[1.12.5] Sterling Systems v0.4.0.2 [Aug 14, 2024]

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

7 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@KspNoobUsernameTaken I would never recommend using a Hydrogen engine for sea level. I would recommend Methane as it has some respectable density for use for heavy lifters and unless I'm mistaken, I've baked in the cryo fuel switching from Rational Resources Nuclear Family. The thermal nozzles and SULEU engines should be able to run on things other than Hydrogen.

The broader solar thermal panel suite isn't out yet but you can try out the gameplay loop via the variants of the Sterling super heavy shield and two of the World Power boxed parts.

Ok, understood. I saw the methane switching stuff, but I was just trying to do something simple. I'm really anticipating solar heated ships; could you consider adding solar sails when you get to it?  When you do add solar thermal panels, will stock panels have that feature?

[JadeOfMaar]

1 hour ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

Ok, understood. I saw the methane switching stuff, but I was just trying to do something simple. I'm really anticipating solar heated ships; could you consider adding solar sails when you get to it?  When you do add solar thermal panels, will stock panels have that feature?

Hah. Well using Methane is still simple, I'd like to think.

I have plans, and very different plans for sail propulsion but it'll be quite a while before I start doing anything about that. As for solar thermal panels, no. As much as possible I now avoid adding to or changing stock parts. If I have the drive to, I'll make my own models for the job.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

50 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Hah. Well using Methane is still simple, I'd like to think.

I have plans, and very different plans for sail propulsion but it'll be quite a while before I start doing anything about that. As for solar thermal panels, no. As much as possible I now avoid adding to or changing stock parts. If I have the drive to, I'll make my own models for the job.

Fair enough; yeah, I agree Methane is simple, I just got a little confused for my first try with the mod. Further play tests are very encouraging. 

So to be clear the ThermalPower gathering works with a ModuleDeployableSolarPanel with resourceName = ThermalPower?

Edited May 23 by KspNoobUsernameTaken

[JadeOfMaar]

26 minutes ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

Further play tests are very encouraging. 

Heck yes.

22 minutes ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

So to be clear the ThermalPower gathering works with a ModuleDeployableSolarPanel with resourceName = ThermalPower?

Also yes. If you're curious to what the engineering differences are and why I won't touch the stock parts, let me know and I'll give a quick answer.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

@JadeOfMaar

Here's something that could be interesting in the future:

I can't make sense of the code, but you could try making it transmit ThermalPower instead. Would be cool (If you are interested ofc). 

[Manul]

3 hours ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

I'm really anticipating solar heated ships

Sun is the best (and the only) fusion reactor we can get but don't forget about the inverse square law that makes it's output dramatically drop with distance. And black panels tend to radiate heat as well as absorb it, turning from heaters to radiators when running red hot that limits both temperature and power output.  So I would not expect solar heating to be comparable to fission heating in power output and maximum temperature. Temperature is important because it makes the difference between ThermalPower and WastheHeat: these high ISP thermal nozzles need to heat propellant to insane temperature to actually have high ISP, if a solar heater can't achieve this temperature it's not producing ThermalPower, it makes WasteHeat instead. Having a fragile 50m umbrella to heat a pot of tea doesn't look good compared to slapping together some pieces of uranium.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

17 hours ago, Manul said:

Sun is the best (and the only) fusion reactor we can get but don't forget about the inverse square law that makes it's output dramatically drop with distance. And black panels tend to radiate heat as well as absorb it, turning from heaters to radiators when running red hot that limits both temperature and power output.  So I would not expect solar heating to be comparable to fission heating in power output and maximum temperature. Temperature is important because it makes the difference between ThermalPower and WastheHeat: these high ISP thermal nozzles need to heat propellant to insane temperature to actually have high ISP, if a solar heater can't achieve this temperature it's not producing ThermalPower, it makes WasteHeat instead. Having a fragile 50m umbrella to heat a pot of tea doesn't look good compared to slapping together some pieces of uranium.

Remember though, its possible to use concentrated solar as a massive orbital laser, propelling a solar sail/vessel along. While direct sunlight might not work, beamed solar power could very well work.

[Manul]

6 hours ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

to use concentrated solar

Yes, solar thermal power is all about parabolic mirrors and giant frensel lenses creating   solar deathray ™ rather than simple black panels. Panels will do the trick if you need to run an orbital distillery to produce cheap booze ethanol fuel, lenses and mirrors allow to melt things that need to be melted (like metallic ore) and run the processing plant with minimum electricity required.

Edited May 24 by Manul

[Oaterson]

Very cool mod, happy to have more future tech

Quick querstion though, the nerv alternatives that run on CO2/Water (I forgot the name) just seem... kinda OP???

Maybe I'm too sandbox player for this idk but the thrust/ISP feels cray-cray

[JadeOfMaar]

@Oaterson I'm glad you like.

Per your question:

• Sterling's SULEU engine. It's not that it's OP (and it could be so, even thrustier, but that would absolutely turn people away and even threaten the relevance of other engines I've made). Rather, the stock NERV is underspec and for two reasons: To not far outclass the stock LFO engines (which is what you actually want when you go nuclear) and that there are known design faults that plagued it and caused it to underperform IRL. The SULEU draws from updated NERV or NERV-alike designs (American in origin or otherwise) which escape these faults and employ newer knowledge that may not have been widely available at the time and was certainly not available to Squad. Part of the vision of my mod is "Plausible high thrust concepts preferred" because as much as anyone, I don't like the idea of crawling through the stars in-game and there are enough mods that provide largely low thrust engines.
• Sterling's thermal nozzle family. They are OP by nature, however, you have to look at them from a new angle and apply new understanding. They are "What if you took the immense heat generation capability of your nuclear reactor and used that as the combustion source?" The angle here is "Rather than worry about insufficient power (TWR) and spamming engines, you keep a big reactor and take stock of your surplus power (thermal) and limit it (throttle limit the nozzle) to suit your needs."

You only think my engines are "cray-cray" because you didn't know yet that there are concepts for high thrust solid-core NTR. If we can have gas-core NTR and NSWR, certainly we could improve the NERV itself and make it amazing.

[Oaterson]

30 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@Oaterson I'm glad you like.

Per your question:

• Sterling's SULEU engine. It's not that it's OP (and it could be so, even thrustier, but that would absolutely turn people away and even threaten the relevance of other engines I've made). Rather, the stock NERV is underspec and for two reasons: To not far outclass the stock LFO engines (which is what you actually want when you go nuclear) and that there are known design faults that plagued it and caused it to underperform IRL. The SULEU draws from updated NERV or NERV-alike designs (American in origin or otherwise) which escape these faults and employ newer knowledge that may not have been widely available at the time and was certainly not available to Squad. Part of the vision of my mod is "Plausible high thrust concepts preferred" because as much as anyone, I don't like the idea of crawling through the stars in-game and there are enough mods that provide largely low thrust engines.
• Sterling's thermal nozzle family. They are OP by nature, however, you have to look at them from a new angle and apply new understanding. They are "What if you took the immense heat generation capability of your nuclear reactor and used that as the combustion source?" The angle here is "Rather than worry about insufficient power (TWR) and spamming engines, you keep a big reactor and take stock of your surplus power (thermal) and limit it (throttle limit the nozzle) to suit your needs."

You only think my engines are "cray-cray" because you didn't know yet that there are concepts for high thrust solid-core NTR. If we can have gas-core NTR and NSWR, certainly we could improve the NERV itself and make it amazing.

Oh I see lmao. 

(I'll prob still just edit the configs cause idk)

Really cool mod though, i am SUPER happy to see more far future tech mods in the community.

[Manul]

5 hours ago, Oaterson said:

Maybe I'm too sandbox player for this idk but the thrust/ISP feels cray-cray

There is no physical reason why nuclear engines should should have low TWR, there is just a gameplay reason to make chemical engines not useless. Near future mods are meant to do exactly this (making 50-60 years old engines obsolete and put them to rest), so there is no reason to worry about.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

@JadeOfMaar

What would you consider a good electric charge to ThermalPower ratio? I'm trying to make a patch for solar panels-> thermal panels, but I kind of suck at balancing...

Do you plan antimatter or similar reactors? What about integration with WBI? 

 

I really like the models btw.

[Oaterson]

5 hours ago, Manul said:

There is no physical reason why nuclear engines should should have low TWR, there is just a gameplay reason to make chemical engines not useless. Near future mods are meant to do exactly this (making 50-60 years old engines obsolete and put them to rest), so there is no reason to worry about.

Oh I know, I just like having trade offs whenever I play

im fine with things being made obsolete just like idk 

[JadeOfMaar]

5 hours ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

@JadeOfMaar

What would you consider a good electric charge to ThermalPower ratio? I'm trying to make a patch for solar panels-> thermal panels, but I kind of suck at balancing...

Do you plan antimatter or similar reactors? What about integration with WBI? 

 

I really like the models btw.

I haven't considered such a ratio since it does not compute to me to convert PV output directly to ThP output. But I do have a formula to use anyway. That is: Get the surface area and multiply by 0.00625 (that is, 0.625%) for the ThermalPower value. This ratio intentionally applies a nerf because in this case I would count on using a highly absorptive surface material, not a highly reflective one. I would hope for it to overheat under casual sun exposure in orbit and pair it with a very small, high efficiency generator. Such a panel will probably only ever make sense as a low temperature heat source (see: @Manul statement on temperature and waste heat).

If you're going to make a proper concentrator model (or get someone else to) which involves a parabolic reflector and a focal point then get the surface area and multiply by 0.05 (5%) for the ThermalPower value.

Spoiler

I might raise this value once I make the solar thermal panel suite and build some test ships using them and a SULEU engine cluster.

I have a special handling planned for fusion and antimatter reactors. I've learned a lot since making the original fusion engines that are already out so it's a good thing I didn't release more already.

 

WBI integration

This is on hold until ISRU parts arrive. I'm at odds with the Omniconverter system since it currently doesn't integrate with System Heat and that I found a pretty worrisome bug with its efficiency scaling. That bug can be avoided, I just need to look back and see what not to do with it. However, I'm going to need it because I don't want to spam the PAW of the refineries with the buttons for every recipe I'm going to write for them. I rather like the idea of having slots and swapping recipes in them.

I'd like to make an Omnistorage compatible tank suite as well but it will have to have less options for diameters and variants. I'd rather not do a load of repeat work just to be cautious of another fuel switch plugin.

 

1 hour ago, Oaterson said:

Oh I know, I just like having trade offs whenever I play

im fine with things being made obsolete just like idk 

At the very least, the SULEU has more dry mass and it has equal heat production base value so while it produces more thrust it will produce as much more heat and you should see the need for radiators much sooner when you do a very long burn with it (and this is without the System Heat mod). With System Heat you absolutely need it to be in a heat loop and it will ask for some radiator capacity. But the demand is currently way excessive, which will be fixed soon-ish.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

13 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

I'd like to make an Omnistorage compatible tank suite as well but it will have to have less options for diameters and variants. I'd rather not do a load of repeat work just to be cautious of another fuel switch plugin.

That's good news; obviously the nice thing about omnistorage is that you only really need to add the omnistorage module and a capacityFactor. I wonder how you'll deal with antimatter in omnistorage though...

I don't know whether omnistorage supports switchable parts, so that could be an issue.

18 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

If you're going to make a proper concentrator model (or get someone else to) which involves a parabolic reflector and a focal point

Do you have any example images for space-vessel capable concentrators? I can't model, but a year back I couldn't make cfgs either so I may as well learn.

15 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

I rather like the idea of having slots and swapping recipes in them.

I'd like to request that your eventual omniconvertors are tagged as AntiMatter-Fab etc for high power reactions, just so that I can't make antimatter inside a standard Pathfinder part.

 

 

[JadeOfMaar]

@KspNoobUsernameTaken Omnistorage supports part variants (using the stock mesh switcher). Some Buffalo 2 parts have length switch and Omnistorage ties into that. At the least we can pretend that any Omni tank will have the proper internals added in order to support whatever resource is chosen. It doesn't concern itself with adding dry mass, dry cost, containment cost etc. Those things just weren't relevant when the code was written. It might be better to stick to existing B9-powered tanks if you care about those details.

I'm familiar with template tagging (to lock recipes in or out of some omniconverter parts). I will do so where AntiMatter is concerned.

Here's an example solar thermal panel for space ships and a member of my planned suite. It's based on the IRL parabolic trough variant and includes a generator. Included but apart from it is a 2.5m cylinder (see: Rockomax tanks) for scale. It's designed so that the mirror can do a 360 around the focal section (black pipe) (without clipping itself) while sun-tracking.

 

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

3 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Here's an example solar thermal panel for space ships and a member of my planned suite. It's based on the IRL parabolic trough variant and includes a generator. Included but apart from it is a 2.5m cylinder (see: Rockomax tanks) for scale. It's designed so that the mirror can do a 360 around the focal section (black pipe) (without clipping itself) while sun-tracking.

 

Ok, looks cool. Time to try & fail to make a model.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

@JadeOfMaar

I made this thing, is it roughly like a parabolic solar panel (its my first time modelling so dont be too hard on it) :

 

https://imgur.com/a/IhgcQLV

 

If it is I'll move ahead to adding ThermalPower modules etc. I couldn't find much information on sun tracking so I thought I'd post it here while trying to figure that out.

Edited May 28 by KspNoobUsernameTaken

[JadeOfMaar]

@KspNoobUsernameTaken It's a good start but just two things: Your pipes have too high a number of sides for how thin they are and the reflective surface of the mirror absolutely doesn't need a PV cell texture. It should just be black. In the config the transforms that you name will rotate around Y and point at Sun with Z+. The transform at pivotName (which rotates) and at secondaryTransformName (which points and is counted for resource production) can be the same, or not.

You may need to swap Y and Z in Blender (rotate around Z, point with Y) since Blender does that.

Edited May 28 by JadeOfMaar

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

7 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@KspNoobUsernameTaken It's a good start but just two things: Your pipes have too high a number of sides for how thin they are and the reflective surface of the mirror absolutely doesn't need a PV cell texture. It should just be black. In the config the transforms that you name will rotate around Y and point at Sun with Z+. The transform at pivotName (which rotates) and at secondaryTransformName (which points and is counted for resource production) can be the same, or not.

You may need to swap Y and Z in Blender (rotate around Z, point with Y) since Blender does that.

Ok, but what's a transform? Is it like the thrust vector thing in engines? Do I make it in unity or blender?

[JadeOfMaar]

53 minutes ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

Ok, but what's a transform? Is it like the thrust vector thing in engines? Do I make it in unity or blender?

A transform (or GameObject) is any object within your model hierarchy that has a position and orientation in 3D space. Some of these can be nulls or empties, having no geometry to speak of. The thrust transform is usually an empty but can be otherwise. You may use an object that geometry or is an empty. You can make an empty in Unity or Blender but you can't (afaik) do model construction in Unity as you can in Blender.

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

3 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

A transform (or GameObject) is any object within your model hierarchy that has a position and orientation in 3D space. Some of these can be nulls or empties, having no geometry to speak of. The thrust transform is usually an empty but can be otherwise. You may use an object that geometry or is an empty. You can make an empty in Unity or Blender but you can't (afaik) do model construction in Unity as you can in Blender.

Understood. Ok, I'll play around with the model some more. This is surprisingly fun.

I'm starting the unity stuff now. Hopefully I'll end up with something to hold me over until you release your stuff.

Edited May 29 by KspNoobUsernameTaken

[Manul]

8 hours ago, KspNoobUsernameTaken said:

Understood.

To keep things simple, the transform is an axle, when it rotates, everything that is parented to this transform rotates with it. For example every red line is an axis of rotation for parts of my landing gear.  Of course I could use meshes as transforms and rotate them around their center instead  but getting the "center" of a mesh into the right place of a mesh might be tricky, a plain axis is more easy to deal with

Using plain axis instead of rotating meshes is especially useful when things become FUBAR and everything is pointed in the wrong direction so you have to reorient everything once again like in THIS case:

Spoiler

 

Edited May 29 by Manul

[KspNoobUsernameTaken]

I'm going to stop cluttering your thread with this stuff @JadeOfMaar. If and when my part(s) get to a workable state I'll post it here. I've got a lot of stuff to learn & this is not the correct thread to put it in.

 

Thanks for the clarification @Manul