[0.25]KSP Interstellar (Magnetic Nozzles, ISRU Revamp) Version 0.13

[Cerebrate]

Well, even if you're not using it, that power's still being generated and has to go somewhere. An extra 9.3 GW of waste heat is going to need lots and lots of radiators...

-c

[NeoAcario]

First of all, Eeloo has ice -> water -> LiquidFuel (+ Oxidizer). Landing : easy. Power : hem, bring a landing-able reactor & land it on a deposit ? Then just land a ISRU + tanks and refill your engines. Plasma engines are ideal for a quick and easy Kerbin -> Eeloo trip (loads of power easily transmittable) but it's very difficult to bring enough power to return that way. Maybe you could take a tank of antimatter (eventually gathered in a potential Joolian collector) and your return ticket is paid.

Eeloo does not have water ice, but actually some other form of ice, or so Fractal told me a few months ago. Did this change in the latest patch? I will admit that I have not checked. Confirmation anyone?

~Steve

[Angelo Kerman]

Well, even if you're not using it, that power's still being generated and has to go somewhere. An extra 9.3 GW of waste heat is going to need lots and lots of radiators...

True, and I have the huge radiators to handle that heat. Still, having a manual in-flight throttle would be nice so I can produce the tritium I need. But like I said, the transmitters solves the problem nicely.

Here's a pic of my engine section about to dock with the command hull, currently undergoing refit in drydock:

On an unrelated note, landing on a moon or planet with a thermal turbojet or thermal rocket and mechjeb seems to be tricky. MJ goes nuts with the throttle. I think it has to do with resetting the thrust curve every update, so I'm going to experiment with the code and see if I can fix that. My guess is that if thermal output hasn't changed since last update, then there's no need to reset the thrust curve. That might smooth out the throttling.

Edited June 11, 2014 by Angel-125

[Cerebrate]

True, and I have the huge radiators to handle that heat. Still, having a manual in-flight throttle would be nice so I can produce the tritium I need. But like I said, the transmitters solves the problem nicely.

I'm wondering, actually, if it might be a good idea to have a specialized tritium-breeding reactor somewhere in KSPI's tech tree. It's nice to have the option to get it as a side-product, and I certainly wouldn't want it removed, but I'm pretty sure that in reality we can build heavily neutronic lithium-jacketed reactors to produce tritium without having to waste such Brobdingnagian amounts of energy in the process...

-c

[nli2work]

True, and I have the huge radiators to handle that heat. Still, having a manual in-flight throttle would be nice so I can produce the tritium I need. But like I said, the transmitters solves the problem nicely.

Here's a pic of my engine section about to dock with the command hull, currently undergoing refit in drydock:

http://www.spellflight.com/WIPS/screenshot3.png

On an unrelated note, landing on a moon or planet with a thermal turbojet or thermal rocket and mechjeb seems to be tricky. MJ goes nuts with the throttle. I think it has to do with resetting the thrust curve every update, so I'm going to experiment with the code and see if I can fix that. My guess is that if thermal output hasn't changed since last update, then there's no need to reset the thrust curve. That might smooth out the throttling.

just put a few reactors at KSC with lots of lithium. set them to breed. When you launch, use tac fuel balancer to fill up your tritium.

[ArcFurnace]

Eeloo does not have water ice, but actually some other form of ice, or so Fractal told me a few months ago. Did this change in the latest patch? I will admit that I have not checked. Confirmation anyone?

~Steve

That sounds like what I heard as well, and checking the PlanetResourceData folder shows no map for water on Eeloo, so it looks like this is correct.

I'm wondering, actually, if it might be a good idea to have a specialized tritium-breeding reactor somewhere in KSPI's tech tree. It's nice to have the option to get it as a side-product, and I certainly wouldn't want it removed, but I'm pretty sure that in reality we can build heavily neutronic lithium-jacketed reactors to produce tritium without having to waste such Brobdingnagian amounts of energy in the process...

That actually sounds like a workable idea. In the real world, the US originally produced tritium in specialized heavy-water reactors (although it also never produced more than 225 kg in total ...). Later on it switched to lithium-containing control rods in a more standard fission power plant, basically equivalent to having tritium breeding enabled on one of the already-present KSPI reactors. The specialized tritium-production reactor could also be given an exemption from the power-control code that automatically throttles down reactors to the minimum necessary for the current power requirements, to ensure it would always breed at the maximum rate. The one problem is that doing this in the real world is incredibly expensive, which can't really be represented well in-game at the moment.

“Typical tritium production capacity from fission reactors specially designed for tritium production is only a few kg per year, and at the prohibitive cost of about $200 million dollars per kg." - Yikes! (Another source gives an estimated price for deliberate production of $100k/gram, or $100m/kg; even buying from current stocks in Canada is $30k/gram)

Alternately, once 0.24 comes out with budgets and such, Fractal could make tritium tweakable in the VAB, but extremely expensive.

Edited June 11, 2014 by ArcFurnace

[Einarr]

I'm interested in pushing a large station to Eeloo, and I'm interested in what options may exist for refining myself a return trip. Currently I don't see a way of gathering this from the wiki, or from the game without just flying there first?

Has anyone got a mission report on a similar mission?

From looking at the planetary resources, I'm only seeing resource maps for Uranium and Thorium for Eeloo. Neither of those are useful as propellants. It appears that it's not even worth the time/effort of bringing refining apparatus there as there's nothing to mine/extract and then refine. You will have to either make a stop along the way to Eeloo, or bring enough fuel with you for the return.

[nli2work]

From looking at the planetary resources, I'm only seeing resource maps for Uranium and Thorium for Eeloo. Neither of those are useful as propellants. It appears that it's not even worth the time/effort of bringing refining apparatus there as there's nothing to mine/extract and then refine. You will have to either make a stop along the way to Eeloo, or bring enough fuel with you for the return.

Quantum Vacuum Plasma drive with a reactor would work for the trip. all you need is refining additional fuel for the reactor. Eeloo's gravity may be low enough to allow you to take off/land with a refinery. Also no atmosphere, so you should be able to use the drive the whole way. TWR is probably abyssmal.

Edited June 11, 2014 by nli2work

[Einarr]

Quantum Vacuum Plasma drive with a reactor would work for the trip. all you need is refining additional fuel for the reactor. Eeloo's gravity may be low enough to allow you to take off/land with a refinery. Also no atmosphere, so you should be able to use the drive the whole way. TWR is probably abyssmal.

If you're going that way, may as well use Antimatter reactors or Antimatter Initiated Reactors to power it. No refinery needed for either of those unless you take a crapton of time with the AIRs as they hardly burn Uranium Nitride or Antimatter, and the Deut/He3 can last a long time depending on the power usage during the coasting phases. If going with straight antimatter, it would be wise to have a few collectors and swing by Jool as needed. Using even the probe sized fission reactor should cover the energy requirements for the antimatter tanks themselves and those things even upgraded will run a long while, could also bring some additional uranium fuel with you in tanks if you're paranoid about running out of fuel. Shouldn't even need more than one refueling's worth of extra fuel, so you can tweak the amount carried in the VAB. If the station includes a science lab, there's no need for a refinery to reprocess nuclear fuel either, provided you have enough Kerbals. Otherwise, the 2.5m inline is small and fairly lightweight. It can't mine or extract anything without modification, but it will allow nuclear fuel reprocessing.

[DarthXavius]

I am getting a significant freezing for about 30 seconds almost every time I go into or come out of time warp. Every time it will hang for a while then state "0 science has been added to the R&D center". I am assuming this has something to do with my science labs I have up and running, which I just started messing around with. Is there a work around to reduce this hang time? I couldn't find anything in the Interstellar thread and a google search turned up zilch.

[MrWizerd]

Who would be a good person to talk to about the ratios of the resources from KSPI to LiquidFuel? I sent a message directly to the OP but I have not received a response. I am trying to use ModularFuels to make it so I only need a few sized tanks for each type 1.25m, 2.5m, etc... to save on resources by eliminating superfluous tanks. To do this I would like to get input on these ratios, as these resources are not used the same way in some cases as LiquidFuels and some need extra infrastructure to contain them. If anyone could point me in the right direction it would be very helpful. I can be reached by direct pm or im's listed in my profile.

[coolbeans123]

Can anyone help me with an issue I've been having? I load KSP with the Interstellar mod (with and without any other mods installed) and the loading works fine right up until it tries to load WarpPlugin/Spaces/sci/model, at which point the game freezes. I've checked and I'm nowhere near the memory limit of 3.5GB

[bartekkru99]

Can you make electric charge automatically convert into magajoules, if there is any module, that is using megajoules? I'm asking because I'm going to send a huge solar generstor to near solar orbit, and i want to to have plasma thrusters on it.

[bartekkru99]

Oh, and it would be good if you add some more xenon tanks (because those stock are too small for me) and argon tanks, that don't look exactly the same as xenon ones.

[ABZB]

Can you make electric charge automatically convert into magajoules, if there is any module, that is using megajoules? I'm asking because I'm going to send a huge solar generstor to near solar orbit, and i want to to have plasma thrusters on it.

I think I posted my solution a while ago.

The simplest solution is this modulemanager code (requires kethane modules):

adds switcher to any part that stores electric charge but not megajoules (so it won't modify generators)

@PART[*]:HAS[@RESOURCE[ElectricCharge],!RESOURCE[Megajoules]]
{
RESOURCE
{
	name = Megajoules
	amount = 50000
	maxAmount = 50000
}
MODULE
{
	name = KethaneConverter
	Label = Store MJ
	InputRates
	{
		ElectricCharge = 500
	}
	OutputRates
	{
		Megajoules = .5
	}
}
MODULE
{
	name = KethaneConverter
	Label = Release MJ
	InputRates
	{
		Megajoules = .5
	}
	OutputRates
	{
		ElectricCharge = 500
	}
}

}

[bartekkru99]

Nah! I don't really like playing with kethane.

[ABZB]

Yeah, I didn't install any of the parts. I just wanted the converter module. The same solution works for any generator that will stop producing if the target resource has no free space left

[nli2work]

Yeah, I didn't install any of the parts. I just wanted the converter module. The same solution works for any generator that will stop producing if the target resource has no free space left

ingenious solution! you wouldn't not need to install any parts from Kethane pack, only the plugin.

[KBluey]

I'm having some trouble with electrical power and I think it's to do with KSPI. Running a space station in orbit around Jool, with lots of panels to make sure it can keep itself charged. Intermittently, the station decides that it will start to lose electric charge (around 4-6 per second). When it does this, extending and retracting solar panels has the inverse effect from what you'd expect (extending the panels increases the rate at which charge is lost). The only thing that solves it is to activate a KSPI electrical generator, which boosts the electric charge immediately back up to full, despite the fact that the 1.25m fusion reactor the generator is attached to isn't activated! As soon as I shut off the generator, the electric charge of the station starts to decline at 4-6 per second again. Any insights into this...?

[NeoAcario]

Yeah, I didn't install any of the parts. I just wanted the converter module. The same solution works for any generator that will stop producing if the target resource has no free space left

Perfect for those crazy people that like solar power satellites.

~Steve

[ABZB]

ingenious solution! you wouldn't not need to install any parts from Kethane pack, only the plugin.

Thanks! That makes me feel warm and fusiony.

[ABZB]

I'm having some trouble with electrical power and I think it's to do with KSPI. Running a space station in orbit around Jool, with lots of panels to make sure it can keep itself charged. Intermittently, the station decides that it will start to lose electric charge (around 4-6 per second). When it does this, extending and retracting solar panels has the inverse effect from what you'd expect (extending the panels increases the rate at which charge is lost). The only thing that solves it is to activate a KSPI electrical generator, which boosts the electric charge immediately back up to full, despite the fact that the 1.25m fusion reactor the generator is attached to isn't activated! As soon as I shut off the generator, the electric charge of the station starts to decline at 4-6 per second again. Any insights into this...?

I have noticed that some parts (such as Novapunch2's freyja and odin trunks) sometimes load with 0 electric charge (but with the normal maximum) and refuse to fill. In some cases (such as with the megajoule converter I posted above) electriccharge basically dissapears into this 'void' - and you end up with no electricity at all. I 'solved' this by deleting that resource node in the cfg. this may not be the issue here, but it is probably worth mentioning.

[ABZB]

Perfect for those crazy people that like solar power satellites.

~Steve

Yeah

I first created, and mostly use this, as a backup battery for probes - as this way I can store a large amount of backup ec that will trickle out when needed. (in fact, i use the nearfuture parts, with the capacitor module he made replaced with my kethane-based node)

[nli2work]

Perfect for those crazy people that like solar power satellites.

~Steve

nah... just the lazy people who doesn't want to launch few dozen solar power sats to power the plasma drives. Now I can just build the plasma drives into the same craft as solar panels... a more ritzy ion drive, with worse TWR.

[SpaceCommanderNemo]

I have noticed that some parts (such as Novapunch2's freyja and odin trunks) sometimes load with 0 electric charge (but with the normal maximum) and refuse to fill. In some cases (such as with the megajoule converter I posted above) electriccharge basically dissapears into this 'void' - and you end up with no electricity at all. I 'solved' this by deleting that resource node in the cfg. this may not be the issue here, but it is probably worth mentioning.

Is this similar to/will it solve the problem with reactors not starting up? It seems I have a 50-50 chance that when I build something with a Generator/Reactor/Rocket, the electric charge starts at 0 and even after EC Fills, Megajoules never count. I could go back to the VAB, delete the reactor, replace it, take it back to the launch pad, then it will work fine. Load up a second copy of the fixed craft - Bugged again.