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

[jallious]

I've been having power problems. My science lab and fusion rocket won't take any power. I have a nuclear reactor connected to them giving power, but it shows 0 is going in. Pictures attached.

[merendel]

BTW i also encountered strange problem, when loading quicksave or switching to another vessel more than 2.3km away sometimes craft does not load. There is just emty space. Save/load fixes it. I tried removing life support plugin - it still happens. No other plugins are installed, so it's either stock problem, or interstellar.

Next time you see this happen try going in and out of map view. I've been noticing this off and on since 2.3 and that normaly makes the ship visable. I still havent fully figured out if the craft is actualy invisable or if my zoom is eroniously set to several KM out as I've only had it happen in high orbits not landed or close enough to any other planet/ship to tell for sure without spending alot of time trying to zoom in.

[Fractal_UK]

I've been having power problems. My science lab and fusion rocket won't take any power. I have a nuclear reactor connected to them giving power, but it shows 0 is going in. Pictures attached.

Welcome to the forums!

This one is quite an easy one to solve - although you have a nuclear reactor, you don't have a generator to produce electrical power. The reactor only creates heat (you can use heat to power thermal rockets but not electrical equipment), a generator will take the heat produced by the reactor to produce power. Your generator will need a direct attachment to your reactor in order to function. Your ship will also need some heat radiators.

The plasma thrusters you have attached are also electrically powered, that's why you're getting no thrust from them.

Two extra bits of information: 1) Once you put a generator on your ship, you will only need one plasma thruster - they scale their thrust to the amount of power available so adding more of them adds weight but no extra thrust (they do have a thrust limit at which point you need to add more but you're nowhere near hitting it) and 2) those plasma thrusters are very low thrust for unupgraded reactors/generators even with big nuclear reactors and Xenon fuel, at your stage in the tech tree I'd go for a thermal rocket instead or you'll be going nowhere fast.

Also, check out the link to the wiki on the first thread, this might help you with some of your designs.

I'm having some serious issues getting my Atmospheric Turbojet engines to work right. They have more than enough resources available but without fail one or two of the four on the craft splutter out and die at a mere 14,000m. Thats with a total of 20 Intakes mind you. 14 supersonic intakes and 6 ram air intakes with precoolers, which strangely only yield a total of 4.00 atmosphere/intake air. It seems like the atmosphere isn't distributed properly or is simply disappearing. As the craft climbs rather than the intake atmosphere slowly dwindling down, it sharply drops off several times. When on the ground and stationary Intake Air fluctuates wildly on all the intakes. I was easily able to get much, much higher in the atmosphere with the old Atmosphereic Scoop intakes, but with their lack of precooler functionality they weren't very practical.

So is my game some how screwed up or is my engineering way off the mark?

I fiddled about with their setup in the latest update and it might not have worked as well as it first appeared to. That said, the main reason the atmospheric intake worked so well is it has incorrect intake area values (it counts as being much much bigger than the stock ones) which is one reason I want to get rid of it. Also, those intakes don't add any drag to the aircraft as normal intakes do so they make things very very easy. I assumed noone would be using them anymore since I added intake atm to all stock and modded intakes but apparently I was mistaken.

The intake air values are correct though, all of those intakes have 0.2 per intake. IntakeAtm just copies the maximum resource capacity of the IntakeAir resource, I don't change that or anything.

I've made some more tweaks ready for the next update anyway, you'll hopefully have an easier time with that, I've also improved the LiquidFuel/Oxidiser rocket mode so that should help you once you run out of intake air too.

[Lightwarrior]

Next time you see this happen try going in and out of map view. I've been noticing this off and on since 2.3 and that normaly makes the ship visable. I still havent fully figured out if the craft is actualy invisable or if my zoom is eroniously set to several KM out as I've only had it happen in high orbits not landed or close enough to any other planet/ship to tell for sure without spending alot of time trying to zoom in.

Yes, it works sometimes, and sometimes dont.

But it is still a bug...

Also i asked steam to redownload game, it changed nothing. And i've just realized that i played all those career up to "nuclear power" and had no such issue until i began to use nuclear reactors on ships.

Edited December 21, 2013 by Lightwarrior

[biglightbt]

Welcome to the forums!

This one is quite an easy one to solve - although you have a nuclear reactor, you don't have a generator to produce electrical power. The reactor only creates heat (you can use heat to power thermal rockets but not electrical equipment), a generator will take the heat produced by the reactor to produce power. Your generator will need a direct attachment to your reactor in order to function. Your ship will also need some heat radiators.

The plasma thrusters you have attached are also electrically powered, that's why you're getting no thrust from them.

Two extra bits of information: 1) Once you put a generator on your ship, you will only need one plasma thruster - they scale their thrust to the amount of power available so adding more of them adds weight but no extra thrust (they do have a thrust limit at which point you need to add more but you're nowhere near hitting it) and 2) those plasma thrusters are very low thrust for unupgraded reactors/generators even with big nuclear reactors and Xenon fuel, at your stage in the tech tree I'd go for a thermal rocket instead or you'll be going nowhere fast.

Also, check out the link to the wiki on the first thread, this might help you with some of your designs.

I fiddled about with their setup in the latest update and it might not have worked as well as it first appeared to. That said, the main reason the atmospheric intake worked so well is it has incorrect intake area values (it counts as being much much bigger than the stock ones) which is one reason I want to get rid of it. Also, those intakes don't add any drag to the aircraft as normal intakes do so they make things very very easy. I assumed noone would be using them anymore since I added intake atm to all stock and modded intakes but apparently I was mistaken.

The intake air values are correct though, all of those intakes have 0.2 per intake. IntakeAtm just copies the maximum resource capacity of the IntakeAir resource, I don't change that or anything.

I've made some more tweaks ready for the next update anyway, you'll hopefully have an easier time with that, I've also improved the LiquidFuel/Oxidiser rocket mode so that should help you once you run out of intake air too.

Ahhh, that makes sense. I actually had the problem with the old intakes not working, but managed to resolve it after reading through a few pages here. So it sounds like some of the problem is definitely poor engineering on my part. Although the stock and modded intakes are still bugging out on me. Occasionally when the craft first loads on the runway the intake will appear with only part of its resources available. For instance the supersonic intakes like in my picture will occasionally load with .20/.20 Intake Air and .05/.20 Intake Atm...which is weird because the craft is just sitting there on the runway. Also is it normal to have the engines drag down the resources when they are throttled up? Just starting the TTJ on the pad pulls down the value in Intake Atm even though it hasn't increased in altitude.

Sorry for the potentially stupid questions.

Edit: On a side note the reason I started using the old intakes in the first place is the other ones don't display that they provide Intake Atm in the VAB, even though once loaded they do provide that resource. I was trying to build a SSTO capable of taking off on Duna so using Intake Atm was needed rather than Intake Air.

Edited December 21, 2013 by biglightbt

[Patupi]

It would probably be easier for him to just place it in his power management display.

I haven't played through the game with the new system far enough to use anything with megajoules, so right now I haven't tested the power management display out yet so didn't think of that. I'm still playing catch up on my AAR. I've played through a lot of missions already and am waiting for me to catch up writing the mission reports! Thus not having tested this out on Colonisation save yet. I'll get there, but I've got maybe four missions to write up first!

How does the new display handle? Would it be easy to put in a peak heat indicator on there?

EDIT: Looking at some of the pics of the power management display I'm not sure numbers would be an easy way to show that effect. If you had 'Heat 21,9440' and 'Estimated Peak Heat 49,500' it's not as intuitive as seeing a line on a bar and making sure the line doesn't go up to the end of the bar. Numbers would still work, but I suspect a bar would be easier to understand on the fly. Of course you could have a color coded percentage of 'estimated peak heat', going red when over 90% say. That might work

Edited December 21, 2013 by Patupi

[jallious]

Welcome to the forums!

This one is quite an easy one to solve - although you have a nuclear reactor, you don't have a generator to produce electrical power. The reactor only creates heat (you can use heat to power thermal rockets but not electrical equipment), a generator will take the heat produced by the reactor to produce power. Your generator will need a direct attachment to your reactor in order to function. Your ship will also need some heat radiators.

The plasma thrusters you have attached are also electrically powered, that's why you're getting no thrust from them.

Two extra bits of information: 1) Once you put a generator on your ship, you will only need one plasma thruster - they scale their thrust to the amount of power available so adding more of them adds weight but no extra thrust (they do have a thrust limit at which point you need to add more but you're nowhere near hitting it) and 2) those plasma thrusters are very low thrust for unupgraded reactors/generators even with big nuclear reactors and Xenon fuel, at your stage in the tech tree I'd go for a thermal rocket instead or you'll be going nowhere fast.

_______________________________

Thank you.

[Babalas]

I had a thought that the science lab should be able to perform similar functions to the new stock science lab. So I added

    MODULE
    {
            name = ModuleScienceContainer

            reviewActionName = Review Data
            storeActionName = Store Experiments     
            collectActionName = Take Data

            evaOnlyStorage = True
            storageRange = 2

            allowRepeatedSubjects = True
    }
    MODULE
    {
            name = ModuleScienceLab

            containerModuleIndex = 1        
            dataTransmissionBoost = 1.5     
            crewsRequired = 2

            canResetConnectedModules = True
            canResetNearbyModules = True
            interactionRange = 5

            RESOURCE_PROCESS
            {
                    name = ElectricCharge
                    amount = 10
            }
    }

This somewhat works, except right clicking the science lab now completely disables being able to right click anything else. I suspect it is possibly due to multiple modules attempting to add menu items. Anyone attempted something similar?

[Lightwarrior]

Just tried to go to Eeloo with 3.75m fission reactor powered by thorium and noticed few problems:

1. If there is more fuel than can fit into reactor it will be still placed there:

And than when i pressed "manual restart" button fuel just disappeared, reactor has 3/3 and external tanks are empty.

2. Nuclear fuel reprocessing seem to have the same bug as tritium breeding, except it is not automatically interrupted. It does not work at timewarp lower than 1000:

3. Reprocessing creates some UF4 along with ThF4 and puts it into reactor (no UF4 containers are present) which seems wrong:

Edited December 21, 2013 by Lightwarrior

[jallious]

Okay, I finally, after 4 hours, got the right setup for my space station. Now I'm cooking!

[jallious]

My science labs don't produce science! I have an amount listed per day, but there's nothing indicating it's actually being collected. Furthermore, my generators, radiators ect don't have an upgrade option. Labs are powered with generators and reactors.

??

EDIT: Just looked back and saw that this problem was 'fixed' but gave no instructions on how, or if it's going to be patched in some time soon.

Edited December 21, 2013 by jallious

[Lightwarrior]

It also seems that Tritium => He-3 decay does not work on non-focused vessels:

I left this at KSC and when i looked at it 2 years later nothing changed. But if i use timewarp while it is focused decay works...

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a384/jallious/screenshot46.png

Okay, I finally, after 4 hours, got the right setup for my space station. Now I'm cooking!

Just wait while radiator temperature rise high enough and it should stabilize.

Also such thrust is unpractical, more than one day of real time to complete 900 dV burn... you'd better use thermal rocket nozzle.

Edited December 21, 2013 by Lightwarrior

[Fractal_UK]

My science labs don't produce science! I have an amount listed per day, but there's nothing indicating it's actually being collected. Furthermore, my generators, radiators ect don't have an upgrade option. Labs are powered with generators and reactors.

The amount per day is the indication that it is being collected.

Furthermore, my generators, radiators ect don't have an upgrade option. Labs are powered with generators and reactors.

Only a few parts have upgrade options available by default, you need to research technology in order to unlock the upgrades. There is a problem with generator and reactor manual upgrades but those upgrades would probably not be available for you at the moment anyway. Most of the time, you'll find that upgrades generally occur automatically in the VAB when you have researched a new tech.

[Azimech]

I'm building a small ship with the same shape as a Constitution Refit (Enterprise-A) using Procedural Fairings, Procedural Wings and Interstellar. Yes, my fantasy is on a holiday again but it looks surprisingly good. Is there a possibility an alcubierre drive could emerge with a radius so it would really fit inside a 1,25m nacelle? Or maybe something not radial but axial? Also I'm having some issues with power generation/center of mass because of the fact that some of the engines can't be fitted elsewhere except directly on a reactor. Center of thrust is at the back of the saucer section where the impulse engines are in the movies/series, but with a reactor larger than 1,25 it would protrude the saucer in an ungainly fashion and with the smaller ones I have nowhere enough thrust for a 100+ meter, 120 tonne starship. In Star Trek they use plasma conduits for energy transportation, something like the big yellow fuel line would be terrific, a red one for feeding parts off the reactor, a blue one for return. By the way, the saucer and secondary hull are hollow, I'm glad radiators work inside the fairings. Thank you for this wonderful mod!

[forsaken1111]

I'm building a small ship with the same shape as a Constitution Refit (Enterprise-A) using Procedural Fairings, Procedural Wings and Interstellar. Yes, my fantasy is on a holiday again but it looks surprisingly good. Is there a possibility an alcubierre drive could emerge with a radius so it would really fit inside a 1,25m nacelle? Or maybe something not radial but axial? Also I'm having some issues with power generation/center of mass because of the fact that some of the engines can't be fitted elsewhere except directly on a reactor. Center of thrust is at the back of the saucer section where the impulse engines are in the movies/series, but with a reactor larger than 1,25 it would protrude the saucer in an ungainly fashion and with the smaller ones I have nowhere enough thrust for a 100+ meter, 120 tonne starship. In Star Trek they use plasma conduits for energy transportation, something like the big yellow fuel line would be terrific, a red one for feeding parts off the reactor, a blue one for return. By the way, the saucer and secondary hull are hollow, I'm glad radiators work inside the fairings. Thank you for this wonderful mod!

Why not just use plasma thrusters rather than thermal rockets? They can be placed anywhere so long as you have enough power generation.

[Sevio]

I started a new career save with 0.23, including this beautiful mod. I've just managed to unlock the first tier of nuclear reactors and decided to make a science lab and fly it to minmus to get some research going. To my surprise the waste heat started building up rather quickly, due to the change to radiators that I read up about in this thread. I've had to revert and launch several revised versions, each time with more radiator capacity.

Each one suffered from waste heat buildup causing a drop in the generator's efficiency, forcing the reactor to run at higher capacity to keep the science lab running and making the problem worse. Eventually, the electric generator's efficiency drops so low that it can no longer supply the lab with power.

Conceptually I like the way the radiators work now, building up heat until they reach equilibrium, and encouraging you to supply enough radiators to keep everything cool. However I'm starting to feel that the balance is off, at least when working with Tier 1 equipment. Here's the final version of my Minmus Science Lab that will stabilize just barely below 100% reactor throttle to keep the lab supplied with 5 MW:

It's not quite visible from this angle but it took 4 of the medium sized radiators to just barely keep the 1.25m KIWI reactor cooled at ~97-98% throttle while supplying a permanent 5 MW of power for the lab, at an efficiency of just 12.9%. To put things in perspective, that's 3.2 tons of radiator for the second-smallest size 2.5 ton reactor.

Is tier 1 equipment really intended to struggle this badly to power electrical things? With the research lab being the cheapest activity power-wise that I know of in the mod, I don't even want to think of what it would take to cool the Aegletes or even Aegletes 2 if you wanted to do anything with the refinery.

All this radiator mass also puts a big toll on the TWR of thermal rockets, even in LFO mode. I launched a minimalistic combination of Stayputnik probe core, Science Lab, 1.25m Nuclear Reactor, Generator, Thermal Rocket, 4 medium radiators and FL-T400 fuel tank (180 LF/ 220 Ox) shows the following specs with MechJeb dev build 139, once in space:

• Max Acceleration: 2.084 m/s (Fuel mode: LFO)
  
• Max thrust: 24 kN
  
• Vessel mass: 11.4 t
  
• TWR: 0.21
  
• Delta-V: 1298
  

For comparison, if I take out the thermal rocket nozzle and replace it with a stock LV-N nuclear engine, I see:

• Max Acceleration: 4.528 m/s
  
• Max thrust: 60 kN
  
• Vessel mass: 13.25 t
  
• TWR: 0.46
  
• Delta-V: 1284
  

Much more usable thrust and delta-V only slightly lower, even though it's pushing more mass around due to having an "extra" nuclear reactor on board.

Sorry for the wall of text, but to summarize: For the engineering and extra mass it takes to bring a KSPI nuclear reactor and assorted equipment into space, Tier 1 feels a little bit underpowered when compared with stock technology. A couple of suggestions:

• Rebalance T1 radiators to make T1 reactors a bit easier to cool
  
• Adjust the tooltips on the radiators to make it easier to determine at a glance how much radiator capacity is needed for effective long-term operation of a nuclear reactor. My test lab from above required ~7.5 times the reactor's capacity in radiator capacity to reach equilibrium at near 100% throttle.
  
• Possibly: Rebalance T1 reactors and thermal rockets to better match up against the stock LV-N
  

Regardless of what you decide to do with my suggestions, thank you for one of the best mods the KSP community has to offer and keep up the good work!

[Lightwarrior]

Stock LV-N was better than thermal rocket + unupgraded nuclear reactor even before radiator change. I used ship based on unupgraded 2.5m reactor + 2.5m thermal nozzle for eve/gilly flyby (which gave me those 3k science needed to upgrade reactors) and noticed no significant change. But those ship had no generators, so it had no efficiency problems caused by high radiator temperature.

May be this is correct? First low-tech reactor usage, suitable for thermal rockets but bad for power generation.

Also, why dont you use thorium? It will give some more power.

Edited December 21, 2013 by Lightwarrior

[forsaken1111]

I believe un-upgraded generators cap out at ~20% efficiency anyway

[Sevio]

They cap at 24%, which means the pictured science lab (which has radiators weighing more than the reactor itself), is running at only half of the efficiency it could have. It just seems rather poor for having 3.2 tons of radiator to 2.5 tons of reactor.

[Fractal_UK]

There are two things that contribute to this, there is obviously the radiator change which does mean that in vacuum you are going to get lower efficiency as you have a smaller heat difference to deal with. You also have the reactor scaling, where the bigger reactors are significantly and disporportionately better than the smaller ones.

Still, I think being able to get 5MW of electrical power out of that small 1.25m nuclear reactor is actually about right - there are lot of things you can do with that, it's enough for science research and it's enough for many of the refinery functions too. If those generators were twice as efficient, it wouldn't make a lot of difference because there aren't all that many new capabilities you could unlock with 10MW. So, in terms of power production, I'm fairly happy with it.

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

[Sevio]

Thanks for your response Fractal_UK.

My previous post was in response to forsaken1111, although part of it leads nicely into what I'd like to say next.

I'm OK with reactors scaling to be better with size, and the generator efficiency being where it is right now, since it can power the research lab. Looking at the 3 different available deployable radiator sizes and matching them up to the 3 largest nuclear reactors, there seems to be a large discrepancy at Tier 1 right now though, as it took 4 of the second-tier radiators to shed the heat of the KIWI reactor. Is it intended that it takes 3.2 tons of radiator to shed the heat of a 2.5 ton reactor for running a research lab?

[Ogamaga]

Fractal, could you look at my posts on page 468 and get back to me? If you have any questions about what I'm looking for, just ask, and I'll try to answer.

[Fractal_UK]

Fractal, could you look at my posts on page 468 and get back to me? If you have any questions about what I'm looking for, just ask, and I'll try to answer.

I can, it's not a big change to make, that said there are certain things (like the tank explosions) that are tied to that module, depending on what you want to do you might be better off looking at the AntimatterStorageTank class and making your own module based on it.

[Ogamaga]

I can, it's not a big change to make, that said there are certain things (like the tank explosions) that are tied to that module, depending on what you want to do you might be better off looking at the AntimatterStorageTank class and making your own module based on it.

Actually, my plan involves fairly high energy costs with highly explosive penalties for nonpayment. Your reactors seem like a good power source, and the antimatter tank explosion fits well. Whenever its convenient for you works for me if you are willing to make the change. Just put it in the change log and I'll start implementing it soon after I have the update.

[db48x]

There are a couple of ways I can fix this: 1) I can change most of the ALL_VESSEL_FLOW resources to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH - this has the downside that existing ships may need significant redesign because those resources will no longer be easy to transfer or 2) I can remove all the checking code that disables mode when you have no fuel for it, which means these options will fail at low time acceleration but will begin working when you accelerate faster and when the vessel is unfocused. Technically, there is also 3) write a new method that handles resource draws for ALL_VESSEL flows properly but I'd quite like to know why this change was introduced before doing that.

Seems to me that you could also change the units.