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

[pilfit]

Think I have found a bug in 0.8.1, if at any time a Thermal Jet flames out it will not start back up again. Switching to another fuel (hybrid mode) wont work either. Tested it on the runway by turning off the intakes then back on and they always say "deprived" of what ever fuel its trying to use. I was using B9 intakes at the time and I also have FAR installed if that helps.

[Fractal_UK]

Think I have found a bug in 0.8.1, if at any time a Thermal Jet flames out it will not start back up again. Switching to another fuel (hybrid mode) wont work either. Tested it on the runway by turning off the intakes then back on and they always say "deprived" of what ever fuel its trying to use. I was using B9 intakes at the time and I also have FAR installed if that helps.

This doesn't happen for me:

On the runway, B9 intakes, intakes closed

Action group to open intakes and we're on the move, don't even have to touch the thermal turbojet propellant controls

Can you give some more details about under what circumstances this happens?

[Fractal_UK]

Apologies as well RealFuelers - I made an error in the compatibility file, here is a fixed version:

https://bitbucket.org/FractalUK/kspinstellar/downloads/MFS-RealFuels2.zip

[sirklick]

Nice, quick catch. I was in the middle of packing up my logs. KSP was halting while loading on the Aluminum Hybrid rocket. Ninja fixed, well done.

[Lewiskerbington]

I think I found some bugs in the latest update:

1) When I go on EVA to switch the reactor fuel from uranium to thorium (after it has been shut off) and I click the "switch fuels" button, nothing happens (And yes I had thorium fuel on board)

2) The in the VAB I'm unable to attach to attach the refinery to my ship. Strangely, this only occurs at the node on the side of the refinery, not the bottom node.

[Saphykitten]

I think I found some bugs in the latest update:

1) When I go on EVA to switch the reactor fuel from uranium to thorium (after it has been shut off) and I click the "switch fuels" button, nothing happens (And yes I had thorium fuel on board)

2) The in the VAB I'm unable to attach to attach the refinery to my ship. Strangely, this only occurs at the node on the side of the refinery, not the bottom node.

Also have the fuel switching problem.

Also have a problem keeping the Fusion reactors running.

[Fractal_UK]

Also have the fuel switching problem.

Also have a problem keeping the Fusion reactors running.

Do you both have spare capacity for Uranium too? You need something to hold the Uranium that was in the reactor too.

Edit:

2) The in the VAB I'm unable to attach to attach the refinery to my ship. Strangely, this only occurs at the node on the side of the refinery, not the bottom node.

This is a pain, it may be that the game is only going to let them work with paired nodes. My ability to fix this is limited because it's a problem with the way the stock game handles attachment nodes but I'll do what I can to find a good compromise solution.

Which attachment nodes on the refinery are people finding most useful?

Edited November 27, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Saphykitten]

Do you both have spare capacity for Uranium too? You need something to hold the Uranium that was in the reactor too.

Nope! That would fix it.

[Eadrom]

In regards to the fission reactor fuel swapping, I just tested this and was able to EVA and turn off reactor, time warped while it cooled off, EVA and swap out fuel to Thorium successfully. It took 8 canisters of fuel of both uranium and thorium to fully swap out my test 3.75m reactor since as Fractal pointed out, you need someplace to store the Uranium you are removing from the reactor in addition to a bunch of Thorium to fill the reactor with.

[Draft]

Which attachment nodes on the refinery are people finding most useful?

I've yet to make use of them, but for such a large part top and bottom stack nodes seem essential to me. Surface attachment should allow for any radial funny business you want, but I do not fancy putting the refinery at the tippy-top of my rockets because I can't put things above and below it.

On a related note, what are the altitude cutoffs for the gamma spectrometer? I was playing with one up to a Mm and was still getting results on Kerbin, with the way it seems to work knowing the performance ceiling would be nice.

[KvickFlygarn87]

Those purple things look ugly, you should implement Kethane to this. I don't know, however, how much time that would take. But you should at least consider it.

[Eadrom]

Fractal, thank you for the microwave transmission fixes. I was successfully able to launch a small one-crew test rocket into orbit, orbited around, then successfully de-orbited, solely under microwave thermal receiver power.

Test rocket was 1.25m thermal nozzle, microwave thermal receiver, two FL-T800 LOF tanks, decoupler, mk 1 pod, chute. I had two rovers with transmitters at the launchpad and a satellite in geosynch orbit over KSC with a 3.75m fission reactor. Averaged between 1 GW and 3ish GW of thermal power during ascent.

I can see launching a cluster of big power sats above KSC and getting some really nice launch power by being able to funnel the power of a bunch of big reactors for VERY cheap mass. Definitely going to be a goodly amount of work setting up a power constellation around kerbin, but once complete, can easily provide gobs of low mass thermal power.

This whole microwave thermal power system is very KSPI and I love it! If any of you fellow users hasn't played around with it, I highly recommend it.

[Goonswarm]

I know this may have been answered, but after my first mission to Laythe I have enough science to upgrade my nuke reactors. What are the exact requirements to do so? I have a 3.75 powering my space station atm, and I would like to upgrade it!

Then I can produce antimatter and hopefully have some when I unlock the reactors.

[Eadrom]

I know this may have been answered, but after my first mission to Laythe I have enough science to upgrade my nuke reactors. What are the exact requirements to do so? I have a 3.75 powering my space station atm, and I would like to upgrade it!

Then I can produce antimatter and hopefully have some when I unlock the reactors.

Right click the part you want to upgrade on your ship. There should be a Science cost/current line as well as a retrofit button which you just click to instantly upgrade. I don't remember the cost off the top of my head.

Edit 1:

Found it. Upgrade costs can be found in the part.cfg files. The 3.75m fission reactor is labeled as 25-1500 under the NuclearReactor1Sphere folder. Upgrade cost is 180 science.

Edit 2:

Also keep in mind that you don't have to have a full 5 GW (I think that's the #) to make antimatter on a lab. Antimatter production in the science lab will scale with the amount of available power up to the cap. So by all means, start manufacturing antimatter as soon as you can get containers for it if you like. Another option is to throw a small collection station up at around 850k meters. By the time you unlock reactors you should have enough antimatter for a mission or two.

Edited November 27, 2013 by Eadrom

[Goodle...]

guys, i found out that by using 6 warp drives in a row, you can go into unnecessarily quick speeds

[Lightwarrior]

After this update if i have antimatter tank on my vessel i cannot use time warp higher than 50x. Even if i disable tank charging and its empty i keep receiving those messages about unpowered antimatter tank... and there is other reactor working and lots of ElectricCharge/Megajoules.

Also had a problem with Lab consuming antimatter instead af producing it at highest time warp.

No other mods installed.

[Myrten]

I have a question regarding antimatter:

If my antimatter collector on Jool's orbit displays 6.64172E-003 and upgraded 3.75 antimatter reactor consumes 11.2185 mg/s am I right to assume that 2 collectors in Jool's orbit are enough to power 3.75 antimatter reactor forever?

Fractal, thank you for the microwave transmission fixes. I was successfully able to launch a small one-crew test rocket into orbit, orbited around, then successfully de-orbited, solely under microwave thermal receiver power.

Test rocket was 1.25m thermal nozzle, microwave thermal receiver, two FL-T800 LOF tanks, decoupler, mk 1 pod, chute. I had two rovers with transmitters at the launchpad and a satellite in geosynch orbit over KSC with a 3.75m fission reactor. Averaged between 1 GW and 3ish GW of thermal power during ascent.

I can see launching a cluster of big power sats above KSC and getting some really nice launch power by being able to funnel the power of a bunch of big reactors for VERY cheap mass. Definitely going to be a goodly amount of work setting up a power constellation around kerbin, but once complete, can easily provide gobs of low mass thermal power.

This whole microwave thermal power system is very KSPI and I love it! If any of you fellow users hasn't played around with it, I highly recommend it.

Actually you don't have to put 3.5m reactors into orbit, they can sit on Kerbin and transmit power to your relay satellite

[Eadrom]

I have a question regarding antimatter:

If my antimatter collector on Jool's orbit displays 6.64172E-003 and upgraded 3.75 antimatter reactor consumes 11.2185 mg/s am I right to assume that 2 collectors in Jool's orbit are enough to power 3.75 antimatter reactor forever?

Actually you don't have to put 3.5m reactors into orbit, they can sit on Kerbin and transmit power to your relay satellite

Antimatter flux is in scientific notation. 6.64172E-003 is actually 0.00664172mg/s. You need 1,690 antimatter collectors to run your antimatter reactor at full power indefinitely at that collection rate.

The reason I would lob the reactors into orbit is to minimize power loss during relay. I also like to keep the number of vessels around KSC to an absolute minimum. I can also dock with power satellites in orbit for maintenance. If I kept a massive reactor farm near the space center, I'd have to use KAS to easily perform maintenance. There are pros and cons to both approaches and everyone can pick the system that works best with their playstyle.

[pilfit]

Well I am using the fusion reactors for it and it has bin upgraded to a hybrid but other then that I am not sure. It only happens if the engine manages to fully flame out, just spitting sparking is not enough, it has to lose all thrust and stop sparking. It can be hard to make it stop sparking if you only have 1 intake per engine. I dont know why that is... I tested it with both vanilla and B9 intakes, same thing.

[Myrten]

Antimatter flux is in scientific notation. 6.64172E-003 is actually 0.00664172mg/s. You need 1,690 antimatter collectors to run your antimatter reactor at full power indefinitely at that collection rate.

Damn, I thought that gram was the base unit here, but thanks for saving me from sending antimatter reactor to Jool only to find out that it doesn't work

The reason I would lob the reactors into orbit is to minimize power loss during relay. I also like to keep the number of vessels around KSC to an absolute minimum. I can also dock with power satellites in orbit for maintenance. If I kept a massive reactor farm near the space center, I'd have to use KAS to easily perform maintenance. There are pros and cons to both approaches and everyone can pick the system that works best with their playstyle.

Distances on Kerbin's orbit are relatively small so power loss is insignificant IMHO, even transmission from Sun to Kerbin only losses 50%.

My problem with putting generators on orbit is that they'll all be in different places and given that receiver has to be pointed at source vessel it will be hard to connect every one of them to your ship. If you have ground farm near KSC then you only need few relay satellites.

[Myrten]

This is completely normal. You're never going to get power to compete with a 30 ton nuclear reactor no matter how close your solar panels are to the sun. Even totally unupgraded, 1/1000th of a 3.75m generator/reactor's output is 600KW - 33x a solar panel's normal power output at Kerbin. Upgrades compound the difference further.

So basically once I've unlocked nuclear reactors using solar powers for transmission is pointless.

As for this one - I wish you had asked me this before I uploaded the fix - looks like you've discovered another bug already . Multiple solar panels will be handled properly but multiple generators won't be. I've fixed it but I'm afraid you'll have to wait for another update for this one.

Another possible bug:

If I place 2 reactors and generator in Reactor/Generator/Reactor layout then generator only generates 4.4 GW and reactors don't operate on full capacity.

[Eadrom]

Damn, I thought that gram was the base unit here, but thanks for saving me from sending antimatter reactor to Jool only to find out that it doesn't work

You should find yourself well served with anywhere around 15-20 collectors at around 9,000 km at Jool. You should rarely find yourself with situations where you constantly need to run a 3.75m antimatter reactor for very long periods of time. You can even still set yourself up an antimatter powered microwave transmitter. Just leave the transmitter off until you find yourself needing the power. When it's not transmitting it will be happily collecting tons of antimatter. I think you can even still keep the transmitter on and it'll probably still provide a trickle charge of beamed power. With the high power of antimatter, it's probably still a goodly chunk of power. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how KSPI handles antimatter powered microwave transmitting when it's not loaded. You might even be able to get full reactor power all the time. Unless Fractal weighs in on this, some research on this definitely needs to be done.

Distances on Kerbin's orbit are relatively small so power loss is insignificant IMHO, even transmission from Sun to Kerbin only losses 50%.

My problem with putting generators on orbit is that they'll all be in different places and given that receiver has to be pointed at source vessel it will be hard to connect every one of them to your ship. If you have ground farm near KSC then you only need few relay satellites.

You can set up a geosynchronous constellation of satellites so they will always be in roughly the same spot. At an altitude of 2.868 Mm for an orbital period of 6.0 hours, the satellite will stay in the same spot in the sky relative to the surface of Kerbin. It is a technique commonly used with setting up comm networks for the RemoteTech mod. I also like spreading out points of failure. Lots of smaller nuke power sats helps do that.

Although, there's nothing to say that you can't combine both systems and have both a big power farm at KSC as well as a bunch of nuke power sats that can both relay and transmit as needed. This would give you the best of both worlds.

[Eadrom]

So basically once I've unlocked nuclear reactors using solar powers for transmission is pointless.

You don't need to refuel solar cells so it still has some uses. Fractal has stated that beaming solar power to a vessel in low Kerbol orbit (like around Moho) is a good cheap way to charge up warp drives.

Another possible bug:

If I place 2 reactors and generator in Reactor/Generator/Reactor layout then generator only generates 4.4 GW and reactors don't operate on full capacity.

Power systems are on a reactor/generator pair basis. One reactor works with one generator and they should have matching stack sizes as well (2.5m reactor would want to be paired with a 2.5m generator).

Edited November 27, 2013 by Eadrom

[Myrten]

You should find yourself well served with anywhere around 15-20 collectors at around 9,000 km at Jool. You should rarely find yourself with situations where you constantly need to run a 3.75m antimatter reactor for very long periods of time. You can even still set yourself up an antimatter powered microwave transmitter. Just leave the transmitter off until you find yourself needing the power. When it's not transmitting it will be happily collecting tons of antimatter. I think you can even still keep the transmitter on and it'll probably still provide a trickle charge of beamed power. With the high power of antimatter, it's probably still a goodly chunk of power. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how KSPI handles antimatter powered microwave transmitting when it's not loaded. You might even be able to get full reactor power all the time. Unless Fractal weighs in on this, some research on this definitely needs to be done.

I prefer more stable power so turning AM reactor on/off doesn't seem like a good idea for me, I think that if you turn on AM reactor and switch to another ship before it will run out of AM then it will operate on full power and transmit full power but let's be honest that's cheating

You can set up a geosynchronous constellation of satellites so they will always be in roughly the same spot. At an altitude of 2.868 Mm for an orbital period of 6.0 hours, the satellite will stay in the same spot in the sky relative to the surface of Kerbin. It is a technique commonly used with setting up comm networks for the RemoteTech mod. I also like spreading out points of failure. Lots of smaller nuke power sats helps do that.

Although, there's nothing to say that you can't combine both systems and have both a big power farm at KSC as well as a bunch of nuke power sats that can both relay and transmit as needed. This would give you the best of both worlds.

But how are you going to get the power of all your satellites into a single ship? Things can get nasty here as each satellite has to be perfectly directed at another one not to lose power. I have some nuke satellites already on orbit in my game and it's very hard to get all their combined power to vessel at launchpad.

In case of ground farm it's enough to put few relay satellites around Kerbin and you can have almost full power everywhere from your farm.

[Railgunner2160]

Anyone have screenies of the new microwave Thermal Rocket in action??

Still working on getting through to the higher end techs, just getting Nukes unlocked....