KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[Ultimate Steve]

Question. How does one make positrons? I can collect antimatter from magnetic fields but I don't know what to do from there. If necessary I can probably switch my operation over to antimatter but I would prefer to not change the tanks on a few different crafts.

[wkwied]

2 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Question. How does one make positrons? I can collect antimatter from magnetic fields but I don't know what to do from there. If necessary I can probably switch my operation over to antimatter but I would prefer to not change the tanks on a few different crafts.

Hydrogen -> Quantum Singularity Reactor = power, positrons, antimatter

Alternativly, you can use the Free Electron Laser to make positrons

 

Freethinker is going to add something standalone to make positrons, too

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/172026-170161151145131-ksp-interstellar-extended-1211-support-thread/&do=findComment&comment=3583113

[Ultimate Steve]

1 minute ago, wkwied said:

Hydrogen -> Quantum Singularity Reactor = power, positrons, antimatter

Alternativly, you can use the Free Electron Laser to make positrons

 

Freethinker is going to add something standalone to make positrons, too

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/172026-170161151145131-ksp-interstellar-extended-1211-support-thread/&do=findComment&comment=3583113

Thank you for your quick response. Intuition says that this would add a lot of mass to my ship, but looking at my landers, about half of them, including the one I spent the longest perfecting, use positron reactors and I don't think I can get similar performance out of anything else.

I may have to redesign the mothership to include a QSR. It had one early in the design phase but I decided I didn't need that much power, and the form factor was rather large. I'll do some tests to see how fast it produces positrons and how much it uses... It might be worth it.

[wkwied]

The alternate would be to have a separate ship with the QSR to generate positrons. It does generate them quite fast, but it only works when in orbit - so you can't use it in a lander unless you shut it down first.

 

On the plus side, QSR on a ship with a positron reactor and MHD (I think) generator feeds itself. Only need hydrogen

[Ultimate Steve]

8 minutes ago, wkwied said:

The alternate would be to have a separate ship with the QSR to generate positrons. It does generate them quite fast, but it only works when in orbit - so you can't use it in a lander unless you shut it down first.

 

On the plus side, QSR on a ship with a positron reactor and MHD (I think) generator feeds itself. Only need hydrogen

Currently the main ship uses a positron reactor and a thermal generator. I haven't looked at MHD generators ever, but looking at the stats those work three times as well, so I will probably switch those on the mothership and maybe one other ship.

The issue is the amount of hydrogen required. The ship in question is designed for extremely long term use without refueling. In practice, I really only need the power a QSR gives while warping near large planets (or stars, I guess) so I wonder if I could get away with just not running it unless I'm refueling positrons or maneuvering...

Or I could redesign the whole thing to be able to ISRU Hydrogen, but the idea of landing an 800 ton spaceship on a small world is not an attractive one.

Well, I accidentally overwrote my mothership so it's getting redesigned anyways. 

[Ultimate Steve]

Okay, now I'm having another problem. It may not be directly KSP IE, but it's related. At high time warp values, liquid hydrogen cooling doesn't work and I get lots of boiloff even though I have lots of power.

[wkwied]

I don't know if the positron reactor can use a thermal generator. If so, that is great.

 

Could always have a smaller craft that can dive into an atmos to get hydrogen =)

[FreeThinker]

6 hours ago, wkwied said:

Question about fusion pellets in the z-pinch engine.... what dictates their use? When going to Eve, one time I totally ran out of pellets while under time acceleration, the other time I was able to go there and back without using a single one.

 

What fuel modes were you using? I'm asking because depending on the fuel mode,  your overal Fussion Pellets mode will be higher or lower

Edited April 19, 2019 by FreeThinker

[wkwied]

4 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

What fuel modes were you using?

Nitrogen - both when I ran out of it while on encounter, and when I did a run to and back to Kerbal  and the pellets didn't run out

Edited April 19, 2019 by wkwied

[FreeThinker]

4 minutes ago, wkwied said:

Nitrogen - both when I ran out of it while on encounter, and when I did a run to and back to Kerbal  and the pellets didn't run out

Perhaps you accidentally switch to pure fusion mode? Can you reproduce the issue? Exactly which Z-Pinch part did you use?

Edited April 19, 2019 by FreeThinker

[wkwied]

5 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Perhaps you accidentally switch to pure fusion mode? Can you reproduce the issue?

Yes. Several times.. both with this craft and without. I could upload the craft to KerbalX if you like, though the only change I've made was to allow the z-Pinch engine to be scaled downward - but on this craft it is not scaled down at all. For all instants and purposes the craft is only stock + KSPIE

[FreeThinker]

@wkwied Alright, it appears I made some calculation mistakes.  Perhaps there are some initialization issues  I will try to rectify it next release.  Notice you should also re-add the part in the VAB it appears you still have the small amount of fusion pellets

Edited April 21, 2019 by FreeThinker

[Snoman314]

On 4/17/2019 at 11:32 PM, FreeThinker said:

Could you explain how to reproduce?

In the end I tracked it down to a conflict with Dynamic Battery Storage. I deleted that and the problem went away.

It happened every time I went to time warp with a KSPI power producing part active.

[FreeThinker]

4 hours ago, wkwied said:

I don't know if the positron reactor can use a thermal generator.

 

Yes it certainly can, but it performs much better when connected with an MHD power generator which allows you to run at plasma temperatures which result in higher efficiency with less wasteheat and more power. Remember that although Positron antimatter reactor is very powerful, due to the difficulty of storing positrons, its endurance is relatively low, so you are advised to use positron power only for short burst

2 hours ago, Snoman314 said:

In the end I tracked it down to a conflict with Dynamic Battery Storage. I deleted that and the problem went away.

It happened every time I went to time warp with a KSPI power producing part active.

Interesting. considering both mods modify the ElectricCharge amount (during timewarp), they could interfere resulting in infinity and zeros and eventually NaN issues

Edited April 19, 2019 by FreeThinker

[mbaryu]

On 4/14/2019 at 3:39 PM, mbaryu said:

Interesting.  I see the rationale, though I think there are three problems with it:

1st, even a PBH wouldn't have a lot of impact on the atmosphere  and PBHs are many orders of magnitude larger than what I suspect the Quantum Singularity Reactor is supposed to use (I assume based on the fact that it feeds in Hydrogen or Helium that it is an unstable size, which means fairly small).

2nd, if that were the reason, why could I then power it up inside the atmosphere?

3rd, The ship has a bunch of MHDs, one for each positron reactor, which haven't been turned off (this is how the ship was originally launched, after all).  So something is wrong with the power feed to the plasma nozzles if that's the case.

But it's definitely a weird problem. 

@FreeThinker   I was able to reproduce the problem with a similar ship in a totally different situation.  The ship has 2 plasma nozzles with positron reactors and MHDs, and a QSR.  The plasma nozzles worked fine until the ship crossed from Kerbin SoI to Kerbol SoI.  After that I had to shut down the QSR to get the plasma nozzles to work.

 

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, wkwied said:

Yes. Several times.. both with this craft and without. I could upload the craft to KerbalX if you like, though the only change I've made was to allow the z-Pinch engine to be scaled downward - but on this craft it is not scaled down at all. For all instants and purposes the craft is only stock + KSPIE

6

Nice craft, I indeed would like to see it in KerbalX. By the way, are you aware it can now use a lot more propellant types, including high-performance propellants like Methane, Hydrazine and Ammonia?

2 minutes ago, mbaryu said:

@FreeThinker   I was able to reproduce the problem with a similar ship in a totally different situation.  The ship has 2 plasma nozzles with positron reactors and MHDs, and a QSR.  The plasma nozzles worked fine until the ship crossed from Kerbin SoI to Kerbol SoI.  After that I had to shut down the QSR to get the plasma nozzles to work.

2

Shut down why? Do you experience any overheat issues of GeForce spikes ?

[Snoman314]

22 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

Interesting. considering both mods modify the ElectricCharge amount, the could interfere resulting in infinity and zerros and eventually NaN issues

Yeah the electric charge, megajoule and other bars in the resource panel would glitch out, running out of space for more zeroes, and then eventually looked like they overflowed in to a NaN, or something like that. Turns out I don't need that mod with KSPI installed anyways, so all is good now.

[FreeThinker]

4 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Okay, now I'm having another problem. It may not be directly KSP IE, but it's related. At high time warp values, liquid hydrogen cooling doesn't work and I get lots of boiloff even though I have lots of power.

Exactly where is the Liquid Hydrogen stored in?

[Ultimate Steve]

7 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Exactly where is the Liquid Hydrogen stored in?

There is one stock tank and four giant spherical tanks.

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, Ultimate Steve said:

There is one stock tank and four giant spherical tanks.

There are a lot of tanks, you need to be very specific what tank so I can try to replicate it.

[mbaryu]

16 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

Shut down why? Do you experience any overheat issues of GeForce spikes ? 

I haven't been able to reproduce this on a simpler craft and the one that had the failure was ridiculously complex, so I suspect something else was going on.  It still points to a strange power distribution problem.

I didn't see any evidence of geforce spiking (though who knows when exiting warp) and I'm pretty sure the heat sinks were much more than necessary.  Certainly wasteheat wasn't near max.

Edited April 20, 2019 by mbaryu

[Snoman314]

Spoiler

The thermal turbojet can also be upgraded to a hybrid thermal rocket, at which point it is capable of toggling to an internal fuel source. In this mode, it functions identically to a thermal rocket nozzle. This makes it the thermal equivalent of a RAPIER engine and is ideal for spaceplanes.

^From the KSPI wiki. 

Is this still true, in regards to the turbojet being upgraded to be able to function as a thermal rocket? If so, I can't seem to make it work. I can only seem to select atmo+hydrogen mode. Unless there's something I'm missing? 

[FreeThinker]

On 4/23/2019 at 3:04 AM, Snoman314 said:

  Reveal hidden contents

The thermal turbojet can also be upgraded to a hybrid thermal rocket, at which point it is capable of toggling to an internal fuel source. In this mode, it functions identically to a thermal rocket nozzle. This makes it the thermal equivalent of a RAPIER engine and is ideal for spaceplanes.

^From the KSPI wiki. 

Is this still true, in regards to the turbojet being upgraded to be able to function as a thermal rocket? If so, I can't seem to make it work. I can only seem to select atmo+hydrogen mode. Unless there's something I'm missing? 

The wiki info is indeed a bit outdated. Have you tried inert propellants (like Helium, Argon) or other oxidizing propellants (like Compressed Air, CO2, Water or HTP)? It cannot use reducing propellants because the thermal heat exchanger is protected by an anti-oxidizing coating which would dissolve in seconds with any reducing propellant like Hydrogen, Hydrazine.

 

 

Edited April 24, 2019 by FreeThinker

[Jumberlack]

18 hours ago, Snoman314 said:

  Reveal hidden contents

The thermal turbojet can also be upgraded to a hybrid thermal rocket, at which point it is capable of toggling to an internal fuel source. In this mode, it functions identically to a thermal rocket nozzle. This makes it the thermal equivalent of a RAPIER engine and is ideal for spaceplanes.

^From the KSPI wiki. 

Is this still true, in regards to the turbojet being upgraded to be able to function as a thermal rocket? If so, I can't seem to make it work. I can only seem to select atmo+hydrogen mode. Unless there's something I'm missing? 

You may have some tech nodes which need to be unlocked, have you tried it in sandbox mode? Alternatively I think your propellant options may be limited by the reactor type upon which the thermal turbojet is attached, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

11 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

The wiki info is indeed a bit outdated.

If you allowed it, I would volunteer to spend some time bringing the wiki up to date. I'm kindof swamped in coursework right at the moment, but once this week is over and especially once the semester is over I'll have more time for writing/testing/browsing through the code and forum.

Edited April 23, 2019 by Jumberlack

[FreeThinker]

1 hour ago, Jumberlack said:

If you allowed it, I would volunteer to spend some time bringing the wiki up to date. I'm kindof swamped in coursework right at the moment, but once this week is over and especially once the semester is over I'll have more time for writing/testing/browsing through the code and forum.

Voluntary help is always welcome. Contact me when you are ready