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

[Fractal_UK]

I am having this problem too. Do the warp engines aka "field inducers" need to be pointed in line with the nose of the ship? I tried to warp toward Moho and while the navball read correctly and the ship pointed toward Moho the whole time it instead warped "above" the plane of the planetary orbits. The ship I am using weighs about 400 tons and has several warp units pointed in several directions. When I warp I just click on one and adjust speed and then activate. I am going to build another warp ship soon and test another I have already built to see if they show the same problem.

Can you give me more information on this? I've done some investigating and I'm finding it hard to reproduce this behaviour. If you could PM with some screenshots of your vessel and the kinds of orbit it is producing, I might be able to diagnose this better. The code that determines warp speed is specific to the vessel rather than the part so the direction of warp should always be the direction the vessel is pointing.

[Stuntaneous]

As with any inclusion or change to a game, what do these things add to the experience? Can their inclusion be justified?

[theonegalen]

This whole thread is nothing but beautiful, beautiful win.

Thank you, FractalUK. I'm not to the point in my KSP career where I would feel (technologically) justified in using the Warp Drive or the other technologies contained within - I only had my first successful manned flight an ingame month ago, and Jeb's been sitting on the Mun, waiting for rescue for a week - but I really look forward to being able to use this plugin eventually, once my Kerbals start climbing the Kardashev scale in earnest.

Edited August 18, 2013 by theonegalen

[Jason_25]

I finally found the source of the warp bug. It seems to set your warp direction by the pointing direction of the first part of your ship. For a rocket, this is probably ok. Less so for a flying saucer for instance. I used a cubic strut instead of the probe I was using and angled it so that it faced the intended direction of travel. The good news is it does not yet seem to matter about the direction of your warp units.

[Fractal_UK]

I finally found the source of the warp bug. It seems to set your warp direction by the pointing direction of the first part of your ship. For a rocket, this is probably ok. Less so for a flying saucer for instance. I used a cubic strut instead of the probe I was using and angled it so that it faced the intended direction of travel. The good news is it does not yet seem to matter about the direction of your warp units.

Consistent behaviour seems like the most important goal here so in the here next update, I will change the behaviour such that the direction of warp travel is always in line with the direction of the warp drive. That way, warping direction will always be consistent with the visual effects the warp drive is producing. That will also allow you to build ships of unorthodox configurations provided that the actual drive unit is facing the right way.

[Scotius]

What will happen if we'd build a ship with two warp drives facing opposite directions, and activate them at once? Will ship stay where he was? Will it rip the hull in two halves? Universe will implode, and a swarm of angry Krakens will appear to devour the reality?

[Fractal_UK]

What will happen if we'd build a ship with two warp drives facing opposite directions, and activate them at once? Will ship stay where he was? Will it rip the hull in two halves? Universe will implode, and a swarm of angry Krakens will appear to devour the reality?

It depends what speeds they are set to, if they both are set to the same speed, for example, you'll just warp back to the speed you were going originally (the same as if you just turned them both off). Using multiple warp drives at the same time isn't exactly a supported feature, though I realise in some ways it makes sense to do so at the moment for energy storage purposes.

[Ratata]

quick question: are MW and electric charge interchangeable now? and second: would it be possible to have a "warp-core" (stores the energy) and the "warp drive" as two different parts? (you know, like the star trek warp-gondolas ;-) so one could customize the design.)

[ckow]

Awesome idea.

I have two questions I haven't been able to answer on my own or figure out by reading this thread.

1) are research points specific to the ship or are they civilization wide?

2) if I connect the thermal rock directly to the nuclear powerplant I get a thrust of 68, if I put an electric generator between the two I get a thrust of of 500. Same isp in both scenarios.

Is this intentional?

[Jason_25]

It depends what speeds they are set to, if they both are set to the same speed, for example, you'll just warp back to the speed you were going originally (the same as if you just turned them both off). Using multiple warp drives at the same time isn't exactly a supported feature, though I realise in some ways it makes sense to do so at the moment for energy storage purposes.

I like the way it is now with the tradeoff in charging time vs. weight of your reactors. Before you make any great changes that break my ships I figured I would release them. Thanks to you and the creator of the warp core models, and thanks for being patient with me in the beginning.

If anyone looking at this thread is a fan of Star Trek, and I'm sure you are, come check out my thread of ships mostly based on this mod:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/46679-Aerotech-Industries-Star-Trek-Shipyards-Division-Warp-Drive-Pack-Mod?p=601982#post601982

[Fractal_UK]

Awesome idea.

I have two questions I haven't been able to answer on my own or figure out by reading this thread.

1) are research points specific to the ship or are they civilization wide?

2) if I connect the thermal rock directly to the nuclear powerplant I get a thrust of 68, if I put an electric generator between the two I get a thrust of of 500. Same isp in both scenarios.

Is this intentional?

1) Research points are specific to a vessel. The idea is that you utilise them by building science stations and docking vessels with upgradeable parts to that science station in order to upgrade them - essentially allowing research stations and research outposts. One option I'm consindering for the future is to differentiate between an initial cost (researching an upgraded the first time) and an upgrade cost (researching an upgraded item the nth item), this has the advantage of functioning rather like a tech tree.

2) This is due to a bug. The proper function of the thermal rocket is to determine thrust by an attached thermal reactor but a previous bug fix has interfered with this code and meant that attaching no reactor at all gives you the base thrust of the engine. This problem has been fixed again and the bugfix will be in the next update.

I like the way it is now with the tradeoff in charging time vs. weight of your reactors. Before you make any great changes that break my ships I figured I would release them. Thanks to you and the creator of the warp core models, and thanks for being patient with me in the beginning.

If anyone looking at this thread is a fan of Star Trek, and I'm sure you are, come check out my thread of ships mostly based on this mod:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/46679-Aerotech-Industries-Star-Trek-Shipyards-Division-Warp-Drive-Pack-Mod?p=601982#post601982

The big thing to do in terms of fixing this is to add a component that can be used to store resources useful to charging the warp drive. I'm also looking at adding an upgrade for the warp drive that increases the mass divisor (i.e. makes it easier for larger ships to charge the warp drive much quicker), afterall science is there for such things!

[ckow]

Thanks for the fast response!

One other thing I'm noticing. I was under the impression that the nuclear rockets would use the powerplant to fuel their thrust, however right now if I 'switch propellant' I have two options; liquid fuel and LFO. There's no thermal only option. Is this by design as well?

[Scotius]

Remember that thermal engines need a propellant too. As of now, only Quantum Thruster (theoretically) is capable of creating its own propellant out of technically nothing - pure void. Any other kind of rocket engine needs some sort of stored substance it can accelerate, and throw out of the nozzle. Thermal engine can use standard mix of LFO, or only liquid fuel - it changes its thrust and Isp.

[Fractal_UK]

Remember that thermal engines need a propellant too. As of now, only Quantum Thruster (theoretically) is capable of creating its own propellant out of technically nothing - pure void. Any other kind of rocket engine needs some sort of stored substance it can accelerate, and throw out of the nozzle. Thermal engine can use standard mix of LFO, or only liquid fuel - it changes its thrust and Isp.

Yes indeed, you still need to expel something out of the back of your rocket in order to alter the momentum of the rocket itself, regardless of whether that stuff is being propelled out of the back by a chemical reaction or a nuclear reactor. In reality, there is the option of using the blackbody radiation from a nuclear reactor to propel your rocket - it's a form of photon rocket which offers specific impulse of ~3x10⁷s but thrust levels, even from a multi-GW reactor would be on the order of 1N (or ~ 500x less thrusty than the stock ion engines) which obviously makes it totally useless for KSP purposes. Cool in real life though!

[GabrielG.A.B.Fonseca]

Sorry for asking, but when do you think the next version will be stable enougth fot a release? (That warp drive model is simply too sexy to wait for!)

Also, what do you think of adding Fusion reactors to the mod?

[Fractal_UK]

Sorry for asking, but when do you think the next version will be stable enougth fot a release? (That warp drive model is simply too sexy to wait for!)

It would've already been ready, but I've decided to tinker with the resource system. KSP doesn't exactly handle resources brilliantly so I've decided to write my own resource handler, which should result in much more stable performance of electrical parts and thermal parts, especially at high time acceleration. My new resource system also supports a limited amount of prioritisation in resource distribution which means that if you have both a thermal rocket nozzle and an electrical generator, you won't need to turn off the generator to get full performance from the thermal rocket when you throttle up. The game will seemlessly transition between the two.

Initial experimentation suggests this is going to be much much more stable. I'm hoping it won't be too long but I don't want to provide an ETA just yet.

Also, what do you think of adding Fusion reactors to the mod?

It's something I've considered repeatedly but not something I'm going to do without ensuring I can make them sufficiently different to the offerings already in the mod, so I'll have to implement them carefully. I think there is scope, I just want to get it right.

[Fractal_UK]

Update:

Resource system seems to be working very well so far. It has also allowed me to introduce some much needed changes easily, for example, electric (plasma) engines will now correctly detect attached Microwave power as well as electrical generators. The new electric engine behaviour will be to detect the sum of all attached electrical generators and microwave receivers, then use that to calculate the electric engine thrust. If you have multiple electric engines, the resource code will detect which electric engines are active and split up the power equally between the active engines.

I've also reduced the mass of the plasma engines since they were extremely heavy. Combined with the microwave changes, this may open up the possibility of using some small solely microwave (and Xenon) powered spacecraft, at least in the inner system.

I also intend to add more persistence in this update, so that you can do more things with your inactive spacecraft - particularly in terms of resource generation. The big one remaining to fix here is allowing antimatter collection/production with inactive craft, which should make your work much more time-efficient.

[pina_coladas]

Have you considered adding laser transmission as a complement to microwave transmission? Lasers could have much lower conversion efficiency but much lower attenuation as well, making them potentially more useful for power transmission to the outer solar system. Could take a bit of balancing to make sense but I think it's a cool idea.

[Scotius]

Update:

Resource system seems to be working very well so far. It has also allowed me to introduce some much needed changes easily, for example, electric (plasma) engines will now correctly detect attached Microwave power as well as electrical generators. The new electric engine behaviour will be to detect the sum of all attached electrical generators and microwave receivers, then use that to calculate the electric engine thrust. If you have multiple electric engines, the resource code will detect which electric engines are active and split up the power equally between the active engines.

I've also reduced the mass of the plasma engines since they were extremely heavy. Combined with the microwave changes, this may open up the possibility of using some small solely microwave (and Xenon) powered spacecraft, at least in the inner system.

I also intend to add more persistence in this update, so that you can do more things with your inactive spacecraft - particularly in terms of resource generation. The big one remaining to fix here is allowing antimatter collection/production with inactive craft, which should make your work much more time-efficient.

Great news This way i could send fast, AM gathering automatic ship to Jool system, then send kerballed expedition the same way. And when my mothership arrives, refuelling station would have nice supply of antimatter ready for journey home

[Ryugi]

As a random note (since I was curious about this myself) the 10c speed setting in the mod is equivalent to roughly Warp 2 on the ST:TNG Warp Scale. That said, the 20c setting doesn't hit Warp 3, which would be approximately 39x the speed of light.

Small tidbit incase anyone was wondering as I was.

[Scotius]

Frankly in planetary system even lowest warp speed is more than enough to get everywhere you want. And sadly, we don't have any extrasolar target

[Fractal_UK]

Frankly in planetary system even lowest warp speed is more than enough to get everywhere you want. And sadly, we don't have any extrasolar target

If or when another planetary system gets added, I'll probably up the speed options but for now, it doesn't matter very much. I doubt an option that would let you reach another star in a matter of a day or so would be very useful when it'd mean you'd cross the diameter of Jool's orbit in ~1 second or so.

[m4ti140]

LOL, science as a resource... "And the science gets done" now has a new meaning

[Scotius]

I've read somewhere that theoretically Alcubierre Drive can reach ten times the speed of light. Which means our starship would have to fly a whole year to reach a star ten lightyears away. And another year back. Kinda long when we look at it from our earthly perspective - on a plane we can circle the Earth in mere days. But it is still much, much better than cruising for decades using any sub-luminal drive we can come up with. And humans kinda/sorta did it long time ago - first explorers to circumnavigate the world spent years onboard their creaky, small, stinking and leaking sailships. We can do that too - with proper toilets this time

[Fractal_UK]

In the next update, I'm killing off warp drive functionality as a big battery for megajoules of power. Instead, the warp drive will be powered by an exotic matter resource, which the warp drive will automatically generate when it has electrical power available. As I said before, I'm also making it an upgradeable part. This upgrade will be the cheapest available because it very much qualifies as "nice to have" rather than a stellar must have. The upgrade will simply allow the warp drive to charge substantially more quickly and permit higher warp speeds with a more massive ship. Since you're adding a few mutlipliers together, this could easily make upgraded nuclear rockets practical warp ships as well.