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

[SeventhArchitect]

Jool is a gas giant. Maybe thats why no one has posted their bases on Jool.

Btw, I'm escaping jool's atmosphere now with the Jump Jet (prototype vessel, and first fully functional Warp Drive fitted vessel)

Edited September 10, 2013 by SeventhArchitect
BTW

[Donziboy2]

Try using the medium size engine, that's what I use, it has tons of power.

You also don't need all the AM, you can turn the reactor off when not running engines to conserve AM fuel.

BTW what is attached below the 4 orange tanks SeventhArchitect?

[Fractal_UK]

BTW what is attached below the 4 orange tanks SeventhArchitect?

They are the ISRU scoops - which reminds me: these also need atmospheric intakes to be attached to the ship somewhere in order to function, it's a good idea to go for the large 2.5m atmospheric intakes to maximise utilisation.

[SeventhArchitect]

Jool, a green gas giant. Flew there in my prototype Warp drive fitted shuttle, and entered the atmosphere, doing a bit of exploring, trying to get close enough to see the surface, and sure enough, it was like looking at the ocean from high above.

So, after taking to reentry of Jool's Atmosphere, I nearly burned the ship up, and would have failed. Went from over 11,200 mph, to 230 mph, and then began to take off. After a scare, being that my ship wouldn't angle it's nose upwards at all for a while, I finally began my way out of the atmosphere, and began a long, boring orbit burn.

Then I remembered, hey, I've got an Alcubierre Drive attached to this ship, and oh, it's fully charged. Plotted a course for Kerbin at 1x light speed, should be there in moments.

I was going over 14 times the speed of sound when I made atmospheric reentry, and survived, I feel accomplished.

[SeventhArchitect]

They are the ISRU scoops - which reminds me: these also need atmospheric intakes to be attached to the ship somewhere in order to function, it's a good idea to go for the large 2.5m atmospheric intakes to maximise utilisation.

o_O So you mean that I HAVE to have the intakes as well?

Guh...I'll just chunk the current design, make something cool, voila. Better AM drive.

BTW, as you had said to use liquidfuel tanks instead of Rocket fuel tanks, and to stop using both Liquidfuel and Oxidizer, I wasn't using oxidizer, because if I try that, it just destroys the AM reactor...

BTW, you gonna make an engine/drive that actually uses Antimatter for fuel, other than the AM reactor and thermal thruster?

[Fractal_UK]

o_O So you mean that I HAVE to have the intakes as well?

Yes, the scoop simply converts "IntakeAtm" into useable resources, it doesn't actually act as an intake itself.

Guh...I'll just chunk the current design, make something cool, voila. Better AM drive.

If you replace the nosecones with intakes, that should help.

BTW, as you had said to use liquidfuel tanks instead of Rocket fuel tanks, and to stop using both Liquidfuel and Oxidizer, I wasn't using oxidizer, because if I try that, it just destroys the AM reactor...

Ah okay, I just assumed you were using LiquidFuel+Oxidiser because you had standard LFO fuel tanks.

BTW, you gonna make an engine/drive that actually uses Antimatter for fuel, other than the AM reactor and thermal thruster?

Unlikely without major changes to the game, particularly physical timewarp. Directly antimatter driven ships have massive specific impulse but almost no thrust to speak of. To put it in context, a directly driven antimatter ship that consumed antimatter at the same rate as the 3.75m upgraded antimatter reactor would produce <1kN of thrust (with Isp of ~10⁷s). It would have sufficient delta-v to reach another star system but would take months to achieve such a cruising speed.

[Donziboy2]

Unlikely without major changes to the game, particularly physical timewarp. Directly antimatter driven ships have massive specific impulse but almost no thrust to speak of. To put it in context, a directly driven antimatter ship that consumed antimatter at the same rate as the 3.75m upgraded antimatter reactor would produce <1kN of thrust (with Isp of ~10⁷s). It would have sufficient delta-v to reach another star system but would take months to achieve such a cruising speed.

Isnt that why you have the Plasma Engine? A small thrust/huge ISP engine.

Any chance in getting a spreadsheet of the Plasma Engine like with the Thermal Engine?

Edited September 10, 2013 by Donziboy2

[SeventhArchitect]

Unlikely without major changes to the game, particularly physical timewarp. Directly antimatter driven ships have massive specific impulse but almost no thrust to speak of. To put it in context, a directly driven antimatter ship that consumed antimatter at the same rate as the 3.75m upgraded antimatter reactor would produce <1kN of thrust (with Isp of ~10⁷s). It would have sufficient delta-v to reach another star system but would take months to achieve such a cruising speed.

You see, antimatter is a very dangerous...erm...fundamental particle (?), that, when it comes into contact with matter, explodes so violently, that about 1 milligram would equal an explosion that could very easily build a bridge between regular everyday missiles/rockets, and a nuke.

Rockets/missiles, Antimatter bomb, nuke.

it can be done in weapons, so why not engines?

And as I say that, I suppose that the fact that Antimatter has the same amount of power as regular matter, would be a great factor in your logic, but I'm pretty sure there cna be other applications, can there?

I mena...It's freaking Antimatter.

Edited September 10, 2013 by SeventhArchitect

[SeventhArchitect]

delta-v <=== Define that please.

[Fractal_UK]

You see, antimatter is a very dangerous...erm...fundamental particle (?), that, when it comes into contact with matter, explodes so violently, that about 1 milligram would equal an explosion that could very easily build a bridge between regular everyday missiles/rockets, and a nuke.

Rockets/missiles, Antimatter bomb, nuke.

it can be done in weapons, so why not engines?

And as I say that, I suppose that the fact that Antimatter has the same amount of power as regular matter, would be a great factor in your logic, but I'm pretty sure there cna be other applications, can there?

I mena...It's freaking Antimatter.

Because, when you annihilate antimatter (antiprotons at least) the majority of the exhaust occurs in different forms: neutral pions, charged pions and gamma rays. If we want to derive thrust from the exhaust, the gamma rays and neutral pions are useless because we can't control them, they simply leave. The charged pions are useful because if we perform the annihilation in a magnetic nozzle, we can direct them and get thrust.

Now, pions are much much less massive than protons and antiprotons, so to conserve energy these pions leave with absolutely enormous velocities (significant proportions of c). That is the exhaust velocity of our antimatter engine. Specific impulse is related to exhaust velocity by V_e = g * I_sp. So, if we have massive exhaust velocity, we neccessarily have massive specific impulse.

For a given amount of antimatter, let's say 1mg, we can annihilate it with 1mg of matter to get ~180GJ at 100% efficiency but a lot of the energy is lost as gamma rays and neutral pions. Let's say we keep 20% of the energy as useful charged pions, that means we have 36GJ of propulsive energy to work with. If we annihilate 1 mg of antimatter/second we have 36GW of thrust power.

Now, Power = 1/2 * g * I_sp * thrust. So, if we rearrange this equation we have 2*3.6x10¹⁰/(9.81 * 10⁷) = thrust. Thus, thrust = 73N.

Now, you'll see the large upgraded antimatter reactor produces 405GW, just over 10x the figure we have above, so if we scale it up... 405/36 * 73 = 821N or just under 1kN for annihilating the same amount of matter as that large reactor does.

We can derive more thrust from an antimatter reactor by heating a propellant like hydrogen, this means that much of the energy goes into heating these particles and we have a large numbers of hydrogen atoms moving quite quickly, rather than very few pions moving at close to the speed of light. By doing it this way, we reduce the specific impulse to increase the thrust. This is what we are doing with an antimatter thermal rocket.

Edited September 11, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[SeventhArchitect]

Makes sense. Look at the Gamma Rays, though, which are actually electromagnetic radiation. Gamma rays are also within solar power processes. you said a lot goes to Gamma rays and neutral pions (which I need to look up soon), but you basically said a small fraction of the reaction goes to usable thrust. The remainder may not be thrust, but it's energy, and last I checked, if you put a solar panel up in the middle of the sunlight, you get energy. Well. you said you had seen Stargate Atlantis, right? Remember that time whenever Lt. Col. John Sheppard was sent into the future a few thousand years? Atlantis was supposed to survive a few more thousand years so that he coudl go back in time, and fix everything the right way. Well, it was said that John was going to die a few hundred years short because the star turned into a red giant, quite literally cookign him in the stasis pod.

Then the idea came up about the solar panels, which are supposed to power the city's auxiliary system, like lights and everything. One said that the closer the sun, the more energy would be absorbed, so, say you create a chamber that the antimatter and matter reacts within, and through the process you explained, turn a bit of it into thrust, and turn the rest of it into electrical power through reprocessing the gamma rays like solar power. It'd be like creating a large engine with a small nozzle, and it generates a ton more energy in terms of electricity than thrust. That could be used to power something else. That somethign else specifically being a plasma thruster!

I'm going to say a majority of the antimatter-matter reaction goes to gamma rays, because neutral pions decay into gamma rays.

You know what? It may not be what I was looking for, but I like this new idea I've come up with. though, does it seem like a legit idea? And one question does plague me right now, and that question may tell me if I'm wrong. Gamma rays occur in sunlight, right?

Edited September 11, 2013 by SeventhArchitect

[SeventhArchitect]

And....I finished The Fire on the Horizon ship. I had to turn it into an SSTO, because it was basically going to be nothing more than a 2 segment ship, the command, and the Antimatter Drive. Thing is, with the new model, it has 4 thermal thrusters, each tied to 2.5m AM reactors. The way that this mod works, I could still have that one AMreactor in the center, fed by that antimatter tank, and it would still make the thermal thrusters work, even if they weren't directly under it. Created 11,900 Kn of thrust, while that single thermal thruster underneath that 3.75m AM reactor only produced a bit over 9k. Better thrust, better flight, adn to boot, what with the fuel hulls changed to pure solidfuel, it would last long enough to easily make a trip to Jool, and make a pit stop on the way.

Though, forgot to turn on the electric generator before launch, so the xenongass was completely emptied from the tanks, adn the only way I could have fixed that, was to deliver a xonengas paylod to the Fire on the Horizon while it was still in orbit, and fire the electric engines long enough to replenish the xenongas tanks.

Though, halfway into orbit burn, something went wrong, and this happened. It is all your fault, Fractal:

And the ship...

Not really your fault though, coding is a bit...annoying at times, and the few times I've tried, I've hit dead ends because I had to try and make something new that the coding probably would not allow.

The 3.75m antimatter reactor is giving problems again, and you did say it would be fixed in the next version, so just #turnup.

[DmitriWillguard]

Just completed my first test run with a warp-driven probe. Unfortunately, a poorly-aimed jump at .1c lead to rapid unplanned disassembly over Duna...but the debris carried on, at high speed, back out of the planet's atmosphere.

The Alcubierre Drive on one of the debris pieces hasn't shut off--and can't be, since the probe core broke off from this piece. Screencaps were taken from another piece of the probe.

http://imgur.com/a/4AIle#0

Is it possible to add a "kill switch" for the actual warp graphic, in the event of catastrophic failure like this? So the drive will shut down if separated from its power source?

All things considered, this is my new favorite mod, for sure.

[Scotius]

Sun does produce some gamma rays due to cyclotron-like processes created by solar flares. But it is a very small amount compared to entire power production of our star. And shielding requires huge amount of mass placed around the source. It can be lead, depleted uranium, granite or other high-density materials. Of course the stronger source is, the more massive shield must be. Considering that weight saving is a primary concern in space engineering, i don't really see any sort of gamma-ray engine being built anytime soon. If ever.

[Donziboy2]

Is it possible to add a "kill switch" for the actual warp graphic, in the event of catastrophic failure like this? So the drive will shut down if separated from its power source?

All things considered, this is my new favorite mod, for sure.

Unless you have some kind of command section like a probe core or capsule attached you cannot control anything.

Maybe Fractul_UK can add a small power requirement or some such so if your craft goes poof it no longer has the power to maintain the drive?

[Aghanim]

Why do as I started the thermal engine it always flameout and fizzles up when throttled up? I have connected the engine in the config: orange fuel tank (no I don't accidentally attach impossible innovations deuterium tank) -> 3.5 reactor -> thermal engine. Sometime it works sometime when I add another stage it doesn't. I use the latest version provided at the download button

EDIT: Ohh nevermind, MechJeb prevent overheat thinks that your thermal rocket is overheated (while it is not) killing the rocket

Edited September 11, 2013 by Aghanim

[Xentoe]

A throw in topic:

Now that 0.22 is in "view".

With now Tec Treee and stuff.

How you think this can be handeled?

I mean we know all, that 85% of all mods (especial the cooler ones like this) will again fail to work....

[Fractal_UK]

http://imgur.com/a/4AIle#0

Is it possible to add a "kill switch" for the actual warp graphic, in the event of catastrophic failure like this? So the drive will shut down if separated from its power source?

Just out of curiousity, are you using Windows 8 and have KSP in your program files directory? There are some issues with permissions in terms of file writing in Windows 8, which can cause various problems in KSP and the other person who suffered this problem also didn't have their warpdrive textures load properly - it should be a transparent effect with blues and reds, not a pure white beam.

I'll look into what I can do to shut down the warp drive if things go wrong. This won't appear in the next update though as unfortunately I have no more time to add features, I'm going on holiday tomorrow so I'm trying to get 0.5 ready for release before I go between all the packing. I can't risk adding anything else that might delay the release.

[Seeker89]

Sorry for the much delay.... here are pictures.... because who doesn't like pictures

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[automcdonough]

i'm finding it very difficult to make accurate jumps. :/

[DmitriWillguard]

Just out of curiousity, are you using Windows 8 and have KSP in your program files directory?

I'm on Windows 7 and have the game on my desktop.

Maybe Fractul_UK can add a small power requirement or some such so if your craft goes poof it no longer has the power to maintain the drive?

This is more-or-less what I'd imagined would be the easiest way to implement it, yeah. Have a very small Electric Charge resource requirement in addition to the existing ones. Since the mod's electric generators produce some EC, I don't imagine it would cause any problems? But I also know nothing about modding, so.

Enjoy your holiday, Fractal!

[DaveStrider]

i'm finding it very difficult to make accurate jumps. :/

What do you mean by accurate? if you're having trouble getting your ship to warp in the right direction all you need to do is leave kerbin's SOI by warping in any direction, setting your target and then pointing at the pink marker. if you're having trouble circularizing afterwards there was a detailed guide a few pages back.

[Donziboy2]

I think Seeker89 has created a stealth cloak by accident. Careful or the Kerbals at War guys will want to add that:P

[wasmic]

Hey Fractal, I have a suggestion... how about expanding the Science lab's electrolysis functions a bit? That is, make ice → LF+Ox possible on Minmus (yes, I know it's too close to the sun, but the dev's say it's made of ice, so it's made of ice ) and make the soil → aluminium+ox possible on Tylo. That would, actually, make sense.

[Seeker89]

After removing all my mods, and putting each one back on with the warp plugin. I found that none of my other mods were the problem.

So... after testing... the problem is: I use the warp core as the first part.

I hope other will try this out and back me up... to make sure I'm not crazy.