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

[Jarin]

Having a little trouble with cross-mod support. I added KAS to my campaign (because ground docking is nearly impossible and I can't transfer resources from my AM plant otherwise), but apparently the parts aren't adding by default, and they're not in the Interstellar tech tree. Is there any quick .cfg tweak I can make to have them appear?

[Fractal_UK]

There isn't? ElectricCharge from generation sources is rated in units per second. 1 ec/s = 1KJ/s.

As I said, that is the conversion that I'm using but there is no particular reason to think it is "correct." The measure works fine for stock solar panels in terms of power/weight but is many orders of magnitude too small to explain the thrust of stock ion engines.

[Fractal_UK]

Having a little trouble with cross-mod support. I added KAS to my campaign (because ground docking is nearly impossible and I can't transfer resources from my AM plant otherwise), but apparently the parts aren't adding by default, and they're not in the Interstellar tech tree. Is there any quick .cfg tweak I can make to have them appear?

Do you have the latest version of both Interstellar and KAS? So long as the KAS parts have been added to the tech tree (the stock one), it should work fine.

[Delwin]

As I said, that is the conversion that I'm using but there is no particular reason to think it is "correct." The measure works fine for stock solar panels in terms of power/weight but is many orders of magnitude too small to explain the thrust of stock ion engines.

I thought it was an accepted fact that the stock ion engines were way overpowered compared to what they should be... Maybe I've been hanging around these boards too much? The FAR thread and the real sol conversion thread complain about it occasionally too.

... that spawns a thought however. There's an educational version of KSP in the works. I wonder if they'll tone down the ion engine in that?

Just a random thought.

Anyway I'll throw together an alternator and see if it completely shatters any semblance of balance.

[Fractal_UK]

Anyway I'll throw together an alternator and see if it completely shatters any semblance of balance.

The main obstacle to making an alternator of some kind is that there are multiple approaches, 1) you can detect all the solar power available to a vessel and convert exactly that amount into Megajoules - the Megajoule resource manager will then convert it back into ElectricCharge in the required quantities. That should work great but doesn't support anything but solar panels or even potentially certain modded panels 2) you try and convert all the power that is presently being stored at any one moment which could risk leaving certainly ships dead in the water when they hit 0 or 3) you make the conversion toggleable and down to the user and if they run their ships out of power it's their fault.

None of them are entirely ideal though, additionally, I'd need a model for the part.

[Ricardo.b]

Im having a problem with this mod, when the game finish the opening load, it closes just before main menu appears!

anyone had this?

[gumwars]

Im having a problem with this mod, when the game finish the opening load, it closes just before main menu appears!

anyone had this?

Have you checked the dump file? If KSP crashes you get a report generated in a folder within the root directory for the application. My guess is you're running out of memory due to running too many mods. What I've gotten in the habit of doing is opening task manager while KSP is loading up. If you exceed 3GB of RAM expect the application to crash (if not on start up, you'll run into problems soon after). Remember that SQUAD is still using a 32 bit version of Unity for the Windows/Mac version of KSP. Only Linux users are free, for the moment, to enjoy as many mods as their system will allow.

[Chaosratt]

You mean the AM tanks, the collectors do not need power. You can toggle off the tanks. Once you place AM in them they will require a charge, unless you want your ship to explode.

And there-in-lies the problem. You can shut the tanks off, but not the collectors. As soon as you reach orbit the whole thing has a real nasty habit of getting all explody. I solved it by placing the smallest genset radially on my OMV, which will de-orbit after joining the collector/tank module to the station (the station already has some 2.5m fission reactors and generators).

[The Destroyer]

When I first saw this mod, it was very early. Version one. I tried it out, cheated deutiriam and then said "this is op and boring" and left.

Now, 7.4 versions later, this mod is amazing, downliading.

[CalculusWarrior]

Having a little trouble with cross-mod support. I added KAS to my campaign (because ground docking is nearly impossible and I can't transfer resources from my AM plant otherwise), but apparently the parts aren't adding by default, and they're not in the Interstellar tech tree. Is there any quick .cfg tweak I can make to have them appear?

I'm afraid that KAS hasn't been updated to integrate with the science tree yet. Officially, that is. If you go through the KAS forum post I'm certain there are links to a modified KAS where the parts have been integrated. If you can't find anything, I can share my version.

[klobasa]

i love the idea of the mod, however i have an issue:

every part required is present, xenon gas consumed, everything seems running fine but im getting no thrust. what am i doing wrong?

i have got around 3/5 of tech tree done, using kethane, few KAS parts, few KW tanks and mechjeb.

please help thx.

EDIT: Big thanks for quick help. Thats the problem, i didnt realized how the Mjs work. In sandbox (full upgrades) it is 0.5 KN, same as in the chart on page 1.

Edited November 10, 2013 by klobasa
thx

[Fractal_UK]

i love the idea of the mod, however i have an issue:

every part required is present, xenon gas consumed, everything seems running fine but im getting no thrust. what am i doing wrong?

i have got around 3/5 of tech tree done, using kethane, few KAS parts, few KW tanks and mechjeb.

please help thx.

You aren't doing anything wrong, that combination of parts is simply not really a viable one. You only have 240KW of power getting to the engines, so you're going to expecting to get about 0.035kN of thrust, technically not zero but small enough that the game's display is rounding it to zero. The nuclear reactors scale up non-linearly in power output with the size, that means the small ones are only for powering electrical stuff and very specific rocket/aircraft applications.

I would recommend not using the plasma engine until you have at least the upgraded nuclear reactors. The thermal engines are much better at your stage of the tech tree, though even then you'll want to use as big a reactor as possible.

[Eadrom]

Edit: beat by Fractal! lol Guess I should have typed faster.

i love the idea of the mod, however i have an issue:

every part required is present, xenon gas consumed, everything seems running fine but im getting no thrust. what am i doing wrong?

i have got around 3/5 of tech tree done, using kethane, few KAS parts, few KW tanks and mechjeb.

please help thx.

It looks like there's very little power available for the plasma thruster. If I remember correctly, KSPI takes the first MJ produced by a generator and converts it to 1,000 EC. That means that you are just getting a TINY amount of power left over from the 62.5cm reactor/generator. It looks like you don't have any reactor/generator upgrades yet either, guessing from the power that the engine is getting. You need some serious power generation to get lots of thrust from a plasma thruster engine. Personally, I typically don't use them until I get antimatter reactors. They *might* be kinda useable with the 3.75m reactor/generators without upgrades.

The good news is that the plasma engine will consume power from all the reactor/generator combos on your ship (someone correct me if I'm wrong). So you can put multiple power sources on your ship and the engine should pull power from all of them. However, you'll run into TWR issues by adding a lot of heavy power generators. Which leads me back to not really using these engines until I get antimatter reactors.

Try making that same design in sandbox mode. It'll automatically have the upgraded nuke reactors and generators. Launch that same ship and see if you get more power on the right click info pane. Then try launching the same ship with an antimatter reactor instead of the nuke reactor. I think you'll find a good amount of thrust once you switch to using antimatter power.

[Fractal_UK]

It looks like there's very little power available for the plasma thruster. If I remember correctly, KSPI takes the first MJ produced by a generator and converts it to 1,000 EC.

Actually, that doesn't happen anymore, the default behaviour is now that everything is converted in Megajoules and the ship will divert any and all Megajoules needed to fill up the ElectricCharge bar as its first priority. That is why the generator output tends to flicker slightly at low power values, because it's just flicking on to top up some electric charge.

[Donziboy2]

And there-in-lies the problem. You can shut the tanks off, but not the collectors. As soon as you reach orbit the whole thing has a real nasty habit of getting all explody. I solved it by placing the smallest genset radially on my OMV, which will de-orbit after joining the collector/tank module to the station (the station already has some 2.5m fission reactors and generators).

A 62.5M reactor/gen which weighs almost nothing will keep the tank from exploding... Althou it probably wouldn't hurt to add an on/off button on the collectors, Fractal_UK thoughts? Also while we are talking about the AM tank/collector, you cant shut down the AM tank after you have drained it, which is annoying...

I didn't know we could use NFPP XenonGas or did you add that Klobasa? From what I understand the XenonGas is not as dense as the normal Xenon tank so you wont get that far on it, I wish somebody had some decent large xenon containers...

Fractal_UK could you add a power slider for Transmission, that way we can throttle our reactors if we don't need 100% output.

Edited November 10, 2013 by Donziboy2

[Fractal_UK]

A 62.5M reactor/gen which weighs almost nothing will keep the tank from exploding... Althou it probably wouldn't hurt to add an on/off button on the collectors, Fractal_UK thoughts?

I'll add it my list for 0.8 along with some little power draw for the collectors most likely, afterall it isn't much work and 0.8 is already going to be the most ridiculously massive update.

Fractal_UK could you add a power slider for Transmission, that way we can throttle our reactors if we don't need 100% output.

I don't think this one is so needed because you have the automatic power throttling, manual power throttling would just get in the way. The only thing it would really affect are engines, which you can just throttle down for the same effect as turning down the reactor and warp drives which you can stop charging if they're eating too much power.

[Eadrom]

Actually, that doesn't happen anymore, the default behaviour is now that everything is converted in Megajoules and the ship will divert any and all Megajoules needed to fill up the ElectricCharge bar as its first priority. That is why the generator output tends to flicker slightly at low power values, because it's just flicking on to top up some electric charge.

Good to know! I must have missed that patch note. Will need to be more attentive to future changelogs!

A 62.5M reactor/gen which weighs almost nothing will keep the tank from exploding... Althou it probably wouldn't hurt to add an on/off button on the collectors, Fractal_UK thoughts?

...I wish somebody had some decent large xenon containers...

It might not be a perfect solution for you, but I typically use antimatter reactors on my primary antimatter collectors and freighters. Yes, I lose a tiny, itsy bit of antimatter to provide a trickle charge to antimatter storage containment, but I use this system as a failsafe. If I run out of antimatter on the ship/station from burning antimatter to charge the containment fields, I no longer need the containment fields because there is no antimatter. On the flip side, Kerbin and definitely Jool both have strong enough magnetic fields so that it's easy to gather more antimatter than you have to burn to power the containment fields. My reactors usually burn at like 0.01% just to power the containment fields. That's a minuscule amount of antimatter you have to burn to keep the containers charged.

In regards to the Xenon containers, check out http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/30472-0-22-x-KSPX-Kerbal-Stock-Part-eXpansion-mod-reposted-v0-2-4. It has a nice 1.25m Xenon container. I think there are other mods like stretchy tanks and such you can use, but if you want a lightweight solution, KSPX might do it for you. There are a few really nice parts in KSPX. I like the 2.5m nuke engine and the half height 2.5m monoprop tank.

[Ricardo.b]

Have you checked the dump file? If KSP crashes you get a report generated in a folder within the root directory for the application. My guess is you're running out of memory due to running too many mods. What I've gotten in the habit of doing is opening task manager while KSP is loading up. If you exceed 3GB of RAM expect the application to crash (if not on start up, you'll run into problems soon after). Remember that SQUAD is still using a 32 bit version of Unity for the Windows/Mac version of KSP. Only Linux users are free, for the moment, to enjoy as many mods as their system will allow.

I reduced some textures and mods and the problem solved. thanks

[Dron]

Hi all. Is the last version module "ElectricEngineController.cs" incompatible with B9 aerospace? KSP stops loading assets when try to parse the "ElectricEngineController" module in MPD part.cfg.

Version 0.7.2 is Ok.

[pantheis]

I'm playing through career mode with this mod installed and have finished the default tech tree with the only things left stuff that this mod adds off the end. I have the plasma engines and see they can use various fuels. I wanted to try argon out, but I cannot find any argon storage tanks. I see xenon, pure liquid fuel, but no argon. What am I missing?

[Makeone]

There's always the 7.5m spherical or 10m toroidal tank one can use. I used the latter one on my ship, 250k units of xenon, started my 'stardrive' section for circulation burn, powered by fus...AM-reactor and 2 seconds later, tank was empty and i had run out of my AM-supply, all 600 units...

For, my 'Stardrive' will have nuclear thermal rocket, even tho it's quite pointless, but... In general, i'm getting pretty much fed up on this AM-joke, until one uses some editor to get full tanks, it's a JOKE. Orbital collectors doesn't collect anything, ground labs work if they doesn't blow up because of physics bugs...

OH well, i can always collect some deuterium for storage...or not, as they doesn't work until focused...yippee

On a another note, if one has disabled AM-reactor in config, it will act as thermal storage, ie. other reactors fill it up with thermal power than can be used like normal, generated thermal power. Intentional?

[Eadrom]

...until one uses some editor to get full tanks, it's a JOKE. Orbital collectors doesn't collect anything, ground labs work if they doesn't blow up because of physics bugs...

I have a station at 300k kerbin orbit with only 16 collectors and use an antimatter reactor to power the containment pods and it still gains several antimatter per hour or so. I have an antimatter freighter in orbit around Jool at 9,000 km and with only 12 collectors on it, I can literally sit there in 1x time and I gain a unit of antimatter every couple seconds. It's insane how quickly you can gain antimatter at Jool. If you collect antimatter in the right spots, you can get lots of antimatter quickly.

One thing that might help you is to mod the config files to have the antimatter storage tanks start with some antimatter. I changed my tanks to start 1% full. I did this to basically simulate a ground based lab making antimatter. Keeps me from having to add a ground base to make antimatter and from having to use KAS to make antimatter fuel trucks. Basically saves me a bit of time and PC memory/processing from having to run the ground factory and an extra mod. I don't think it's too cheaty for me to do that. This way I can usually get my ships to my low orbit antimatter station to fuel up on antimatter gained in a legit manner.

edit:

I also think some people might be underestimating how far antimatter can go. Every ship doesn't need a full tank of antimatter. I designed a long endurance ship with ~120 parts or so (maybe less) using an un-upgraded plasma thruster running off liquid fuel that has 38,000 delta V starting from a 700k orbit and has an acceleration of roughly 3m/s^2. If I remember correctly, it has a couple of the 62.5cm nuke reactors for backup power but the main drive is powered by an antimatter reactor. The ship only need 7,500 antimatter to spend alllll that delta V. That's less than 10% of the smallest antimatter tank. Most ships can probably get by with a few hundred to a couple thousand antimatter for the duration of their mission. When you look at only needing to supply a ship with those lower quantities of antimatter instead of filling each ship's tanks to full, the whole antimatter economy suddenly looks WAYYYY more manageable.

Edited November 10, 2013 by Eadrom

[Donziboy2]

There's always the 7.5m spherical or 10m toroidal tank one can use. I used the latter one on my ship, 250k units of xenon, started my 'stardrive' section for circulation burn, powered by fus...AM-reactor and 2 seconds later, tank was empty and i had run out of my AM-supply, all 600 units...

Ok so, 250k units of XenonGas is 25T. INSERT BrainFart Kraken, sorry Makeone my math is someone off sometimes.....EDIT... OK, so a 3.75m AM reactor could burn it that fast yes, you would get some crazy acceleration for a short amount of time. Xenon has poor ISP compared to the other fuels, and crazy thrust at high enough power levels. If your using AM you should not be using Xenon....

Also 3.75m AM reactors max fuel usage is 11.2units/s.

For, my 'Stardrive' will have nuclear thermal rocket, even tho it's quite pointless, but... In general, i'm getting pretty much fed up on this AM-joke, until one uses some editor to get full tanks, it's a JOKE. Orbital collectors doesn't collect anything, ground labs work if they doesn't blow up because of physics bugs...

Myself and many others have no problems collecting Antimatter, I will admit ground based collection can be a pain, and launching large collector sats is somewhat challenging. But it can be done, this is supposed to have challenges to it, not just "Here have unlimited fuel and thrust forever without working towards it". A single collector in 900K orbit of Kerbin will give you almost 4 AM per day.

OH well, i can always collect some deuterium for storage...or not, as they doesn't work until focused...yippee

On a another note, if one has disabled AM-reactor in config, it will act as thermal storage, ie. other reactors fill it up with thermal power than can be used like normal, generated thermal power. Intentional?

Its a WIP Mod being used in an ALPHA game. There will be bugs.

edit:

I also think some people might be underestimating how far antimatter can go. Every ship doesn't need a full tank of antimatter. I designed a long endurance ship with ~120 parts or so (maybe less) using an un-upgraded plasma thruster running off liquid fuel that has 38,000 delta V starting from a 700k orbit and has an acceleration of roughly 3m/s^2. If I remember correctly, it has a couple of the 62.5cm nuke reactors for backup power but the main drive is powered by an antimatter reactor. The ship only need 7,500 antimatter to spend alllll that delta V. That's less than 10% of the smallest antimatter tank. Most ships can probably get by with a few hundred to a couple thousand antimatter for the duration of their mission. When you look at only needing to supply a ship with those lower quantities of antimatter instead of filling each ship's tanks to full, the whole antimatter economy suddenly looks WAYYYY more manageable.

Slap a 3.75m AM reactor and Gen onto a 2.5m Quantum Plasma Thruster with a full tank of AM. That is fun

It comes out to over 3000kN/s for almost 7 hours with the biggest tank:)

Edited November 10, 2013 by Donziboy2

[Eadrom]

Slap a 3.75m AM reactor and Gen onto a 2.5m Quantum Plasma Thruster with a full tank of AM. That is fun

It comes out to over 3000kN/s for almost 7 hours with the biggest tank:)

I just finished the KSPI tech tree in my career save a couple days ago, so I while I've made a couple utilitarian designs with the quantum plasma thruster and the warp drive, I haven't really played around with anything goofy or for fun yet. I will definitely have try that! I really like that once you finish the KSPI tech tree, you can move to almost an entirely antimatter fueled fleet of space ships. Other than the launch of new ships, monoprop resupply, and atmo landers, you don't really need anything but quantum plasma thrusters and warp drives powered by antimatter reactors. At least for me, it gives me a very satisfying endgame.

[Donziboy2]

I just finished the KSPI tech tree in my career save a couple days ago, so I while I've made a couple utilitarian designs with the quantum plasma thruster and the warp drive, I haven't really played around with anything goofy or for fun yet. I will definitely have try that! I really like that once you finish the KSPI tech tree, you can move to almost an entirely antimatter fueled fleet of space ships. Other than the launch of new ships, monoprop resupply, and atmo landers, you don't really need anything but quantum plasma thrusters and warp drives powered by antimatter reactors. At least for me, it gives me a very satisfying endgame.

There is one drawback, you cannot use Quantum Plasma in atmosphere, you have to switch to normal propellents.

I am slowly updating the Wiki with newer stats for engines, reactors and generators. And adding explanations to different things.