KSP Interstellar Extended Support Thread

[DGerry]

So I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding how to mine and reprocess regolith, or if the whole system is just worthless?  4 drills and one ISRU produces less than 1g of He-3 per day on the Mun in the highlands(concentration 240% or something), that's with a 2-star engineer.  Is there a way to mine/reprocess regolith that actually makes it worthwhile?

[maculator]

Would I have fun if I just install this alone without reading stuff up? Would it be like the first time I played KSP and didn't know anything?

[Drew Kerman]

1 hour ago, maculator said:

Would it be like the first time I played KSP and didn't know anything?

given all the questions I see here, and the amount of links to various documentaion in the OP, and the amount of people I still see asking for docs, I would guess this

I don't mean any of that in a bad way, just to be clear

Edited April 22, 2017 by Drew Kerman

[maculator]

Gave it a quick look and since its really late game tech I think I'll add it to my new career, it's gonna take a while to reach all that stuff anyways and until then I'll know what I'm doing.

[juanml82]

Question, how do you turn solar wind into something useful?

[DGerry]

1 minute ago, juanml82 said:

Question, how do you turn solar wind into something useful?

I believe the KSPI ISRU part has a Solar Wind Process, that being said I was never able to get a Solar Wind harvester to actually...harvest solar wind.

[juanml82]

1 minute ago, DGerry said:

I believe the KSPI ISRU part has a Solar Wind Process, that being said I was never able to get a Solar Wind harvester to actually...harvest solar wind.

Uh, errr... do you know which one of them? I tried several and none had an option to process it

[DGerry]

I'm pretty sure the "All in One" ISRU has it - you have to click on "toggle refinery window", some of the processes are in there and not on the normal right-click context menu.

[juanml82]

1 minute ago, DGerry said:

I'm pretty sure the "All in One" ISRU has it - you have to click on "toggle refinery window", some of the processes are in there and not on the normal right-click context menu.

Ah, ok. I haven't unlocked it yet, so I'll try to collect solar wind another time then

[DGerry]

26 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

Ah, ok. I haven't unlocked it yet, so I'll try to collect solar wind another time then

I honestly wouldn't bother regardless of your tech level - A full standard-size gas tank of Solar Wind will net you about 14grams of He-3 and a whole bunch of mostly-worthless junk(carbon monoxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a small amount of neon and deuterium and normal helium).  I cheated a fairly large(7.5M part size, 450m^2 collector area) collector into an orbit inside moho(the lowest orbit the game will let you cheat to around the sun) and was getting ~.06units of solar wind per second.  At that rate it would take over 1200 Kerbin-days of time to fill up that tank(1.6M units worth of Solar Wind).  I'm not sure if there's some hidden value to both this(the Solar Wind "system") and the Regolith parts, but if there is it seems to be pretty well hidden.

[juanml82]

I see. Another question: is there a way to "see" what's a good orbit to harvest antimatter? I've put a test collector in Kerbin's orbit but I had to fiddle the orbit with hyperedit until I found the "sweet" spot ("sweet" meaning: 385 years to fill two 2.5m tanks). And a way to compare how much antimatter can be harvested in the different planets?

[DGerry]

You can use the Magnetometer to see what the flux is at whatever your current altitude.  There was a set of graphs showing the ideal altitudes at each planet from a while back but I don't have it anymore.  IIRC on Kerbin it's 900km at 0 inclination, but the way to test it would be to get a spacecraft you can put on a highly-elliptical orbit and then pop open the magnetometer and just...watch it as you fly through the orbit and see where it peaks.  As far as I know, other than looking at the config files or maybe the code(can't remember where that's defined) there isn't a better way to determine it on your own.

[Loren Pechtel]

14 minutes ago, juanml82 said:

I see. Another question: is there a way to "see" what's a good orbit to harvest antimatter? I've put a test collector in Kerbin's orbit but I had to fiddle the orbit with hyperedit until I found the "sweet" spot ("sweet" meaning: 385 years to fill two 2.5m tanks). And a way to compare how much antimatter can be harvested in the different planets?

My understanding is that the best place to harvest is Jool because of it's powerful magnetic field.

[juanml82]

1 hour ago, Loren Pechtel said:

My understanding is that the best place to harvest is Jool because of it's powerful magnetic field.

Yep, I just made a test hyperediting a probe with an antimatter collector. Some of this values are rounded up (and I'm not sure how to copy and paste from Excel in this forum)

Planet    Height (km)    mg per day    
Kerbol    463400    16,1    (does it resist the heat?) It's very low
Moho    390    0,0017    
Eve    1063    1,233    
Kerbin    875    0,963    
Duna    485    0,028    
Dres    222    0,0037    
Jool    9000    143    Halfway between Jool's "surface" and Laythe's orbit
Laythe    715    1,1205    
Tylo    935    0,5658    
OPM gas giants            
Sarnus    7800    17,5    Just outside the rings
Urlum    3535    1,75    
Neidon    3000    2,1254   

It simply doesn't make any sense to harvest it at anywhere other than Jool. Maybe Kerbin to test it, but that's it.

Edited April 23, 2017 by juanml82

[SimonTheSkink]

@FreeThinker So I have built a vessel to carry my crew to the Jovian system in KSP. I am trying to leave the Kerbin sphere of influence with a DT Vista Fusion Engine, but I keep running into the same problem over and over. Out of the blue, my thrust drops to 0. I check Kerbal Engineer and it says that my fuel is burning and all other resources are being consumed as normal. Check the engine itself and it says it has 600Kn of thrust, but my orbital speed isn't changing at all. There is a constant supply of power coming from the Nuclear fusion generator, keeping the power above 2.5Gw. This isn't happening right when I start my burn either, I will use 1,750DV in a certain direction with perfect output from the engine, but after that it just stops, with 250 more DV required to finish my burn correctly. I have been looking over this all night and I cannot for the life of me figure out what is causing this constant failure in engine output. Any advice? Anyone else seen this weird bug?

 

This video should give you an idea of what I am experiencing around the 36 second mark my thrust just stops:

 

 

Edited April 24, 2017 by SimonTheSkink
Proper labeling

[SaturnianBlue]

How do you extract Helium-3 from the solar wind collector/regolith?

[DGerry]

1 hour ago, SaturnianBlue said:

How do you extract Helium-3 from the solar wind collector/regolith?

Run it through an ISRU(the All-in-One ISRU can do it).

[mrgreco]

On 4/22/2017 at 3:41 PM, juanml82 said:

Question, how do you turn solar wind into something useful?

you can turn it into hydrogen for fueling a rocket engine, take the round silver isru refrigerator

Edited April 24, 2017 by mrgreco

[LastStarDust]

Hello

I am trying to use solar energy to power an electric thruster (such as plasma thruster or ATTILA thruster).

I would like to do this:  SOLAR PANELS -> CONVERT EC TO MJ (HOW?) -> ELECTRIC THRUSTERS

This is a ship which should generate some thrust but doesn't: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ywhlkz1z0rgirdx/screenshot428.png?dl=0

What do I need or what am I doing wrong?

Thanks

[FreeThinker]

On 23-4-2017 at 4:18 PM, SimonTheSkink said:

@FreeThinker So I have built a vessel to carry my crew to the Jovian system in KSP. I am trying to leave the Kerbin sphere of influence with a DT Vista Fusion Engine, but I keep running into the same problem over and over. Out of the blue, my thrust drops to 0. I check Kerbal Engineer and it says that my fuel is burning and all other resources are being consumed as normal. Check the engine itself and it says it has 600Kn of thrust, but my orbital speed isn't changing at all. There is a constant supply of power coming from the Nuclear fusion generator, keeping the power above 2.5Gw. This isn't happening right when I start my burn either, I will use 1,750DV in a certain direction with perfect output from the engine, but after that it just stops, with 250 more DV required to finish my burn correctly. I have been looking over this all night and I cannot for the life of me figure out what is causing this constant failure in engine output. Any advice? Anyone else seen this weird bug?

 

This video should give you an idea of what I am experiencing around the 36 second mark my thrust just stops:

 

 

What I suspect what happens is one of your parts becomes negative. In space this has the effect of being unable to move. The question is what part  is responsible.

Edited April 24, 2017 by FreeThinker

[FreeThinker]

9 hours ago, LastStarDust said:

Hello

I am trying to use solar energy to power an electric thruster (such as plasma thruster or ATTILA thruster).

I would like to do this:  SOLAR PANELS -> CONVERT EC TO MJ (HOW?) -> ELECTRIC THRUSTERS

This is a ship which should generate some thrust but doesn't: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ywhlkz1z0rgirdx/screenshot428.png?dl=0

What do I need or what am I doing wrong?

Thanks

Make sure the panels point the  correct side to the sun (rotate the ship a bit)  and you should be able to go anywhere ... fortunately KSPI electric engine can work under time acceleration

For improved performance, point a GW laser at it and it can achieve unreachable performance

Edited April 24, 2017 by FreeThinker

[SimonTheSkink]

8 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

What I suspect what happens is one of your parts becomes negative. In space this has the effect of beeing unable to more. The question is what part  is responsible.

First off, I would like to thank you for taking your time to help me with this issue. As for the part becoming "negative" are you referring to the mass of a certain part that is attached to the ship? I will look over the parts of the ship when I get home from work. Most of the parts that compose this ship are stock, Interstellar Extended, DeepFreeze Continued, Kerbal Engineer, Simple construction, and MechJeb. There is quite a few mods I have installed, however none should cause something as dramatic as my thrust just stopping like this. I will check over the parts that I have installed, but I am also willing to provide any information that you ask of me, such as logs.

[FreeThinker]

5 minutes ago, SimonTheSkink said:

First off, I would like to thank you for taking your time to help me with this issue. As for the part becoming "negative" are you referring to the mass of a certain part that is attached to the ship? I will look over the parts of the ship when I get home from work. Most of the parts that compose this ship are stock, Interstellar Extended, DeepFreeze Continued, Kerbal Engineer, Simple construction, and MechJeb. There is quite a few mods I have installed, however none should cause something as dramatic as my thrust just stopping like this. I will check over the parts that I have installed, but I am also willing to provide any information that you ask of me, such as logs.

logs are no use in this instance, most likely it is a some kind of container. I suggest you remove all part except for the ones needed for the test, then check if the problem surface, if not, add more parts until found

Edited April 24, 2017 by FreeThinker

[SimonTheSkink]

3 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

logs are no use in this instance, most likely it is a some kind of container. I suggest you remove all part except for the ones needed for the test, then check if the problem surface, if not, add more parts until found

After thinking about what you said here and doing some research on YouTube, I found some videos of people gaining negative mass from Ore containers, which I happen to have on my vessel. I will detach these and see what happens. This is a great lead, thank you very much for this info! I will let you know the results either way. 

[SimonTheSkink]

6 hours ago, FreeThinker said:

logs are no use in this instance, most likely it is a some kind of container. I suggest you remove all part except for the ones needed for the test, then check if the problem surface, if not, add more parts until found

Good news! I figured out the problem, it appears to be related to the "Drill-o-matics". I would have never have figured that out though if it wern't for your advice, thank you very much. I need to figure out a way around this issue, and moreso why this is happening, but at least I know what's causing it. Thank you for you time!