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

[Delwin]

Throium:

What about the continuous reprocessing of liquid core thorium reactors? No one wants to shut down a Thorium reactor and take out the core (U-233 is amazingly nasty stuff) so all the ones I've seen are molten salt reactors that use a liquid core and they syphon off some, reprocess it and re-inject it in a continuous loop.

Maybe an upgrade?

Edit: That'll teach me to reply before finishing reading the thread.

Edited November 14, 2013 by Delwin

[Fractal_UK]

Throium:

What about the continuous reprocessing of liquid core thorium reactors? No one wants to shut down a Thorium reactor and take out the core (U-233 is amazingly nasty stuff) so all the ones I've seen are molten salt reactors that use a liquid core and they syphon off some, reprocess it and re-inject it in a continuous loop.

This is what you do, you can do the reprocessing while the reactor is running, you don't need to turn it off or anything. It will take quite a while for the power output to drop appreciately, so you won't need to reprocess continuously, it's just something that will need to be done perhaps every couple of months. It all depends on reactor output though, the smaller ones tend to last much longer without any intervention because their power density is lower.

[brendanbrs]

ok, im sure this has been covered, but i am having problems with this mod. i install it per the instructions, but when i go to start ksp, it wont load past a certain point. i am running .22 and it is on steam. any help would be appreciated

[db48x]

I've been thinking about a way to introduce a use of Plutonium(-238) for RTGs but so far I can't find a satisfactory solution that balances gameplay considerations against the interest value. Still, it is a good idea, I understand Plutonium-238 is in really short supply and does give space agencies real problems. Producing it themselves would be one solution to that availability problem...

A related idea is to attach thermocouples to a nuclear reactor. They're less efficient than the turbines, but lighter and smaller and thus more suitable for planes and rovers that don't need megawatts or even kilowatts of power.

An RTG is just some thermocouples jacketing a can of plutonium, so perhaps that's a way forward. Make the thermocouples tall and narrow, with a radiating fin on the back and it'll even have the correct look, if you use radial symmetry.

[localSol]

Fractal_UK : Great plugin, I reduced most of the textures in this pack and converted any pngs to tga, and also resized any existing tgas. According to 'Bac9' a month or so ago, "png loading in KSP is 'borked' " . I guess that's still true, I don't know. I didn't try to edit the mbms. It helped much more than I thought it would. I can give the pack to you if you want, Fractal_UK. If you're not interested, would you consider making a low texture pack to go with this too? I resized everything to 25% in each dimension , 1024x1024 became 256x256 - potentially 16 times less texture memory and total texels. My game works much better now when using this with some of the other large-texture mods - an easy way to tell which mods use the most space is by using TreeSize, a very good disk space management utility. For anyone wanting to do it themselves, I edited mu data with HxD and resized textures using Lanczos filter (usually a little better quality than spline) and the default light sharpen filter with Irfanview. I didn't change the root warp.pngs and similar, I guessed they were dummy images controlled by the DLL. The texture artists for this are really good but even downsized they're good for usual viewing distances... KSP tends to kersplode when it starts to use near 3GB of system memory so this sort of thing can keep that from happening for now..

[Donziboy2]

"Line of Sight"*...

(Yes, I actually posted solely for this... I'm sorry, I'm terrible- I know...)

Its been a long day......

[ROFLCopter64bit]

I've been thinking about a way to introduce a use of Plutonium(-238) for RTGs but so far I can't find a satisfactory solution that balances gameplay considerations against the interest value. Still, it is a good idea, I understand Plutonium-238 is in really short supply and does give space agencies real problems. Producing it themselves would be one solution to that availability problem...

Easy, add a mode for a nuclear reactor which acts as a breeder reactor, producing Plutonium instead of power. RTGs act as a mini-nuclear reactor, but don't produce as much energy, whilst being more efficient.

[JSArrakis]

With regarding to MPDs, Im trying to play around with the config files to add Antimatter as a possible propellant. I added it and gave it the same attributes as Liquid propellant for the MPD in the ElectricEnginePropellants.cfg, and while the Antimatter becomes usable with the engine (it pops up as one of the available propellants when a tank of it is attached), when I ignite the engine it burns throught a tank of 27000 antimatter units in less than a second. Im not entirely sure what Im doing wrong because Liquid should have the best ISP rate and I gave antimatter the same ISP rate just to test it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[AerospaceME]

So I've been lurking this thread for a while now as I played through the KSPI tech tree, but I think I've found a bug. Being an engineer and "creatively lazy" I tend to make modular ships from common sub-components and assemble in orbit. One of my design components is a Drive / Service section using a 3.75m thermal nozzle, 3.75m basic nuke reactor, 3.75m generator, 3.75m x 8m NP LFO tank, 3.75-2.5m LFO adapter tank, 2.5m probe core and 2.5m docking port. This has appropriate RCS, monoprop, radiators, etc appended to the side. I dock this to whatever "payload module" I'm using. Typically this has a 1.25m reactor and generator or two to provide "hotel" power when the engine is thrusting to keep my science labs running.

Anyway, the problem I'm having is that the 3.75m reactor seems to be pumping some of its DUF6 into the smaller kiwi. The UF6 on the Kiwi still shows as full, but it's DUF6 capacity is half full and the big reactor fuel/waste mass is off by about the amount. I thought the fuel/waste was non-transferable. Does the resource manager balance DUF6 across all available "tanks"? This isn't a problem for my 3 lab orbital stations which are permanently docked to their drive sections, but I fear it might cause problems for my lander modules which take the Kiwi full of UF6 and half full of DUF6 with them.

[Fractal_UK]

Fractal_UK : Great plugin, I reduced most of the textures in this pack and converted any pngs to tga, and also resized any existing tgas. According to 'Bac9' a month or so ago, "png loading in KSP is 'borked' " . I guess that's still true, I don't know. I didn't try to edit the mbms. It helped much more than I thought it would. I can give the pack to you if you want, Fractal_UK. If you're not interested, would you consider making a low texture pack to go with this too? I resized everything to 25% in each dimension , 1024x1024 became 256x256 - potentially 16 times less texture memory and total texels. My game works much better now when using this with some of the other large-texture mods - an easy way to tell which mods use the most space is by using TreeSize, a very good disk space management utility. For anyone wanting to do it themselves, I edited mu data with HxD and resized textures using Lanczos filter (usually a little better quality than spline) and the default light sharpen filter with Irfanview. I didn't change the root warp.pngs and similar, I guessed they were dummy images controlled by the DLL. The texture artists for this are really good but even downsized they're good for usual viewing distances... KSP tends to kersplode when it starts to use near 3GB of system memory so this sort of thing can keep that from happening for now..

Thanks, yes I am interested, could you send me a PM with the details?

Easy, add a mode for a nuclear reactor which acts as a breeder reactor, producing Plutonium instead of power. RTGs act as a mini-nuclear reactor, but don't produce as much energy, whilst being more efficient.

The main problem with the idea is I just don't like the idea of refueling an RTG, it's a solid block of metal. Getting the Plutonium is no problem, some of the waste products surely contain Pu-238, that's how real RTGs are made so you could just have a bit less waste production and a bit of Pu-238 production. Problem is, this would just be forged into a number of complete RTG units.

An RTG is just some thermocouples jacketing a can of plutonium, so perhaps that's a way forward. Make the thermocouples tall and narrow, with a radiating fin on the back and it'll even have the correct look, if you use radial symmetry.

That's not a bad idea for an alternative "generator" for reactors, nuclear reactors with thermocouples have flown in space and are something like 3% efficient but would save a lot of weight. I wouldn't want to make an RTG two parts though, two parts for maybe 750W_e and 11KW_th just seems cruel.

[ROFLCopter64bit]

The main problem with the idea is I just don't like the idea of refueling an RTG, it's a solid block of metal. Getting the Plutonium is no problem, some of the waste products surely contain Pu-238, that's how real RTGs are made so you could just have a bit less waste production and a bit of Pu-238 production. Problem is, this would just be forged into a number of complete RTG units.

Then make it filled up from the start, with no way to refuel it later, and instead make it a mini nuclear reactor with an inbuilt solid heat transmission thingo. You can make the sense of it not being something to spam on a ship by making it really expensive, even though it won't make a difference until Career mode is fully developed.

[Fractal_UK]

With regarding to MPDs, Im trying to play around with the config files to add Antimatter as a possible propellant. I added it and gave it the same attributes as Liquid propellant for the MPD in the ElectricEnginePropellants.cfg, and while the Antimatter becomes usable with the engine (it pops up as one of the available propellants when a tank of it is attached), when I ignite the engine it burns throught a tank of 27000 antimatter units in less than a second. Im not entirely sure what Im doing wrong because Liquid should have the best ISP rate and I gave antimatter the same ISP rate just to test it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you look in the resource files, you will see that Antimatter has a density of 0.000000001 (1mg per unit) while LiquidFuel has a density of 0.005 (5kg/unit). In other words, if you are burning an amount of LiquidFuel to get a particular thrust, you need to use 5,000,000x that amount of antimatter to get the same thrust.

Setting up an MPD to use antimatter as propellant is something akin to, instead of buying petrol to run your car's engine, throwing gold jewellery out of the back.

You could make an antimatter engine but a reasonable Isp for such an engine would be something like 10,000,000s, at which point, wave goodbye to any thrust. That's why I haven't bothered making any such engine - it would be great in real life but too little thrust to be any use in KSP.

Anyway, the problem I'm having is that the 3.75m reactor seems to be pumping some of its DUF6 into the smaller kiwi. The UF6 on the Kiwi still shows as full, but it's DUF6 capacity is half full and the big reactor fuel/waste mass is off by about the amount. I thought the fuel/waste was non-transferable. Does the resource manager balance DUF6 across all available "tanks"? This isn't a problem for my 3 lab orbital stations which are permanently docked to their drive sections, but I fear it might cause problems for my lander modules which take the Kiwi full of UF6 and half full of DUF6 with them.

At the moment, the resources are indeed drawn evenly from all sources but I've totally rewritten the reactor mechanics for 0.8 and this won't happpen anymore. When 0.8 arrives, all your reactors, regardless of their current condition will return to being 100% fueled with 0% of any waste products so my advice is: don't worry - whatever happens, 0.8 should resolve it.

[AerospaceME]

<snip>

At the moment, the resources are indeed drawn evenly from all sources but I've totally rewritten the reactor mechanics for 0.8 and this won't happpen anymore. When 0.8 arrives, all your reactors, regardless of their current condition will return to being 100% fueled with 0% of any waste products so my advice is: don't worry - whatever happens, 0.8 should resolve it.

Wow! Talk about being ahead of an issue. If they do run out of UF6 or DUF6 space, the boys on Duna can sit tight for a bit.

[Mekan1k]

Anyone know which page has the folding Warp engine link on it?

[Tommygun]

Anyone know which page has the folding Warp engine link on it?

Here you go:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-22-KSP-Interstellar-%28Science-Integration-Heat-Mechanics%29-Version-0-7-4-%28Beta%29/page144?p=685428#post685428

[K3-Chris]

... ah AM tanks need electrical charge not to blow up, that's useful to know

I'm a bit puzzled about how my tanks on this design are getting power, I sent an AM station to Jool (takes a while) and the UF6 in my 1m reactors ran out, only has DUF6 and has no science lab (only way to re-process the fuel right?) and no AM reactors but it has a 3m nuclear reactor, it's not connected to an electric generator, it's only powering a 3m thermal rocket nozzle, yet somehow I got max thermal power, and max megajoules

one of the 1m electric generators is outputting 5-6MW and another 0-0.8MW but I have no idea how, the reactors they're connected to have no UF6 left but still somehow have max thermal power, is the thermal power from the 3m reactor flowing into the 1m reactors?

When the UF6 in the 3m runs out will it go boom? or can the 1m reactors somehow keep going on DUF6 at a lower rate or something? No idea about these mechanics and the wiki doesn't say.

The solar panels have about 5 energy flow each so they can't be the reason it's working.

[Fractal_UK]

This is just me showing off some pictures, it doesn't do anything other than what you see here at the moment but there are all sorts of possibilities that could exist as a result of this.

The radiation levels are dominated by three different regimes around planets like Kerbin, the low orbit regime where the radiation is very low and you are shielded by the magnetosphere, the moderate orbit regime where you are within the Van Allen belts and the radiation level is very very high and finally the solar regime where the radiation goes back down quite a bit.

The radiation level is based the strength on the summation of all the overlapping celestial body magnetic fields fields and their particle fluxes, this has huge impacts on the levels you see when visiting Laythe - near Laythe it's magnetic field dominates and provides lots of protection but Laythe is pretty smack bang in the middle of Jool's magnetic fields so as you move away from the moon (even while still in Laythe's SOI), Jool's magnetic field effects will start to dominate fairly quickly.

The first two images demonstrate the effect of shielding - the crew experience over 10x less radiation inside their command pod compared to on EVA activities.

[Fractal_UK]

... ah AM tanks need electrical charge not to blow up, that's useful to know

I'm a bit puzzled about how my tanks on this design are getting power, I sent an AM station to Jool (takes a while) and the UF6 in my 1m reactors ran out, only has DUF6 and has no science lab (only way to re-process the fuel right?) and no AM reactors but it has a 3m nuclear reactor, it's not connected to an electric generator, it's only powering a 3m thermal rocket nozzle, yet somehow I got max thermal power, and max megajoules

one of the 1m electric generators is outputting 5-6MW and another 0-0.8MW but I have no idea how, the reactors they're connected to have no UF6 left but still somehow have max thermal power, is the thermal power from the 3m reactor flowing into the 1m reactors?

When the UF6 in the 3m runs out will it go boom? or can the 1m reactors somehow keep going on DUF6 at a lower rate or something? No idea about these mechanics and the wiki doesn't say.

The solar panels have about 5 energy flow each so they can't be the reason it's working.

Neat station.

The 1.25m reactors are running on the UF6 from the big reactor - UF6 and DUF6 have all vessel flow (so that they can be reprocessed) but are not pumpable. This can have some strange effects, like this one. When your UF6 supply in the large reactor runs out, it most likely will explode.

In 0.8, the reactors will only draw power from their own supply of resources.

[K3-Chris]

Ah, viable to send a small AM reactor + generator to supplement the design as a patch? or would a science lab be a better idea? I want the station to have long lingering capabilities and the idea of ever decreasing nuclear fuel doesn't appeal to me, but if it runs on AM to keep it's AM tanks from exploding would that impact it's AM collection rate noticeably?

[Fractal_UK]

Ah, viable to send a small AM reactor + generator to supplement the design as a patch? or would a science lab be a better idea? I want the station to have long lingering capabilities and the idea of ever decreasing nuclear fuel doesn't appeal to me, but if it runs on AM to keep it's AM tanks from exploding would that impact it's AM collection rate noticeably?

I definitely think it's worth having a small AM reactor to supplement antimatter tanks/collectors, it will reduce your antimatter production a little but it should only take a tiny fraction of reactor output to maintain that much power, so you should be collecting antimatter much faster than you're consuming it to maintain containment. It also saves a lot of potential problems because an antimatter reactor will provide power until it's empty and an empty tank won't explode.

[K3-Chris]

Makes sense, you can't make a lab always re-process UF6 right? You need to remember to re-do it before you run out right?

[Fractal_UK]

Makes sense, you can't make a lab always re-process UF6 right? You need to remember to re-do it before you run out right?

Indeed, the supply should last a fair while until you've been through a few reprocessing cycles though.

By the way, I reckon it will cost you about 14.4 antimatter/day to maintain containment with a small reactor. I can't see your orbit altitude but it looks to me like you're likely to be collecting a lot more than that from all those collectors, though that will drop to about 5.75 if you have upgraded generators.

[localSol]

I sent you a PM yesterday about the textures, FractalUK. I noticed today though that the science lab and interior of it look pretty nintendo-Wii-like when I reduced textures that low for them, so I will probably redo those to the next 2^x step. I tested a 768 squared texture though and it looks like it took as much system memory as 1024 squared. I didn't try to confirm for VRAM..

I didn't know a type of thorium could make potentially dangerous by-products. I heard a while ago about proposals for thorium fuel being so good and abundant as to change the modern world,.. LFTR molten salt reactors being much safer than uranium reactors today... well, who knows. Interesting anyway.

I'm doing an alumin(i)um hybrid rocket manufacturing mission on the Mun! Back to little green men!

[Fractal_UK]

I sent you a PM yesterday about the textures, FractalUK.

Yeah, got it, thanks. I've been experimenting with it a bit.

I didn't know a type of thorium could make potentially dangerous by-products. I heard a while ago about proposals for thorium fuel being so good and abundant as to change the modern world,.. LFTR molten salt reactors being much safer than uranium reactors today... well, who knows. Interesting anyway.

The reason that Thorium is good with respect to nuclear waste is that it is lighter than Uranium, as Uranium absorbs neutrons you get transuranic elements immediately while Thorium has to work up through a chain of several neutron captures in order to reach the same point and that's far less likely to happen, of course, you're dealing with massive collections of atoms so that just translates to a smaller proportion of those atomic species.

You can usually do something with actinide products when you have a breeder reactor though and turn them into something useful, you're much better off with short-lived high activity fission products than a bunch of actinide waste.

LFTR is a really neat design but I think it has been both over and under-hyped by different groups respectively. I'd guess it'll take some time before we see their deployment because I don't see a major pressure to switch to Thorium fuel, Uranium is already so abundant we could use it virtually forever without risk of running out and the Uranium infrastructure is already there, so it might take a while before people start heavily investing in Thorium alternatives. One of the main pressures for that might be in selling LFTRs to non-nuclear weapon states because thorium reactors are harder to produce weapons grade material from, existing nuclear states might prefer to use their large stockpiles of existing waste as fuel.

I'm trying to present it as something that has some real and useful advantages but also a few slightly irritating drawbacks.

[Donziboy2]

Sounds interesting Fractal_UK.

Sadly X-Rebirth launches tomorrow so that will probably have my undivided attention for a while:)