[1.12.x] Far Future Technologies - October 9

[Rakete]

@Nertea I know you are on KSP2 now, but is there a chance, that you would consider looking into this issue of the FFT engines, that need charging? I wrote a down a solution proposal above in my last posting (problem description, last post on page 19). Is this a thing you might consider? The other solution would be to stay away from all the engines, that need charging, as you can't do precise burn calculations with them (unless you have some mods that enable those, but I don't know any which would solve this specific problem).

 

 

Here my proposal in detail, how this might be fixed:

The code for your plugin would be something like this (pseudo code, as I don't know the KSP variables and the programming language that you are using in your plugins...):

IF engine.chargingstatus == 100% & Engine.activationbuttonpressed == true then

{

Engine.status :=  engaged

Engine.activationtimestamp := actual ingame time                   // time marker for later on

}

 

If actual ingame time == engine.activationtimestamp + 5 kerbal hours & Engine.status =  engaged  then

{

Engine.status := disengaged                  // timed engine shutdown for the hightech engines, which can't be always on

}

 

If engine.throttle > 0% & engine.status == engage then

{

engine.burned == true                 // Marker for engine burn - for disabeling after one burn with the need to re-charge up

}

 

 

If engine.burned == true & engine.throttle=0% then

{

engine.status := disengaged.

engine.burned := false    // reset of burn-marker for next ignition

}

 

 

If Engine.deactivationbuttonpressed == true then

{

engine.burned := false    // reset of burn-marker for next ignition     // also reseting the marker on manual engine shut down

}

 

This behavior would make usage of the ingame burn time calculator possible. What do you think of this kind of solution? It's just pseudocode, but maybe a useful way of bugfix/problem solving?

So you could charge up and engage the engine when you get anywhere near the planned maneuver node. The engine can't be hold on stand-by for a long term and would also turn-off after burn completion.

Edited October 12, 2021 by Rakete

[Nertea]

Appreciated but this is a lot more involved that it looks. There is probably a better solution in the works but have no idea when I will get around to that. 

[Rakete]

6 hours ago, Nertea said:

Appreciated but this is a lot more involved that it looks. There is probably a better solution in the works but have no idea when I will get around to that. 

Alright. It was just a naive proposal from an external point of view. Looking forward to a fix. Will be right here to give feedback, when a new package is available (unless I don't have other stuff to do in real life :-) )

[Not a Spy]

On 10/3/2021 at 12:05 PM, Nertea said:

The z-pinch drive already exceeds its realistic parameters. The antimatter drive you can cut the thrust and increase the Isp if you want, but functionally if your motivation is 'realistic' then you should also increase the needed radiators by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 

You can do whatever you want though with the configs. 

ih yeah my b

i forgot the zpinch wast a kilometer long lmao

[Uncommonality]

How do you even cool these monsters? I've got only a few radiators that work with System Heat (no idea why the rest doesn't), and even stuff like the Oroborous engine generates like 8000k. I'd need like 20 big radiators to get it cooled. Can you somehow adjust the cooling down into more manageable levels in the VAB, like how you can throttle reactors for longer lifespans?

Edit: Smh I didn't have Heat Control installed and was trying to cool extreme super-engines with basic-ass vanilla radiators

Edited October 20, 2021 by Uncommonality

[Davi SDF]

On 10/20/2021 at 2:00 PM, Uncommonality said:

How do you even cool these monsters? I've got only a few radiators that work with System Heat (no idea why the rest doesn't), and even stuff like the Oroborous engine generates like 8000k. I'd need like 20 big radiators to get it cooled. Can you somehow adjust the cooling down into more manageable levels in the VAB, like how you can throttle reactors for longer lifespans?

Edit: Smh I didn't have Heat Control installed and was trying to cool extreme super-engines with basic-ass vanilla radiators

You should download the mod "Heat Control", it adds many usefull radiators, wich System Heat is balanced around

Edited October 22, 2021 by Davi SDF

[Rakete]

Any info on the charge-up needing engines issue?

[Nertea]

On 10/22/2021 at 6:38 AM, Rakete said:

Any info on the charge-up needing engines issue?

No? I haven't worked on this and probably won't anytime soon unfortunately.

[danfarnsy]

On 10/22/2021 at 7:38 AM, Rakete said:

Any info on the charge-up needing engines issue?

FWIW, Kerbal Engineer still calculates and displays this correctly, so long as you don't have other inactive engines on the same stage number (like you might with an attached lander, etc.). It's a workaround, at least.

[Rakete]

4 hours ago, danfarnsy said:

FWIW, Kerbal Engineer still calculates and displays this correctly, so long as you don't have other inactive engines on the same stage number (like you might with an attached lander, etc.). It's a workaround, at least.

Mhhh this would KE some kind of dependency. Not sure if this is intended by @Nertea.

And yes i usually have other engine deactivated in the same stage. e.g. as some lander/set of planetary probes is most times attached to the mainship (assembled in orbit). So it does not fix the issue really. But thanks for the info. 

Hope Nertea might find the time to implement a nice solution for this. 

[danfarnsy]

3 hours ago, Rakete said:

Mhhh this would KE some kind of dependency. Not sure if this is intended by @Nertea.

And yes i usually have other engine deactivated in the same stage. e.g. as some lander/set of planetary probes is most times attached to the mainship (assembled in orbit). So it does not fix the issue really. But thanks for the info. 

Hope Nertea might find the time to implement a nice solution for this. 

Hah, of course it's not intended. But a workaround lets you work around it in case, you know, you want an ugly solution that exists instead of a nice solution that doesn't (yet). Nertea's modding schedule seems, uh, retired.  Emeritus? Modder Emeritus.

In flight, you can add a new stage number and move your main engine to it, then activate the engine by action group, so this KER fix can work okay. I wasn't saying "you're out of luck if your engine is sharing a stage with a lander," but just "make sure it isn't sharing a stage so you get accurate burn times."

[Rakete]

18 hours ago, danfarnsy said:

Hah, of course it's not intended. But a workaround lets you work around it in case, you know, you want an ugly solution that exists instead of a nice solution that doesn't (yet). Nertea's modding schedule seems, uh, retired.  Emeritus? Modder Emeritus.

In flight, you can add a new stage number and move your main engine to it, then activate the engine by action group, so this KER fix can work okay. I wasn't saying "you're out of luck if your engine is sharing a stage with a lander," but just "make sure it isn't sharing a stage so you get accurate burn times."

Does KER help with the not functioning burntime indicator? Since the Charge-up-requiring-engines not work correctly with the stock dV readings it's hard to tell, when to start your burn, because it uses the stock dV/TWR-readings. The ingame burntime guess-o-meter can't deal with the FFT engines being turned off, when not ignited right now. At least this happens after at least on complete burn - you can't use the stock burn start indicator anymore.

The remaining dV readout is far less important to me than a functioning burn start indication for planned maneuver nodes.

Edited November 3, 2021 by Rakete

[EnderiumSmith]

I compiled the stats of the near/far future engines to compare them. Also included some ideas/suggestions.

Also it seems the electric engines should be lower on the tech tree than the fusion ones

[danfarnsy]

18 hours ago, Rakete said:

Does KER help with the not functioning burntime indicator? Since the Charge-up-requiring-engines not work correctly with the stock dV readings it's hard to tell, when to start your burn, because it uses the stock dV/TWR-readings. The ingame burntime guess-o-meter can't deal with the FFT engines being turned off, when not ignited right now. At least this happens after at least on complete burn - you can't use the stock burn start indicator anymore.

The remaining dV readout is far less important to me than a functioning burn start indication for planned maneuver nodes.

From the maneuver readout in KER, there's a section with "burn time" and "time to node burn," which gives the start time precisely. I've got a screen shot here (in which you can also see that MechJeb and stock readouts are lost):



 

[danfarnsy]

15 hours ago, EnderiumSmith said:

I compiled the stats of the near/far future engines to compare them. Also included some ideas/suggestions.

Also it seems the electric engines should be lower on the tech tree than the fusion ones

Welcome to the forums! Looks like you put a good bit of work into compiling this. A few thoughts:

The Casaba's dry mass is misleading, because it has ablator pre-loaded. Its actual dry mass is 15 tons, once you burn up the 17 tons of ablator. Since it also has less heat output than the Verne, you can save a bit of radiator mass, too.

Dirac allows you to make a lighter craft and a smaller profile.

Asimov is indeed pretty awesome with afterburning. No afterburning allows a craft with much smaller power requirements (since you don't have to cool cryotanks), but I haven't used it that way.

[EnderiumSmith]

5 hours ago, danfarnsy said:

Welcome to the forums! Looks like you put a good bit of work into compiling this. A few thoughts:

The Casaba's dry mass is misleading, because it has ablator pre-loaded. Its actual dry mass is 15 tons, once you burn up the 17 tons of ablator. Since it also has less heat output than the Verne, you can save a bit of radiator mass, too.

Dirac allows you to make a lighter craft and a smaller profile.

Asimov is indeed pretty awesome with afterburning. No afterburning allows a craft with much smaller power requirements (since you don't have to cool cryotanks), but I haven't used it that way.

It seems the casaba does indeed perform much better but it still has the problem of using uranium as reaction mass, which us much more expensive than hydrogen. It can win on costs over the electric engines since argon is also expensive for some reason but the ablator means it has limited total impulse and is a lot harder to refuel or recover.

As for the dirac it costs as much as a full length fresnel and requires you to collect antimatter in addition to helium 3. It also only wins for very low ship masses and target deltaV while using he3 as reaction mass. Those high isps are really only needed to go interstellar in which case the fresnel wins in both twr and isp. The asimov has higher twr, requires no exotics and uses hydrogen reaction mass while still having very decent isp.

[danfarnsy]

3 hours ago, EnderiumSmith said:

It seems the casaba does indeed perform much better but it still has the problem of using uranium as reaction mass, which us much more expensive than hydrogen. It can win on costs over the electric engines since argon is also expensive for some reason but the ablator means it has limited total impulse and is a lot harder to refuel or recover.

As for the dirac it costs as much as a full length fresnel and requires you to collect antimatter in addition to helium 3. It also only wins for very low ship masses and target deltaV while using he3 as reaction mass. Those high isps are really only needed to go interstellar in which case the fresnel wins in both twr and isp. The asimov has higher twr, requires no exotics and uses hydrogen reaction mass while still having very decent isp.

Did you know ablator can be refurbished with the Vulcan refinery? I've made a massive refinery at 2,000 km Kerbin orbit complete with pitifully slow antimatter collection. My idea was going to be shipping ore and uraninite (USI mods) and helium-3 there. I've used it a lot less than I planned. Reusability with the lower and middle techs has felt odd since I've made ships obsolete after one or two missions. I'll still use them, though. They're fun!

Dirac is expensive, for sure. In "bang for buck" it doesn't hold up. But I have a design for a small passenger ship, with USI life support, at 27 tons (could be made lighter) with 30k dV, which is enough for short-duration transfers between planets. Small weight, small profile for launching into space in the first place. That's not bad. So I'm not disagreeing about where Fresnel wins. I'm just saying Dirac has a different place than competing with the Fresnel.

[Axelord FTW]

Just dropping by to say I'm really, REALLY enjoying the learning curve on FFT, along with SystemHeat. I've only just unlocked the lowest tier deut/H3/Li engine and getting a craft functional only took (i.e. killed) four pour green souls.
I'm going to try out KER to see if it can fetch correct dV for engines with charge-up. Other than that, I'm actually stocked to work my way up the science ladder to unlock more stuff.

Big fan of Nertea's work in general, and I've been running most of his mods since 2014(ish?). Booted up KSP again for the first time in about two years recently, as 2022 is just around the corner, and it's been a blast so far.

P.S. Had to recover account, and just now realize this is the first post in 6 years. Damn, time flies.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Axelord FTW

[danfarnsy]

Anybody have a working He-3 scoop example for Jool? 110 km altitude is tough to get. Either my scoop (the only part exposed out of the heat shield) explodes, or I slow down so much I can't get the momentum back again (even with the fusion aerospike), and keeping control authority is hard.  I'm wondering if, once loaded with scooped fuel, it's too heavy?

Earlier version:



Latest version:


Edit to add view from front, scoop protruding through heat shield:


 

Edited November 9, 2021 by danfarnsy

[Tangle]

9 hours ago, danfarnsy said:

Anybody have a working He-3 scoop example for Jool? 110 km altitude is tough to get. Either my scoop (the only part exposed out of the heat shield) explodes, or I slow down so much I can't get the momentum back again (even with the fusion aerospike), and keeping control authority is hard.  I'm wondering if, once loaded with scooped fuel, it's too heavy?

Earlier version:


Latest version:

Edit to add view from front, scoop protruding through heat shield:

 

I think the easiest solution here is to bite the bullet and accept that there isn't a KSP switch for making parts as strong as they'd need to be for this and turn on ignore max temperature

[EatenOrpheus30]

Do the fuels required by the engines in this mod have to be created using SpaceDust? How does that work?

[danfarnsy]

54 minutes ago, EatenOrpheus30 said:

Do the fuels required by the engines in this mod have to be created using SpaceDust? How does that work?

They can be launched, but some of them get very expensive. A filled 3.75m round container of He-3 is almost 2 million space bucks.

There are harvester parts (exospheric and atmospheric) that allow you to collect some of the fuels, as well as telescopes and detectors to help you find where they are. Space Dust has a nice visualization of it in map view. There's a bit of a resource refining chain for fission fuels, I think some of it dependent on what other mods you have installed. Getting fission fuels from ISRU is not dependent on Space Dust or atmospheric resources. Also, the best sources of He-3, like the Mun and, I think, parts of Dres?, are not Space Dust resources.

[EatenOrpheus30]

15 minutes ago, danfarnsy said:

They can be launched, but some of them get very expensive. A filled 3.75m round container of He-3 is almost 2 million space bucks.

There are harvester parts (exospheric and atmospheric) that allow you to collect some of the fuels, as well as telescopes and detectors to help you find where they are. Space Dust has a nice visualization of it in map view. There's a bit of a resource refining chain for fission fuels, I think some of it dependent on what other mods you have installed. Getting fission fuels from ISRU is not dependent on Space Dust or atmospheric resources. Also, the best sources of He-3, like the Mun and, I think, parts of Dres?, are not Space Dust resources.

How do you get the fuels back to Kerbin then?  Is there a way for them to be stored for usage in the VAB or do you have to dock with a craft in space to fill it up?

[danfarnsy]

1 hour ago, EatenOrpheus30 said:

How do you get the fuels back to Kerbin then?  Is there a way for them to be stored for usage in the VAB or do you have to dock with a craft in space to fill it up?

Like I said

1 hour ago, danfarnsy said:

They can be launched, but some of them get very expensive. 

Just go ahead and play it. All the space resources stuff is extra.

Edited November 10, 2021 by danfarnsy

[Nertea]

On 11/8/2021 at 9:16 PM, danfarnsy said:

Anybody have a working He-3 scoop example for Jool? 110 km altitude is tough to get. Either my scoop (the only part exposed out of the heat shield) explodes, or I slow down so much I can't get the momentum back again (even with the fusion aerospike), and keeping control authority is hard.  I'm wondering if, once loaded with scooped fuel, it's too heavy?

Earlier version:



Latest version:


Edit to add view from front, scoop protruding through heat shield:


 

 

On 11/3/2021 at 4:17 AM, EnderiumSmith said:

I compiled the stats of the near/far future engines to compare them. Also included some ideas/suggestions.

Also it seems the electric engines should be lower on the tech tree than the fusion ones

It's hard to take these totally seriously without any mention of thermals or other things. Seems like you want more thrust in everything. Probably not happening!

On 11/3/2021 at 1:24 AM, Rakete said:

Does KER help with the not functioning burntime indicator? Since the Charge-up-requiring-engines not work correctly with the stock dV readings it's hard to tell, when to start your burn, because it uses the stock dV/TWR-readings. The ingame burntime guess-o-meter can't deal with the FFT engines being turned off, when not ignited right now. At least this happens after at least on complete burn - you can't use the stock burn start indicator anymore.

The remaining dV readout is far less important to me than a functioning burn start indication for planned maneuver nodes.

KER is going to have to be pseudo-recommended at this point, because stock DV also can't handle the Clarke for some reason....