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

[RadHazard]

Is anyone playing around with plasma thrusters? I'm in career mode so I only have upgraded nuclear reactors right now and they are not a great option for plasma thrusters, so I'm trying to go the microwave energy path. The problem with this is that the microwave receiver limitations are more stringent then remotetech where the dish must actually be pointed at the transmitters/relays.

So the options I see are to either flood the entire area with transmitters and relays or to build ships with multiple receiver dishes all over the ship.

What are you guys doing?

I've had good results with just putting 3x symmetry receivers around my craft that face slightly backwards and a fourth receiver pointing forward. I've found that you can usually get an angle that will give you a decent percentage of power, especially if you have a powerful network as Deredere mentions. I've only tested in LKO with a relay constellation though, so I don't know the best way to do it if you're trying to go interplanetary.

[cpw]

This plugin is fundamentally broken on Linux. It only runs when it is installed alone, and even then, barely. It appears that mono is crashing with OutOfMemory errors whenever this mod is installed with almost any other mod at all. I remove this mod, and I can run about 20-30 mods, install this mod, and I can run *maybe* one.

Using 64bit vs 32bit unity (BOTH of which work well on linux) doesn't seem to make a difference. I think, based on some googling, there is something in this mod that is causing the mono garbagecollector to freak out, and crash with OOM. Very disappointed

[cjones]

Thanks guys. I considered going the damned robotics route with an articulated receiver dish, but I was worried about CoM moving too far off axis when rotating to face very shallow angles and also the annoyance of having to micromanage it. I think the long term solution will be flooding systems with transmitters and relays though. This is still kind of annoying though.

Still, I do like the heavy limitations that are imposed on the different technologies. They really make things interesting when trying to use them.

[Ballistic Idiot]

This plugin is fundamentally broken on Linux. It only runs when it is installed alone, and even then, barely. It appears that mono is crashing with OutOfMemory errors whenever this mod is installed with almost any other mod at all. I remove this mod, and I can run about 20-30 mods, install this mod, and I can run *maybe* one.

I get very similar behaviour with Windows as well. It doesn't always hang while loading but it's always unstable when Interstellar and any other mod are installed. The crashes seem to happen at any transition between my space port yard and the VAB, SPH, or research campus (all buildings where you can view parts) for sure and can randomly happen in other places.

[Fractal_UK]

If you are having issues with 32 bit Linux/Windows you likely need to either pick up some texture reduction systems or you have an installation issue with Interstellar. There does seem to be an issue with Linux 64 that I can't, at present, explain.

[illectro]

Has anyone with my set of mods managed to get a working solar power station beaming megajoules? Whenever my test station (Panels, engine, probe, radiators) gets close enough to the sun to generate megajoule range power outputs the UI locks up and won't let me control the vehicle, it's like I'm stuck in timewarp. I tested this in a spare savefile and it refuses to work.

[seb-eisdrache]

why does a fusion recator not work?

my Ship is on the launchpat, there are radiators on it and a electric generator.

[TheTom]

Did you start it? Fusions must be started. Make sure you have batteries on board for a restart.... later in space.

[Fractal_UK]

Has anyone with my set of mods managed to get a working solar power station beaming megajoules? Whenever my test station (Panels, engine, probe, radiators) gets close enough to the sun to generate megajoule range power outputs the UI locks up and won't let me control the vehicle, it's like I'm stuck in timewarp. I tested this in a spare savefile and it refuses to work.

If you can send me a copy of your KSP.log file, I might be able to shed some light on what's going on.

[cpw]

If you are having issues with 32 bit Linux/Windows you likely need to either pick up some texture reduction systems or you have an installation issue with Interstellar. There does seem to be an issue with Linux 64 that I can't, at present, explain.

I was using the active texture reduction system - it didn't help, even with the "aggressive" setting.

[seb-eisdrache]

Did you start it? Fusions must be started. Make sure you have batteries on board for a restart.... later in space.

there was just not enough energy to start the reactor.

[cjones]

Has anyone with my set of mods managed to get a working solar power station beaming megajoules? Whenever my test station (Panels, engine, probe, radiators) gets close enough to the sun to generate megajoule range power outputs the UI locks up and won't let me control the vehicle, it's like I'm stuck in timewarp. I tested this in a spare savefile and it refuses to work.

At what altitude? Was planning on a 500000km ring of solar transmitters next.

[Boamere]

This plugin is fundamentally broken on Linux. It only runs when it is installed alone, and even then, barely. It appears that mono is crashing with OutOfMemory errors whenever this mod is installed with almost any other mod at all. I remove this mod, and I can run about 20-30 mods, install this mod, and I can run *maybe* one.

Using 64bit vs 32bit unity (BOTH of which work well on linux) doesn't seem to make a difference. I think, based on some googling, there is something in this mod that is causing the mono garbagecollector to freak out, and crash with OOM. Very disappointed

Have your turned your graphics settings down (planet res down to lowest plus render and others to lowest, this stopped my crashes)

[Fractal_UK]

Has anyone with my set of mods managed to get a working solar power station beaming megajoules? Whenever my test station (Panels, engine, probe, radiators) gets close enough to the sun to generate megajoule range power outputs the UI locks up and won't let me control the vehicle, it's like I'm stuck in timewarp. I tested this in a spare savefile and it refuses to work.

I was just testing this and I think I've released what the problem might be - the solar panels and microwave transmitters produce/consume ElectricCharge in constrast to most Interstellar parts, which are using Megajoules - that means the consumption system is less refined. The transmitter draws power equal to what the solar panels are producing and the probe will draw a little bit more power on top of that. Over time, that will mean that the ElectricCharge on the ship will tend to deplete unless you have another source of power, like an RTG or two, that doesn't let the microwave transmitter steal its power.

A ship running out of ElectricCharge will cause the behaviour you described.

If you add an RTG or tiny nuclear reactor or something to your power satellite, that should take care of the problem. Hope that helps you.

Edited January 17, 2014 by Fractal_UK

[Rainoa]

weird i could have sworn i had a account here... anyways >.<

thought i read a post a while back saying a update was happening soon!? or am i thinking maybe the wrong addon!? :3

The antimatter storage having to be right next to the collector + the nuke/antimatter reactor's next to the generators, is this a bug or something meant to be!?

also the "alcubierre drive" would be nice to have a option to turn it off before u go to launch or have it off by default.

[biglightbt]

Ok, I hate to be one of those guys that only posts when something free isn't working right, however I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of performance from Thermal Turbojets. Irregardless of how many intakes I put on a craft both the 1.25m and 2.5m Thermal Turbojets (Coupled to an upgraded Aegletes II reactor in career mode) suffer from a severe thrust drop at roughly 15,000m. It also seems as though the Intake Atm resource and Intake Air resource do not scale appropriately with Intake Atm often running short far before Intake Air. Using FAR I can even confirm that the engines are getting enough air in Intake Air mode. Even though the engine is being provided with 113% the amount of air it needs to operate at full power it still starts to lose thrust as though its being starved of atmosphere.

If I swap out the crafts twin 2.5m Thermal Turbojets with a total of eight stock KSP TurboJet engines, leaving the reactors with the same amount of air intakes I can get well over 30,000m before needing to use an alternate propulsion method as the engines become oxygen starved. What gives!?!

[Matrix Aran]

A quick question: Can anyone point me towards some detailed information on Tritium breeding?

I have a lot of designs that produce a small amount of tritium on the launchpad, but once in space the reactor fails to produce any tritium whatsoever. The Interstellar wiki has very little information on the subject, and the KSP forums search function is very lacking at best to find any individual post on the subject. I'm rather eager to figure out not just what I'm doing wrong, but the mechanics behind how tritium production works in Interstellar.

[Fractal_UK]

Ok, I hate to be one of those guys that only posts when something free isn't working right, however I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of performance from Thermal Turbojets. Irregardless of how many intakes I put on a craft both the 1.25m and 2.5m Thermal Turbojets (Coupled to an upgraded Aegletes II reactor in career mode) suffer from a severe thrust drop at roughly 15,000m. It also seems as though the Intake Atm resource and Intake Air resource do not scale appropriately with Intake Atm often running short far before Intake Air. Using FAR I can even confirm that the engines are getting enough air in Intake Air mode. Even though the engine is being provided with 113% the amount of air it needs to operate at full power it still starts to lose thrust as though its being starved of atmosphere.

If I swap out the crafts twin 2.5m Thermal Turbojets with a total of eight stock KSP TurboJet engines, leaving the reactors with the same amount of air intakes I can get well over 30,000m before needing to use an alternate propulsion method as the engines become oxygen starved. What gives!?!

A stock KSP turbojet has an Isp of up to 2500s, which is ~13x what you're getting. That means the thermal turbojet needs 13x the air to produce the same thrust, so while turbojets lose thrust in the mid-20kms, nuclear powered jets lose thrust at much much lower altitude. Ultimately, they do not fly particularly fast or particularly high, that is the price you pay for an aircraft that only needs refueling every couple of years. Forget about building a playload-carrying SSTO of any kind, building an SSTO that delivers itself and some Kerbals to orbit will be a decent challenge.

I would suggest trying what you are doing again when you have unlocked new reactors that work at higher temperatures, then you'll get more specific impulse and better performance at high altitude.

A lot of the early Interstellar technologies are not universally effective and pose some engineering challenges until you learn what you can and can't do with them.

A quick question: Can anyone point me towards some detailed information on Tritium breeding?

I have a lot of designs that produce a small amount of tritium on the launchpad, but once in space the reactor fails to produce any tritium whatsoever. The Interstellar wiki has very little information on the subject, and the KSP forums search function is very lacking at best to find any individual post on the subject. I'm rather eager to figure out not just what I'm doing wrong, but the mechanics behind how tritium production works in Interstellar.

All you need is a Lithium tank and a Tritium tank anywhere on your ship and a nuclear reactor, it can be a fission or fusion reactor, though you can't do it with a fusion reactor using pure He-3 fuel.

I suspect you're experiencing a weird issue introduced in KSP 0.23, if you time accelerate while tritium breeding up to 1000x or so, you should begin to see Lithium being used up and Tritium being added. KSP doesn't allow draws of ALL_VESSEL flow resources of less than 1e-5 for some bizarre reason, which means the draw isn't big enough at low time acceleration not be zeroed out. I've written some code for the next version of ORS, which reimplements ALL_VESSEL resource draw behaviour in a better way and that will allow me to resolve this problem in the next version of Interstellar.

[biglightbt]

Thanks for the great reply. For some reason the way ISP works just didn't click in my head. I was wondering if it was just a part of the way the mod worked and I simply didn't have the technology to fully utilize that part yet. Thanks for the incredible mod and great support! Keep up the great work!

One other question though. It seems pretty clear that Beamed Microwave is the direction I need to be going at the moment. Any tips for assembling a reliable satellite relay network? I actually did check the Wiki and there was very little information about how the phased array transceivers function. Are they directional? Do i need to use the Relay feature or have one receiving and one transmitting?

[Kevin_010]

Mostly working, still some strangeness

[Jyro117]

This mod is pretty awesome. I have a few comments and concerns which maybe you (Fractal_UK) can address and/or think about. I know other people might disagree with me, but that is to be expected and this is only my opinion:

1. Heat – It is really only an issue on active vessels which kind of takes away from the challenge because I can very easily launch some 3.75m reactors into space with only a couple small radiators. I make sure to get them into a ‘good enough’ orbit quickly and return to space center before they over heat. This means I can easily ignore the heat mechanic for any vessel I don’t plan on actively using… i.e. setting up a microwave network.
   
2. Microwave Networks - I’m not sure this intended. I see A LOT of people launching massive nuclear power systems into space and setting them up around Kerbin. After figuring out how the microwave networks actually works I realized all I need to do is put a bunch of 3.75m reactors on the ground and face their transmitters to the sky and just put a relay directly above them. In under and our I went from 0MW to 12GW by simply putting a bunch of non-upgraded 3.75m reactors just outside the 2.3km range of the KSC Launchpad/runway and made them face the sky. I went from launching rockets to super crazy powered everything in an hour… Sort of killed the idea of progression and now I just feel crazy powerful. Honestly, microwave networks needs to be looked at because becoming super powerful so fast just kills any sense of progression. Make the atmosphere have a more negative effect on transmission power, make relays generate heat in the background if they are transferring a ton of energy without lots of radiators, make the power decay over large distances. In my opinion, it should be more rewarding to actually get a ship with an onboard reactor into space than just building a quick and dirty microwave network like I did above. Alternatively, maybe consider making microwave transmission its own special node later in the tech tree. As it stands now I can simply build a ship, point it at a relay and I have all the power I could ever dream of.
   
3. ISRU Refinery vs Resupply Ship – Currently the ISRU Refinery seems vastly weak compared to simply launching resupply ships at regular intervals. This might come from the fact I can send all the UF4 or ThF4 (ThF4 via tweakable in VAB) to my ships and actually sending a lander to the ground and returning with a refinery is more effort. Aluminum just doesn’t feel as useful as simply building ships with more fuel tanks or assembling ships via docking in LKO is always a better option, I couldn’t ever find a time where it would actually be better to use Aluminum Hybrid Rockets for anything. Deinonychus 1D Liquid Methane/Oxygen Engine is very awesome on ground but because it only has a 368 ISP in space I was always using 390ISP LV-909 or 800ISP LV-N engines for any long distance trips. The LV engines usually give me plenty of mileage which made the idea of collecting fuel for the methane engine not worth it. As far as liquid fuel goes it is useful for it, but Kethane kind of defeats the point of it since I can find Kethane on almost all celestial bodies whereas LqdWater is only on a few locations. Side note, maybe it’s a bug but the Methane engine seems to sort of drift to the side like the gimbal is locked when using multiple engines in a circle around a ship. Maybe if science labs couldn’t process nuclear fuel I would actually use the refinery, but as it stands now it just seems to be junk and I can’t find a good use for it compared to resupply ships or mining Kethane. Maybe if I couldn’t easily launch resupply ships with a bunch of Lithium/UF4/ThF4 I would feel the need for using the ISRU.
   
4. Science Lab’s Science – The idea of just sticking a lab into space somewhere (on Duna/Mun/etc) and it automagically collecting science is an odd concept. While it provides an easy way to get lots of science it seems… too easy? Why not change the mod to add more science experiments (creatures in space labs, bacteria tests, medical exams, psychological tests, etc) and have the vessels need to actually transmit/return the Kerbin instead of spontaneously ‘creating’ science by just sitting in a cylinder and doing ‘research’. Another simple solution would be to add a science cap or degeneration over time per celestial body. It would be more interesting and put more emphasis exploration instead of putting a bunch of science labs on the Mun and pressing time warp. (Same with the Computer Core’s AI).
   
5. Technology Nodes - I really feel like there should be a separation of technology upgrades from new technology nodes. As it currently stands there are only a few limited ‘choices’ to make when advancing at the end of the tech tree. It would be more interesting to decide if I should get Fusion Power or upgrade my Fission Reactors. Splitting them up into more nodes (even if the total science cost stayed the same) would mean at some point I would have to decide which technology would be a better upgrade. This would be better than a no compromise choice of “yes, I want more powerâ€Â.
   

Take what you will from this, I don’t really expect anything but I figure more feedback can’t hurt.

[RadHazard]

Thanks for the great reply. For some reason the way ISP works just didn't click in my head. I was wondering if it was just a part of the way the mod worked and I simply didn't have the technology to fully utilize that part yet. Thanks for the incredible mod and great support! Keep up the great work!

One other question though. It seems pretty clear that Beamed Microwave is the direction I need to be going at the moment. Any tips for assembling a reliable satellite relay network? I actually did check the Wiki and there was very little information about how the phased array transceivers function. Are they directional? Do i need to use the Relay feature or have one receiving and one transmitting?

Easiest method to make a reliable relay network is to put 3 equally spaced relays in an orbit 120 degrees apart from each other and at least 700 km high. Technically you can go as low as 600 km (equal to Kerbin's equatorial radius), but going higher gives you some margin for error. In this configuration, any craft in an equatorial orbit can see at least one relay, and most of the time two. Each relay can also see every other relay, so this means a receiving craft can connect to every transmitting craft in equatorial orbit around Kerbin via the relay network. If you want perfect coverage for polar orbits you'll need to do something fancier, e.g. Molniya orbits.

As for how the transceivers function: Transmitters and Relays are not directional. Since they are on separate craft, it is abstracted away and assumed that they rotate to provide optimal coverage. Receivers are directional, and must be pointed toward the transmitter or relay to get the best efficiency. As your angle increases, your efficiency drops, eventually going to zero at a 90 degree angle or above. I recommend putting several receivers on your craft and rolling just before any burns in order to find the angle that provides the most power.

Relay satellites only need one transceiver, set to relay mode.

Edited January 17, 2014 by RadHazard

[Deredere]

This mod is pretty awesome. I have a few comments and concerns which maybe you (Fractal_UK) can address and/or think about. I know other people might disagree with me, but that is to be expected and this is only my opinion:

Bro, stop trying to shut down the party. (This is my dissenting opinion)

I don't agree that microwaves need a nerf. The system as it is is both incredibly powerful and incredibly limited, which is great.

Yeah, launching becomes trivial, but first - when is it not trivial? The only difference is you're upgrading from 200 tons of fuel to 5 tons. You say "it kills progression" but first - if you're getting launch thrusts, you're just about at the end of the tech tree, so you don't have much further to progress. Second, after launching the 25 moon/minmus missions and/or spending the better part of a day navigating the whole solar system you need to max out the vanilla tech tree, you should be just about over putting together huge asparagus monstrosities. Third, late game goals like returning from the surface of Eve and getting to Eeloo are still challenging with microwaves going around.

Fourth, microwave power is very ill-suited for some applications. Landing, for instance. With your power fluctuating wildly and even potentially shutting off completely, landing with a plasma thruster is a nightmare. I still use chemical rockets for landers.

If you're playing sandbox I can understand the sentiment, because it totally makes all those rockets worthless, but this mod isn't intended for sandbox.

About labs - well, I don't disagree, but getting the Alcubierre drive without them - well, I'm not even sure it's possible.

Definitely do agree about ISRU, it needs a massive bump.

[AndreyATGB]

Maxing the tech tree in 0.23 without labs is probably not possible. You can get maybe 500-700 science per planet/moon if you do it right. I don't remember how much the alcubierre drive costs (5500?) but I'm pretty sure there isn't enough science in the game for this.

[Domfluff]

Maxing the tech tree in 0.23 without labs is probably not possible. You can get maybe 500-700 science per planet/moon if you do it right.

Now, I don't have a full understanding of how Science is calculated in KSP, but I'm playing through career mode with Interstellar, and my last two manned missions (Gilly and Dres) both netted me over 1,000 science apiece - Gilly was 1,056 science, and Dres was a little more, as I recall. These were also not optimal missions - I could have taken science labs with me, for example.

I have two labs on the Mun (with TAC life support) These are generating about a science point a day. I'm taking things easy - focusing on one mission at a time - so these usually give me a bump of 100-200 science per mission, between supply missions.

I mentioned before, but I think having a science-creating part (or at least something with long-term activity) is something that KSP needs. It gives reasons to set up bases, settle and colonise - developing the solar system for more than just the prestige. It's also a reason to have manned spaceflight, which is always tricky to justify.