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

[Tygroux]

Hi, i have some radiators problems.

I'm setting up a Remote Tech Satellite network, waiting for the mod to update: probes core, giant solar array and giant antenna. I added two small radial radiators, to dissipate heat generated by solar panels.

I see my wasteheat increasing dramatically. In 2 month the probe is heated at 80%.

It looks like the radiator radiate 0 heat. It convect in atmosphere, and store heat correctly, but it's still heating insanely fast, and radiate 0.0mw in space.

I tried an inline radiator with similar results.

Am doing something wrong, is there a bug somewhere?

[Spearka]

could it be possible to have a radial precooler?

or maybe a smaller one?

also, they don't appear to work for atmospheric intakes

Edited December 21, 2013 by Spearka

[Gibster]

Hi, I'm trying to use the thermal engines and I want to know what the most efficient fuel to use for it is. I tried liquid only, which seems efficient but then realized I would have to be even more efficient than it already is because it takes 9 minute burns to get to places like Moho. So yeah, what combo is the most efficient for planetary transfers and insertions?

[Cottonhill1987]

I need some help, None of the instruments are working or animated in Career mode or Sandbox for the Interstellar Mod.

Any advice?

[pina_coladas]

I like the realistic mechanics of the radiators but I agree with others that it's very unclear in the VAB about how much radiator capacity you need for a given reactor.

Also, the magnetometer instrument needs to have "rerunnable = True" in its cfg. Trying to transmit the data makes the instrument "inoperable" as if it were a goo canister. And having a penalty for transmitting doesn't make any sense imo, not for something like a basic sensor reading (looking at you, squad).

[Hedd]

Was there ever an update involved with MJ and the variable thrust engines? I read some older posts about some issues with it but couldn't find if they were resolved and I was noticing some issues vertically landing them. MJ seems to have an issue with incoming speed resulting in a pancake incident which I would assume is associated with an inability to determine the TWR at partial throttle.

I also ran across an odd little bug from the thermal jets. It may effect other engines but that is what I was using when I noticed it. If I choke output down, say 50% just as an example, and I leave the spacecraft to attend to something else, when I focus on the craft again it displays at 100% output but retains the actual output of the choked down throttle. So it would be showing 100% output, but yielding 50% limited output in the example I used. I haven't found a way around it or regaining that lost power yield yet, only to remember to turn off all my limiters before leaving a ship behind.

[Lightwarrior]

I like the realistic mechanics of the radiators but I agree with others that it's very unclear in the VAB about how much radiator capacity you need for a given reactor.

...

Adding just enough radiators to dissipate 30% of reactor power + ~10-20% seems a good place to start. Assuming that reactor is idle during transfers.

[BigD145]

MJ currently does not like them.

[TheNewGuy]

Can ANYONE help me? I'm missing nuclear reactors, the ones that work with the thermal turbojet, and the others, will not provide any thrust. ANYONE?

[Fractal_UK]

Version 0.9.1 Released

I've replaced the badly retextured methane tank by a probably similarly bad unique model and texture. It also comes with a smaller, half size methane tank that is more suitable to landers. Anyway, on the bright side, Interstellar finally has a model created by me, which is at least a novelty.

Version 0.9.1
-Methane tank replaced and new smaller tank more suitable for landers
-Fixed Reactor and Generator Upgrades
-Fixed loading of warp plugin settings
-MJ treatment of plasma engines improved
-Megajoule display now responds to F2 and is hidden for vessels with no appropriate power supply
-Improvements to atmospheric engine code
-Tritium breeding option can now be selected - due to stock problem this will only function while ship is unfocused or at moderate time acceleration
-Expanding refinery in VAB workaround
-More info on radiators
-Atmospheric intake removed from VAB
-DT magnetometer rerunnable

Download links on the first page have been updated.

Edited December 21, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Donziboy2]

Version 0.9.1 Released

I've replaced the badly retextured methane tank by a probably similarly bad unique model and texture. It also comes with a smaller, half size methane tank that is more suitable to landers. Anyway, on the bright side, Interstellar finally has a model created by me, which is at least a novelty.

Version 0.9.1
-Methane tank replaced and new smaller tank more suitable for landers
-Fixed Reactor and Generator Upgrades
-Fixed loading of warp plugin settings
-MJ treatment of plasma engines improved
-Megajoule display now responds to F2 and is hidden for vessels with no appropriate power supply
-Improvements to atmospheric engine code
-Tritium breeding option can now be selected - due to stock problem this will only function while ship is unfocused or at moderate time acceleration
-Expanding refinery in VAB workaround
-More info on radiators
-Atmospheric intake removed from VAB
-DT magnetometer rerunnable

Download links on the first page have been updated.

Nice!

I did notice that you don't have the module manager file in there anymore. Are you not using it now?

[pina_coladas]

Serious Bug report: your link to the first page links back to your post instead!

Thanks for the update. I hope someone who knows what they're doing offers to help do some textures for you so we can get our hands on those new models...

[Donziboy2]

I see an increase in power on the runway but once you get to 10K+ it goes down hill fast....

Still coming far short of 8.2 performance. The uneven intakeATM usage does not help.

[Fractal_UK]

Nice!

I did notice that you don't have the module manager file in there anymore. Are you not using it now?

How did that creep out of there? I'll have to re-upload

Edited December 21, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Fractal_UK]

Okay, ModuleManager is back in the download.

If you downloaded without ModuleManager, please download it here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55219-Module-Manager-1-5-%28Nov-11%29

[Fractal_UK]

I see an increase in power on the runway but once you get to 10K+ it goes down hill fast....

Still coming far short of 8.2 performance. The uneven intakeATM usage does not help.

Unfortunately if you're comparing atmosphere intakes in 0.8.2 to other intakes in later versions, you won't see the same performance - the atmospheric intakes had intake values 4x what they should have had with no drag.

I checked out the engines quite carefully for this update and they do seem to be using almost exactly the maximum amount of IntakeAtm/IntakeAir they can get away with without causing a flameout. You should, however, see fairly significantly improved LFO thrust from fusion engines in this update which should make the post-atmospheric part of the ascent easier.

[Donziboy2]

Unfortunately if you're comparing atmosphere intakes in 0.8.2 to other intakes in later versions, you won't see the same performance - the atmospheric intakes had intake values 4x what they should have had with no drag.

I checked out the engines quite carefully for this update and they do seem to be using almost exactly the maximum amount of IntakeAtm/IntakeAir they can get away with without causing a flameout. You should, however, see fairly significantly improved LFO thrust from fusion engines in this update which should make the post-atmospheric part of the ascent easier.

Actually that plane is using Stock Ram Intakes.... I am having some luck with another craft its almost up there, still working my way up. Its alot more work then in 0.8.2 when you could just set the throttle and forget it...

Edit..

OK on another note... I was almost out of the atmo and decided to deploy my radiators, being a smart guy I quick saved first and deployed one radiator which detached from the ship... Well I reloaded and 11 of the 12 Thermal TurboJet engines vanished, out of 4 reloads one of them said that the engine overheated....

Logs

I have found its possible to choke all the engines so you don't have to play around with uneven thrust but its tricky and easy to cause spinouts(its pretty hard to actually get all the engines to cut thrust, half keep wanting to run hard full throttle), its challenging to do but worth it if done right I will do more tests...

Edit 2...

Ok second run to orbit, for some damn reason could not make it up, it just refused to speed up enough to get past 30Km, im taking a break now......

Edited December 22, 2013 by Donziboy2

[biglightbt]

Hello again guys, I'm still having some very unusual effects with intakes trying to get anywhere past 14,000m. Out of the 4 TTJ's on my plane I keep finding that the bottom right one flames out extraordinarily easily. That aside though I feel I'm not getting the way that intake air/atmo is measured. You can see the troublesome engine in my picture just as it starts to choke, which is odd, as all four engines at that particular point should be demanding .308U of fuel if each is demanding .0077U. Whats strange is that only one of my multiple intakes is providing 5.53U of intake atmo, multiple times more than what the engines should be demanding...yet one continually flames out.

Am I not understanding the way that the air resource are being used or is there something else going on here? Someone please explain, I feel like a freaking idiot here

[Fractal_UK]

Hello again guys, I'm still having some very unusual effects with intakes trying to get anywhere past 14,000m. Out of the 4 TTJ's on my plane I keep finding that the bottom right one flames out extraordinarily easily. That aside though I feel I'm not getting the way that intake air/atmo is measured. You can see the troublesome engine in my picture just as it starts to choke, which is odd, as all four engines at that particular point should be demanding .308U of fuel if each is demanding .0077U. Whats strange is that only one of my multiple intakes is providing 5.53U of intake atmo, multiple times more than what the engines should be demanding...yet one continually flames out.

Am I not understanding the way that the air resource are being used or is there something else going on here? Someone please explain, I feel like a freaking idiot here

I have no idea what the intake flow value is supposed to mean - it could be the adjusted fuel intake flow once you account for density. The engines, however, do not account for the density of the propellant in the displayed flow - that means in order to see how much IntakeAtm you're using you take the 0.077 figure and divide by the density, which is 0.005, that gives you 15.4. You then multiply by the physics delta-time, this measures how often the game's physics is updated and that value is often something like 1/43 but it depends on your settings. Assuming that's right, it gives you an intake value (as you'd see on the bar) of 0.358, i.e. each engine running at that rate needs 0.358 in the resource bar to run at the currently displayed power.

You can derive the 0.077 figure from the engine's thrust and Isp by taking thrust/isp/9.81 = 111/147.7/9.81 = 0.0766.

[Tharios]

Not sure if it's intentional or just an oversight, but the stock radial intakes do not work with the pre-coolers. All other air intakes (but air intakes only, not atmo intakes) work as intended. Absolute necessity with the new RAPIER engines...much better than the SABREs from B9, imo.

[biglightbt]

I have no idea what the intake flow value is supposed to mean - it could be the adjusted fuel intake flow once you account for density. The engines, however, do not account for the density of the propellant in the displayed flow - that means in order to see how much IntakeAtm you're using you take the 0.077 figure and divide by the density, which is 0.005, that gives you 15.4. You then multiply by the physics delta-time, this measures how often the game's physics is updated and that value is often something like 1/43 but it depends on your settings. Assuming that's right, it gives you an intake value (as you'd see on the bar) of 0.358, i.e. each engine running at that rate needs 0.358 in the resource bar to run at the currently displayed power.

You can derive the 0.077 figure from the engine's thrust and Isp by taking thrust/isp/9.81 = 111/147.7/9.81 = 0.0766.

Ok. So how do I diagnose my problem here? Just good old fashioned Kerbal engineering? Keep slapping on more intakes until the engines stop stalling? Toss the design entirely and take it from the top?

Edit: Tried good old Kerbal engineering, engines still splutter and die at 12,000m at any speed irregardless of how many intakes are on the craft. WTF!?!?!?

Edited December 22, 2013 by biglightbt

[Eadrom]

Downloaded new version of KSPI and TACLS. Made my TACLS water consolidation changes.

Tested Water Electrolysis option on refinery using TACLS water, successful.

Tested Anthraquinone option on refinery using TACLS water, successful.

Tested crew consumption of TACLS water from the KSPI large water tanks, successful. (Be advised that these tanks do not have WasteWater storage, so you have little capacity to store and then reprocess using a water purifyer.)

Tested thermal rocket able to to use TACLS water as fuel, successful. Only issue here was that the thermal nozzle did not automatically set fuel mode to use water. Appears to have defaulted to LF. (Stats at launch pad using 1.25m parts: fuel flow: 0.00144 U/s, thrust: 7.4 kN, Isp: 527.3s) (Stats in vacuum: fuel flow: 0.00144 U/s, thrust: 18.6 kN, Isp: 1316.8s)

Tested TACLS Water Purifyer using KSPI water tank, successful. (Again, be advised that KSPI tanks do not have WasteWater storage.)

Tested Refinery collecting TACLS water from ocean, successful. (Tested using ocean just off KSC.)

I think that is a good selection of use cases to prove that TACLS water has been integrated into Interstellar.

BEWARE!!! These two processes do NOT stop consuming base resource (water) when product resource tank is full. Be careful with timewarp, lest you leave your crew thirsty. @Fractal, is this a bug or a stock limitation or a result of me using a different water resource definition than LqdWater?

Now working on a Module Manager config to implement these changes for other people and across updates.

[EnDSchultz]

I must be really poor at rocket design. I seem to consistently run into the problem of my NTR transfer stages ending up having less dV than conventional chemical stages of similar mass; the mass from the reactor and all the paraphernalia associated with it end up doing bad things to the rocket equation.

I understand that the initial un-upgraded tech is supposed to be crude precursors to mature nuclear space technology; however, I've yet to find an application for it which I did not end up better serving with a smaller, lighter rocket of more conventional design. Again, maybe I'm just bad at it.

[Eadrom]

I must be really poor at rocket design. I seem to consistently run into the problem of my NTR transfer stages ending up having less dV than conventional chemical stages of similar mass; the mass from the reactor and all the paraphernalia associated with it end up doing bad things to the rocket equation.

I understand that the initial un-upgraded tech is supposed to be crude precursors to mature nuclear space technology; however, I've yet to find an application for it which I did not end up better serving with a smaller, lighter rocket of more conventional design. Again, maybe I'm just bad at it.

See this quote by Fractal. There was a discussion regarding this very topic a few pages back in this thread.

The thermal rockets and their performance relative to the stock LV-N is all down to the reactor power scaling. The equivalent TWR point is, I believe, somewhere between the 2.5m and 3.75m reactor and thermal rocket combination so the biggest reactor is simply invariably better than the stock one, the 2.5m one is certainly lower thrust but not massively and brings that better Isp to the table. By the time you get down to the smaller ones though, although you've still got that improved specific impulse, you're really starting to have thrust problems. I'm pretty committed to retaining the non-linear reactor scaling, it's much more realistic and adds a bit more compromise to the design process than having everything perform identically relative to size.

[Northstar1989]

What do you mean?

I'd hazard a guess that it's happening because you have upgraded radiators and unupgraded reactors - those are a bad combination because the radiator temperature can get as hot the reactor and when that happens efficiency -> 0. The problem can still be solved by more radiators though. Basically, you won't see much benefit of having upgraded radiators until you get upgraded reactors because the upgraded radiators won't be able to get hot enough to work at anywhere near full capacity.

Additionally, those inline radiators are really not designed for radiating the heat of a nuclear reactor in space, it's nowhere near big enough. They're amazing little things in atmosphere but you will need a huge quantity in space to get the job done.

For a 3.75m generator/reactor, four of the second largest radiators might not be enough (at least until you get those reactor upgrades). The second largest radiator dissipates 75MW when unupgraded, without upgraded reactors you won't see substantially more than this even from an upgraded radiator - you might get 100MW. The 3.75m reactor is 3GW thermal upgraded, so four lots of 100MW is not going to do the trick, not even close.

2 of the huge radiators will do the trick though, provided you don't want to run the reactor at full power all the time, if you do, try three or four.

To cool the 1.25m reactor, three or four small deployable radiators or 1 medium deployable radiator will easily handle it.

You might've missed the part where I said the design worked fine in space (with absolutely no WasteHeat accumulation for several HOURS)- and then it suddenly stopped radiating heat correctly after several unloads/reloads. ALSO, keep in mind this bug occurs with EITHER the inline radiators, OR the deployable versions. The bug also occurs when the Science Lab is off- and there is almost no electrical demand on the system, or when the generators were off- which means essentially the same thing to the reactor... I even experienced this problem on a design utilizing a 3.75m fission reactor and 2 of the LARGEST ("HUGE") upgraded deployable radiators...

The most power-drain any of these craft ever experienced (when the thermal rocket nozzles were inactive) was 5 MW- from a single Science Lab performing research. So the reactor only needed to run at less than 10% capacity to meet the power demands with the upgraded generators in use... 4 of the medium deployables (or two of the largest deployables for sure) *SHOULD* be more than enough to dissipate the heat of a 3.75 meter fission reactor running at low capacity to meet an electrical demand of only 5 MW...

What you said about the radiators not working properly when they got HOTTER makes no sense, and you might want to re-examine the coding that went into the radiators if you programmed them that way. Radiators should always give off MORE heat the hotter they get- so if the unupgraded fission reactors allow the upgraded radiators to reach their maximum temperature, but the upgraded reactors don't, the radiators should give off MORE heat at the higher temperatures reached with the unupgraded versions according to the basic physical laws governing heat radiation.

It doesn't matter what the reactor temperature is when calculating the radiator heat give-off to the vacuum of space- a given size radiator gives off a given amount of heat at a given temperature. Period. End of story. I think you're over-complicating things by thinking of the equations for the heat-transfer *TO* the radiators, instead of the equations for the heat transfer *FROM* the radiators. The radiators will heat up or cool down until the rate they receive energy is equal to the rate they give it off at- but none of that effects the rate of power give-off of the radiators themselves at a certain (set) temperature.

The efficiency that was falling to zero, once again, was that of the electric generators, not the radiators (which indicated they were giving off more than enough energy to cool the reactors, at full output, when right-clicked). It's not exactly explained anywhere how that is related to radiator temperature- but one would think their efficiency should be related to the ambient temperature of the craft (total fractional WasteHeat levels)- NOT to the temperature of the radiators.

Of course, I've also noticed the WasteHeat not partitioning in any logical way- i.e. rather than spreading out evenly through the craft, one radiator or one reactor will climb to maximal levels before another starts to accumulate WasteHeat, apparently without any logical ordering (it MIGHT work by the stack-priority rule used to govern fuel drain by engines, but that wouldn't make any logical sense, as the heat sources can be placed anywhere on the craft...)

No matter what, WasteHeat shouldn't have been accumulating with the generators OFF. This effectively decouples the reactors from all power drains, and means they should only be running on standby (0%). Considering the inline radiator used was a 170 MW radiator, and the reactor was only a 40 MW reactor, even the inline radiator should have been able to radiate the reactor's output at full-power anyways. The 3.75m reactor was a 3GW reactor, yes- but the radiators attached were either four 3.4 GW radiators, or two 13.6 GW radiators- once again more than enough for the reactor size...

Even using the un-upgraded figures instead, the 3GW reactor was overheating on standby with either four 75 MW radiators,

or two 300 MW radiators attached... And once again, this only began to happen after several load/unloading cycles- it worked fine at first...

RECAP: Bug experienced ONLY after multiple load/unload cycles, with:

1.25m Molten-Na uranium reactor + 1.25m Solid State Generator + 2.5m Graphene Inline Radiator (generator on *OR* off)

3.75m Molten-Na uranium reactor + 3.75m Solid State Generator + 4 upgraded medium deployable radiators (deployed; generator on *OR* off)

3.75m Molten-Na uranium reactor + 3.75m Solid State Generator + 2 upgraded "Huge" deployable radiators (deployed; generator on *OR* off)

Edited December 22, 2013 by Northstar1989