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

[merendel]

The big problem is that I also have deadly reentry installed, which means anything I try to send down there inevitably burns up on the way down.

That sounds like your just taking too aggressive a decent path. have you tried lingering for longer in the upper atmosphere to decelerate more before droping lower? I'm asumeing this craft of yours has wings so you should be able to leverage the lift to maintain altitude till your speed drops low enough to be safe to descend a bit more.

[Shad0wCatcher]

@Newb sounds like either an incompatibility with another mod or a corrupt install.

[WanderingOrange]

@Fractal_UK - What sort of things do you not want on the wiki? Are there specific details you'd like people to find themselves?

I think I have a firm understanding of Interstellar so as I need a bit of a challenge/goal until the next KSP update, updating the wiki seems a decent idea.

[BigD145]

I wouldn't mind seeing some screenshots showing certain parts and their usage. The Alcubierre comes to mind as well as thermal rocket fuel types. Part for part, should I be using a 9 mass LFO tank or 8ish mass ammonia tank, considering they have fairly close ISP's but very different volumes of fluids.

I'm thinking about a large warp taxi for landers and/or refuelers but I'm figuring out how to use it.

Edited February 7, 2014 by BigD145

[AndreyATGB]

I wouldn't mind seeing some screenshots showing certain parts and their usage. The Alcubierre comes to mind.

I'm thinking about a large warp taxi for landers and/or refuelers but I'm figuring out how to use it.

You want to warp when your relative velocity is at the lowest since you'll need to kill off all of it. If you're going to a planet on the other side of the sun you're gonna need insane dV to brake from it. The vista engine is pretty much necessary, build a huge power station and a functional network to avoid carrying reactors and generators with you. With the alcubierre drive you just need to get out of the atmosphere, no need for an orbit first so that makes launching heavy stuff much easier.

[BigD145]

Kerbin should be eclipsing the sun if you draw a straight a line from the sun out to your target body, with Kerbin and you in line. Let's say Jool-------you-Kerbin----Sun : in a straight line. Is that about right? I was going somewhat perpendicular to that line and getting just a thousand or so m/s over Kerbin's orbital velocity within Dres's SOI with a light 1.25m rocket. Did a flyby and went back to Kerbin and burned for half an hour so I wouldn't have to fine tune a warp trajectory into atmosphere.

[Kaa253]

Is it just me or is there something wrong with the 62.5cm ATTILA Thruster?

You'll probably need to be more specific. What sort of problem are you having?

Specifically the engine produces no thrust. It must be just my install if no one else has noticed it...

Static engine test.

Tip says Thrust = 260 kN at 100% throttle. No fx_exhaust going on at all. When the launch clamp is released an acceleration occurs... falling object style . He doesn't have a history of reliable reporting with this plugin but on this occasion MechJeb agrees with my observations... TWR = 0.

Under the same conditions but with the 1.25 m ATTILA Thruster there is nice blue light and smoke and on release it goes up... fast. I tried re-installing KSPI, after deleting WarpPlugin folder, results the same. Linux 64 - lots of mods.

Edited February 8, 2014 by Kaa253

[xfrankie]

Alright, microwave power once again...

2x 3.75m Fusion reactor, each with their own pair of generators (one direct conversion + one thermal), Transmitter on the top.

How it manages to drain 150% of produced power is beyond me, however that doesn't concern me as much as the fact that the Transmitter will actually shutdown the Reactors, because it drains simply everything and that causes loss of power to heat the reactor plasma...

After I set up my first powerplant (in the pic is 2nd, 1st one was recovered) I flew a 500 days mission to Dres. When I came back from Dres, I went to see how much He-3 was produced, only to find dead powerplant with absolutely no power - MJ and EC depleted.

When the message turned up for the first time (on 1st vessel), I suspected some shenenigans so I watched the powerplant for another moment. It was happily transmitting, not bothered by 0 MJ, probably because the priority-system worked fine. So, my tip goes on high time-warp & focus on other vessel causing the problem.

Anyone had simillar problems?

edit: just to clarify, the second powerplant was launched after the Dres mission, after recovery of the 1st one

Edited February 8, 2014 by xfrankie

[MaHuJa]

You want to warp when your relative velocity is at the lowest since you'll need to kill off all of it. If you're going to a planet on the other side of the sun you're gonna need insane dV to brake from it. The vista engine is pretty much necessary,

There are three ways to use the warp drive.

You're talking about the direct jump, where you go straight to the target planet and burn to the same speed.

To minimize the ÃŽâ€V required, you want to have a relative phase angle close to 0 - meaning you're lining up on the same side of the sun.

(Time is too small that it's worth specifying phase at departure vs arrival.)

As an aside, if the target has an atmosphere, do an aerocapture over several passes by warping back to the other side of the planet after each time.

The second way is to use three jumps to your destination. First, you jump to a position at a 90° phase angle from your start. Then you wait for the sun's gravity to slow you down to near 0m/s (this will be faster the closer you are to the sun, I believe) before you jump again, this time to -90° from your destination. When you've built up as much velocity as your destination, you jump straight to your target. This can reduce the ÃŽâ€V requirement to practically 0.

The third way is to combine the two velocity changes into one. If you're at ~0 or ~180 relative phase, this is just a matter of skipping one of the stops above. Otherwise, if you're not inclined to do the maths, you have to look at the "map" of the solar system, visualize the velocity vector of your origin and destination and in particular the difference, go to the place where the sun will accelerate you along that difference, and then jump to the destination.

[Lightwarrior]

Alright, microwave power once again...

2x 3.75m Fusion reactor, each with their own pair of generators (one direct conversion + one thermal), Transmitter on the top.

How it manages to drain 150% of produced power is beyond me, however that doesn't concern me as much as the fact that the Transmitter will actually shutdown the Reactors, because it drains simply everything and that causes loss of power to heat the reactor plasma...

After I set up my first powerplant (in the pic is 2nd, 1st one was recovered) I flew a 500 days mission to Dres. When I came back from Dres, I went to see how much He-3 was produced, only to find dead powerplant with absolutely no power - MJ and EC depleted.

When the message turned up for the first time (on 1st vessel), I suspected some shenenigans so I watched the powerplant for another moment. It was happily transmitting, not bothered by 0 MJ, probably because the priority-system worked fine. So, my tip goes on high time-warp & focus on other vessel causing the problem.

http://i.imgur.com/bPPZcp5.png

Anyone had simillar problems?

edit: just to clarify, the second powerplant was launched after the Dres mission, after recovery of the 1st one

This may be called "known bug", transmitter will try to transmit power based on both generators maximum power which will cause it to transfer more than is produced. You can just use single generator.... probably thermal, and you will not have this problem.

Also fusion reactors will not produce any tritium/he-3, they will use all tritium they breed, for tritium/he-3 production you'd better use fission reactors.

[Northstar1989]

The LiquidFuel/Oxidiser recovery is already implemented in Interstellar, you'll notice that the Sabatier reaction produces Oxidiser as well as LqdMethane. The power that is consumed is supposed to represent the electrolysis of water, the LiquidFuel part which is then fed back into the reaction. The reaction that you describe at the bottom isn't quite correct because only half the Hydrogen goes into water in the end product, the rest of it becomes bound up in the methane, so you do still need a supply of hydrogen.

You therefore see in Interstellar the reaction Hydrogen+Carbon Dioxide+Energy -> Oxygen and Methane.

I potentially want to allow an option to go the other way and decompose the methane into pyrolytic graphite, giving you to your hydrogen back. This gives you a closed loop reaction -> Carbon-Dioxide+Energy -> Oxygen; this has obvious uses if you're playing with any life support mods.

Read my posts more carefully and thoroughly. I address the loss of hydrogen to methane form- specifically by suggesting methane pyrolysis (CH4 + Energy --> C (solid) + 2 H2) to recycle excess methane, and allow for net production of oxygen (useful either for burning with hauled/mined LiquidFuel, or to allow complete utilization of all manufactured Methane), OR the use of the Reverse Water Gas Shift reaction (CO2 + H2 + Energy --> CO + H2O) to avoid the production of methane entirely...

The screenshots where the Sabatier Reaction produced Methane and Oxygen, due to automatic electrolysis of the water, were older ones. Since Water Hydrolysis is now a separate reaction, I figured you might have altered the reaction.

It doesn't actually make sense to have automatic Water Hydrolysis, as I might want to use that water for other things such as:

(1) A Life-support mod

(2) Production of Hydrogen Peroxide for Monopropellant production

(3) Emergency water-cooling systems, for heat management, if they're ever added

Additionally, I might not have the electricity immediately available to perform Water Hydrolysis. I should be able to deploy a small probe with an ISRU Refinery and nothing but a couple small solar panels, and perform the Sabatier Reaction until I run out of storage space for the Methane and Water. Then, I could deploy a nuclear reactor later on, and electrolyze much of that water to obtain LiquidFuel and Oxidizer back; perhaps utilize some of the water for Monopropellant production; and perhaps even pyrolyze some of the Methane to obtain back some of my LiquidFuel supply...

As it currently stands, I'm forced to deploy a powerful reactor right from the beginning, when the Sabatier Reaction, the first one I am likely to want to perform, is entirely spontaneous once I heat it up a bit. That doesn't make sense.

What makes even less sense, the ISRU refinery currently forces me to produce more Methane than I am able to utilize with the Oxidizer it produces- forcing me to throw a lot of my leverage mass away!

And, what about seeing addition of the Reverse Water Gas Shift Reaction? (for net production of LiquidWater- the Carbon Monoxide could just be released) Perhaps I'd rather not produce any Methane to start with- thus entirely avoiding the inefficiency of needing to pyrolyze my methane to recover my hydrogen...

CO2 + H2 + Energy --> CO + H2O

Water Electrolysis is already implemented, so recovering the hydrogen from the Reverse Water Gas Shift reaction is entirely trivial...

Regards,

Northstar

Edited February 8, 2014 by Northstar1989

[Northstar1989]

Another thought:

A lot of players are complaining about the difficulty of producing Monopropellant as it currently stands, due to the lack of available Ammonia.

Shouldn't we be able to just produce Ammonia directly out of Nitrogen-containing atmospheres (Mars is 1.9% Nitrogen in real life- only slightly less than the 2% Argon- which you already let us utilize on the game-analogue Duna...) via the Haber-Bosch Process?

N2 + 3 H2 → 2 NH3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber-Bosch

Also, I'm pretty sure you have your equation for Monopropellant production off. As it currently stands, the reaction appears to consume Hydrogen Peroxide and Ammonia, and produce only Monopropellant. But the actual NET reaction is:

2 H2O2 + 4 NH3 --> 4 H2O + 2 N2H4

Note the production of TWICE as much water as there is Hydrogen Peroxide consumed in the reaction (the Ammonia acts as a hydrogen-donor to the Hydrogen Peroxide) or Hydrazine produced. Since water is a useful resource, and Water Electrolysis has already given us the ability to turn it into LFO mix, the reaction should be *FIXED* to yield the proper products (Hydrazine *AND* Water).

See the following thread I started for a more in-depth discussion of all the equations I mentioned here:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68797-In-Situ-Resource-Utilization-Useful-Reactions

Regards,

Northstar

P.S. It seems to me, you currently have all the right resources implemented- Water, Ammonia, Hydrogen/LF, Oxygen/Oxidizer, Methane, and Monopropellant. You just need more of the reactions that allow these resources to be dynamically inter-converted, and fully utilized WITHOUT waste (such as producing twice as much Methane as you can burn) in the real world.

P.P.S. What are the chances you could allow a back-conversion of Methane into Kethane? This would at least allow SOME recycling of Methane for Hydrogen (LiquidFuel), without needing to throw out half our Methane stockpiles until you implement Methane pyrolysis- and would also allow it to be fed into other mods already utilizing Kethane- such as Orbital Contruction Re-Redux mod's 3D printer- which turns Kethane into RocketParts. Useful and semi-realistic since, with a couple more steps processing (don't make me show you the reactions necessary) you can turn Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen Gas into long-chain hydrocarbons (or hydrocarbons of any desired length) via the Fischer-Tropsch reaction, and then turn the long-chain hydrocarbons into structural plastics...

Edited February 8, 2014 by Northstar1989

[xfrankie]

This may be called "known bug", transmitter will try to transmit power based on both generators maximum power which will cause it to transfer more than is produced. You can just use single generator.... probably thermal, and you will not have this problem.

Also fusion reactors will not produce any tritium/he-3, they will use all tritium they breed, for tritium/he-3 production you'd better use fission reactors.

Thanks for clarifying the tritium-breeding for me.

However, it doesn't matter if you use both generators or just one; it needs MJs for running whether they are generated from Charged or Thermal power. The transmitter will take anything and everything, with two gen. it is 150% (somehow), and with only one as seen in the pic, 101.722%.

The 100% is taken by transmitter and the additional 1.7% (those -184MW) is taken to heat the reactor. This would be very elegantly solved by having adjustable Transciever throughput and telling it to send only 95-98% total power, so that the surplus is used to run the fusion. But as it stands now, fission reactor seem better for microwave despite having less than half power.

I'm not sure why I'm still typing this if it's a known bug (it wasn't to me, now it is)... Maybe it will help someone who's wondering why their reactors are going out like candles.

edit: Or did you mean that the reactor shuts down during timewarp because of the two generators, while with only one it would survive?

(it's very much possible I misunderstood you, my bad)

Edited February 8, 2014 by xfrankie
possibly, I'm being silly

[InfinityArch]

That sounds like your just taking too aggressive a decent path. have you tried lingering for longer in the upper atmosphere to decelerate more before droping lower? I'm asumeing this craft of yours has wings so you should be able to leverage the lift to maintain altitude till your speed drops low enough to be safe to descend a bit more.

I've tried almost everything short of a straight out powered descent (though granted, doing shuttle style banking to slow down high in the atmosphere isn't on that list as of yet, so I might prove myself wrong), and I'm still dying. Note that I'm using both Ferram and DR, so there's basically no lift to be had at high hypersonic speeds. It simply seems to be a matter of DR being made primarily with Kerbin reentry in mind.

[Lightwarrior]

xfrankie,

Yes, tried this also... and strange thing is that even if you will disable transmitter reactor sometimes fails at maximum timewarp. I think it is not caused by transmitter at all, because transmitter has lower priority and should never cause reactor shutdown. I defenitely remember it worked better in 0.10.2... strange...

Also yes, fission reactors are better for power transmission, not only because they have no such problems and can produce lots of tritium, they also can run almost forever while landed on surface of some planet/moon, just add a refinery and few tanks for depleted fuel and thats it, reactor is self-sufficient. You only need to replace those tanks when they are full.

Add:

Also tested it again, and tritium=>He-3 decay and nuclear fuel reprocession does not work on off-focus vessels. Just left those transmitter with refineries/tritium breeding for ~1 year and it ran out of fuel (reactors are full of actinides) and produced ~3000 tritium and 0 He-3. I turned on fusion reactor on rover to provide power for refineries, turned on reprocessing and it cleared actinides in ~2 days, also producing ~2 He-3...

Edited February 8, 2014 by Lightwarrior

[ctbram]

ah yes it was running out of power during transmission but in the past all this did was pause the transmission and then when enough power built up again it would transmit a bit more and continue that until all the data was transmitted. I'd get all the data, just not all in one solid transmission, has this changed?

If so I will need to remember to add sufficient battery to all my probes that will transmit data. I have been generally building probes with enough power to allow the antennas / dishes to remain open. The issue with power and transmission is the number of mits to transmit data and the ec/mit are not always displayed in the VAB so to the first time you realize you don't have sufficient power is when the damn things are Gm's away in space!

Thank you for the response. I really do not mind the fact that running out of power corrupts the data transmission. I always thought it was kind of a cheat that you could get the full amount by transmitting little chunk as you gained more charge. I'll be sure to add batteries to all things that transmit in the future. From the wiki it appears the three stock antenna/dishes transmit 2 mit packets and range from 5 to 10 ec/mit so 20ec is all that is needed. I think my probes just using generators and produce a constant 15ec. This is enough to drive the antenna's and dishes while idol and acting as a relay but apparently not enough for science data transmission.

You made it sound like the amount of ec is not dependent on the antenna but your seismic mod itself. So how much ec do I need to build into my probes that transmit your seismic data? I don't really want to stick a 100ec battery on board fly out 12 new stations to mun and minmus and then find that I still do not have enough power. This is one of my gripes. If there is a certain amount of a certain resource required to do a certain thing then this information should be available as you are building things not found out on accident after you've shipped **** off to elo!

Edited February 8, 2014 by ctbram

[federicoaa]

I tried today the impactor. Works fine but it overrides the stock science experiment for the accelerometer, it there a way to have both experiments available?

Also, the impactor result packet is too big, could you make it smaller so it doesn't take too long to transmit?

EDIT: I guess I've been ninja'd (I'm new to this terminology XD)

[Jasmir]

Hi Fractal,

the Fusions-Reactors that acting as Powersource for the Microwave-Transmitters are still anonying unstable and sometimes go offline. The only difference is, that it is random and you get the "plasma-heating" -warning all the time the transmitter is on. Maybe a kind of inflight tweakable that can limit the "beamed power" could solve that issue? (and if you are make this, i wish the same on the receiver-side )

[NeoAcario]

Fractal_UK

New bug amendment for you! You may recall how I mentioned that my power station wasn't generation power properly at the outer ring of Generators. Now that I've changed to using ONLY the Direct Power Conversion Gens and dropped the Solid State Gens, not only are they not producing power at the Gens, the Reactors THEMSELVES aren't even throttling up.

Would you mind taking a look at this? Could be an unspotted bug with regards to Dusty Plasma Reactors, Direct Conversion Gens, and the Microwave Transmitters.

I should be getting almost 30 GW, not 12.5 GW (showing higher due to the transfer stage reactor).

~Steve

Edited February 8, 2014 by NeoAcario

[AndreyATGB]

Could anyone explain why the plasma thruster is stuck on quantum vacuum mode even though I have liquid fuel on the ship? This is with Real Fuels and RSS, sandbox mode. It doesn't cycle through modes, just stays on quantum unlike other engines which cycle through fuels I don't even have on the ship.

[Jivaii]

What's 0.1 AU from Kerbol? (Was messing around with the heat manager thing and was wondering how close to kerbol that would be.)

[AndreyATGB]

What's 0.1 AU from Kerbol? (Was messing around with the heat manager thing and was wondering how close to kerbol that would be.)

1/10th the distance of Kerbin from Kerbol. So about 1.400.000 km.

[Jivaii]

1/10th the distance of Kerbin from Kerbol. So about 1.400.000 km.

Sweet, now I know where to drop the solar furnace plants.

[Fractal_UK]

the Fusions-Reactors that acting as Powersource for the Microwave-Transmitters are still anonying unstable and sometimes go offline. The only difference is, that it is random and you get the "plasma-heating" -warning all the time the transmitter is on. Maybe a kind of inflight tweakable that can limit the "beamed power" could solve that issue? (and if you are make this, i wish the same on the receiver-side )

New bug amendment for you! You may recall how I mentioned that my power station wasn't generation power properly at the outer ring of Generators. Now that I've changed to using ONLY the Direct Power Conversion Gens and dropped the Solid State Gens, not only are they not producing power at the Gens, the Reactors THEMSELVES aren't even throttling up.

Would you mind taking a look at this? Could be an unspotted bug with regards to Dusty Plasma Reactors, Direct Conversion Gens, and the Microwave Transmitters.

I should be getting almost 30 GW, not 12.5 GW (showing higher due to the transfer stage reactor).

Looks like this is a bug with the enumeration of maximum power with direct conversion generators - the microwave transmitter is thinking that they are thermal generators so the power it is trying to consume is totally disconnected from what it should be. If I correct this problem and use my trick for fusion reactors (like I did with thermal rockets) of drawing a little less power than the maximum so that the plasma heating doesn't get affected, we get a nice stable situation.

(rubbish rocket but it demonstrates the fix at least!)

[Jacksonian]

I'm still having issues with the Dragon capsule mod. I saw earlier where you said it was an issue with the radiation (?), but that it was supposed to be fixed in the last update. Its still collapsing at launch for me every time.