't have fuel for it (oops), so I had to ship some from Kerbin (oops).  When I fueled the reactor it wouldn't do anything.  I looked at it in the save file and noticed that its KSPI reactor info was full of NaNs.  I assumed that was a bug (was it?) so I copied values from a similar sized reactor and it worked fine.

[davidle]

1 hour ago, mbaryu said:

I've noticed that several of the reactors (not that one in particular, but I haven't tested it) get corrupted in the save file if they run out of fuel.  For example, I created a ship with a molten salt reactor using Extraplanetary Launchpads.  I didn't have fuel for it (oops), so I had to ship some from Kerbin (oops).  When I fueled the reactor it wouldn't do anything.  I looked at it in the save file and noticed that its KSPI reactor info was full of NaNs.  I assumed that was a bug (was it?) so I copied values from a similar sized reactor and it worked fine.

Good suggestion!

In this case the reactor still has about 33% percent fuel remaining. =/  

[FreeThinker]

7 hours ago, RabidSmurf said:

I had to turn the thrust down as the thing is just too insane for most ships, for some reason thrust limiter only available in VAB (not sure if that's intentional).

Well it is intentional that it should not be able the deep throttle or use the thrust limiter during flight. The reason is that the NSWR works on the basis a finely calibrated neutronicity to achieve fission criticality which can only be calibrated in the VAB before flight. During flight you are only able to activate or deactivate the NSWR and it takes a bit of time to spool up and down. The spool down time is also dependent on the amount of radiators available as it needs to use additional water  to cool down the nozzle.

Edited April 3, 2019 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

7 hours ago, RabidSmurf said:

Also due to the limited options of tank types for nuclear fuels I am using the fabricator to convert liquid water to nuclear salt water. This allows me to use radial spherical tanks for the bulk of the fuel storage so I can condense the engine stage length significantly.

Storing enriched uranium and water separately before mixing into NuclearSaltWater is indeed the best strategy as it maximizes deltaV and realistically minimizes potential hazards (and insurance cost). But NSW storage options might indeed be too limited in certain scenarios. Would it help if I added the option to allow IFS Cylindrical Radioactive store tanks to storage NuclearSaltWater?

Edited April 3, 2019 by FreeThinker

[TheOrqwithVagrant]

14 hours ago, davidle said:

I have space station producing positrons powered by a Open Cycle Gas Core reactor. As it begin to run out of fuel, I flew up a container full of UF4, powered it off and sent up a Kerbal engineer to refuel and restore power. However, the reactor isn't responding to commands, it won't refuel or power up. This has persisted across the current version of KSPI and the one before it, so I can't tell if this is a bug or a feature.

 

Thanks!

Yeah I keep forgetting about this - I can't remember ever successfully re-starting a fission reactor once it's been shut down. There's supposed to be a fairly long 'cooldown' period before you can re-start, but I've never been able to make a reactor restart no matter how long a wait i've given it.

[samooo2]

3 hours ago, TheOrqwithVagrant said:

Yeah I keep forgetting about this - I can't remember ever successfully re-starting a fission reactor once it's been shut down. There's supposed to be a fairly long 'cooldown' period before you can re-start, but I've never been able to make a reactor restart no matter how long a wait i've given it.

Did you do it correctly? I'm sure the process was documented...somewhere, it's unintuitive.

You have to hit "shutdown" from the reactor control window. Reactor status should change to "decay heating", where it produces only 10% power (and you can't use any of it, for some reason) and this slowly decays down to 0% over several days. Then the status chages to "Idle" or something like that. Now go EVA and hit refuel, here you need to have enough fuel to fill up the reactor completely and enough storage for actinides/depleted fuel which you'll be taking out. Finally hit restart from EVA.

[FreeThinker]

On 4/3/2019 at 2:08 AM, RabidSmurf said:

What I initially wanted to do was store the fuel as iiquid hydrogen and oxygen and then use ISRU to convert to liquid water, but that process was not available.

1

Now, why would you want to store water as hydrogen + oxygen which are much more difficult to store than simply store it liquid water which is much denser, lighter and cheaper?

Edited April 4, 2019 by FreeThinker

[mbaryu]

42 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Now, why would you want to store water as hydrogen + oxygen which are much more difficult to store than simply store it liquid water which is much denser, lighter and cheaper?

It seems like since water is not compressible, but hydrogen and oxygen are, wouldn't liquid O2 and liquid H2 compress to a more dense fuel than water?  Math (maybe my math is right and maybe not - this isn't an area of expertise for me): Oxygen is 16g/mole, hydrogen is 2g/mole = 16g + 2*2g = 20g / mole.  Water is 18g/mole.  I guess water is more dense, though if you could cool the liquid oxygen/hydrogen further, perhaps the density would go up?  On the other hand, if the system could also use the energy produced by the O2 H2 -> H2O conversion (thermal generator for a hall effect engine?) there might be an advantage.

While looking this up it occurred to me that I don't remember seeing a Metallic Hydrogen engine in KSPI.  Definitely Science Fiction at this point, but conceivable.  Does it belong?

[FreeThinker]

57 minutes ago, mbaryu said:

While looking this up it occurred to me that I don't remember seeing a Metallic Hydrogen engine in KSPI.  Definitely Science Fiction at this point, but conceivable.  Does it belong?

Yes I have some plans for adding more fuel propellant powered engines (which include  Metallic Hydrogen). The technology which I developed for NSWR was kind of the precursor for future fuel propellant engines.

Edited April 4, 2019 by FreeThinker

[Snoman314]

6 hours ago, mbaryu said:

It seems like since water is not compressible, but hydrogen and oxygen are, wouldn't liquid O2 and liquid H2 compress to a more dense fuel than water?  Math (maybe my math is right and maybe not - this isn't an area of expertise for me): Oxygen is 16g/mole, hydrogen is 2g/mole = 16g + 2*2g = 20g / mole.  Water is 18g/mole.  I guess water is more dense, though if you could cool the liquid oxygen/hydrogen further, perhaps the density would go up?  On the other hand, if the system could also use the energy produced by the O2 H2 -> H2O conversion (thermal generator for a hall effect engine?) there might be an advantage.

While looking this up it occurred to me that I don't remember seeing a Metallic Hydrogen engine in KSPI.  Definitely Science Fiction at this point, but conceivable.  Does it belong?

Firstly, The numbers you looked up are wrong. Hydrogen is 1.008g per mole (or 1g/mole is close enough). I think you got the number for molecular hydrogen (H2), and then doubled it again. Anyway the grams per mole is the same for O2/H2 in the appropriate amounts, and water. However the number of moles doesn't tell you what the volume will be in this case. Liquid water is denser than a combination of liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

By my maths, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in the appropriate ratio to make water, would have a combined specific gravity of 0.426, making it take over twice the volume of the same mass of water.

[pp3d]

Umm.. i've been scratching my head on the following thinking that i am doing something wrong but I think there is a bug  unless something on the gameplay is not explained (definitely changed from previous versions). This is in regards to the Alcubierre Heavy Warp drive. It puts the ship in a solar retrograde motion once it exits Kerbin's SOI.  It doesn't matter how you do it... 2k prograde kerbin orbit, fire the warp retrograde or prograde in respect to kerbin's orbit ... and you get 7k or 11k respectively --- as you should -- but retrograde once you exit the SOI. Version 1.20.18

16 minutes ago, pp3d said:

Umm.. i've been scratching my head on the following thinking that i am doing something wrong but I think there is a bug  unless something on the gameplay is not explained (definitely changed from previous versions). This is in regards to the Alcubierre Heavy Warp drive. It puts the ship in a solar retrograde motion once it exits Kerbin's SOI.  It doesn't matter how you do it... 2k prograde kerbin orbit, fire the warp retrograde or prograde in respect to kerbin's orbit ... and you get 7k or 11k respectively --- as you should -- but retrograde once you exit the SOI. Version 1.20.18

ps: I have not tested any of the other KSPIE warp engines yet... 

Edited April 5, 2019 by pp3d

[mbaryu]

14 minutes ago, pp3d said:

Umm.. i've been scratching my head on the following thinking that i am doing something wrong but I think there is a bug  unless something on the gameplay is not explained (definitely changed from previous versions). This is in regards to the Alcubierre Heavy Warp drive. It puts the ship in a solar retrograde motion once it exits Kerbin's SOI.  It doesn't matter how you do it... 2k prograde kerbin orbit, fire the warp retrograde or prograde in respect to kerbin's orbit ... and you get 7k or 11k respectively --- as you should -- but retrograde once you exit the SOI. Version 1.20.18

ps: I have not tested any of the other KSPIE engines yet... 

I've seen this happen randomly from time to time.  At first I thought it was my questionable piloting skills, or my questionable vector skills, but I've seen definite reversal of velocity vector in a few cases after crossing an SOI boundary.  But getting this consistently is interesting.  Has anyone else seen this?

[pp3d]

for me it's happening consistently for this engine... first time i have used it in a 1.6 game. Last versions I used was ksp 1.2.2 and back then the mod versions i was playing was 1.11-1.14... Now I jumped into the latest with 1.6.1 and I was inclined to believe that I am doing something wrong first ... 

But this is not expected... and as is, it's unusable... and the game then stops for me because you can't haul large payloads large distances without it... RoverDude's engines that use xenon and exotic matter have a fixed warp bubble in size that severely limits the linear size of your ship... But they work as expected so far for this version 

 

[pp3d]

3 hours ago, pp3d said:

for me it's happening consistently for this engine... first time i have used it in a 1.6 game. Last versions I used was ksp 1.2.2 and back then the mod versions i was playing was 1.11-1.14... Now I jumped into the latest with 1.6.1 and I was inclined to believe that I am doing something wrong first ... 

But this is not expected... and as is, it's unusable... and the game then stops for me because you can't haul large payloads large distances without it... RoverDude's engines that use xenon and exotic matter have a fixed warp bubble in size that severely limits the linear size of your ship... But they work as expected so far for this version 

 

ss

Just now, pp3d said:

ss

so it happens with the folding drive as well. ship equipped with folding 2.5m drive, beam core antimatter, cp generator and some additional reactor (fusion from WildBlueIndustries). Kerbin orbit at 1.6k, orbital velocity at 1.2km/s. Activate prograde in kerbin orbit, and about retrograde Kerbol at 0.2c (maximum throttle at that distance). Ship gets out with 8 km/s, ~9.2 km/s (kerbin's orbital) - 1.2km/s (ships orbital around kerbin)... But it's retrograde resulting in relative velocity with Kerbin of nearly 17km/s. I upgraded to KSPIE, 1.20.19.3.

[FreeThinker]

5 hours ago, pp3d said:

Umm.. i've been scratching my head on the following thinking that i am doing something wrong but I think there is a bug  unless something on the gameplay is not explained (definitely changed from previous versions). This is in regards to the Alcubierre Heavy Warp drive. It puts the ship in a solar retrograde motion once it exits Kerbin's SOI.  It doesn't matter how you do it... 2k prograde kerbin orbit, fire the warp retrograde or prograde in respect to kerbin's orbit ... and you get 7k or 11k respectively --- as you should -- but retrograde once you exit the SOI. Version 1.20.18

5

So let me get this straight, you warp jump to outside Kerbin SOI and the vessel is (sometimes) going the opposite way then you expect? That's indeed very weird, especially since I haven't modified the Alcubiere drive for at least 1 year. KSP 1.6 might screw up math by negating some of the input parameters under certain conditions. We need to figure out the difference between when it goes right and when it goes wrong.

Edited April 5, 2019 by FreeThinker

[pp3d]

@FreeThinker It goes wrong all the time for me. Another user mentioned its intermittent. The vessel jumps out of the SOI in retrograde irrespective of the direction of the jump from within the SOi. The absolute value of the velocity is correct but the sign is flipped.

Edited April 5, 2019 by pp3d

[pp3d]

15 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

So let me get this straight, you warp jump to outside Kerbin SOI and the vessel is (sometimes) going the opposite way then you expect? That's indeed very weird, especially since I haven't modified the Alcubiere drive for at least 1 year. KSP 1.6 might screw up math by negating some of the input parameters under certain conditions. We need to figure out the difference between when it goes right and when it goes wrong.

See my response above. At this point all I am asking is for people to verify this with 1.6.1 and the latest version of the mod. If it is persistent as I claim it should be reproducible. 

1. The test game has mods included there... I have not tried this with a vanilla KSP 1.6.1 and the latest version of the mod. But I can not think of a reason why other mods should interfere

2. Bob Palmer's warp drives that use xenon work, so they are presumably not affected by any math differences in the new KSP release

3. Non related to this but the warp to mass ratio in the warp control window is reversed. The default GUI shows it correctly

 

Edited April 5, 2019 by pp3d

[TheOrqwithVagrant]

On 4/3/2019 at 2:50 PM, samooo2 said:

Did you do it correctly? I'm sure the process was documented...somewhere, it's unintuitive.

You have to hit "shutdown" from the reactor control window. Reactor status should change to "decay heating", where it produces only 10% power (and you can't use any of it, for some reason) and this slowly decays down to 0% over several days. Then the status chages to "Idle" or something like that. Now go EVA and hit refuel, here you need to have enough fuel to fill up the reactor completely and enough storage for actinides/depleted fuel which you'll be taking out. Finally hit restart from EVA.

Done all that, has never once worked. FWIV, the save file edit is easy enough. I remember at one point, I thought I had this tracked down to IsEnabled existing in the save file in a capitalized and non-capitalized form (isEnabled and IsEnabled). 'Restart' from EVA did change one of those in the save file, but I'd end up with isEnabled = false IsEnabled = True and the reactor remained offline until I removed the ' = false' one. I don't use fission reactors all that much anymore in my campaign (fusion reactors power on and off just fine) so it's been a while since I had to deal with this.

[pp3d]

10 hours ago, pp3d said:

See my response above. At this point all I am asking is for people to verify this with 1.6.1 and the latest version of the mod. If it is persistent as I claim it should be reproducible. 

1. The test game has mods included there... I have not tried this with a vanilla KSP 1.6.1 and the latest version of the mod. But I can not think of a reason why other mods should interfere

2. Bob Palmer's warp drives that use xenon work, so they are presumably not affected by any math differences in the new KSP release

3. Non related to this but the warp to mass ratio in the warp control window is reversed. The default GUI shows it correctly

 

I can confirm that is happening for vanilla KSP 1.6.1 with only the KSPIE mod installed

[pp3d]

18 hours ago, pp3d said:

I can confirm that is happening for vanilla KSP 1.6.1 with only the KSPIE mod installed

... and with KSP. 1.5.1 and 1.4.5 with KSPIE-1.20.19

edit: Went back to KSP 1.4.5 with KSPIE-1.18.2 ---- single mod on the base game... still happening

edit: KSP 1.3.1 with KSPIE 1.16.6 --- single mod ... still  happening
All downloads from SpaceDock... 

will now attempt to go to 1.2.2 with the 1.12.24 which I have it on my previous computer... and i know it's doing it right there

final edit on this: had to go all the way back to ksp 1.2.2 --- before the first introduction of the Warp Control Interface. All previous versions give me a target velocity at the position shown below (Kerbin being the target) for the ship of 16-17k as it was being placed in retrograde... in this case it's correctly placed prograde upon exiting the SOI

Edited April 6, 2019 by pp3d

[wkwied]

Is there a reason why some parts are not able to be scaled down? Is it possible for me to tweak my install to allow them to be scaled down? Namely, I am referring to the z-pitch engines - they can not be scaled downwards

[pp3d]

My final report on the issue with the KSPI-E warp engines.. the video kind of explains what i see as a user... hopefully this will be addressed as these engines are critical for multi system gameplay. The video has no sound... so please use captions. Quality is poor just to cut down on the upload times on youtube