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

[Thourion]

Yes I know... I never said you couldn't.

What I said was that you cannot use the AM you produce in an AM reactor to produce MORE AM. That is what Thourion was trying. Did you actually read the posts? Because he talked about using nukes.

Indeed. I just wanted to use an AM reactor, since they are more powerfull, to reduce the size of the whole thing, since you need 1 for 1 lab with nukes. More like a concept design, with an already big craft that is movable as well (wheel based), than a best/intelligent design.

EDIT:

This is easy to check though...SNIP...

And yeah, the simple things sometime evade us, i should have filled an AM tank in the first place

Edited November 19, 2013 by Thourion
I think im getting old lol

[Donziboy2]

Producing Antimatter is a very energy intensive process and is not worth burning AM to make it....

[Entelin]

My finally finished interstellar mod ship. 8 labs, 21 kerbals on board, 400tons, nuclear and fusion reactors, and 9 AM collectors. This was built over a number of launches, initially the ship was fitted with a 36 nuclear engine cluster which I used to fly to jool and finish the interstellar mod tech tree with various docked landers and of course the labs onboard. Once everything was researched I sent out a replacement engine cluster and this is the finished result. Quite happy with it.

[sidfu]

is there any low res textures for this yet. this is my biggest mod installed and cant get rid of any of its parts since they needed.

[Helix935]

rahhh i want to get rid of this but i love these models too much rahhh

[Tommygun]

Instead of answers (which would be just as nice), if anyone got a craft of AM production on the ground, id be happy to have a look at it. Not because there arent any better ideas out there, but mostly to cure my curiosity of "What's the matter Antimatter?"

I put together a small basic setup. It uses four science labs and two small nuclear reactors.

It produces fine, but it is slow. I haven't had any issues yet with time warp.

I have had some issue with KSP destroying solar panels during time warp inside an atmosphere, so I wouldn't trust the fold able heat sinks, just have enough of the inline heat sinks.

I don't have a lot of uses for antimatter on the ground other than launching a new craft into orbit.

Antimatter containment needs a lot of power, so transporting it up to orbit does become more challenging as you need a nuclear reactor on your transporter.

So antimatter SSTO are not worth the trouble on Kerbin for me. I think it is more practical to assemble your craft in space and refuel it there.

edit: I should state that I time warp at 10,000x for only 5 to 10 minutes at a time to keep the physic engine from breaking down.

So I only produce small amounts. It could use larger reactors too.

Edited November 20, 2013 by Tommygun

[Eadrom]

I wasn't able to quickly find it, but the discussion on using antimatter to power lab making antimatter has happened before in this thread. If I remember correctly, Fractal said it was around 1% efficient. All your antimatter producing ground labs aught to be nuke powered or microwave beam powered.

is there any low res textures for this yet. this is my biggest mod installed and cant get rid of any of its parts since they needed.

Someone did make a low res texture pack for themselves and I believe Fractal said he was interested. Might be something we could see in the next couple updates. Or you can look in the bit of the thread and try to find the person that made his own reductions and forum pm him.

Just to be clear, there's nothing "official" to help you in this regard.

Edited November 20, 2013 by Eadrom

[Fractal_UK]

Finally, waste heat should not be generated if power is being produced by solar panels and is not being used by the spacecraft. (for nuclear reactors that are at idle, this is understandable). Solar panels that are not producing power do not produce waste heat in real life physics. (I mean, they do heat up, but you are basically just holding the circuit open, and there's no load that they are driving)

Sorry but this is completely incorrect with respect to "real life physics", a spacecraft that has solar panels deployed but is not using any power is in absolutely the worst position for production of waste heat. The photon either hits the solar panel and creates a useful electrical current or it hits the solar panel and creates heat. In the case of zero applied load, you effectively just have a black body with some albedo receiving power radiated by the sun. If you do have a load, some of that energy instead goes on promoting electrons from the valance band into the conduction band and later doing useful work, only the left over energy above this band gap and the energy from photons of inappropriate frequency is wasted as heat.

It is easier to think of the devices you carry on your spacecraft not as sources of WasteHeat but instead as a way of getting rid of it, the Plasma Engine is a good example. The plasma engine is 72% efficient at turning electricity into kinetic energy for your spacecraft, that 72% therefore becomes something useful (hurray!), the overwhelming majority of the remaining 28% does become heat.

Many devices aren't anything like this efficient and ultimately turn much of the electrical power they use into heat anyway but you're still better off than you would with that little bit of useful work done than you are with your solar panels pointed at the sun and doing absolutely nothing.

So, if you don't want heat production, fold the solar panels away.

Hence i guess the heat loss without radiators could be increased a little. Real space probes don't have big radiators either.

The passive dissipation is actually fairly generous, it's modelled by making some generic assumption about spacecraft surface area based on its mass. Regardless, predictably structural parts not designed for it are far inferior as radiators than parts that are designed specifically for that purpose, all but the tiniest of low power output probes have specialised radiator components, all you need is one tiny radiator for a small solar powered probe and it isn't a problem anymore.

In reality things are quite a bit more complicated and you may need to use stored energy to heat the spaceprobe when its in shadow to keep equipment within a certain range of operating temperatures in addition to dissipating heat when in sunlight.

I wasn't able to quickly find it, but the discussion on using antimatter to power lab making antimatter has happened before in this thread. If I remember correctly, Fractal said it was around 1% efficient. All your antimatter producing ground labs aught to be nuke powered or microwave beam powered.

It is 1% efficient at turning energy into mass but since we have to produce particle/antimatter particle pairs (due to lepton and baryon number conservation), only half of this 1% can be antimatter. So it is 0.5% efficient at the production of antimatter.

Basically, unless you can collect it in orbit, using an antimatter factory is a way of using a huge amount of energy to store a moderate amount of energy into an extremely high density energy storage medium which you can use to get far more power for a given mass than any other alternative. You are basically paying a huge cost in energy for short periods of ultra-high power output, which are nevertheless incredibly useful.

Edited November 20, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Hremsfeld]

I hadn't done much with antimatter rockets before, due to thinking they weren't worth the effort. I have now changed my mind. Re-circularized at 900km after ditching the transfer stage into Kerbin and then boosted to Jool; I've used less than 900 units of liquid fuel with it so far, which will certainly prove to be the limiting factor. I'm wishing I'd thrown the adapter on front so I could cart around a few hundred tons of fuel or so, just so it wouldn't be such a drastically limiting factor.

[Entelin]

I don't have a lot of uses for antimatter on the ground other than launching a new craft into orbit.

Antimatter containment needs a lot of power, so transporting it up to orbit does become more challenging as you need a nuclear reactor on your transporter.

You don't really need any nuclear plants on the ship itself, and you don't need much AM either. Just bring some collectors and fly to jool as soon as you take off and top off your AM tanks. The thing I enjoy most about interstellar mod is that it allows you to make silly large ships that are actually practical. Here is a self sufficient vtol/ssto/rover I built, about 3.4 TWR, so it can land and take off from eve just fine.

[XanderTek]

I'm having some trouble.. I made a ship with the largest antimater reactor, the largest power generator, antimatter tank, fusion engines, warp drive. It works fine for awhile, I took off from earth flew to jool, the power usage is stable the whole time. Until the generator seems to just stop working for no apparent reason.

Did the generator stop working right after an aerocapture maneuver around Jool? That was happening to me. If I stayed out of the atmosphere and just used my engine to create a circular orbit then everything seemed to keep working.

[Entelin]

Did the generator stop working right after an aerocapture maneuver around Jool? That was happening to me. If I stayed out of the atmosphere and just used my engine to create a circular orbit then everything seemed to keep working.

Thats what I had thought initially, however I did it again and noticed that it had actually occurred before the aerocapture took place. I just didn't notice it until after the capture the first time because the amount of MJ required for the PE adjustment was less than what I had stocked up.

[xenogray]

Hello !

I think you are aware of this but i'll post it anyway : it seems there is a conflict with your mod and Snjo's Firespitter about the atmospheric intakes.

That error is from KSP Interstellar, which assumes that all air intakes must produce intakeAir, and then swaps it for a custom IntakeAtm.

Any news if the patch for it will be released soon ?

[Tharios]

Does anyone in this thread happen to know of a mod that "fixes" the ASAS? A craft with only three control surfaces and prober CoM/CoL balancing should not constantly want to roll clockwise and try to flap itself apart.

[DaMichel]

The passive dissipation is actually fairly generous, it's modelled by making some generic assumption about spacecraft surface area based on its mass. Regardless, predictably structural parts not designed for it are far inferior as radiators than parts that are designed specifically for that purpose, all but the tiniest of low power output probes have specialised radiator components, all you need is one tiny radiator for a small solar powered probe and it isn't a problem anymore.

Right. One thing i don't like about that is that you have to add a part from Interstelar to a craft which should be fine without it IMO. Also, i disagree about the dissipation being generous.

One more question/suggestion: When you switch the engine to liquid consumption mode, it leaves the oxidiser in the tank, right? Which means one would use Jet-Fuel tanks. Of which there is only one or two (stock). Am i missing something here?

If not, would it be possible to add a monopropelant consumption mode with the same properties as liquid mode? Just because of the larger selection of tanks.

And one more: Make radiators glow based on their temperature! Also the inline/radial radiators.

[Nando]

Dont know if this is intended but i got blank lines on radiators and generators .... fresh vanilla 0.22 ksp

[RadHazard]

Right. One thing i don't like about that is that you have to add a part from Interstelar to a craft which should be fine without it IMO. Also, i disagree about the dissipation being generous.

One more question/suggestion: When you switch the engine to liquid consumption mode, it leaves the oxidiser in the tank, right? Which means one would use Jet-Fuel tanks. Of which there is only one or two (stock). Am i missing something here?

If not, would it be possible to add a monopropelant consumption mode with the same properties as liquid mode? Just because of the larger selection of tanks.

And one more: Make radiators glow based on their temperature! Also the inline/radial radiators.

There are 2.5 and 3.75 pure liquid fuel tanks added by the mod. I do agree that more liquid fuel tanks would be nice though. Hopefully the 0.23 tweakables system will add the ability to adjust what kind of fuel each tank carries.

Smaller surface-attach radiators (like the OX-STAT) would be pretty cool for small probes, although I imagine they'd need an inverted form of the solar panel efficiency code so that they don't work if they face toward sunlight.

Edited November 20, 2013 by RadHazard

[Thourion]

...One thing i don't like about that is that you have to add a part from Interstelar to a craft which should be fine without it IMO...

...One more question/suggestion: When you switch the engine to liquid consumption mode, it leaves the oxidiser in the tank, right? Which means one would use Jet-Fuel tanks. Of which there is only one or two (stock). Am i missing something here...

Well, in your first post you said you know how to fix it, and it is so much of an insta fix, that i believe a minor itch in my beard would make me more uncomfortable to deal with .

For the Liquid part, yeah we need more parts to go with the theme, im guessing as the mod goes further we are getting additions here and there. Like all the stuff thats been added/changed already.

What you can do in the meantime of course, is to just take your favorite tank, copy-paste its cfg at the same location and rename it to whatever (i use part2.cfg lol), edit the fuel values to your preference, and boom you got your nice LF tanks, no more RAM increase as well.

[Fractal_UK]

Dont know if this is intended but i got blank lines on radiators and generators .... fresh vanilla 0.22 ksp

Yeah, there was something weird about the code I was using to limit the refresh rate in the 0.7.X versions. I'm not really sure why it happened, it was an intermittent problem with no apparent trigger, all I can say is I replaced the code for 0.8 and I don't get that issue anymore.

[Fractal_UK]

This stuff is more KSP "maybe in a year or two" than KSP "Interstellar" but all new technology is exciting technology, in my opinion. So, I bring you the latest work from that renowned Kerbal entrepreneur Elon Kerman.

This is a new rocket engine that instead of using LiquidFuel+Oxidiser, it uses Methane in place of the LiquidFuel. This is advantageous because Methane is cheap and easy to handle compared to traditional rocket fuels, it also offers slightly improved specific impulse compared to most lower stage engines but the fuel tanks do take a bit of a hit in terms of overall capacity. The real reason that a Methane engine is really interesting though is because of the Sabatier reaction:

CO₂ + 4 H₂ → CH₄ + 2 H₂O

It describes a mechanism by which we can use a small amount of hydrogen, mixed with some carbon dioxide to generate methane and water. This is of great interest because the atmosphere of Mars (and presumably by analogy Duna) have atmospheres rich in carbon dioxide. This means that by taking a small amount of Hydrogen with you, you can react it with ambient CO₂ to generate Methane and Water. The water can then be electrolysed to give you Oxygen and 2/3 of the amount of Hydrogen you started with.

You can thus repeat the process until all the hydrogen is sequestered way in the methane and you have only methane and oxygen. In this way, you can carry with you to Duna a small amount of Hydrogen mass, source the carbon dioxide locally and produce rocket fuel equivalent to 20x the mass of hydrogen you brought along with you. That's great if you don't want to carry all the fuel with you (which of course you don't!).

So, what do we have in game?

Well, to start with a beautiful new engine created by ZZZ (and a really-not-so-beautiful fuel tank textured by me - hopefully 0.23 and tweakables will improve all this!)

We also have a nice new option on the Refinery to perform a Sabatier ISRU process! This ship isn't exactly the best designed so I apologise but it does the job. You can hopefully just about see LqdMethane and Oxidiser going up and LiquidFuel going down (very very slowly).

[Hremsfeld]

Methane engines!

This once again raises the question: How similar to Methane is Kethane? (because obviously real Methane contains xenon) The methane will be added to the list of Thermal Engine fuels, I take it?

[Fractal_UK]

This once again raises the question: How similar to Methane is Kethane? (because obviously real Methane contains xenon) The methane will be added to the list of Thermal Engine fuels, I take it?

I'm probably going to add an option to the Kethane converter that permits conersion from Kethane to Methane at high efficiency. I don't, however, want to make this a Kethane engine because I can't neccessarily assume that everyone has Kethane installed.

[BrickedKeyboard]

Sorry but this is completely incorrect with respect to "real life physics", a spacecraft that has solar panels deployed but is not using any power is in absolutely the worst position for production of waste heat. The photon either hits the solar panel and creates a useful electrical current or it hits the solar panel and creates heat. In the case of zero applied load, you effectively just have a black body with some albedo receiving power radiated by the sun. If you do have a load, some of that energy instead goes on promoting electrons from the valance band into the conduction band and later doing useful work, only the left over energy above this band gap and the energy from photons of inappropriate frequency is wasted as heat.

I am virtually certain you are wrong about this. As the black body of the solar panel heats up, eventually it will reach a temperature that is in equilibrium with the environment. This temperature is not going to be hot enough to damage the panels in most situations, and all the heat is being radiated away from the black body panel outside your spacecraft.

If you use the energy to drive a circuit inside your spacecraft, virtually any circuit you might be driving produces waste heat.

If it drives the electronics controlling the probe, all that energy is going to be released as waste heat by the chips, and if the probe has no way to dissipate the heat, it will build up until it fails.

If it drives the plasma rocket, that 28% waste heat is released inside the housing of the engine's high power circuitry modules. (the high voltage transformers, the magnetrons, the big power control semiconductors). Those components will overheat if there is no way to get that waste heat away from them.

So, no, your model is wrong. Solar panels not driving a load are not going to overheat your spacecraft, while if they are driving a load, they will. The best model would be to identify every single electrical component on a spacecraft, and cause it to produce waste heat as a percentage of how efficient it is. Electronics are space heaters (100% of the power they consume goes to waste heat), while plasma engines have a smaller percentage of waste heat, but they use hugely more energy.

But, barring this, you could just model it by the power consumed from the solar panel's output.

From your other writing, I'm guessing you have a decent education in physics. However, sometimes, it takes a bit of engineering knowledge to understand how these abstract ideas will actually apply in an actual system. I can give you schematics of actual spacecraft if you are still not convinced.

[BrickedKeyboard]

As for a simple way to handle a spacecraft overheating : When heat > thresholdOverheat, trip a thermal overload breaker for the entire spacecraft. You could set the EC to 0 to model this, since, while the breakers are tripped, the electrical systems of the spacecraft are shut down. Once the heat gets below some thresholdOk, reset the breakers automatically, which will cause the game to power up it's systems, and restore any EC that was stored in the batteries. (the EC wouldn't be lost, just temporarily unavailable)

This would be far more realistic than losing probes because the panels decide to fold up on their own. Also, you should reduce the storage greatly so the overheat happens within hours.

[Fractal_UK]

I am virtually certain you are wrong about this. As the black body of the solar panel heats up, eventually it will reach a temperature that is in equilibrium with the environment. This temperature is not going to be hot enough to damage the panels in most situations, and all the heat is being radiated away from the black body panel outside your spacecraft.

If you use the energy to drive a circuit inside your spacecraft, virtually any circuit you might be driving produces waste heat.

If it drives the electronics controlling the probe, all that energy is going to be released as waste heat by the chips, and if the probe has no way to dissipate the heat, it will build up until it fails.

If it drives the plasma rocket, that 28% waste heat is released inside the housing of the engine's high power circuitry modules. (the high voltage transformers, the magnetrons, the big power control semiconductors). Those components will overheat if there is no way to get that waste heat away from them.

So, no, your model is wrong. Solar panels not driving a load are not going to overheat your spacecraft, while if they are driving a load, they will. The best model would be to identify every single electrical component on a spacecraft, and cause it to produce waste heat as a percentage of how efficient it is. Electronics are space heaters (100% of the power they consume goes to waste heat), while plasma engines have a smaller percentage of waste heat, but they use hugely more energy.

But, barring this, you could just model it by the power consumed from the solar panel's output.

From your other writing, I'm guessing you have a decent education in physics. However, sometimes, it takes a bit of engineering knowledge to understand how these abstract ideas will actually apply in an actual system. I can give you schematics of actual spacecraft if you are still not convinced.

The fact that the spacecraft reaches thermal equilibrium with the environment is precisely the problem - indeed your whole argument relies on the spacecraft not reaching thermal equilibrium. It doesn't matter whether your computer chip or your solar panel is producing the heat because heat conduction is going to dominate the heat transfer process within your spacecraft, in other words, if your solar panels becomes warm enough to cause harm to your vulnerable components, so do the vulnerable components themselves, whether the solar panels themselves get damaged is irrelevant - if the solar panels are hot enough heat to cook your satellite's CPU, your CPU will be more or the less temperature - at which point goodbye space probe! Yeah, your solar panels aren't damaged but your probe is just as useless as if they were.

I think you are being mislead by thinking of something analogous to a battery powered spacecraft. A battery powered spacecraft functions as you describe because the battery will do nothing when there is no power draw. A solar powered spacecraft is totally different. Your spacecraft does not stop absorbing energy from the sun just because you have no power draw and for most electronic systems where most of the initial electrical power ends up as Waste Heat, it makes very little difference whether the solar panels are deployed with no load or whether the equipment is running.

Sure, the second case produces heat in a more localised area but you hope that your heat management system is capable of moving that away from that particular component and spreading it over a large area quickly to try and dissipate it. If this isn't the case and you have individual components overheating, you have simply designed a rubbish spacecraft, just as surely as someone who tries to run a top of the range CPU in their desktop computer without a heatsink.

So yes, I'm making an approximation but my approximation is that of a well-designed spacecraft that spreads heat evenly throughout its heat rejection system and maintains thermal equilibrium rather than a badly designed spacecraft that produces localised overheating.

Edit: In reality, you have a few more options because you are not obliged to point your spacecraft solar panels entirely at the sun, you can optimise the angle for better heat rejection if necessary. Unfortunately, in KSP, this would require a whole new set of solar panel code.

Edited November 21, 2013 by Fractal_UK