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

Fractal_UK

By Fractal_UK
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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Atrius129

Atrius129

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Right - that's why I like the idea of a 1,250kN 200,000s plasma engine: the power checks out to be easily within the capability of the 405 GW antimatter reactor, and it fulfills the niche of the endgame high-thrust high-Isp antimatter rocket. We really don't need another high-Isp low-thrust propulsion system; those are headaches to use (KSPI magnetic nozzles, plasma engines, and every ion engine mod ever, I'm looking at you) and we already have a whole bunch of them.

You can theoretically just stuff more propellant through a plasma-core rocket to increase your thrust and lower your Isp anyway, so the physics check out. There's no need for a rocket with 800,000s Isp anyway with the Kerbol-sized solar system.

The 10-meganewton figure given on Project Rho for the beam-core engine is the maximum theoretical that you could get from an engine made of matter.

A rocket with an Isp of 10,000,000 seconds (exhaust velocity of 98,000,000 m/s) and a thrust power of 405 gigawatts would have a thrust of just over 4 kilonewtons, but I think you could get away with just injecting more antimatter and getting higher thrusts that way up to a point, but the real issue is not vaporizing your engine when >40% of the input power is turning into heat. The wasteheat generated by my torch drive is almost certainly several orders of magnitude too little, but I pulled some hand-waving that it's not thermalizing the gamma rays and most of the energy is lost that way. I'm not at all sure that's plausible. I wanted ships that use that drive to have to carry the next size bigger radiators than normal, but anyone who's tried to get the maximum possible power out of an antimatter reactor knows that 405 gigawatts is a lot of radiator, and my engine probably should put out close to that in waste heat. Once again, I encourage you to edit that file however you like. :P

Since this engine seems to operate on some similar principles as the Vista, maybe you could solve this problem by scaling your engine the same way, i.e. high thrust = low Isp & vice versa.

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NeoAcario

NeoAcario

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This is entirely the rationale behind the change.

I'm certainly open to suggestions about small changes to thermal rocket performance, NorthStar made a good point about a universal specific impulse cap for all propellants not being as elegant as properly accounting for the temperature of different elements a couple of pages back and I certainly will take that into account in future changes. The exact value of the cap, in whatever form it takes in the future, could be tweaked as well but I'm not considering going back to how things were before.

I know it is a big change and I knew that some people wouldn't like it when I made it but ultimately I feel it is both a realism improvement and a gameplay improvement because the thermal rockets were just too good before. Other engines could be competitive with thermal rockets but only in a particular range of use cases while the thermal rockets performed generally excellently in all use cases. Having to make a tradeoff between different performance considerations is a nice thing, so despite it removing a cool toy, I think it is a change that makes the range of options available in Interstellar more interesting.

Alright... so then give us a thermal, magnetic rocket nozzle option? I'm surprised you didn't just convert the thermal rocket nozzles already in the mod to this. Nerfing the turbo jets for these reasons make perfect sense, but you capped both. Turbo jets having the Atmo option gives them a step up over Standard Thermals in that regard anyways. Regardless of ISP.

~Steve

Edited by NeoAcario
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GreeningGalaxy

GreeningGalaxy

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Alright, in light of what Fractal just said, I've decided that I like the Isp caps on thermal rockets after all. It makes at lot of sense in terms of accuracy, for one, and it also more or less un-nerfs thermal rockets smaller than 2.5 meters - they now have enough thrust to actually get places with sane burn durations (and to be used as lander engines too!). I'm keeping my antimatter torch drive in my game, but the Isp nerfs on thermal rockets do take a step back towards the stock design model in which your ship has to have a significant mass fraction to get a good amount of delta-V, which wasn't the case at all with 17000-second antimatter rockets. I also like the idea of using them for launch vehicles; I haven't considered that much.

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ABZB

ABZB

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This Mod grants cryogenic crew storage:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/92806-WIP-25-PaladinLabs-Dev-Thread-DeepFreeze-cryonic-crew-storage-v-012

It uses a custom resource: Glykerol.

It is useful for life-support mods.

I made a slight tweak to the code and compiled - to use LqdHelium - for now, convenient really only for the gravitational lensing thing (and for now, the only mission that that might be terribly useful for, anyway).

The edited source and .dll can be downloaded from my dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/svy9pgp1qwodlfw/DeepFreeze-v.12-KSPI-Version.zip?dl=0

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FreeThinker

FreeThinker

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The theoretical optimum is energy equal (under E=mc^2) to the rest mass of the output antimatter and an equal quantity of matter. 1 unit of antimatter is 10^-9 ton (= 1 milligram) if I've counted the zeros in the config file right. 2 milligrams times c squared comes out to 179.8 gigajoules per unit of antimatter. If you're using ElectricCharge at the Interstellar setting of 1 EC = 1 kilojoule, that's about 179,800,000 EC to 1 AM.

Intresting. Now let's assume we only want to fill a single Small Antimatter Bottle with 1 microgram of antimater (0.001) and have access to a single 3000 MW Uranium reactor and Brayton Cycle to generate power. How much time would it take to generate this amount of power?

Edited by FreeThinker
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ABZB

ABZB

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Intresting. Now let's assume we only want to fill a single Small Antimatter Bottle with 1 microgram of antimater (0.001) and have access to a single 3000 MW Uranium reactor and Brayton Cycle to generate power. How much time would it take to generate this amount of power?

energy per µg:

179.8/1 (Gj/mg antimatter)**(1mg/1000 µg) => 179.8*10^(-3) Gj/µg * 1000 Mj/Gj = 179.8 Mj/µg = 179.8 Mj/µg

time per .1798 Mj:

(.1798 Mj)/(3000 MW) ~ .06 seconds

assuming you actually have 3000 MW output.

Edited by ABZB
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undercoveryankee

undercoveryankee

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Alright, in light of what Fractal just said, I've decided that I like the Isp caps on thermal rockets after all. It makes at lot of sense in terms of accuracy, for one, and it also more or less un-nerfs thermal rockets smaller than 2.5 meters - they now have enough thrust to actually get places with sane burn durations (and to be used as lander engines too!). I'm keeping my antimatter torch drive in my game, but the Isp nerfs on thermal rockets do take a step back towards the stock design model in which your ship has to have a significant mass fraction to get a good amount of delta-V, which wasn't the case at all with 17000-second antimatter rockets. I also like the idea of using them for launch vehicles; I haven't considered that much.

After my attempt to add ChargedParticles to the existing AM reactor succeeded only in discovering an implicit assumption in the plugin that no one would ever try that, I'm taking another look at the AM torch. A Vista/VASIMR-like ability to vary the Isp by varying the ratio of inert hydrogen to reactants should be possible. Atomic Rockets suggests that the hydrogen-rich limit has an Isp of around 5000 s, with the hydrogen-lean limit around 100,000 s. Efficiency of energy transfer from the pions to the hydrogen would likely vary from near the gas-core estimate of 35% at the rich end down to about 10% on the lean end. I'll try to whip up a plugin to handle the variable-Isp setting and hammer the physics into a plausible performance curve.

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The Yellow Dart

The Yellow Dart

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Hi, quick questions:

1. Should the intake precooler be completely nulling jet engine overheating at high speeds or is it just supposed to make it manageable?

2. Can I stack both a RAM air intake & an inline intake body part onto a precooler and have them both be precooled?

(I'm using a 0.24 version of ksp & interstellar, if that matters)

Thanks!

-J

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ghost22

ghost22

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So the Attila engine how can I use diffrent fuels? on the wiki it says xenon is the best one to use for more thrust but I cant toggle that fuel type in flight I also cant see the thrust to weight or delta v I get with mechjeb but if I use liqued fuel I see the delta v and thrust to weight I also cant see the thrust to weight or delta v if I use monoprop :(

No answer for that?

Can I also make a microwave network with solar panels?

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cicatrix

cicatrix

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Question,

I want to Modify the Particle Accelerator of Station Shience to generate AntiMater. This obviously requires huge amount of power. The question is, how much power? How much power would it realisticly need generate a one unit of antimater ? I Guess it cost at least the amount of power as it released when it's used and multiply that by 10. I tried to look a the antimater config files but it's not clear what the conversion rate is between Antimapter to (Power + Heat + Waterheat + Radiation). Could anyone clarify?

I think, everyone knows by now the most famous Einstein's equation: E = mc^2

But that's ideal. In 'real life' (if that term could be applicable here) you'll need twice as much.

Edited by cicatrix
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LostElement

LostElement

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How do you get the Fusion Engine to work? I have the liquid fuel, tritium and deuterium. I have a 3.75m Fusion reactor and a 3.75 Electric Generator. Everything is powered up. However, when I throttle up my fusion engine nothing happens, and according to my thrust It should be lifting. Help?

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cicatrix

cicatrix

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How do you get the Fusion Engine to work? I have the liquid fuel, tritium and deuterium. I have a 3.75m Fusion reactor and a 3.75 Electric Generator. Everything is powered up. However, when I throttle up my fusion engine nothing happens, and according to my thrust It should be lifting. Help?

Do you have any fuel? The reactor provides energy, but fuel is sort of necessary as well.

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ghost22

ghost22

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So the Attila engine how can I use diffrent fuels? on the wiki it says xenon is the best one to use for more thrust but I cant toggle that fuel type in flight I also cant see the thrust to weight or delta v I get with mechjeb but if I use liqued fuel I see the delta v and thrust to weight I also cant see the thrust to weight or delta v if I use monoprop :(

Could someone PLS Give me an answer?

look here http://imgur.com/a/4Stnq#0 why doesnt it work?

wiki says https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/ATTILA-thruster

I can use XENON and alot of other fuel types

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Atrius129

Atrius129

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How do you get the Fusion Engine to work? I have the liquid fuel, tritium and deuterium. I have a 3.75m Fusion reactor and a 3.75 Electric Generator. Everything is powered up. However, when I throttle up my fusion engine nothing happens, and according to my thrust It should be lifting. Help?

On paper it looks like you have everything you need. Post a pic and we may be able to see where you went wrong. Have the MJ manager open. Also, if you have Vista's you should have the fusion upgrade so you should only need to 2.5m reactor. Make sure you generator is in thermal mode, not direct conversion (though it is likely that the 3.5 would be able to produce enough power on DC mode).

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Atrius129

Atrius129

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I seem to be having trouble with antimatter collectors not actually collecting. Before I go titrating this problem have there been any recent changes or something obvious likely causing this?

Are they getting power in the form of MJ? I haven't set up an AM farm for a few updates.

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Atrius129

Atrius129

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Could someone PLS Give me an answer?

look here http://imgur.com/a/4Stnq#0 why doesnt it work?

wiki says https://github.com/FractalUK/KSPInterstellar/wiki/ATTILA-thruster

I can use XENON and alot of other fuel types

For the other electric engines, you need a reactor attached for it to show you any ÃŽâ€V in the VAB. If you have the other fuels aboard, you should just be able to right click to change fuel type. I have never actually used the Attila's but I will check it out later.

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Cdr_Zeta

Cdr_Zeta

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Hi,

Ya nice mod but I havnt got it to work yet or maybe I did haha !

I am looking forward to tryin again in my Kerbin Missions !

I also thought it would be kool to post my 500th post on page 1250 in the KSP forum !!

Thank you Modder(s) !!

Cmdr Zeta :cool:

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Atrius129

Atrius129

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Yes they are powered, they are directly attached to a AM storage container, could that be a problem?

Pics? It shouldn't matter what they are attached to, so long as there isn't a docking port between the collectors and the tank. It doesn't like that for some reason.

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