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

[Jasmir]

I can't seem to be able to get the complete save file from that posting, regardless, I think I've figured out why this problem exists. Is this happening when you have some ExoticMatter in the drive already? If you can, try editing out the ExoticMatter and see if it then begins to charge. If I'm right, you should get at least a little ExoticMatter appearing.

I think, you're right. I can't test now, but as far as i remember i had started a 2nd warp crewshuttle yesterday, and it started to produce ExoticMatter on the launchpad (after filling in some antimatter, ofc) before the initial staging.

[Donziboy2]

Found a small bug. As you can see in the image I am hardly producing any Thermal power and no generator or warp drive taking anything.

What I found is that the outer AM tanks are empty, if I balance all the tanks so that they all have fuel the reactor works like normal, but if I just have AM in the center tank, the thermal output goes waaaay down.

[GabrielG.A.B.Fonseca]

Oh, and not all the volume of the AM Tank is ocupied by A-M itself. A fair ammount is taken up by the Electromagnets that keep the stuff safe.

[nhnifong]

I achieved my first warp! woop woop!

[SeventhArchitect]

Fractal, you're more in depth with this than I am, man/gal. I mean, I've seen that nearly a milligram of antimatter can create an explosion which is...qutie big. Not exactly a hydrogen bomb, or a missile, bigger, even, but it's still a large explosion. Detonate it within a small city, and it's all but gone.

So, thats why I estimatedly scaled what I estimated up to driving texas into a deserted area.

Antimatter, though, if you look at it, is the opposite of matter. It has very little energy. But the combination of antimatter and matter is what gives us that huge amount of energy.

Maybe thats why I don't see anything using simple antimatter as a fuel on it's own. It would probably destroy the engine, if precautions weren't taken, and the whole nine yards of whatever. Lsot my train of thought. Anyway. Of to build more ships, and write stories along the way.

[Gaius]

In reality, if 1 unit of Antimatter from this mod is ~1mm^3, you'd have 10,000 in a small container, giving ~10m^3 of antimatter, which right there, could very much easily equal a multiple of that which a nuclear explosion can do. You'd be looking at something about the size of maybe...I dunno, probably Texas, from America, should you not know what Texas is.

Even if we did try to contain an explosion that big in an area which is inside a very small area, not even a full 1.25m cylinder, the amount of protection we could give it would do absolutely nothing. Sir/madame, I don't think you quite understand antimatter.

I understand antimatter perfectly. You seem to have missed the point of my post (feel free to reread it). You're completely, utterly insane if you think we'd put that quantity of antimatter in a container in our reality, ready to detonate and tear a hole through the crust of the planet the moment the power goes out. In reality, an antimatter container would never contain as ludicrously large an amount as a cubic centimeter of it (unless it was an extremely rarefied gas). When we build antimatter containers, we count the amount of antimatter in it by the number of atoms. The number of milligrams is a silly unit to use when talking about such tiny fractions of a milligram.

Incidentally, I got a good chuckle out of "In reality, if 1 unit of Antimatter from this mod..." If you're talking about this mod, you're not talking about reality. In reality, this mod contains no actual antimatter.

Edited September 17, 2013 by Gaius

[Fractal_UK]

I understand antimatter perfectly. You seem to have missed the point of my post (feel free to reread it). You're completely, utterly insane if you think we'd put that quantity of antimatter in a container in our reality. In reality, an antimatter container would never contain as ludicrously large amount as a cubic centimeter of it (unless it was an extremely rarefied gas). When we build antimatter containers, we count the amount of antimatter in it by the number of atoms. The number of milligrams is a silly unit to use when talking about such tiny fractions of a milligram.

Using volume as a measure for antimatter isn't very meaningful, the containers that do hold antimatter are much much bigger than a cubic centimeter but still hold virtually no antimatter, certainly not enough to be dangerous. The mass of the antimatter will tell you how dangerous it actually is.

As for how much antimatter you'd put in a container, you'd put as much in as needed. If you want to use antimatter to perform an interstellar mission, there is no way to avoid having antimatter aboard that will go off with the force of, at least, a large nuclear weapon if something goes wrong. I'm sure that you can engineer the danger away to near zero by having multiple backup magnetic coils, electrostatic plates and, if worse comes to worst, some kind of ejection system. Afterall, the whole point of antimatter is energy density, sure you can use it in small quantities but in small quantities you can replace antimatter with 50-200x as much fission or fusion fuel. If your antimatter ship explodes with the force of a nuclear weapon, you can, by definition, contain that same amount of energy in something nuclear weapon sized and a nuclear weapon is hardly enormous on the scale of a spacecraft, at which point why not just use nuclear fuel instead?

Payload fraction might be one reason but ultimately, antimatter is at its most useful when you're carrying more of it than you could feasibly replace with nuclear fuel because you reach a regime of power output/weight that is totally inaccessible with other fuels and that means your spaceship is in a whole new regime of capabilities.

[DaveStrider]

I just designed an SSTO for Eve using the upgraded turbojets, and it should work (it managed to reach the upper limit of the atmosphere intakes) however it seems that when my jets are at high throttle (and sometimes completely randomly) the antimatter reactors wobble wildly around, sometimes breaking off entirely. I've never seen this behaviour before so i assume it's got something to do with the reactors connection to the rest of the plane. Another problem i've ran into occasionally is when i throttle high before takeoff, one of the jets runs out of IntakeAtm, despite being at sea level and having two intakes to itself (this may be because i'm not travelling fast enough to collect enough Atm)

I'm posting a screenie just in case this problem is actually just a huge design oversight and has nothing to do with the mod (i think this angle covers everything important)

The plane managed to make orbit on kerbin without any wobbling, and the wobbling persisted past 10km on Eve, so perhaps it's related to gravity? idk. Anyway so far i've tried toggling the gimbal of the jets, and toggling SAS, toggling the gimbal didn't help, but piloting the plane manually seemed to slow/stop the wobbling for a while (the control surfaces are pretty jittery when SAS controls them)

[Gaius]

As for how much antimatter you'd put in a container, you'd put as much in as needed. If you want to use antimatter to perform an interstellar mission, there is no way to avoid having antimatter aboard that will go off with the force of, at least, a large nuclear weapon if something goes wrong. I'm sure that you can engineer the danger away to near zero by having multiple backup magnetic coils, electrostatic plates and, if worse comes to worst, some kind of ejection system.

No, you put as much antimatter in the container as it can safely contain should the magnetic bottle fail and the antimatter impacts the container walls. If you need more, you use multiple containers, and if the containment on one bottle fails (and it will -- if you don't understand Murphy's Law, you don't become an engineer), you're out a fraction of your fuel supply, but the ship does not explode. An ejection system is pointless. If the containment fails, either the container contains the explosion or it doesn't faster than you can do anything about it.

Afterall, the whole point of antimatter is energy density, sure you can use it in small quantities but in small quantities you can replace antimatter with 50-200x as much fission or fusion fuel. If your antimatter ship explodes with the force of a nuclear weapon, you can, by definition, contain that same amount of energy in something nuclear weapon sized and a nuclear weapon is hardly enormous on the scale of a spacecraft, at which point why not just use nuclear fuel instead?

Payload fraction might be one reason but ultimately, antimatter is at its most useful when you're carrying more of it than you could feasibly replace with nuclear fuel because you reach a regime of power output/weight that is totally inaccessible with other fuels and that means your spaceship is in a whole new regime of capabilities.

Indeed. It remains an open question whether antimatter really has a better energy density than other sources, once you factor in all the support equipment necessary to use it without blowing your ship to kingdom come.

Not arguing with the sci-fi aspects of this. Just that when you say "in reality"... in reality, it remains to be seen if any of this is feasible. But once thing is for sure: in reality, we would NOT be using containers that blow holes through the crust of the planet when the power goes out. Handwave all you want, that much is a fact. We're not kerbals. We may be stupid but we're not that stupid. We're not always perfect at it, but we do always try to ensure systems fail gracefully. No real engineer says "it's not going to fail"... we design around the fact that they will, and test what happens when they do and how to prevent that from being catastrophic.

Edited September 17, 2013 by Gaius

[Fractal_UK]

No, you put as much antimatter in the container as it can safely contain should the magnetic bottle fail and the antimatter impacts the container walls. If you need more, you use multiple containers, and if the containment on one bottle fails (and it will -- if you don't understand Murphy's Law, you don't become an engineer), you're out a fraction of your fuel supply, but the ship does not explode. An ejection system is pointless. If the containment fails, either the container contains the explosion or it doesn't faster than you can do anything about it.

There is no container you could possibly design that would contain even the smallest fraction of a useful amount of antimatter going off at once. You're talking about safely containing the equivalent of large nuclear detonations within a spacecraft, so you split them up into multiple containers and only have to contain some small nuclear explosions. It simply doesn't make a difference, even if you're orbitally constructing a massive ship that is hundreds of metres in length, chances are the force from one of these smaller scaled down explosions will chain detonate all the other containers. Even if you somehow do manage to contain the actual concussive force of the explosion, how is your heat dissipation system going to cope with an entire reactors worth of fuel for months or years going off at once? You've killed the ship no matter what you do.

The only way to handle antimatter safety is to largely look beyond the ship itself. Of course you maximise the number of backup systems you have but the key is to keep the ship away from anything that might be damaged by the explosion. That probably means limiting the amount of antimatter you're allowed to store in containers while on the planet surface and until certain altitudes above the planet are reached because you certainly don't want that size of detonation occuring by accident around a civilian population nor do you want to destroy space infrastructure, like satellites or whatever. Likely that means putting your antimatter ship in a very high orbit and onerously transporting the antimatter up in tiny quantities.

I'm sure that if we reach that technological level as a species, there will be people arguing that antimatter is simply too dangerous to use as a fuel source in large quantities and people arguing about the regulations it should be subjected to but ultimately, if you want to use it for a meaningful mission in a spacecraft you either accept that that spaceship will be one of the most explosive things ever created or you don't do it. If you have a choice between mounting an interstellar expedition to explore another solar system which has a small probability of killing the crew due to antimatter containment failure or not mounting the expedition, what do you do?

There isn't a right answer but there's no getting around the around the power density issue. It's no different to comparing a nuclear reactor to a bonfire, there is no question which has the higher power output and which poses the greater danger in the event of a problem, moving on to antimatter just adds a couple more orders of magnitude.

Regardless, this is getting a bit off topic and might be more suited to a science lab topic on antimatter safety or something.

[Fractal_UK]

I just designed an SSTO for Eve using the upgraded turbojets, and it should work (it managed to reach the upper limit of the atmosphere intakes) however it seems that when my jets are at high throttle (and sometimes completely randomly) the antimatter reactors wobble wildly around, sometimes breaking off entirely. I've never seen this behaviour before so i assume it's got something to do with the reactors connection to the rest of the plane. Another problem i've ran into occasionally is when i throttle high before takeoff, one of the jets runs out of IntakeAtm, despite being at sea level and having two intakes to itself (this may be because i'm not travelling fast enough to collect enough Atm)

It may just be the breaking force/breaking torque config settings for the antimatter reactors aren't quite right. It's a bit of a balancing act to get them right. You could try tweaking these in the .cfg file for the reactor and see if it helps, I can do this too but I won't be able to until Sunday at the earliest, my laptop doesn't run KSP terribly well so you might get faster results tweaking them yourself and seeing what happens. If you try that and it helps, please let me know the settings you used.

The other alternative is that it's to do with parts clipping into each other, the effect of which often seems to be gravity dependent. The old KSP staple of more struts might help too, the antimatter jets are ludicrously powerful so you do have to be careful in atmosphere.

In other news, I've figured out what's behind the electrical generator bug, it turns out that my previous fix for the warp charging bug was a start but didn't fix the entire problem. This should explain why the plasma engines aren't performing right for nuclear and antimatter power sources as well.

[SeventhArchitect]

I just designed an SSTO for Eve using the upgraded turbojets, and it should work (it managed to reach the upper limit of the atmosphere intakes) however it seems that when my jets are at high throttle (and sometimes completely randomly) the antimatter reactors wobble wildly around, sometimes breaking off entirely. I've never seen this behaviour before so i assume it's got something to do with the reactors connection to the rest of the plane. Another problem i've ran into occasionally is when i throttle high before takeoff, one of the jets runs out of IntakeAtm, despite being at sea level and having two intakes to itself (this may be because i'm not travelling fast enough to collect enough Atm)

I'm posting a screenie just in case this problem is actually just a huge design oversight and has nothing to do with the mod (i think this angle covers everything important)

The plane managed to make orbit on kerbin without any wobbling, and the wobbling persisted past 10km on Eve, so perhaps it's related to gravity? idk. Anyway so far i've tried toggling the gimbal of the jets, and toggling SAS, toggling the gimbal didn't help, but piloting the plane manually seemed to slow/stop the wobbling for a while (the control surfaces are pretty jittery when SAS controls them)

Dave, there is this incredibly amazing part called an EAS-4 Strut connector that allows you to rid your vessel of that stupid wobble. No, I'm not being a smart ass here, that part really is freaking amazing, and I'm surprised not too many modders have made stronger, bigger struts.

[DaveStrider]

It may just be the breaking force/breaking torque config settings for the antimatter reactors aren't quite right. It's a bit of a balancing act to get them right. You could try tweaking these in the .cfg file for the reactor and see if it helps, I can do this too but I won't be able to until Sunday at the earliest, my laptop doesn't run KSP terribly well so you might get faster results tweaking them yourself and seeing what happens. If you try that and it helps, please let me know the settings you used.

The other alternative is that it's to do with parts clipping into each other, the effect of which often seems to be gravity dependent. The old KSP staple of more struts might help too, the antimatter jets are ludicrously powerful so you do have to be careful in atmosphere.

I ended up fixing the problem with struts (i was reluctant to at first since i think they look rather ugly on aircraft), but before i did that i tweaked the breaking torque to 250 (i wasn't sure how big the changes should be so i just guessed), and that didn't help the wobble. based on your clipping suggestion i also turned off gravity, which also had no effect. i don't know if this information is useful, but i'm running too many mods and my load times are too slow to do any serious .cfg trial and error.

Anyway, thanks to the magic of struts and lazy engineering, i managed to make orbit!

I made the orbit pretty badly (i didn't know where the edge of the atmosphere was at the time), so that 90 fuel surplus could probably be increased to around 150-200 ideally. Now that i know i can ferry personnel from Eve's surface to low orbit cheaply (50 units of antimatter per launch) I can start my Eve colonization program!

[SeventhArchitect]

I ended up fixing the problem with struts (i was reluctant to at first since i think they look rather ugly on aircraft), but before i did that i tweaked the breaking torque to 250 (i wasn't sure how big the changes should be so i just guessed), and that didn't help the wobble. based on your clipping suggestion i also turned off gravity, which also had no effect. i don't know if this information is useful, but i'm running too many mods and my load times are too slow to do any serious .cfg trial and error.

Anyway, thanks to the magic of struts and lazy engineering, i managed to make orbit!

I made the orbit pretty badly (i didn't know where the edge of the atmosphere was at the time), so that 90 fuel surplus could probably be increased to around 150-200 ideally. Now that i know i can ferry personnel from Eve's surface to low orbit cheaply (50 units of antimatter per launch) I can start my Eve colonization program!

I see that you are...good enough to do that. Just, one question. How the hell do you get a jet engine driven vessel to eve without the aide of a rocket thruster?

[Fractal_UK]

I see that you are...good enough to do that. Just, one question. How the hell do you get a jet engine driven vessel to eve without the aide of a rocket thruster?

He's using the upgraded antimatter thermal turbojet - the one that can toggle between intake propellant or internal fuel tanks. It's pretty much ideal for making an Eve SSTO because you don't need to use up any internal propellant until you get high enough to flameout.

You can just take off from Kerbin, fly it to Eve like a rocket, perhaps refuel in Eve orbit then land on the surface.

[SeventhArchitect]

Wow....I've done so little towards research...yet the possibilities are so awesome...

Which makes me bring up the point of Why are we not funding this?!

[DaveStrider]

I see that you are...good enough to do that. Just, one question. How the hell do you get a jet engine driven vessel to eve without the aide of a rocket thruster?

That ship was hyperedited to Eve's surface purely for testing, Fractal's right about my planned delivery method though, i can make kerbin orbit with around 1700 m/s of spare delta-v, which is enough to get me into eve's SOI using nothing but the fuel-burning mode on the jets.

[nhnifong]

Funding what dude? Lay off the big text.

[Fractal_UK]

Why are we not funding this?!

The short answer is that there is nothing to fund because we are a long way from having all of the technology needed to produce something like this.

The longer answer is a bit more naunced. The idea of using heat exchangers instead of combustion in turbojets was actually developed actively by the US military for a while as a means of developing extremely long range bombers, they also looked into the idea of nuclear ramjets to produce cruise missiles that could maintain virtually indefinite hypersonic flight. Both of these technologies were explored relatively early in the cold war and in the end weren't extensively developed due to the development of superior conventional jet engines and intercontinental ballistic missiles respectively. One of the major disadvantages of nuclear reactors, of course is the weight of the extensive radiation shielding needed to keep your crew safe and you can see in the mod that if you try and build a nuclear turbojet it's probably going to be impossible to get off the ground due to all the weight you need to carry.

Antimatter is, I guess, just an evolution of the design and goes back to what I was saying earlier about energy density. With antimatter, you can carry less fuel and still produce more power for longer compared to nuclear fuel, which should translate to a much more powerful and useful engine.

We're all fine up to there but in reality actually obtaining antimatter isn't so easy. I've scaled up the amounts that are collectable in planetary magnetospheres by quite a bit in order to make the mod more playable, though this approach may be practical for much smaller quantities, whether you could collect enough to be useful is another question. The other way to get antimatter is to make it, much like the science lab does in this mod, only in reality the only current way to do this is with a supercollider like the LHC, in which case you build 27km circular tunnel underground that uses up massive amounts of power to produce a few atoms of antimatter that can be trapped for a few milliseconds before they escape the trap. So, we are actually funding the idea, but we're funding the fundamental research, particularly looking at better ways of trapping antimatter as well as gaining experience with technologies like particle accelerators that you could theoretically adopt for "mass"-producing antimatter if you decided to go down that route.

You also have forthcoming projects like the ELI that might theoretically point to a more efficient or more practical way of producing it in addition to their primary research goals.

[SeventhArchitect]

lol, the "why are we not funding this?!" quote was towards research. It's because I've actually done little to none research to help these parts upgrade, but that also gives me something to look forward to.

BTW, how did you upgrade those parts without a science module, or supercomputer attached?

Edit:I am also currently producing .1 research every second, so one research unit every ten seconds.

Edited September 18, 2013 by SeventhArchitect

[nhnifong]

BTW, how did you upgrade those parts without a science module, or supercomputer attached?

I accumulate my science points at my primary space station. I usually dock new ships to it in orbit and upgrade their parts there.

[SeventhArchitect]

I accumulate my science points at my primary space station. I usually dock new ships to it in orbit and upgrade their parts there.

Dude! True~!

Down here in the swamps of good ole Louisiana, the local group has recently begun using the words True, Wow, and Right in context for a lot of things. True, as used here, is a statement that "ya so cool, yo", or however you'd interpret that.

As for now, thats not a bad idea...

[nhnifong]

I'm trying to use to AEIS models for the Beamed Microwave power and I think it has messed up the animation and/or readouts. I see 0.000 KW on both the receiver and the transmitters and the activate button works but it never changes state to "deactivate". (but it does after re-loading the vessel)

The context menu shows an efficiency readout, but no power is transmitted.

Do you think I just need to get name of the anim right or if your code hard-bound to the stock models?

EDIT: what if the model I want to use does not have an animation?

EDIT 2: Woohoo I got it working. Just had to correct the anim names and stick to parts with animations. Also all the existing sats in my save had to be turned off and on. Now I have a nice selection of collapsible antennae for my sats!

Edited September 18, 2013 by nhnifong

[nhnifong]

One more question before fractal wakes up

Why is this small generator is not producing more megajoules when there's thermal power to spare?

[Fractal_UK]

One more question before fractal wakes up

Why is this small generator is not producing more megajoules when there's thermal power to spare?

Fractal is already long awake

Anyway, the generator doesn't just try to use up all the thermal power, it tries to only produce the amount of electricity that you need at a given moment. Usually the thermal power and electrical outputs will be the same in percentage terms. If the reactor is nuclear though, it's thermal output might be capped at the minimum 30% while the generator might not need to produce that much electricity.

There is however unfortunately still a bug where the resource manager won't detect the maximum Megajoule supply correctly.