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

[tdstrange]

Are microwave transmitters supposed to always use ~101% of available power? I set up what I thought was a working relay array prior to 10.3, now after upgrading, my fusion ground station continually drains megajoules with the transmitter active, until reaching 0 at which point it stops working until manually restarting. What's going on here?

Also, my relay sats at geostationary altitude are no longer seeing the ground station sitting at KSC. Was the effective range modified? And would it be possible to get a statement of what the transmission range actually is? There's nothing in the in game descriptions or the wiki, and I cant find anything in this thread, although admittedly I only read back about 10 of the 700 pages.

[merendel]

How much power is needed (sorry if that is in the descriptions, I don't have Kerbal running)? Right now, since the reactor shut down, I am only getting power from 8 big solar panels and a bunch of batteries. Do the UF4 tank, refinery, science lab, reactor, etc. all have to be connected directly, or is it OK to have them connected via docking ports and scaffolding?

it needs 5MW as I recall, those solars are not going to cut it as they dont convert to MW unless you transmit it off and then recieve it back. If that nuke is part of a microwave network swap its transmiter to recieve and that should get you power. Otherwise your going to need to dock a ship with at least the tiny reactor or a reciever (if you've got a power network) to get the proccess rolling.

[slakr007]

it needs 5MW as I recall, those solars are not going to cut it as they dont convert to MW unless you transmit it off and then recieve it back. If that nuke is part of a microwave network swap its transmiter to recieve and that should get you power. Otherwise your going to need to dock a ship with at least the tiny reactor or a reciever (if you've got a power network) to get the proccess rolling.

Rgr. I knew it was something stupid I was missing.

[ABZB]

I have the 2.5 meter antimatter reactor attached directly to the 2.5 meter generator. I already have .37 grams of antimatter, and my thermalpower is maxed. However, my generator is generating no power, although it does tell me that its efficiency is 50.7%

I had a stage with a small fission plant to power it into orbit (this is my first antimatter power station). I first became aware of this issue after I staged that away. Is this a bug? is there a way to fix it?

[merendel]

I have the 2.5 meter antimatter reactor attached directly to the 2.5 meter generator. I already have .37 grams of antimatter, and my thermalpower is maxed. However, my generator is generating no power, although it does tell me that its efficiency is 50.7%

I had a stage with a small fission plant to power it into orbit (this is my first antimatter power station). I first became aware of this issue after I staged that away. Is this a bug? is there a way to fix it?

is anything actualy requesting power from it? Unlike fision reactors an antimater will throttle all the way down to 0% if there is no demand for power.

[bonesbro]

I think that the VAB's calculations of thermal energy at low Kerbol orbit are incorrect. I have a craft with an upgraded 3.75m Aegletes 2, four upgraded huge radiators, four gigantor panels, and six 1x6 panels. The VAB claimed my max thermal dissipation would be 51GW at 0.001 AU, with a max radiator dissipation of 54.5GW. However, I'm sitting at 13,330,000m with full solar panel exposure and my waste heat is only at 1,6M / 40M and pretty much holding steady, about 1580 / 3500K, radiating 566MW each. The gigantors have an energy flow of about 44000 (44MW, yes?) and heat production of about 22 MW.

When I add an additional gigantor, the VAB claims that my heat production at 0.001AU would increase by 9GW, but they're only putting out 22MW of heat at that distance.

It would also be great if the thermal helper in the VAB could report power flow from solar panels; particularly useful for low-orbit solar satellites, ion probes, and antimatter containment pods.

[ABZB]

is anything actualy requesting power from it? Unlike fision reactors an antimater will throttle all the way down to 0% if there is no demand for power.

Yes, I have a slight MegaJoules draw for the antimatter containment. I have a lot of that left, so I am not near exploding by any means (the draw is .04 and I have several thousand).

The immediate issue is I have no electriccharge left, and I can no longer maneuver (I used up RCS sooner than I thought) . (this is a manned ship, so I can still ocntrol at least).

I also have power transmitter (the smaller non-folding one). I managed to get stuck in an orbit and position where I am unable to match it to any power transmitters.

I am sending a ship to dock with it now, hopefully if this is a bug i can jostle it by interacting... Once I finish orbiting the rescuer I will see what happens if I try to transmit with the power sender/receiver.

.... I attached the docking port backwards...

Also, activiantign power transmission on the factory does not do anything. transmitter says that it is active, but nothing changes

Edited February 21, 2014 by ABZB

[merendel]

Not sure what could be your problem other than possibly a fuel flow issue. Also since its a maned mission if your reciever issue is just that its pointed in the wrong direction but the craft itself has LOS you could always just have the kerbal get out and give it a nudge unless the RCS thrusteres used up the spacesuit reserve as well.

[ecat]

Still playing with Antimatter, a few points, sorry if they've been covered before:

1) I reiterate the problem of collecting AM when the collector and contaminant device are separated by docking ports. This may be a SQUAD/resource issue?

2) When I tell a contaminant device connected to one or more collectors to 'Stop Charging', something I can only do when it is empty, I expect it to remain in this state until I tell it start charging. I do not expect it to magically take control the situation and switch itself on.

3) Megajoules Power Management Display: When a containment device is 'Collecting' this display shows the power this device is consuming, it also shows this power added to the 'DC Electrical System' and so to the total Power Demand. ie an empty 3.5m containment device requiring 200kW ends up consuming 200kW as a storage tank + 200kW as part of the electrical system for a total of 400kW.

Something that has been covered before: the VAB display. Please add a check box preventing it from appearing until requested. Also check out the MechJeb source for compact display modes and how to handle/prevent 'click through'. The latter especially could be copied directly from their code as iirc they freely copied it from someone else.

[Blackstar]

I don't think the Vista is OP. You can get tons of delta-v and even more thrust with a decent microwave network and plasma thrusters.

Microwave power seems more OP to me than the Vista. Beaming gigawatts through space with a beam tightly focused enough not to dissipate over interplanetary distances, pinpoint accuracy, and automagic targeting of the active vessel?

Needs some downsides, like instantly cooking any Kerbal who goes on EVA while the ship is receiving that much power.

[AndreyATGB]

Microwave power seems more OP to me than the Vista. Beaming gigawatts through space with a beam tightly focused enough not to dissipate over interplanetary distances, pinpoint accuracy, and automagic targeting of the active vessel?

Needs some downsides, like instantly cooking any Kerbal who goes on EVA while the ship is receiving that much power.

I agree it needs a nerf for Kerbin based stations. Right now there's pretty much no reason to send reactors in orbit instead of building a really large vessel with 10 reactors on the surface. Though in general I don't think it's insanely OP, you do need a network after all to be able to relay stuff around, especially for operations outside of Kerbin orbit. You might lose power unexpectedly when burning to get captured by a planet as well.

[Donziboy2]

I agree it needs a nerf for Kerbin based stations. Right now there's pretty much no reason to send reactors in orbit instead of building a really large vessel with 10 reactors on the surface. Though in general I don't think it's insanely OP, you do need a network after all to be able to relay stuff around, especially for operations outside of Kerbin orbit. You might lose power unexpectedly when burning to get captured by a planet as well.

Im hoping costs will be a big incentive later on, you wont be able to afford to build and maintain a 200GW transmitter station right next to KSC.

[K3-Chris]

Can we edit the KSPi wiki? I understand that Fractal_UK doesn't have time to keep it current, can players that figure out how stuff works add to the wiki? it's pretty sparse and outdated.

[Ethan3369]

Ya anyone can edit the wiki.

[ctbram]

Emmmm It's hard to plan when nothing is shared by the author to indicate the amount of mits it is going to take to transmit the data or what the algorithm is to determine it BEFORE you build your lander!!! Like people are going to build a device and then make it a secret how much energy it will take to transmit the data! Really? Every time I transmit seismic data from this thing the amount of mits required are different. There is no discernable pattern so you are left to guess! I put 10 times the ec on this ship as I have on my mun and minmus sensors and they had 50% battery left after completing the ****ing transmission. So how the ****ing hell is someone supposed to plan mr. speaking out your ass?

Furthermore! 13000 ec to transmit data from one 500 science tee exp is ****ing ******ed! What? People are expected to build a warp drive starship with 10000000000 DV to carry the ****ing batteries for and 500 level experiment and then build 3.75m landers with griffon xxx engines to carry the god damn batteries!!!! I mean common 13000 mits is ridiculous!!! What is it going to take from eloo 15000000000000000000000 ec?

and I redid the math to show how unreasonable requiring 13000+ mits to transmit 500 level science results really is...

all antenna / dishes xmit 2 mits / packet => 13000 mits will require 6500 packets

most all antenna / dishes transmit science data at 15 ec / packet => 6500 packets will require 97500 ec!

most all antenna / dishes transmit at a rate of 1 packet / .3 sec => 6500 packets would require 1950 sec

(1) and (2) above imply a rate of 97500 ec/1950sec or 50ec/sec

So you either would have to lug 97500 ec of batteries or some way to generate around 50ec/s. I am not going to stick 25+ solar panels (which by the time you have this experiment is the primary ec generation source) on a small probe that should only need to carry a small ec generation source, a small battery, the seismic sensor and an antenna or dish because it would be ridiculous! Furthermore removing the stock 500 level sensor and replacing it with one that requires getting to 2000+ levels of the science tree to get the generators needed to produce 50ec/s is also unreasonable and clearly self serving as you now force people into your own high level tech tree to transmit low level science!

QED - 13000 mits to transfer 500 level science is ridiculous

Edited February 21, 2014 by ctbram

[SorensonPA]

Something I noticed while farting around in the data files for my own ends: the 3.75 tokamak has mass roughly in line with its scale compared to the 2.5, but its power output is over twice what one would think it to be given volume cubing. Is that some interesting little particular about that specific reactor design or perhaps an oversight from when you were setting up the files given every other size upgrade is an 8x cubing?

[Blackstar]

OTOH, as someone who's actually worked with real life seismic data before, I can say that 6500 packets is downright tiny for it.

[merendel]

Microwave power seems more OP to me than the Vista. Beaming gigawatts through space with a beam tightly focused enough not to dissipate over interplanetary distances, pinpoint accuracy, and automagic targeting of the active vessel?

Needs some downsides, like instantly cooking any Kerbal who goes on EVA while the ship is receiving that much power.

Well how far you could theoretically send a beam of light or any similar energy stream through a perfect vacuum mostly depends on the precision of your lenses or focusing device. Most losses would be through the beam spreading out as it travles, aka instead of a perfect cylinder its forming a cone. There would be some loss due to hiting particulate mater that drifts into the beam refracting portions of it but over the ranges were talking about there shouldnt be that much of that as long as your not trying to beam through a dense dust cloud or something. Really power loss comes down to precision of focusing and aiming the beam.

Personaly I dont have a problem with the "automagic" targeting of the active vessle. Yes its something that needs to be considered from a full realism point of view but this is a game, notibly one with some rather squirrely physics at times. Just because its more real does not make it fun. Haveing to constantly update the aiming every time you changed ships would be intresting the first few times and then just boring repetitive work that you'd wish the computer could just handle automagicly. Note that even remote tech has a funtion on its antinas where you can set it to always aim at the active vessle. Same deal here its just you dont have to manualy tell it to do that when you first configure the relay/transmiter.

As to cooking kerbals... you ever tried to use too much microwave power with insufficient radiators? Technically didnt cook my kerbal but the craft overheated and cut the engines at a very... inopportune moment. Official cause of death was blunt force trauma due to impact with mun but considering craft tempature that pilot was on the extra crispy side well before he came to a stop Thats what I get for deploying an extra power node between launch and arrival.

[Blackstar]

I'd be perfectly fine with automatic targeting of vessels if

(1) Power to any inactive vessel that particular transmitter was supplying cut out, shutting down background processing for refineries, science labs, and even life support if there's no local power available. It may already do this, I honestly haven't tried it since I'd consider it cheating to take advantage of if it doesn't.

(2) Power to the new target only kicked in after appropriate signal delay as required by distance / speed of light.

Though given how much people hated it from a gameplay standpoint with Remote Tech, I really doubt (2) would ever be implemented.

[merendel]

I agree on point 1 blackstar. In fact I'm prety sure it does not shut them down nor does it limit power in the current grid. AKA if munbase 1 needs 50MW to run its proccessing out of your 100MW network and you swap to vessle 2 it still has 100MW avalible. Its one reason I dont use beamed power for ongoing operations out of focus. I send along an apropreately sized reactor to power any ongoing operations and use the network for burns or to kickstart a reactor. While theres no reason a network couldnt be transmiting to more than one location as long as you were not building to the absolute minimum network nodes I dont see the current free energy way it works to be realistic.

I'd oppose point 2 for pretty much the reason you stated for remote tech. Yes its realistic to have signal delay but it would just be anoying from a gameplay standpoint. And agian theres nothing to say you couldnt have a network with enough redundancy to be transmiting a beam in 2 locations. You could just handwave that the burn was planed far enough in advance that they started the secondary transmission an apropreate length of time in advance.

[tmbomber]

Hello Everyone,

I'm having an issue with my orbital fusion power plants shutting down while I'm not looking at them...

Here's a photo gallery showing what's going on.

I have a 3.75m fusion reactor along with a like sized generator connected to one of the large microwave transmitters. It has a dozen of the large radiator panels along with some batteries and solar panels.

Everything will be stable and I'll go off and do other things... some time later I'll come back and find the fusion reactor shut down. My usual solution is to shut the microwave transmitter down and either let the solar panels charge the batteries so I can do a re-start or switch the microwave antenna to "receive" and use it's power to do the restart.

This has happened several times, I usually catch it, but on occasion I've had all three power plants shut down (good thing I have the solar panels & batteries)

Does anybody see something I'm doing wrong here???

I also notice that while I'm transmitting power my tritium level falls off even though I have tritium breeding selected.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[SeventhArchitect]

How come my nuclear powered engines are so weak now? Last I used nuclear powered engines (thermal nozzles), the thrust was wonderful. Now, I get around 40 KN of thrust while vanilla rockets would produce more than 5 times that. Whats with the drawback?

[merendel]

I'm having an issue with my orbital fusion power plants shutting down while I'm not looking at them...

Fusions are are not always playing nicely with transmition in the current version. Sometimes the transmiter will end up pulling all the power and not leave enough to maintain the reaction. Your better off sticking with fission reactors for power plants for beamed power and only use fusion for direct onboard power.

How come my nuclear powered engines are so weak now? Last I used nuclear powered engines (thermal nozzles), the thrust was wonderful. Now, I get around 40 KN of thrust while vanilla rockets would produce more than 5 times that. Whats with the drawback?

Couldnt tell you for sure without knowing exactly what setup you had on each ship. What size and type of reactor? what was the fuel? was this vacume or at the launch pad(they get **** all for thrust at sea level but it gets better as you go up) Only way I could think of geting near 40KN thrust would be a 1.25 thorium reactor on LFO. Thrusts on thermal nozoles are sub par to LV-Ns for their weight on most of the smaller reactors and only get slightly better ISP. They do not really become worth it unless your useing the the larger reactors. I think the 3.75 thorium comes out to about on par with a cluster of 13 or so LV's. slightly heavier but same TWR similar thrusts with a bit more ISP unupgraded and alot better upgraded. The thrust on the thermals will always be anemic unless your useing antimater although upgraded reactors for fission gets an amazing ISP compared to stock.

Now if your useing one of the newer reactors added in 10.0 I couldnt tell you as I dont have a handy table with stats for those.

Edited February 22, 2014 by merendel

[TomatoSoup]

I'm having a peculiar problem. This probably shows it best:

http://i.imgur.com/3Hjt9Xy.png

So let me explain. Both of those engines are active. Deactivating them does not remove the effects. In spite of this, they still behave relatively correctly with two exceptions:

The fuel type selector loops between LiquidH2, Lithium, Vacuum Plasma, and Vacuum Plasma. The first of the two Vacuum Plasmas actually tries to consume Monopropellant, as seen in the screenshot. The second one consumes Vacuum Plasma and, well, after it uses its ten units it won't fire anymore which totally defeats the purpose of the Quantum Vacuum upgrade as I understand it.

I've used the thread search feature and found some people with the same problem but no solution.

[db48x]

and I redid the math to show how unreasonable requiring 13000+ mits to transmit 500 level science results really is...

all antenna / dishes xmit 2 mits / packet => 13000 mits will require 6500 packets

most all antenna / dishes transmit science data at 15 ec / packet => 6500 packets will require 97500 ec!

most all antenna / dishes transmit at a rate of 1 packet / .3 sec => 6500 packets would require 1950 sec

(1) and (2) above imply a rate of 97500 ec/1950sec or 50ec/sec

So you either would have to lug 97500 ec of batteries or some way to generate around 50ec/s. I am not going to stick 25+ solar panels (which by the time you have this experiment is the primary ec generation source) on a small probe that should only need to carry a small ec generation source, a small battery, the seismic sensor and an antenna or dish because it would be ridiculous! Furthermore removing the stock 500 level sensor and replacing it with one that requires getting to 2000+ levels of the science tree to get the generators needed to produce 50ec/s is also unreasonable and clearly self serving as you now force people into your own high level tech tree to transmit low level science!

QED - 13000 mits to transfer 500 level science is ridiculous

Time warp to simulate transmitting more slowly. At 5x timewarp you will only need 10ec/s. The alternative is to simply let the power run out. As long as you have some power generation then any time your manage to collect 10 power it will send out another packet. No science will be lost, even if it says that you gained 0.0 science from the packet, it merely truncates the amount for display. Once it finishes you will have collected all of the science.