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

[Dante80]

Some feedback.

1. It seems like the refinery currently does not have a tech tree defined for career mode, I had to add it in the .cfg myself. Don't know whether its a bad install by me or a real problem.

2. The resource finding module currently has no action group compatibility (not that it really needs it though). When using two modules, its impossible to set them to scan and show in the map both resources at the same time. I guess thats intended/a limitation of the resource viewing code.

Btw, its impossible for me to extend/retract the magnetometer via action groups too

[Hremsfeld]

Kinda getting the same thing...launched a new AM scoop and after time warp it will gather no AM, despite the collector showing 3.1+ AM flux, all tanks charged...should be collecting, but getting nothing.

I'm still gathering antimatter, it's just that soon I'm not going to be able to store it due to a lack of electricity. This will be rather...unpleasant for Lenlin, so I'm hoping to avert this.

Edit: This has happened before, and somehow fixed itself. As soon as it did, the reactor spooled up, the generator kicked on, and my megajoules shot to full. I don't know what I did differently then, but some finagling should be able to overcome it. Although, if it's just a matter of not using part.requestResource(), it might be a simple bugfix. Or is that an oxymoron?

Edited November 24, 2013 by Hremsfeld

[Eadrom]

I have had this issue once before whilst in optimum antimatter collecting orbit around Jool. Turning my plasma thruster off then back on brought my system back to life.

[Hremsfeld]

Sadly, turning it off and on again did not work for me. I'm hoping my main antimatter collector won't behave similarly when I tow it out there.

Relatedly, getting there sure won't be a problem, because wow fusion ships pack some dV.

I may have included more fuel on this tug than is strictly necessary.

[123nick]

Sadly, turning it off and on again did not work for me. I'm hoping my main antimatter collector won't behave similarly when I tow it out there.

Relatedly, getting there sure won't be a problem, because wow fusion ships pack some dV.

I may have included more fuel on this tug than is strictly necessary.

0.09 thrust to weight ratio? how do you live with that?

[Hremsfeld]

0.09 thrust to weight ratio? how do you live with that?

By not landing. This was strictly a tug to push an antimatter collector into orbit around Jool, and then deorbit itself. Or, that was the plan, until the antimatter collector exploded about ten seconds before I docked. I'm not really sure why, it was powered by a nuclear reactor/gen. I noticed the reactor itself wasn't visibly attached, though; it'd been up since before 0.8, so the models didn't line up.

On another note, only two of the five antimatter tanks actually collect the antimatter as it comes in; I don't know if that'll change when they fill up or not.

[Rabblerouser]

Trying to get science.. and.. well.. the science output is dismal for my space station..... 0.106/Day

[pasty2k2]

An old bug is rearing its ugly head again:

I've got a ship parked in orbit in Jool's radiation belt, powered exclusively by antimatter. The reactor and generator are both online, but neither of them are producing any power. I've got an antimatter collector inline with its tank, which is directly above the generator and reactor. My ship has 1043 out of 20,000 megajoules, and no electric charge (when timewarping to gather antimatter, it depleted and wasn't replenished). I've tried quicksave+quickloading; I've gone to the tracking station; I've switched to a vessel on the surface of moho, quicksaved, and quickloaded; I very briefly ran the engines while MechJeb limited me to 0.01m/s^2. This has happened before, but I don't remember how I fixed it.

The reactor and generator's right-click menus I've uploaded here, along with a screenshot of the debug log. The "dT is NaN!" messages look quite suspicious, but I've got no idea what to do with them, or if it's even this mod.

I am getting the same thing - however I have new info from some bug-testing!

I had solar panels regardless of the reactor so my ship stayed alive after I found this bug occurring. I've transferred from the Jool SOI into Laythe's, and, MAGIC the generator started providing power, both MW and ElectricCharge. No idea why but I hope this helps locate the issue!

Gotta say I love this mod - thanks for putting in the effort dude, it shows!

[Cairan]

Great work Fractal

Now some bug reports:

I confirm that the refinery is not listed in career mode. Also my orbiting space stations now have an issue with heat management. I built these to have very narrow margins for the radiator loads... When I'm at normal acceleration, everything is ok. However, when using time acceleration, the waste heat resource fills up quickly. Drop back to 1X, everything settles and the waste heat is taken care of, albeit slowly since the margin is thin.

Seems to me there's an issue with delta_heat calcultations between timesteps of larger than the frame durations at 1X...

[123nick]

help! my refinery is on and mining thorium and it says that there is0.047 thorium being made per day but i had it on for like 3 days and not a single 0.1 thorium is made. i have a aegletes 2meter reactor with 2 meter electric generator and 16 radial radiators on the mun but nothing is happening! please send help!

[Audiopulse]

Hey,

Im pretty sure its been said before, but you guys should get together with the Kethaners about Mineral-scanning. I would love to have one Interface for all scannable Ores/Materials instead of several - it would make everything more streamlined.

Either way, still a pretty awesome mod. I wish I had more time to play some KSP again.

[Slackerboy]

Sorry if this has already been covered but I have not been able to find anything via the search function.

I recently tried to build a solar power station to make use of the Microwave Beamed Power units, I started out with just 2 Huge panels and a set of docking ports. Next I docked a ship with 4 more panels on it however the power produced from these panels did not go to the transmitter. If I retracted the 2 panels that were part of the original ship then it would have no power at all even with all 4 others all open and showing that they were producing power.

No combination of opening and closing the panels seemed to help in any way.

Is this part limited to the panels that were part of the ship when you build it? Or am I missing something to make it work with docked parts?

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Sorry if this has already been covered but I have not been able to find anything via the search function.

I recently tried to build a solar power station to make use of the Microwave Beamed Power units, I started out with just 2 Huge panels and a set of docking ports. Next I docked a ship with 4 more panels on it however the power produced from these panels did not go to the transmitter. If I retracted the 2 panels that were part of the original ship then it would have no power at all even with all 4 others all open and showing that they were producing power.

No combination of opening and closing the panels seemed to help in any way.

Is this part limited to the panels that were part of the ship when you build it? Or am I missing something to make it work with docked parts?

Try a quick save and quick load. The code might not be acknowledging that the vessel is now one whole entity after docking.

[Seeker89]

What am I missing here?

I have liquid fuel -> Nuclear reactor -> Thermal Rocket Nozzle

Max Speed is 1 m/s and thrust is 44 Kn

So what am I missing?

[Hremsfeld]

I had solar panels regardless of the reactor so my ship stayed alive after I found this bug occurring. I've transferred from the Jool SOI into Laythe's, and, MAGIC the generator started providing power, both MW and ElectricCharge. No idea why but I hope this helps locate the issue!

Huh. Well, my window opens in 38 days, I guess I'll see if I just have to push it somewhere else.

Great work Fractal

Now some bug reports:

Seems to me there's an issue with delta_heat calcultations between timesteps of larger than the frame durations at 1X...

There might be one with delta_MJ, too; Two of the 0.625m nuclear reactors running off UF4 are enough to run a science station's research with an 0.29 MJ/s surplus, but if you go to 1000x speed or higher, Megajoule storage rapidly depletes.

What am I missing here?

I have liquid fuel -> Nuclear reactor -> Thermal Rocket Nozzle

Max Speed is 1 m/s and thrust is 44 Kn

So what am I missing?

Liquid fuel is very-high-specific impulse, but very-low-thrust. Without knowing anything about your ship besides that it has a nuclear reactor and uses LF, I'd say it looks about right.

[Donziboy2]

What am I missing here?

I have liquid fuel -> Nuclear reactor -> Thermal Rocket Nozzle

Max Speed is 1 m/s and thrust is 44 Kn

So what am I missing?

Nuclear Reactors will not give you enough thermal power to launch a ship, the stock nerva also better. The Nuclear reactors work best at supplying a good amount of power for years.

[Slackerboy]

Sorry if this has already been covered but I have not been able to find anything via the search function.

I recently tried to build a solar power station to make use of the Microwave Beamed Power units, I started out with just 2 Huge panels and a set of docking ports. Next I docked a ship with 4 more panels on it however the power produced from these panels did not go to the transmitter. If I retracted the 2 panels that were part of the original ship then it would have no power at all even with all 4 others all open and showing that they were producing power.

No combination of opening and closing the panels seemed to help in any way.

Is this part limited to the panels that were part of the ship when you build it? Or am I missing something to make it work with docked parts?

I am not 100% sure what fixed it, but when I docked the next part of the station it just started working.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Yes... It's not the power of the reactor that you must consider when determining thrust.

But rather, as it is with all reaction engines. How much mass are you throwing out the back how fast?

Chemical rockets throw huge amounts of mass out the back of the rocket at moderate speeds. Most of the speed is developed by the combustion process heating the burned gas mixture and causing it to expand and force its way out the nozzle like a giant garden hose.

The nuclear rockets operate more on the function of throwing smaller amounts of mass out at much higher speeds.

In this case, nuclear thermal uses reactor heat to increase the temperature of the propellant and throw that out the back.

An ion engine uses xenon or argon gas for its electrical ion properties and shoves that out the back with a magnetic field.

Plasma thrusters and the like are pretty much the same mechanic, different configuration under the hood. At that point, it's really just finding the best way to add the most energy to the fuel so you can shove it out the back. The more energy you can add, the faster the shove, the more efficient your propellant, the less you have to shove out the back.

Theoretically, fusion and antimatter engine configurations can get matter up near light speed, making extremely powerful and efficient engines possible. The caveat to that however is that such engines are only possible by mathematical concept, not practical development, and even then, they're very big, and produce huge amounts of waste heat.

Personally, I want my fusion torch engines. So I may go open the old pack, grab the model for the old 2.5 and 3.5 m reactors, replace the code with the fusion code, scale the fusion reactor codes up to match the sizes, and go stick them on something with a few Vista engines.

Then I shalt laugh mightily as I power up my first full-sized science frigate covered in Sunbeam Lazors.

EDIT: Oh, and fractal. I'm afraid I can't help you with the Ramscoops thing. I didn't learn how to use them to begin with, so I haven't designed a viable craft to test it with and don't know what its behavior should be. I'd spend more time un-wrecking a design than seeing if your code is working as intended.

On the flip side, what scaling ratio are you using for the nuclear reactors? If I go and scale the fusions up, I at least want them to balance right.

Edited November 24, 2013 by AdmiralTigerclaw

[Telanor]

Can someone explain how to use thorium in the nuclear reactors? I built a test rocket with a reactor and a hexcan of ThF4 and I can't figure out how to make it use the thorium instead of the UF4 it comes with. There's not right click option to switch it, even with an EVA kerbal

[Fractal_UK]

Can someone explain how to use thorium in the nuclear reactors? I built a test rocket with a reactor and a hexcan of ThF4 and I can't figure out how to make it use the thorium instead of the UF4 it comes with. There's not right click option to switch it, even with an EVA kerbal

You have to shut down the reactor and then wait a while for the decay heating to subside, after that the option should appear (with an EVA Kerbal).

[KhaosCorp]

You have to shut down the reactor and then wait a while for the decay heating to subside, after that the option should appear (with an EVA Kerbal).

I havent been using this mod long enough to find out on my own but Im curious...If you run thorium breeding in a nuc reactor its entire life once the uranium dies off will there be enough thorium to just change the reactor over?

[Cairan]

I havent been using this mod long enough to find out on my own but Im curious...If you run thorium breeding in a nuc reactor its entire life once the uranium dies off will there be enough thorium to just change the reactor over?

we breed Tritium (Hydrogen 3) from neutron absorption by deuterium (Hydrogen 2), not Thorium (Thorium 232). No perpetual machine trick possible here ;-p

[KhaosCorp]

Haha..I keep reading the contextual menu saying thorium..makes more sense now.

[Fractal_UK]

help! my refinery is on and mining thorium and it says that there is0.047 thorium being made per day but i had it on for like 3 days and not a single 0.1 thorium is made. i have a aegletes 2meter reactor with 2 meter electric generator and 16 radial radiators on the mun but nothing is happening! please send help!

Just to check but do you have thorium tanks on there? You cannot mine thorium directly into a reactor, you have to put it into a fuel tank first. You can only refuel the reactor itself via the EVA option.

Im pretty sure its been said before, but you guys should get together with the Kethaners about Mineral-scanning. I would love to have one Interface for all scannable Ores/Materials instead of several - it would make everything more streamlined.

Either way, still a pretty awesome mod. I wish I had more time to play some KSP again.

Yes, it's a nice idea in theory and I have actually discussed this issue with Majiir but both of us are rather set against acquiring cross-plugin dependence. Interstellar requiring a Kethane install is out of the question and the reverse is likewise true. The only option that remains would therefore be a third plugin that could be distributed with any compatible plugins to provide the interface for the mods wanting to make use of it but this has issues that have been discussed recently, e.g. in the ModuleManger thread. Particularly, if a user downloads one plugin with an older version of this resource handler, a newer version might get overwritten and cause bugs that are quite opaque to the user.

Kethane has a very good API for third parties and I know that Majiir is helpful to people who want to make use of it. I'm likewise happy to help anyone who wants to make use of Interstellar's resource system, which I have tried to make very easy to use and to mod but I obviously have no feedback about this aspect yet. I would however recommend these features mainly to modmakers who are interested in making resources a supplemental part of their mod. Obviously this is definitely not the case of Kethane and while it's probably true of Interstellar as of 0.8, it will become less so over time as many of my plans for expansion revolve around use of the resource system - particularly using the resource system for new science experiments, maybe even some science experiments that require a bit of thought from the operator, as well as things like Helium-3 mining from regolith and potentially tracking abundances of more common materials. Of particular interest amongst these is obviously Aluminium, which already has a place in the mod but is currently a binary thing that is either present or not.

I know it's nice for players to have common frameworks so that everything appears to be unified and tidy but it's unclear whether such a mechanism will become viable by any means at this stage. Additionally, the two resource systems are already quite different and I guess it depends on the direction of both Interstellar and Kethane as to whether they evolve to be more or less similar in the future - I actually hope for the second because two systems that do more or less the same thing are far less valuable to the community than two systems that have unique strengths.

[Telanor]

You have to shut down the reactor and then wait a while for the decay heating to subside, after that the option should appear (with an EVA Kerbal).

Ok so I shut down the reactor, waited, got the option to switch fuels. Clicked on it, nothing seemed to happen. I clicked start generator and looked at the output, seemed to be exactly the same. How do we know which fuel type its using?