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

[AndreyATGB]

I like how you helped him and slightly teased 0.10 at the same time.

[Boamere]

On that note, any ETA?

(looks so cool XD)

(also please don't rage at me for asking )

[Deredere]

I have to admit that's a more elegant solution by far than my suggestion of buffing base thermal radiation to prevent confusion.

[Shania_L]

Hi again, I'm slowly working my way through the tech tree and have managed to unlock the thermal rockets and nuclear reactors... my power troubles are over.

However I am now trying to find uses for these modules, I tend to stick to smaller scale rockets as I use mainly stock parts so I'm not sure if I will ever get a 3.75m reactor off the ground. I built myself a small probe to try out the capabilities of a 0.625m reactor/thermal rocket combo. I wasn't expecting a whole lot of thrust but as I havent even unlocked any ions yet I thought this would make a decent stop-gap.

1.6 KN, on a 2.2tonne craft, is there anyway I can increase the thrust of this? I was using LFO and Thorium in the reactor.

Reading the previous few posts I am leaning away from the idea of using tiny reactors to power my Remotetech network sattellites. I am interested in what uses people have found for small non-upgraded fission reactors. I did make a nice rover powered by a 0.625 reactor and that seemed to work well as solar panels break in atmosphere this lets me charge and drive all the time

[charno]

Thanks for your help.

I've had this happen on windows, try updating some mods, also wait a little and see if it changes.

Well, I don't have any mods beside interstellar installed. The interstellar mod is the newest version.

One last thing after you've updated plugins etc. delete Fnmethane tank3-1 and see if the problem continues

Without the fnmethaneTank I can start KSP, and a short test shows that KSPI parts are available at the VAB.

I've never used linux, so I don't know much about it, but good luck anyway

(also see if you could add boulder.co texture compressor (it might help)

One other thing: have you got the 3 folders that are in KSPI in the gamedata folder? (warp plugin JSI and something else)

I have the following folders and files in there:

HexCans ModuleManager_1_5.dll Squad TreeLoader WarpPlugin

Edit: What is ksp x86? x86 bit? do you have a x64 version? Or is this a linux thing?

.x86 is the 32 bit version, and .x64 is the 64 bit version. The linux version of KSP already supports 64 bits (but I don't think that this should matter, since KSPI runs at the 32 bit version at windows). Maybe this could be an argument to get some KSP players to linux if they want to try a lot of mods ;-)

In another log file (the unity one which I didn't know about at the time of my old post) I found the following lines:

PartLoader: Compiling Part 'WarpPlugin/Parts/FuelTank/fnmethaneTank/part/FNMethaneTank31'

(Filename: /BuildAgent/work/ea95e74f6e5f192d/Runtime/ExportGenerated/LinuxStandalonePlayer/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 54)

FormatException: Unknown char: ,

at System.Double.Parse (System.String s, NumberStyles style, IFormatProvider provider) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at System.Double.Parse (System.String s) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at PartResource.Load (.ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at PartResourceList.Add (.ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at Part.AddResource (.ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at PartLoader.ParsePart (.UrlConfig urlConfig, .ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

at PartLoader+.MoveNext () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

(Filename: Line: -1)

I tried to have a look in the part.cfg, but didn't find a coma which seems displaced. I think this may be a bug in the part.cfg, but it could also be a bug in the PartLoader. Maybe one of the DEVs could have a look (KSP or KSPI)

[Boamere]

Hmm odd :/

Also I have a question, I've seen pictures of peoples relays and they have lines showing where the relay is going, is this remote tech or is it something to do with interstellar?

And now a non related question-Also recently I upgraded to a HD radeon 7970 and I'm getting smooth framerate, but sometimes (every 10 secs or so) I get a stutter and the screen freezes then goes back to normal, anyone have knowledge on PC's? (could it be caused by the fact I have an underpowered CPU?)

Edited January 30, 2014 by Boamere

[db48x]

I tried to have a look in the part.cfg, but didn't find a coma which seems displaced. I think this may be a bug in the part.cfg, but it could also be a bug in the PartLoader. Maybe one of the DEVs could have a look (KSP or KSPI)

As I recall, Unity makes assumptions about the locale it's running in. Try running "LC_ALL=C ./KSP.x86_64".

[ctbram]

Before I get more "you are powering a flashlight with a reactor". I realize this is not a practical design. I just wanted to see the smallest craft I could build using the 0.625 stuff. More importantly I was trying to use this to study how the heat transfer stuff works. But I just get frustrated because I cannot correlate any of the numbers in a way that makes sense. I would rather meltdown a small cheap ship then build a 1500 part monster and then find out I don't know how to size the damn radiators!!!

Where is the thermal mechanics helper? That would be useful rather then having to deorbit and rebuild stuff by trial and error.

[TomatoSoup]

Hmm odd :/

Also I have a question, I've seen pictures of peoples relays and they have lines showing where the relay is going, is this remote tech or is it something to do with interstellar?

And now a non related question-Also recently I upgraded to a HD radeon 7970 and I'm getting smooth framerate, but sometimes (every 10 secs or so) I get a stutter and the screen freezes then goes back to normal, anyone have knowledge on PC's? (could it be caused by the fact I have an underpowered CPU?)

What CPU are you using?

Where is the thermal mechanics helper? That would be useful rather then having to deorbit and rebuild stuff by trial and error.

I believe that is teasing a new feature in .10.

And unrelated to that...

Fractal_UK, your mod adds loads of lovely content to pretty much every aspect of Kerbal Space Program except for RCS. I find it odd that, at the end of the tech tree, I'm still using Monopropellant. Do you have any plans to address this? I'm in favor of a component that attaches to a reactor and heats some working fluid, which then has internal piping to deliver it to RCS clusters.

[Lightwarrior]

...

And now a non related question-Also recently I upgraded to a HD radeon 7970 and I'm getting smooth framerate, but sometimes (every 10 secs or so) I get a stutter and the screen freezes then goes back to normal, anyone have knowledge on PC's? (could it be caused by the fact I have an underpowered CPU?)

I noticed that too. I have 2 pc-s i play KSP on, first is old GF 9600GT + Phenom2 x4 965, KSP work slow but without shutter. And new one 2*GTX660 + i7-3770, KSP works much faster but sometimes i see those freezes you are talking about and even sound shutter.

It seems to me that this is caused by CPU (one its core obviously) being fully loaded, because on first pc i always have 99% GPU load (GPU bottleneck here), and on second (as in your case) GPU is way too powerfull for this game and is no more limiting FPS, so CPU becomes bottleneck here, causing such problems. But i may be wrong...

[AndreyATGB]

AFAIK the stuttering was at some point MechJeb's fault, I remember having it in 0.19 and 0.20 but it seems gone since.

Before I get more "you are powering a flashlight with a reactor". I realize this is not a practical design. I just wanted to see the smallest craft I could build using the 0.625 stuff. More importantly I was trying to use this to study how the heat transfer stuff works. But I just get frustrated because I cannot correlate any of the numbers in a way that makes sense. I would rather meltdown a small cheap ship then build a 1500 part monster and then find out I don't know how to size the damn radiators!!!

Where is the thermal mechanics helper? That would be useful rather then having to deorbit and rebuild stuff by trial and error.

Take it easy, calm down. You will get a feeling for the thermal aspects after some time with the mod or maybe 0.10 comes faster and we get to use that thermal helper in Fractal's picture. You don't need a lot of launching or time to figure it out, you can just launch only reactors straight up of different sizes and see how much one radiator dissipates.

Edited January 30, 2014 by AndreyATGB

[Lightwarrior]

I do not understand the problem.

You know reactor power output. Radiator heat dissipation is also known.

What you need is at least being able to dissipate 30% of reactor power so that idle reactor will not overheat.

To calculate how much more radiators you need if reactor is not idle you need to consider that all power that is produced but not used becomes wase heat and need to be dissipated by radiators.

Maximum here is full reactor power in worst case.

With those 1.5kw you will probably need only those 30%.

AFAIK the stuttering was at some point MechJeb's fault, I remember having it in 0.19 and 0.20 but it seems gone since.

This happens even in stock KSP when FPS falls below ~20 because of lots of parts.

Edited January 30, 2014 by Lightwarrior

[db48x]

Before I get more "you are powering a flashlight with a reactor". I realize this is not a practical design. I just wanted to see the smallest craft I could build using the 0.625 stuff. More importantly I was trying to use this to study how the heat transfer stuff works. But I just get frustrated because I cannot correlate any of the numbers in a way that makes sense. I would rather meltdown a small cheap ship then build a 1500 part monster and then find out I don't know how to size the damn radiators!!!

Where is the thermal mechanics helper? That would be useful rather then having to deorbit and rebuild stuff by trial and error.

The thermal mechanics helper will be in the next version of the mod, 0.10.

In the mean time, you can calculate the necessary radiator area with the formula A = P/(o*e*T^4), where o=5.6704e-8 W/(m^2*K^4) and e=1. Since your design needs to generate so little electricity, we can allow the generator efficiency to drop as low as we want; in fact, we will ignore the generator entirely. Likewise, we know that the generator will always run at 30% power, since that's the minimum it can run at. At minimum power level, the .625m fission reactor running on uranium hexaflouride (UF4) produces 450kW of thermal power at a temperature of 1674K, as you've seen. Unupgraded reactors can heat up to 1350K before they melt, so we'll use that temperature instead of the reactor temperature.

Substituting into the formula we get A=450000/(5.6704e-8*1350). Plugging that into google <https://www.google.com/search?q=450kW%2F((5.6704e-8W%2F(m^2*K^4)*(1350K)^4)> gives me 2.4m^2. If the numbers in the wiki are correct, then you should be able to use three large radial radiators or one medium inline radiator.

Note however that your waste heat bar will fill almost entirely up, because the amount radiated is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Higher waste heat bar means faster heat radiation.

Also, the amount of waste heat in any one part is not used for anything, only the total matters.

[mdapol]

What CPU are you using?

I believe that is teasing a new feature in .10.

And unrelated to that...

Fractal_UK, your mod adds loads of lovely content to pretty much every aspect of Kerbal Space Program except for RCS. I find it odd that, at the end of the tech tree, I'm still using Monopropellant. Do you have any plans to address this? I'm in favor of a component that attaches to a reactor and heats some working fluid, which then has internal piping to deliver it to RCS clusters.

RCS fuel is hypergolic. It doesn't require heat.

[RadHazard]

For anyone who's still confused about waste heat management and can't wait for the update, here's the wiki page on the subject. I don't know what the relationship between the level of waste heat you have and your radiator's heat is, but I can tell you that if you correctly design your craft using the equations on the second half of that page, it will not overheat and shut down.

The radiator page has all the information on radiator surface area. Note that the convection bonus on the inline and radial radiators has no effect on the radiator area. That simply means they will convect 20x as much heat per amount of surface area compared to the deployable radiators while in-atmosphere. That's only important if you are building a surface base or atmospheric craft.

RCS fuel is hypergolic. It doesn't require heat.

From what I can tell, I think he was asking for a more efficient replacement for monopropellant at higher tech levels that uses an alternative fuel source, e.g. liquid hydrogen heated by a reactor.

That'd actually be pretty interesting. Maybe have a low-tech thermal version that had a low constant temperature and that drew thermal power from anywhere on the craft (to represent the heat-exchange system). It'd have more efficiency than monopropellant, but would require that there was a reactor somewhere on the ship.

A high tech version could be a RCS-sized version of the plasma rocket with a low maximum power draw. Again, much more efficient than monopropellant (especially if you used liquid fuel for them, which would be fairly practical due to the lower thrust needed for RCS purposes).

The only problem would be fuel flow if you used any fuel type that wasn't VESSEL_ALL_FLOW.

[Lightwarrior]

Problem with RCS is that this thrusters need to "ignite" a lot of times, may be few times a second. They need to have very, very fast reaction time and do not need high thrust. Fot this purpose simple thrusters using monopropelant may be the best, because plasma thrusters will defenitely have problems with restart time / restart count, and some kind of thermal nozzles probably will have same issues.

[W.O.P.R.]

Unless you are needing a ton of power on those things you shouldnt even need the deployable ones. The small radial ones, while best in atmosphere, should be enough to keep a couple of solar pannles from overheating as long as your not sunskiming or something like that. if you needed to attach a bunch of gigantors it might be different but if you have room for gigantors the deployable radiators wouldnt look out of place.

I do need quite a bit of power, 4x fold out dishes, 2x omnidirectional, Ion Drive, kethane scanner, and two probe cores (two stage probe, kethane/iondrive dock/undock). Not to mention the added benefit of night-time scanning going nuclear. I have a second variant that is LKO powered (science package instead of kethane) designed to land on planets (no return trip). A relay and science transmission station. Again large power requirements for each probe. The small radial ones are just a waste of surface space, there is a need to have something telescopic or folding out (decently folding out like stock solar). I hope there is someone out there with modeling skills who agrees, and I hope it just sounds like a good idea.

[Fail-Man 3D]

Problem with RCS is that this thrusters need to "ignite" a lot of times, may be few times a second. They need to have very, very fast reaction time and do not need high thrust. Fot this purpose simple thrusters using monopropelant may be the best, because plasma thrusters will defenitely have problems with restart time / restart count[noparse][...][/noparse]

There are actually specialized designs for just such a role (Wikipedia link)

[JeffreyCor]

OMG I am REALLY looking forward to the update for the thermal helper alone! Major asset by itself, great thinking!

[Fractal_UK]

I tried to have a look in the part.cfg, but didn't find a coma which seems displaced. I think this may be a bug in the part.cfg, but it could also be a bug in the PartLoader. Maybe one of the DEVs could have a look (KSP or KSPI)

There are actually misplaced commas in the file (which I have now fixed ready for the next update). The resource definitions include a comma seperated number, which might explain why this is only affecting certain people and certain platforms. Try to taking that out and see if it improves things.

The small radial ones are just a waste of surface space, there is a need to have something telescopic or folding out (decently folding out like stock solar). I hope there is someone out there with modeling skills who agrees, and I hope it just sounds like a good idea.

It sounds like you are suggesting deployable radiators, which are not only already included (in three different sizes) but are by far the most important radiators in the mod...

Radial and inline radiators are generally only for cooling things in atmosphere or cooling solar powered ships in space.

[Lightwarrior]

BTW, is those nasty bug with nuclear fuel reprocession producing both fuels instead of one also fixed in next version?

[Fractal_UK]

BTW, is those nasty bug with nuclear fuel reprocession producing both fuels instead of one also fixed in next version?

Not so much fixed as eliminated. The code for reprocessing was totally redesigned and it works very nicely now.

[Lightwarrior]

Nice.

And is there any way to fix reactor which already has both fuels in?

[merendel]

I do need quite a bit of power, 4x fold out dishes, 2x omnidirectional, Ion Drive, kethane scanner, and two probe cores (two stage probe, kethane/iondrive dock/undock). Not to mention the added benefit of night-time scanning going nuclear. I have a second variant that is LKO powered (science package instead of kethane) designed to land on planets (no return trip). A relay and science transmission station. Again large power requirements for each probe. The small radial ones are just a waste of surface space, there is a need to have something telescopic or folding out (decently folding out like stock solar). I hope there is someone out there with modeling skills who agrees, and I hope it just sounds like a good idea.

The smallest deployable radiator is about two to three times the size(visualy, its 8x the mass) of a stock 1x6 deployed, its a bit larger it its stowed state because of the way it folds. If your powering an ion drive your probably looking at at least a gigantor or an equivlenet of the smaller ones. Incidently the small radiator is close to half the weight of a gigantor so you could add 2 to one side and a gigantor on the otherwith a small bit of balast to equalize the weight. Alterntively you could skip solar, stick the .625 reactor on there along with a couple small radiators and power everything in that craft for the next 26 years if you dont have the reactor upgrades yet.

[NeoAcario]

Ok, this is driving me bonkers:

There used to be a table, or a graphic, or a spreadsheet that I had / bookmarked. I can no longer find it and 10 google searches bring up nothing. I'm specifically looking for optimal altitudes and values of antimatter flux per body.

Anyone help me out here?

~Steve