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

[KhaosCorp]

So, I downloaded this. However my antimatter collector doesn't collect and my fusion reactors don't power on. The only mods I'm using are MechJeb, the ALCOR pod and the ANVIL Core mod. Is there something I'm missing with this?

AM collectors work rather slowly...even in the best yield spots, it takes a bit. The fusion reactors need to be jumpstarted so to speak...fusion reactions can be self-sustaining, but not self-starting.

[Lightwarrior]

And for fusion reactors to be self-sustaining generator is required.

And still if you use 100% of ThermalPower (say by thermal turbojet in LFO propellant mode at 100% thrust) generator will generate no power and reactor will shut down. And because of this i'd recommend to have backup power, say smallest fission reactor.

Edited November 29, 2013 by Lightwarrior

[db48x]

So, I downloaded this. However my antimatter collector doesn't collect and my fusion reactors don't power on. The only mods I'm using are MechJeb, the ALCOR pod and the ANVIL Core mod. Is there something I'm missing with this?

Antimatter can only be collected from what is trapped in the magnetic fields of a planet; the larger field the more it can trap and the faster you can collect it. Also, antimatter annihilates on contact with normal matter, so there isn't much of it floating around in an atmosphere. Use the magnetometer to measure magnetic field strengths and find out how much antimatter you can collect.

As for the fusion reactor, you'll need a fairly hefty external source of power to start those. You can leave it behind if you like.

[egreSS]

Sorry if this has already been mentioned I just installed this yesterday.

The thermal turbojet appears to bug out if it has a flameout while in atmo - Switching fuel type at that point no longer matters as its stuck in "IntakeAir deprived" yet Fuel Type: Liquid. 3/4 of them are still working fine.

BTW - I feel the limit of having to be directly attached to the reactor virtually negates any benefit to using them on an SSTO unless this fact is taken to account during the initial design phase. If I may, the fuel hose mechanic could be used to construct a "heat pipe" type deal.

[db48x]

BTW - I feel the limit of having to be directly attached to the reactor virtually negates any benefit to using them on an SSTO unless this fact is taken to account during the initial design phase. If I may, the fuel hose mechanic could be used to construct a "heat pipe" type deal.

Negates what, exactly? This is no different than how a chemical engine is built; the rocket nozzle goes directly below the combustion chamber for a reason.

That said, Fractal_UK mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he was looking into some heat pipes to add. He wasn't specific, but I imagine there'll be one for radially attaching generators, and possibly some for changing diameters or something. Moving heat around is difficult though, and if you put a fuel tank or something in the way it would be a bit unrealistic. Moving electricity around is a lot more straight-forward, so you may want to look at the plasma thruster and the DT Vista; they're powered by electricity instead of heat. Higher tech == more options.

[Myrten]

This is still not very surprising. If you aren't in a location that has at least a moderate amount of the resource then you're unlikely to see even a small increase for a very long time. There are some "moderate" areas, usually close to the marked high value resource areas that are quite viable to mine despite not being marked but if you just pick "any old spot," it's not going to work unless you're prepared to wait for months or years.

OK, I understand that but then displayed extraction rate of 0.xxL per hour is quite misleading.

The ship it is attached to has to be landed, yes.

Of course ship is landed but since refinery's only attachment point is at the bottom does it matter if it's on the bottom of the ship or at the top at all for mining purposes?

Then like the other person who asked about this, did you have some UF4 tank capacity to store the old UF4 from your reactors? If you can't put the UF4 somewhere, you can't swap the fuel.

My bad, I didn't expected that I had to put 10 TF4 and 10 UF4 tanks to swap fuel of 3.75 m reactor

Generally at this point I'd say that there is so much work with setting up thorium based reactor to work that it's not worth the effort, at least for microwave power plant purposes.

RemoteTech functions the way it does because you are pointing one receiver at one transmitter, this system has the capacity to receive power from multiple receivers at the same time. You cannot point a receiver at transmitters that are in two different physical locations so using physical orientation is the only sensible solution - other than making it possible to receive power from both in front and behind the receiver at the same time, which isn't very sensible and I also don't really like.

How about pointing receiver at particular location but receiving power from multiple transmitters just like receiver would be physically directed at that location?

I'd also like to report three bugs:

B1)I have transmitter + antimatter reactor/generator + container and some collectors, after I fill up container with some antimatter and turn on reactor and transmitter then reactor works at full power for a few seconds and goes back to 0.09% power when antimatter in container runs out but generator and transmitter never stops working at full power - 80 GW in case of 1.25 AM reactor. This power is actually transmitted and received to other ships.

B2)If I turn on relay on transmitter and switch to another ship and back I'll have 'Deactivate Transmitter' button instead of 'Deactivate Relay'

B3)Turning off receivers doesn't initiate closing animation and they are still visually open although they're offline. Switching to another ship and back fixes this.

And three questions :

Q1)How relay with multiple receivers actually work? I've put 1 receiver at front and 4 on sides + transmitter set on relay and it seem to be working somehow but I can't figure it out how exactly it works... Is it MAX(all receivers) or do you actually calculate real received power from all satellites?

Q2)Is my assumption that if I provide x% of required antimatter consumption to AM reactor using collectors it will operate at x% capacity? This seems to be the case.

Q3)Have there been any changes in how dish receiver works in 0.8? It seems now to be working as good as phased array receiver?

[egreSS]

Fractal, the repo is missing .csproj but contains the .suo for some reason. We can't open it without csproj. You should commit the .sln and the .csproj, but not the .suo or the .user files.

Negates what, exactly?

...The benefit to using them on an SSTO? ..? o_O

Not sure what I'm leaveing out. Generators are heavy and the part is described as being ideal for SSTO's?

I understand the logic behind heat flow and not disputing that - but since were on the subject. Molten sodium nuclear reactors are a good example of practical heat transport - It's not like it's unheard of.

But anyway - I'm specifically talking about the restriction:

• It is different than chemical - LFO parts/engines do not have this limit due to something called fuelCrossfeed

• It's inconsistently implemented - WasteHeat and radiators ignore the restriction.

[hampe321]

Could someone possibly provide me with a parts list for this mod ? Im trying to set my KMP server up and as some of you probably know, in order to build with parts from a mod the player needs to have put the name of all of the parts in a parts list otherwise it won't work and I really want to have this on my server.

[db48x]

...The benefit to using them on an SSTO? ..? o_O

Not sure what I'm leaveing out. Generators are heavy and the part is described as being ideal for SSTO's?

I guess I don't understand what you would gain by moving the generator away from the reactor. Perhaps moving the center of mass? You could move the center of lift instead.

I understand the logic behind heat flow and not disputing that - but since were on the subject. Molten sodium nuclear reactors are a good example of practical heat transport - It's not like it's unheard of.

But anyway - I'm specifically talking about the restriction:

• It is different than chemical - LFO parts/engines do not have this limit due to something called fuelCrossfeed

• It's inconsistently implemented - WasteHeat and radiators ignore the restriction.

You wouldn't want to run a pipe full of molten sodium down the middle of a fuel tank or crew compartment. Likewise, you wouldn't run a pipe full of rocket exhaust down from a combustion chamber through a fuel tank and into a rocket nozzle. I'll grant you that if the rocket uses cryogenic fuels then KSPs fuel crossfeed is already a bit unrealistic, but there's no need to make it worse

Waste heat is specifically that heat which low temperature and spread out through the ship. Sure, a real ship will have heat exchangers to cool the air in the crew quarters, and an ammonia transport system out to the radiators, but you have to abstract something.

[Myrten]

To illustrate problem with AM reactors\generators and transmitter - 242 GW at Kerbin orbit with only 64 collectors, actually I think one collector is enough... :

[Fractal_UK]

OK, I understand that but then displayed extraction rate of 0.xxL per hour is quite misleading.

When you're getting a good rate, the extraction will be shown in cubic metres/hour, i.e. 1000x more. I could have used cubic decimetres per hour but I think that would mean a lot less to people.

Of course ship is landed but since refinery's only attachment point is at the bottom does it matter if it's on the bottom of the ship or at the top at all for mining purposes?

Nope, it doesn't matter at all.

My bad, I didn't expected that I had to put 10 TF4 and 10 UF4 tanks to swap fuel of 3.75 m reactor

Generally at this point I'd say that there is so much work with setting up thorium based reactor to work that it's not worth the effort, at least for microwave power plant purposes.

Hopefully the advent of tweakables will help with this, it might given options for choosing fuel in the VAB but we'll have to wait and see what SQUAD come up with.

How about pointing receiver at particular location but receiving power from multiple transmitters just like receiver would be physically directed at that location?

It would make sense in space where you can more or less orient your spacecraft as you like but it makes a lot less sense when you're spacecraft is constrained due to being, say, on the ground. The RT antennas are much smaller and you could imagine they have a range of mobility, most of these antennas clearly do not move.

Having a small but mobile antenna definitely seems like the best solution to me.

I'd also like to report three bugs:

B1)I have transmitter + antimatter reactor/generator + container and some collectors, after I fill up container with some antimatter and turn on reactor and transmitter then reactor works at full power for a few seconds and goes back to 0.09% power when antimatter in container runs out but generator and transmitter never stops working at full power - 80 GW in case of 1.25 AM reactor. This power is actually transmitted and received to other ships.

Is this only happening if you switch away from the antimatter ship or is it continuing to transmit power while the vessel with the antimatter reactor is still active?

Edit: Seeing your latest post, still not sure what is going on, what happened to make the reactor output go down in the last picture?

B2)If I turn on relay on transmitter and switch to another ship and back I'll have 'Deactivate Transmitter' button instead of 'Deactivate Relay'

Ah, the relay value wasn't being stored persistently, I have fixed it for the next update now.

B3)Turning off receivers doesn't initiate closing animation and they are still visually open although they're offline. Switching to another ship and back fixes this.

Strange, I didn't think I'd changed any of the animation code but I'll have a look.

And three questions :

Q1)How relay with multiple receivers actually work? I've put 1 receiver at front and 4 on sides + transmitter set on relay and it seem to be working somehow but I can't figure it out how exactly it works... Is it MAX(all receivers) or do you actually calculate real received power from all satellites?

A receiver just tries to connect to every transmitter, if it can't connect to a particular relay, it will attempt to connect to that satellite via each relay in turn until it has either found a connection it can use, or it can't find a possible connection at all.

Q2)Is my assumption that if I provide x% of required antimatter consumption to AM reactor using collectors it will operate at x% capacity? This seems to be the case.

Correct.

Q3)Have there been any changes in how dish receiver works in 0.8? It seems now to be working as good as phased array receiver?

There shouldn't have been but then I rewrote the entire microwave system almost from scratch so it's always possible I've missed something out. I will check it out.

Edit: It doesn't look there is anything wrong, I think your satellites are probably just close enough that range losses aren't proving to be a major issue. Notice that there is a small difference in power between the two.

...The benefit to using them on an SSTO? ..? o_O

Not sure what I'm leaveing out. Generators are heavy and the part is described as being ideal for SSTO's?

You're not really losing much, to be fair. How ideal the turbojet is for SSTOs depends more on the reactor than the performance of the jet itself but, I recently built an twin antimatter reactor powered thermal turbojet that was easily capable of SSTO operations in the Real Solar System mod. Sure it's a design constraint but it's hardly constraining functionality.

I understand the logic behind heat flow and not disputing that - but since were on the subject. Molten sodium nuclear reactors are a good example of practical heat transport - It's not like it's unheard of.

I do have some code for heat exchangers, it basically allows you to place another attachment point that you can attach thermal rockets to but the operational temperature is capped so it's something you can use with temperature equal to MSR operating temperatures without penalty but you can't pump around heat at the temperature of, e.g. Gas-Core designs. The result is, using the heat exchanger, your Isp will be always be capped at around ~900-1000s. Basically, we just have to take into account materials limits when transporting heat around.

Edited November 29, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Myrten]

When you're getting a good rate, the extraction will be shown in cubic metres/hour, i.e. 1000x more. I could have used cubic decimetres per hour but I think that would mean a lot less to people.

I'd either use the base units here and display rounded 0.00 or use scientific notation based on based units.

It would make sense in space where you can more or less orient your spacecraft as you like but it makes a lot less sense when you're spacecraft is constrained due to being, say, on the ground. The RT antennas are much smaller and you could imagine they have a range of mobility, most of these antennas clearly do not move.

Having a small but mobile antenna definitely seems like the best solution to me.

Phased array receiver not being mobile makes sense to me since it's quite big but IMHO dish receiver should be mobile.

Is this only happening if you switch away from the antimatter ship or is it continuing to transmit power while the vessel with the antimatter reactor is still active?

Edit: Seeing your latest post, still not sure what is going on, what happened to make the reactor output go down in the last picture?

It doesn't matter if ship is active or not, I even warped for a few days with that ship switched to another one to check if it received that bugged power. It did so I switched back and it was still bugged

Reactor output went down because antimatter in container got exhausted in few seconds after switching reactor on as 3.75 m AM reactor need 1690 collectors to work indefinitely at full power instead of just 64 which my ship had

Here is entire sequence of events:

1)Everything is switched off at the begging

2)I launch my ship into 1000 km Kerbin orbit

3)After some time collectors gather around 3 units of antimatter in container

4)I turn on Reactor and generator but they operate at low capacity since there is no need for this huge power

5)I turn on transmitter which instantly goes to 242 GW output, so does generator and reactor operates at 100% power

6)After few second there is no antimatter left in the container so reactor goes to near zero

7)Generator power starts getting lower but at insanely slow rate (need to warp a lot)

8)Transmitter output stays the same no matter what, even if generator says that current power is zero. Resetting transmitter doesn't change anything.

9)Even when I switch off reactor completely and only generator and transmitter are online bug still occurs and 242 GW are transmitted.

A receiver just tries to connect to every transmitter, if it can't connect to a particular relay, it will attempt to connect to that satellite via each relay in turn until it has either found a connection it can use, or it can't find a possible connection at all.

Actually, I was asking about one relay-ship having multiple receiver antennas - what it will actually relay at output? Actually do you check at all if antennas at relay-ship are pointed at source transmitter-ship or is it only final ship which antenna direction in relation to relay matters?

There shouldn't have been but then I rewrote the entire microwave system almost from scratch so it's always possible I've missed something out. I will check it out.

Edit: It doesn't look there is anything wrong, I think your satellites are probably just close enough that range losses aren't proving to be a major issue. Notice that there is a small difference in power between the two.

So the only difference between phased array and dish is that dish has higher 'distance penalty'? Is that correct or does array also have larger angle at which it can receive signals?

Also, can you tell us how distance penalty is being calculated now?

Edited November 29, 2013 by Myrten

[Fractal_UK]

Here is entire sequence of events:

1)Everything is switched off at the begging

2)I launch my ship into 1000 km Kerbin orbit

3)After some time collectors gather around 3 units of antimatter in container

4)I turn on Reactor and generator but they operate at low capacity since there is no need for this huge power

5)I turn on transmitter which instantly goes to 242 GW output, so does generator and reactor operates at 100% power

6)After few second there is no antimatter left in the container so reactor goes to near zero

7)Generator power starts getting lower but at insanely slow rate (need to warp a lot)

8)Transmitter output stays the same no matter what, even if generator says that current power is zero. Resetting transmitter doesn't change anything.

9)Even when I switch off reactor completely and only generator and transmitter are online bug still occurs and 242 GW are transmitted.

Just a quick question since I don't have time to go through the entire list at this moment: it looks like your ship in the picture has a very large number of microwave receivers on. I'm guessing all the power to power the transmitter is coming from those receivers - at the moment the transmitter will try to draw power equal to the generator's maximum power output, even if the generator is running at 0.1%, so if it can't get it from the generator, it will try to get it from elsewhere. This power draw is done using the resource manager, which means it can't just create power out of nowhere, it has to be available on your ship somehow - I'm guessing it's coming from all those receivers.

Equally, I see you have thermal receivers which are lit up, that'll be where all the thermal power is coming from.

If you disable all the attached microwave receivers (the dishes and the thermal receivers) on that vessel, I'm guessing this effect stops?

Edited November 29, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Myrten]

Just a quick question since I don't have time to go through the entire list at this moment: it looks like your ship in the picture has a very large number of microwave receivers on. I'm guessing all the power to power the transmitter is coming from those receivers - at the moment the transmitter will try to draw power equal to the generator's maximum power output, even if the generator is running at 0.1%, so if it can't get it from the generator, it will try to get it from elsewhere. This power draw is done using the resource manager, which means it can't just create power out of nowhere, it has to be available on your ship somehow - I'm guessing it's coming from all those receivers.

Equally, I see you have thermal receivers which are lit up, that'll be where all the thermal power is coming from.

If you disable all the attached microwave receivers (the dishes and the thermal receivers) on that vessel, I'm guessing this effect stops?

Bingo, both electric and thermal receivers have to be shut down in order to stop this bug. If I disable only one type this effect continues.

I've also noticed another bug:

Disabling thermal receiver doesn't make them black again, they are still red.

Another issue:

1.5m thermal receiver\nozzle has almost the same power\thrust as 3.75m ones, while I had problem lifting this ship to orbit with 9x3.5m receiver\nozzles when I changed them to 9x 5x 1.5m receivers\nozzle I got total thrust going into 300000 kN range...

Edited November 29, 2013 by Myrten

[BigD145]

It looks like I will be holding off on installing for the first time until these sorts of things are hammered out. Interesting late game mod, though.

[KhaosCorp]

It looks like I will be holding off on installing for the first time until these sorts of things are hammered out. Interesting late game mod, though.

Honestly most of the bugs are small, and dont really hinder most gameplay. If you have any interest in this pack you may want to get it now, launch some Anitmatter scoop ships...and then wait to use it till the bugs are fixed...that will put ya one step ahead for sure =)

[egreSS]

How ideal the turbojet is for SSTOs depends more on the reactor than the performance of the jet itself

it's a design constraint

Exactly! I already built a ****, over-engineered, flying pile of fail around a nice reactor - For me to use a thTurbojet I would be required to place a 1.5m reactor on each engine(B9 4x1.5 S2W) when I already have power to spare from my main reactor. It's actually pretty cool with reactor and generator in cargo bay, set "abort" to detach and fire ullage motors attached to the "core"

I would just tweak it myself but I'm hoping you could give me your .csproj so I don't have to build it from scratch.

Also of note, even when using it in liquid fuel mode it's thrust is terrible in vacuum, is the velocityCurve supposed to cap out at 1700 or is that a bug?

[Myrten]

BUG or WAD :D:D:D:D:D?

[Fractal_UK]

Another issue:

1.5m thermal receiver\nozzle has almost the same power\thrust as 3.75m ones, while I had problem lifting this ship to orbit with 9x3.5m receiver\nozzles when I changed them to 9x 5x 1.5m receivers\nozzle I got total thrust going into 300000 kN range...

The receivers only differ on receiver area, since the power density isn't currently limited, it's almost universally true that the smaller ones are better.

It looks like I will be holding off on installing for the first time until these sorts of things are hammered out. Interesting late game mod, though.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, the problems are confined to a small subset of the parts, the vast majority of the parts are working as expected. Hopefully the update will be out soon anyway.

Also of note, even when using it in liquid fuel mode it's thrust is terrible in vacuum, is the velocityCurve supposed to cap out at 1700 or is that a bug?

The velocityCurve is dependent upon exhaust velocity, if you have low exhaust velocity, low velocity curve limit, also the velocity curve only applies to atmospheric propellants. LiquidFuel is much lower thrust than atmospheric propellant, this is intended because air has a much higher molar mass than hydrogen. LiquidFuel thus gives you less thrust at higher Isp.

Edited November 29, 2013 by Fractal_UK

[Myrten]

I managed to get 8.31 petawatts of energy.

Therefore I hereby claim :D:D::D

Last rover on this screenshot generates 200 GW of power and all other ones increase total network output by 48%

[Fractal_UK]

I managed to get 8.31 petawatts of energy.

Therefore I hereby claim :D:D::D

Last rover on this screenshot generates 200 GW of power and all other ones increase total network output by 48%

This is a surprisingly nightmarish problem to solve - everything is functioning correctly it's just that that functionality is giving an absurd result, there is simply no internal way to distinguish between power than has just been received from a receiver and power that has come from an onboard reactor. The easiest solution is to either prevent transmitters being activated while receivers are active or to have activating transmitters turn off all other receivers on the same ship. I'd prefer that there was a more elegant solution than this, however so I'll keep investigating.

[Myrten]

This is a surprisingly nightmarish problem to solve - everything is functioning correctly it's just that that functionality is giving an absurd result, there is simply no internal way to distinguish between power than has just been received from a receiver and power that has come from an onboard reactor. The easiest solution is to either prevent transmitters being activated while receivers are active or to have activating transmitters turn off all other receivers on the same ship. I'd prefer that there was a more elegant solution than this, however so I'll keep investigating.

My suggestion would be to prevent generators from using thermal receiver's thermal power to generate electricity as I'm pretty sure this effect cannot be replicated to this extend by electric receivers only.

[Myrten]

Generally this problem can be divided into following sub-problems:

Power multiplication effect:

-It's caused by generator being able to generate power from thermal receiver which is connected to it - this feature must be disabled as it causes positive feedback loop which can lead to insane levels of power.

Power creation from nothing effects:

-Generator connected to offline\not full capacity reactor producing full power despite reactor being offline because there are thermal receivers adding 'Thermal Power' resource - I'd solve this by making sure that generator cannot produce more power then current capacity of the reactor permits, even if there is 1000000000 thermal power available.

-Transmitter transmitting generator's full efficiency despite generator running not at full capacity because electric receivers produce mega joules - again I'd limit transmitter's output to sum of all generators and solar panels CURRENT output.

This solutions can conflict with your feature of reactor\generator not operating at full capacity if there's no need that is - if thermal power\mega joules are at 100%. To solve this conflict I'd disable this feature if vessel contains any active transmitter.

[forsaken1111]

Fractal, to break away from the bug talk for a moment:

Have to given any thought to a steam-based RCS system? Bring along a tank of water and heat a small amount to high temperature and let it escape from an RCS nozzle like a propellant. Could use thermal power from a generator to do so.

Normal RCS blocks use a monopropellant like hydrogen peroxide passing through a catalyst mesh to produce steam and oxygen via chemical decomposition, but this could be a neat tie-in with your reactor system and refill-able anywhere water can be found. (or anywhere you could get hydrogen and oxygen to combine)

[Fractal_UK]

-Transmitter transmitting generator's full efficiency despite generator running not at full capacity because electric receivers produce mega joules - again I'd limit transmitter's output to sum of all generators and solar panels CURRENT output.

This unfortunately doesn't work because of the way the resource manager works - let's say we've put a transmitter in orbit, it isn't doing anything so it's not really needing to produce any power, generator is at 0%. Then we turn the microwave transmitter on, microwave transmitter says give me the current power, current power is 0, we get nothing. We have to request more power than we have right now, otherwise we get nothing or nearly nothing.

-Generator connected to offline\not full capacity reactor producing full power despite reactor being offline because there are thermal receivers adding 'Thermal Power' resource - I'd solve this by making sure that generator cannot produce more power then current capacity of the reactor permits, even if there is 1000000000 thermal power available.

I think this part may be the key to the solution, there needs to be an additional step that compares the thermal power received to the reactor output and, in some sense, gets rid of the power from other sources.

Fractal, to break away from the bug talk for a moment:

Have to given any thought to a steam-based RCS system? Bring along a tank of water and heat a small amount to high temperature and let it escape from an RCS nozzle like a propellant. Could use thermal power from a generator to do so.

Normal RCS blocks use a monopropellant like hydrogen peroxide passing through a catalyst mesh to produce steam and oxygen via chemical decomposition, but this could be a neat tie-in with your reactor system and refill-able anywhere water can be found. (or anywhere you could get hydrogen and oxygen to combine)

I did some work on an electrical RCS system, it was actually designed to use Xenon propellant and function similarly to the plasma engines but I wasn't particularly happy with the result and turned to other things - I may go back to it at some point because it'd be nice to offer a long term RCS alternative, especially with ISRU options.

Edited November 30, 2013 by Fractal_UK