[1.12.5] Supplementary Electric Engines

[triple cheeseburger]

Supplementary Electric Engines [1.3.2]
Last Updated: September 13th, 2024
KSP 1.12.5

Download
*Also on CKAN

This is a parts mod that adds some additional electric engines.

Dependencies: Module Manager, B9 Part Switch. (The mod will not work without these mods installed). Recommendations: Waterfall (These engines do not have any stock plumes configured). Suggests: Near Future Propulsion Supports: Vab Organizer, Community Tech Tree, System Heat.

Screenshot Gallery

The engines in this mod can be split into the following categories:

Pulsed Plasma Thrusters: Very square-shaped engines, comes in two sizes. Middling performance by electric engine standards, but are quite cheap and do not take much power. Contains a limited amount of solid fuel inside itself, which cannot be refuelled.

Resistojets: Small, simple electrothermal thrusters, comes in two sizes and an RCS thruster. Unlocked early in the tech tree, these engines run on monopropellant but get an ISP in the range of 400 seconds.

Arcjets: More advanced electrothermal thrusters, also comes in two sizes. More power-hungry, but still run on monopropellant and can get ISPs around 800 seconds. However these engines steadily corrode their internal electrodes, and as such has a limited lifespan (represented by the limited ablator resource each engine stores).

Field-Emission Electric Propulsion: An electrostatic engine that uses liquid Caesium as propellant, comes in one size. This engine has an exceptionally high ISP of 14,000, but is otherwise lacking in all other areas. Its liquid Caesium propellant is quite expensive too.

Most of these engines are quite small and not terribly power-hungry, so you should be able to get away with just using solar power or RTGs for them.
However, for larger ships you may want to use one of the nuclear reactors from Near Future Electrical.

 

Liscense: CC-BY-SA

Edited September 14 by triple cheeseburger
Fixed an image link

[M - Kerbonaut]

More Electric Engines, yeah!

 

 

[Kerbal the crazyest]

Congratulations on this mod! Very good for being a first mod. Need to see how to get it's potential.... Two engines, but a great idea! I'll add it to some probes..... and see what I get from it  

Also, what did you use for the diagrams, they are amazing. Photoshop? Or other apps 

[softweir]

Very classy!

Sorry to nag, but I suggest you check out the Add-on posting rules: You need a license to go with your mod! (You can ask in the Modding discussions forum for advice on which license to use to suit your preferences.)

[zer0Kerbal]

congrats!

[Kavaeric]

Congrats on your first release! It was great watching you from worrying about how to texture to banging out two of these in a day

[Starhelperdude]

Wow, this is great! I love it when electrical engines get the love they deserve!

[triple cheeseburger]

9 hours ago, Kerbal the crazyest said:

Congratulations on this mod! Very good for being a first mod. Need to see how to get it's potential.... Two engines, but a great idea! I'll add it to some probes..... and see what I get from it  

Also, what did you use for the diagrams, they are amazing. Photoshop? Or other apps 

Thank you for the diagrams I just used Paint.NET and some renders I did in Blender

9 hours ago, softweir said:

Very classy!

Sorry to nag, but I suggest you check out the Add-on posting rules: You need a license to go with your mod! (You can ask in the Modding discussions forum for advice on which license to use to suit your preferences.)

Oh woops, my apologies. I added the liscense to the top of the post, should that do?

[softweir]

5 hours ago, triple cheeseburger said:

Oh woops, my apologies. I added the liscense to the top of the post, should that do?

You also need to add to the download a text file containing the full text of the license. (It's all necessary:- but one reason amongst many that I feel disinclined to create mods!)

[triple cheeseburger]

57 minutes ago, softweir said:

You also need to add to the download a text file containing the full text of the license. (It's all necessary:- but one reason amongst many that I feel disinclined to create mods!)

Ah okay, alright I've gone and updated the mod now to include that. Thanks for letting me know

[softweir]

You're very welcome! Happy modding!

[Aebestach]

Great mod. It’s very convenient to plan orbits with small thrusts under Principia. By the way, will it support more fuel tanks?

[PicoSpace]

I love mods with Tiny Parts!
Already used it in one of my launches (full review video coming soon, although it would be neat if there was a 1x1 version for the smallest of probes/landers).
 

 

[triple cheeseburger]

19 hours ago, Aebestach said:

Great mod. It’s very convenient to plan orbits with small thrusts under Principia. By the way, will it support more fuel tanks?

Thank you! About adding more fuel tanks... fuel tanks in the traditional sense wouldn't really work I think due to the structure of the engines (in theory the block of solid fuel is kept inside the engine and is pushed forwards by a spring, so a regular fuel tank wouldn't really line up with that description). I did consider making variants of the engine where they're a bit longer and have more fuel stored in them, but I'm not sure... feel like it might just make the original variants obsolete, as solid fuel is extremely cheap in terms of funds so there's not really any downside to using the more fuel versions. I'm not sure, it feels like something that might need a bit more balancing.

15 hours ago, PicoSpace said:

I love mods with Tiny Parts!
Already used it in one of my launches (full review video coming soon, although it would be neat if there was a 1x1 version for the smallest of probes/landers).

Cool video! Looking forward to hearing your full review video too. About a 1x1 version... I did consider that, but I feel like it would be so tiny it would be difficult to get a useful amount of delta v out of it on even really small probes. Although I suppose there might be some cases where it could be useful. I'll think about it and if more people ask for one I'll go ahead and add a 1x1 version

[The Dressian Exploder]

Maybe a 1x1 version could be usable as an RCS thruster? Additionally, if you'd consider adding more parts to this then perhaps you try some resistojet thrusters?

[triple cheeseburger]

38 minutes ago, The Dressian Exploder said:

Maybe a 1x1 version could be usable as an RCS thruster? Additionally, if you'd consider adding more parts to this then perhaps you try some resistojet thrusters?

Funny you say that... Near Future Propulsion has a pulsed plasma RCS engine, it's pretty much what inspired this whole mod lol.

Earlier I was just thinking that perhaps resistojets could be a nice addition... Yeah, in the future I'll see if I can go ahead and add some

[triple cheeseburger]

Here's some shoddy doodles I did of how the resistojets in the mod could look. trying to come up with ways to make up for their poor performance

Resistojets can in theory use pretty much anything as propellant (with different affects on performance), so I thought it would be neat to include that as an option. Using water as a propellant is a unique idea imo, and water is extremely cheap so it could be worth it in some cases. But I imagine it could get frustrating for those using life support (for instance - you try doing a burn and accidentally use up all of your ship's water supply, your crew will now die). Thinking they could also be available pretty early on in the tech tree, before the first ion engines tech node.

[NiL]

24 minutes ago, triple cheeseburger said:

Here's some shoddy doodles I did of how the resistojets in the mod could look. trying to come up with ways to make up for their poor performance

Resistojets can in theory use pretty much anything as propellant (with different affects on performance), so I thought it would be neat to include that as an option. Using water as a propellant is a unique idea imo, and water is extremely cheap so it could be worth it in some cases. But I imagine it could get frustrating for those using life support (for instance - you try doing a burn and accidentally use up all of your ship's water supply, your crew will now die). Thinking they could also be available pretty early on in the tech tree, before the first ion engines tech node.

Absolutely love the concept and the mod, the models and concept drawings/pics look so good!  As for resistojets - maybe arkjet mode could be incorporated as an upgrade/mode on resistojects, having higher isp and thrust at the cost of consuming more power? Adding them as a separate part seems unnessesary, they wouldn't be unique enough from a gameplay perspective, both RJ and AJ would be multi-fuel electric engines. Or maybe you could have smaller RJ thrusters and bigger AJ ones.

NF solid fuel RCS were useful as a self-contained option to add to your satellite (without adding monoprop tanks), if electric thermal thrusters would have integrated fuel tanks, they could be a more attractive option considering they look multidirectional on your pic. Or they could use the fuel from engine's integrated tanks, but people might want to use them alone. As for fuel choices - water seems really interesting, but then it may be better to add custom small water tanks, because life support mod is a pretty substantial dependency to include, and not all of them even have water (maybe a small circular tank in addition to integrated ones?). Liquid fuel seems like a strange resource to use (assuming it's kerosene), but stock nuke uses it, so idk.

Another interesting idea is cold gas thrusters, they are used extensively IRL and to my knowledge nobody has implemented them in KSP yet. Their tradeoff could be having higher thrust and not using electric charge, but having really low isp, use case - rocket stages, kickstages, tiny satellites that don't have much electric charge. IRL they mostly use nitrogen, which is a great propellant option from a gameplay standpoint - it can be used both for RJ and cold gas thrusters, but a more stockalike alternative may be to just use oxidiser: yes, lox is not an optimal choice for RJ, but has less uses than LF, and every rocket stage would have it no matter the propellant (so instead of having separate RCS parts or variants for LF/Ox, ch4/ox, lh2/ox one could just have RCS that uses OX). CG RCS could have two modes - high and low thrust. This way both cold gas and electric thermal sets would have two variants each (resistojets/arkjets, low-thrust CG/high-thrust CG), and the mod wouldn't be too overcomplicated. And nano-fuel tank could have options of holding either water or oxidiser, or just have water and for ox NFE's tiny tanks could be used. Or CG could be a mode for RJ thrusters.

Of course, that's all my personal opition and/or suggestions, I don't know what your artistic vision for the mod is, I'm just throwing ideas/suggestions out in case something would sound interesting to you. Also, I know it's a lot of incoherent text, but have you thought about monoprop ion engines? They exist IRL, and also provide an interesting gameplay option.

[triple cheeseburger]

27 minutes ago, NiL said:

Absolutely love the concept and the mod, the models and concept drawings/pics look so good!  As for resistojets - maybe arkjet mode could be incorporated as an upgrade/mode on resistojects, having higher isp and thrust at the cost of consuming more power? Adding them as a separate part seems unnessesary, they wouldn't be unique enough from a gameplay perspective, both RJ and AJ would be multi-fuel electric engines. Or maybe you could have smaller RJ thrusters and bigger AJ ones.

NF solid fuel RCS were useful as a self-contained option to add to your satellite (without adding monoprop tanks), if electric thermal thrusters would have integrated fuel tanks, they could be a more attractive option considering they look multidirectional on your pic. Or they could use the fuel from engine's integrated tanks, but people might want to use them alone. As for fuel choices - water seems really interesting, but then it may be better to add custom small water tanks, because life support mod is a pretty substantial dependency to include, and not all of them even have water (maybe a small circular tank in addition to integrated ones?). Liquid fuel seems like a strange resource to use (assuming it's kerosene), but stock nuke uses it, so idk.

Another interesting idea is cold gas thrusters, they are used extensively IRL and to my knowledge nobody has implemented them in KSP yet. Their tradeoff could be having higher thrust and not using electric charge, but having really low isp, use case - rocket stages, kickstages, tiny satellites that don't have much electric charge. IRL they mostly use nitrogen, which is a great propellant option from a gameplay standpoint - it can be used both for RJ and cold gas thrusters, but a more stockalike alternative may be to just use oxidiser: yes, lox is not an optimal choice for RJ, but has less uses than LF, and every rocket stage would have it no matter the propellant (so instead of having separate RCS parts or variants for LF/Ox, ch4/ox, lh2/ox one could just have RCS that uses OX). CG RCS could have two modes - high and low thrust. This way both cold gas and electric thermal sets would have two variants each (resistojets/arkjets, low-thrust CG/high-thrust CG), and the mod wouldn't be too overcomplicated. And nano-fuel tank could have options of holding either water or oxidiser, or just have water and for ox NFE's tiny tanks could be used. Or CG could be a mode for RJ thrusters.

Of course, that's all my personal opition and/or suggestions, I don't know what your artistic vision for the mod is, I'm just throwing ideas/suggestions out in case something would sound interesting to you. Also, I know it's a lot of incoherent text, but have you thought about monoprop ion engines? They exist IRL, and also provide an interesting gameplay option.

Awesome suggestions!

From what I've read arcjets have very different performance from resistojets, I was thinking to have them be a separate part. Could be unlocked slightly later in the tech tree or something, I feel like if they were unlocked at the same time then it would render the resistojets even more useless. And yeah I agree, if I were to include water as a fuel option I would go and add a few small water tanks. With liquid fuel I was thinking of people who don't have stuff like cryofuels installed and thus wouldn't be able to use things like liquid hydrogen. Though I suppose if the engines can use water and the mod includes water tanks then that eliminates the need for a liquid fuel option.

Cold gas thrusters are a neat suggestion, I was thinking about them a bit. Though they don't really fit the namesake of the mod (since they're not electric)... but I suppose I can make an exception (or rename the entire mod lol). Using liquid oxygen as a propellant is a cool idea - could maybe add it as a propellant option for resisto/arcjets too. Not sure about the tweakable thrust mode for CG thruster - can't really think of many use cases where it could come in handy and might just overcomplicate things.

So so far my current ideas for parts are something like this:

Cold gas thruster - has an engine and RCS version. Small and extremely cheap, but pitiful ISP. Propellant options include:

• Liquid oxygen (default option probably)
• Liquid hydrogen (slightly higher performance, but comes with the downsides of dealing with LH2)
• Liquid methane (sure why not)
• Water (although I suppose if liquid oxygen is available then it makes water a little bit useless, because liquid oxygen on its own is quite cheap - which is sort of what I was thinking with this option. Plus having some fuel tanks specifically for one mode of operation for an engine seems a bit weird so idk actually)

Resistojet - Similar to cold gas, but has slightly improved performance. Takes a small amount of electric charge. Can also use all the same propellants as the cold gas thruster can. Still comes in both engine and RCS forms.

Arcjet - An improved version of resistojets that is unlocked later on in the tech tree. Has a good ISP (around 2,000 seconds probably) and retains the multi-fuel options of its predecessors. Could maybe have RCS versions too?

I have not heard of monoprop ion engines, so I suppose I'll need to look into them a bit. If they look interesting though and could fill a niche I don't mind considering adding them to the mod.

[PicoSpace]

On 7/17/2023 at 7:39 AM, The Dressian Exploder said:

Maybe a 1x1 version could be usable as an RCS thruster? Additionally, if you'd consider adding more parts to this then perhaps you try some resistojet thrusters?

So I did some more testing, and 1x1 part while "Cool looking" wouldn't have more than like 50dV for even the smallest of craft (probe + battery + comms).
Maybe make the 1x1 version actually bigger nozzle scale? If triple ever decides that route.

[triple cheeseburger]

Progress being made on the resistojet engines. Haven't done the RCS engines yet but here's the Fudge, which works as a main engine.

Here's the stats and a size comparison against the mk1 command pod:

Thinking of making a dedicated resistojet/arcjet fuel tank, since this thing will have liquid hydrogen and liquid methane as fuel options I can add them to this fuel tank so people don't need to install something like cryofuels for the mod to work. Also, since it's using community resources I could pick any of the resources from that as potential fuel options. So water as a fuel choice might be a thing, and I'm talking to people who are smarter than me to find out what other things could be used as fuels. Thinking these fuel tanks could just be one part but then their contents can be decided through the variants. (Feedback on these ideas/this approach is welcome)

Edited July 21, 2023 by triple cheeseburger

[triple cheeseburger]

Hello! Just wanted to say that I'll be away for about five days, so the update may take a bit longer than expected - my apologies.

For now though, here's some screenshots showing the progress I've been making:

I've implemented the multi-fuel options into the resistojets, fuel choices include:

• Liquid Hydrogen (787s ISP, 0.2kN thrust)
• Liquid Methane (373s ISP, 0.422kN thrust)
• Water (364s ISP, 0.432kN thrust)
• Monopropellant (296s ISP, 0.532kN thrust)
• Carbon Dioxide (180s ISP, 0.874kN thrust)

Also been working on the RCS thrusters, got those working too and they have a few different configurations (combined with their fuel choices there's about 30 possible combinations for them!). The texture shown in the screenshot is not final. I've also started some work on some fuel tanks for storing these different fuel choices, so you don't have to use something like a life-support container as a fuel tank. Finally, I haven't begun work on the arcjets yet - but they will follow a similar principle of having these many fuel choices and can use the same fuel tanks.

Edited July 24, 2023 by triple cheeseburger
Hit send too early by accident

[Manul]

On 7/19/2023 at 8:56 AM, triple cheeseburger said:

I have not heard of monoprop ion engines, so I suppose I'll need to look into them a bit. If they look interesting though and could fill a niche I don't mind considering adding them to the mod.

There are monopropellant engines that have a little spark for extra ISP.  Aerojet MR-510 and ARTUS arcjet thrusters decompose hydrazine as usual monopropellant thrusters do but they use an arcjet nozzle. They don't count as ion engines and don't have a huge ISP,  it's just a cute little hybrid  of chemical and electric propulsion.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Manul

[triple cheeseburger]

Hello again! Apologies for not making much progress recently, have been busy with other projects and haven't really had the energy to work on KSP modding. But I'm back in the mood now, so I will continue work on this.

Here's some sketches I did of my ideas for the arcjet thrusters for the mod:

And here's a current list of things still left to get done:

• Finish texturing the resistojet RCS thrusters, then they're done I believe.
• I started modelling the fuel tanks for these engines. Still trying to think of what sort of look/design I should go for when texturing them...
• After those two things are done I'll get to work on the arcjets.

Also, question; would you prefer if I released the resistojets and fuel tanks as an update and then released the arcjets once they're done later on as their own update? Or should I just stick with the plan of releasing all these parts in one major update?

[The Dressian Exploder]

Oooh, I really like the look of those!