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

[gorkyporky]

Hi guys! I've been having a lot of fun with this mod, eventho i havent actually built anything thats usefull with it yet. Its just a lot of fun to experiment and unlock new stuff in the carrer mode, after replaying it 4 times on a stock game. Anyway, i just set up my microwave network, like it says in the wiki, and it works great. I finaly have constant power for my plasma engines. But i just realized they are still not really that powerfull. How should i go about using them? I put a single liquid fuel tank on a capsule and a 2.5m plasma engine, and once in orbit, it barely goes anywhere, even if i power it from Xenon or monopropelant tanks. Any strategies on how to use the plasma engines without it taking a really long time to do anything? Do they get upgraded later?

And the most important question, how do i get the thermal helper window back after i turn it of in the VAB?

Thanks!

[WaveFunctionP]

Hi guys! I've been having a lot of fun with this mod, eventho i havent actually built anything thats usefull with it yet. Its just a lot of fun to experiment and unlock new stuff in the carrer mode, after replaying it 4 times on a stock game. Anyway, i just set up my microwave network, like it says in the wiki, and it works great. I finaly have constant power for my plasma engines. But i just realized they are still not really that powerfull. How should i go about using them? I put a single liquid fuel tank on a capsule and a 2.5m plasma engine, and once in orbit, it barely goes anywhere, even if i power it from Xenon or monopropelant tanks. Any strategies on how to use the plasma engines without it taking a really long time to do anything? Do they get upgraded later?

And the most important question, how do i get the thermal helper window back after i turn it of in the VAB?

Thanks!

How much power is the craft receiving? The 2.5m engine caps at 200 GW. Which is a substantially large power network. If you can't provide that much power, you might be better off going smaller with a 1.25 engine which can cap at 25 GW. The different sized engines only vary is maximum power capacity. ISP and Thrust/MW all remain the same. They do get slightly better max TWR, but you have to maxxing power to see that happen. If you aren't providing atleast 150 GW to the 2.5, you'd have better twr going with something more suitable to your networks power capacity.

As for the power button, I don't know. I haven't been bothered enough to figure it out. You can always exit and come back to the VAB.

Edited March 13, 2014 by WaveFunctionP

[VaporTrail]

With the upgraded plasma thrusters (playing around with the stuff in sandbox here, rathter than in career) you can do SSTO for small craft (couple of tons IIRC) using nothing but a 62.5cm thruster and monoprop as fuel, and not a whole lot of that. Trick is you have to be able to put ~1gigawatt on target at surface. That tends to translate to somewhere on the high side of 3GW in orbit... I actually built my low orbit relays around that combination (one fixed Xcvr, three receivers (made angle agile with Infernal Robotics) landing legs, lights, and control pods).

Best thing you can do for a plasma engine is more power input.

That said, once you've got the Vaccum Plasma thruster, the Kerbol system is your oyster. Getting anywhere just means you've got to get power there. Reaction mass is unnecessary... Of course, unless you're getting multiple tens of gigawatts of reception, you're still stuck with some pretty low thrust without a carried reaction mass. Still, it's quite a bit easier getting somewhere if you don't have to haul tons of fuel.

Matter of fact, I've got a Solar Generation station braking into 20,000 km Kerbol orbit right now... ~three hours of boost @ 2.526 M/sec^2 from 4.38 GW received.

Edited March 13, 2014 by VaporTrail

[undercoveryankee]

And the most important question, how do i get the thermal helper window back after i turn it of in the VAB?

The "I" key toggles the thermal helper.

[Fractal_UK]

Quick question re: the IR Telescope's Grav-Lens survey, which requires a 550AU orbit:

Given that takes around 67 years to get out there, is the only realistic method of transport the Alcubierre drive?

It only takes a long time to get there if you Hohmann transfer to get there but there is no need to get there that way, it's possible to use some of the later tech engines to simply burn away from the sun until you build up some significant speed then burn in the opposite direction to kill that velocity and subsequently circularise. If you can get 200k delta-v you should be able to complete the mission in 5 years.

It's not easy but that's the point, if you can do it without the alcubierre drive it gives you a huge boost towards actually getting those late techs.

[merendel]

Best thing you can do for a plasma engine is more power input.

Not in every situation actualy. for at least right now the more power in your network the more heat dissipation you need. A not uncommon mistake for people to make is to start building plasma craft useing only a few GW of beamed power. With a light craft this is plenty for orbital maneuvers or sometimes even a self powered launch from kerbin. The mistake comes later when after deploying a small fleet of light craft a player decides to upgrade the power network to support heavier launches/craft. What was plenty of heat dissipation before suddenly melts the craft within minutes of opening the receiver when the available power goes up a couple orders of magnitude.

You can also sometimes get situations where you used say the 1.25 plasma because it fit nicely with the profile of the craft but were only feeding it 2gw or so and it worked nicely for a light craft. if you suddenly shove max capacity into it you can find yourself pulling crazy G's potentialy breaking bits off the craft (or killing crew if you've got a mod that punishes for g limit breaches)

[Makeone]

It only takes a long time to get there if you Hohmann transfer to get there but there is no need to get there that way, it's possible to use some of the later tech engines to simply burn away from the sun until you build up some significant speed then burn in the opposite direction to kill that velocity and subsequently circularise. If you can get 200k delta-v you should be able to complete the mission in 5 years.

It's not easy but that's the point, if you can do it without the alcubierre drive it gives you a huge boost towards actually getting those late techs.

Burning heavily in order to get high orbits tends to break down ksp and reduce the fps to...well, as low as it goes, and probably lover than that. I have made couple time the mistake of trying to burn either out of suns soi or outer planet, Eeloo in this one case, and at some point, orbital period goes really nuts, like 1000years and simulations draws nearly a full halt. I can operate other ships fine, but switching back to this heavy burner, lag hits again and game almost stops. I am not sure if its ksp itself that melts, or is it MechJeb that's causing it as it probably calculates those readouts as well?

I can only wonder what happens with alcubierre drive...

[VaporTrail]

Not in every situation actualy. for at least right now the more power in your network the more heat dissipation you need. A not uncommon mistake for people to make is to start building plasma craft useing only a few GW of beamed power. With a light craft this is plenty for orbital maneuvers or sometimes even a self powered launch from kerbin. The mistake comes later when after deploying a small fleet of light craft a player decides to upgrade the power network to support heavier launches/craft. What was plenty of heat dissipation before suddenly melts the craft within minutes of opening the receiver when the available power goes up a couple orders of magnitude.

You can also sometimes get situations where you used say the 1.25 plasma because it fit nicely with the profile of the craft but were only feeding it 2gw or so and it worked nicely for a light craft. if you suddenly shove max capacity into it you can find yourself pulling crazy G's potentialy breaking bits off the craft (or killing crew if you've got a mod that punishes for g limit breaches)

Hmm... No offense meant, but that's actually a pretty dumb way to run a power network. Granted you want the ability to shunt all power to any specific node if you can swing it... but you don't want the necessity of doing that. It's like powering each individual house/building in a city with the full output of the local powerplant. You'd blow crap up that way too (mostly transformers).

In fact, building a microwave power network (or ground based electrical network, for that matter) with that kind of flaw is actually harder than doing it the right way... because there should be some kind of intelligence in charge of the system. The easiest way of limiting a power network from doing this is simply turning off select relays. Or just don't make microwaves. Or don't beam all the microwaves at the requesting node. Alternatively you can sweep the beam across the receiver, so it only gets hit by the beam for a few milliseconds out of every second, just enough time to supply enough power for your needs, and little enough that you don't melt.

The player should be able to control the network, not the other way around.

Mechjeb allows the user to set a throttle limit (multiple ways in fact), so breaking Kerbals with chairs isn't going to be much of an issue for me...

That said, the possibility for human (kerbal?) error should still exist. If you have a ship that has megawatt levels of heat dissipation and you make a terawatt power request of the network, you're going to get that terawatt... if the ship can't deal with the waste heat and shut down fast enough... boom.

Speaking of, why does a ship with radiators explode if you hit its receiver with a terawatt beam, and a ship with a receiver but without radiators simply shut off the receiver? Haven't tried that experiment lately, but the last time I did I hit a radiatorless receiver with a gigawatt and all I got was a slightly scorched receiver and a nasty-note from the system.

[merendel]

Hmm... No offense meant, but that's actually a pretty dumb way to run a power network.

No argument here and fractal has discussed adding the ability to limit the power recieved at the node. Its just that as things currently stand most players will bootstrap their power network as needed with the unfortunate side effect of early ship moddles still in service when the net is upgraded becomeing rather melty. That and theres really no good way to build a 5-10 ton ship powered by beamed power that can run on a 200+ GW power grid. what are you going to do strap twice its weight in huge radiators to it so you can do more than a 20s burn? I eagerly await fractal geting around to releaseing that feature to limit power without haveing to shut down the plants manualy. Although at this point I'm kinda suspecting he may be waiting for .24 before releasing the next major version of KSPI. Either that or he's just exceptionaly busy with RL right now.

[VaporTrail]

Hm... Guess I'm going to put my Dyson Ring on hold for now. Plan was for 360 solar generators a degree apart in 20 Mm orbit of Kerbol, each pushing ~1.5 GW out to a ring of relays in ~100Mm orbit.

Thats roughly .54 TW of power available. 1/32 of a planetary power supply, maintenance free...

Edited March 14, 2014 by VaporTrail

[WaveFunctionP]

Hm... Guess I'm going to put my Dyson Ring on hold for now. Plan was for 360 solar generators a degree apart in 20 Mm orbit of Kerbol, each pushing ~1.5 GW out to a ring of relays in ~100Mm orbit.

Thats roughly .54 TW of power available. 1/32 of a planetary power supply, maintenance free...

I wouldn't do that simply for ksp/warpplugin performance reasons.

[BigD145]

Nope, those are stock Gigantors. Kinda leery of adding another mod to the mix... getting missing numbers in my navball dV occasionally, think I'm tempting the memory Kraken.

Kosmos have 200 to stock's 18. You could do your network with fewer parts and only add the Kosmos solars portion. If you're not using certain parts, get rid of them.

[merendel]

I wouldn't do that simply for ksp/warpplugin performance reasons.

I would agree. I start noticing performance hits with 100 or so active flights I dont want to know what sticking 360 on top just for the cool factor would do to my poor PC.

[VaporTrail]

Well, I'm just now getting past two dozen flights in progress at the same time... so it was more of a "can I do this kind of thing" thing... That, and the maintenance issue. I don't want to have to service my power supply.

I could just stick about twenty, which would give me an easy 20 GW.

Or I could just go the fusion route...

Hmmm... floating fusion reactors processing the sea for He2/He3...

[Taki117]

Question regarding Microwave relays: I've set up a relay network around Kerbin with 4 of the 3.75 Reactor/Generator combos with 2 microwave transceivers. I've set 1 to relay and the other to Transmit. My ship on the launch pad is only seeing 2/4 satellites connected, am I missing something or is this Normal?

[merendel]

Well, I'm just now getting past two dozen flights in progress at the same time... so it was more of a "can I do this kind of thing" thing... That, and the maintenance issue. I don't want to have to service my power supply.

I could just stick about twenty, which would give me an easy 20 GW.

Or I could just go the fusion route...

Hmmm... floating fusion reactors processing the sea for He2/He3...

Theres also the ground based power plant. Just make one big "Rover" made up of tons of fission generators and deploy it from the SPH. can either leave it there or drive it west a few clicks so you dont have loading issues. Then the only "Service" you need to do on the power supply is your yearly recover/redeploy. You could also split the difference. Have a few solars going for your every day amount of power needs and have a big power plant you deploy on the runway whenever you just need to melt some componants ASAP.

[smunisto]

I am considering starting a new game separately from my other save with this mod.

Are there any known mod incompatibilities I should be worrying about?

I use mostly plugin mods, not others, but still wondering.

[Tristavius]

On a station with multiple fission reactors and generators I have 3 reactors on shutdown and 1 active. Despite three being offline the transmitter is successfully drawing the full online power from all four, as long as the generator attached to each offline one remains on. If the generator is turned off, that power plant no longer adds to the total. The Power Management display reads a current supply of only 1 reactor yet a power demand of all 4, showing a huge deficit to the net power.

Additional Info (hopefully this stuff helps with the bug tracking!)...

A new reactor was added. The reactor had been turned off in the VAB and never active. On initial docking it did NOT add it's power like the other offline ones did. After leaving the scene and later returning it is now incorrectly applying its power.

I tried turning off the 1 remaining online reactor and the transmitter now only transmits a tiny amount, which I think is from the 'cool-down' period the reactor is currently undergoing. All offline reactors now don't seem to apply power.

[WaveFunctionP]

Question regarding Microwave relays: I've set up a relay network around Kerbin with 4 of the 3.75 Reactor/Generator combos with 2 microwave transceivers. I've set 1 to relay and the other to Transmit. My ship on the launch pad is only seeing 2/4 satellites connected, am I missing something or is this Normal?

Assuming you have them setup with the same period and ~90% separation, you should be getting power from each one. And it should show x/x if they all see each other.

[Taki117]

Assuming you have them setup with the same period and ~90% separation, you should be getting power from each one. And it should show x/x if they all see each other.

thats the exact setup I'm using. 4 power stations at about a 90 degree interval in a 1500km circular orbit. thats whats confusing me is they should all have LOS, but im still reading from only 2 on the pad. And i really dont want to put a Manley Power Station on the Runway ( I use that)

[Taki117]

I am considering starting a new game separately from my other save with this mod.

Are there any known mod incompatibilities I should be worrying about?

I use mostly plugin mods, not others, but still wondering.

I'm running the Mod Gauntlet and I haven't hit anything yet. (My GameData folder is 2GB in size) with everything from KW and B9 to Chatterer and RCS Sounds

[RSF77]

Has anyone made reduced textures for KSPI yet? I can already hear my computer crying when I start KSP so I'm leery about adding other big mods without reducing the memory load somewhat.

[Donziboy2]

Has anyone made reduced textures for KSPI yet? I can already hear my computer crying when I start KSP so I'm leery about adding other big mods without reducing the memory load somewhat.

Most people use Active Texture Management mod.

[Makeone]

thats the exact setup I'm using. 4 power stations at about a 90 degree interval in a 1500km circular orbit. thats whats confusing me is they should all have LOS, but im still reading from only 2 on the pad. And i really dont want to put a Manley Power Station on the Runway ( I use that)

There is one issue that we could consider: relay mode requires some electric charge to operate but as we already know, transmit mode eats everything from its source so nothing left for relay transceiver...

Way to fix it? Sure, use all power satellites transmit only mode and launch few simple satellites with relay mode set transceiver, couple of solar panels and maybe a heat radiator. More stuff at orbit, yup. That's why i use ground power transmitter, especially when they run out of fuel, you either collect it and launch a new, or reprocess the fuel, something that i did for testing purpose, two 3.75m reactors, took 180h to fully reprocess 6000 actinides. Obviously one needs to remember add at least one fuel canister for depleted fuel. Oh, and i think 3.75m reactor will only stay up about 3 months at constant 100% power. Orbital powerstations are even more troublesome until you got a reprocessing ship in orbit as well. I don't recommend going faster than 1000x time warp while reprocessing or it will mess up.

[merendel]

There is one issue that we could consider: relay mode requires some electric charge to operate but as we already know, transmit mode eats everything from its source so nothing left for relay transceiver...

You could include a couple RTG's on the ship. As I recall the transmiter will only convert the output of solar pannles to MW and wont touch RTG output. Even if something does mess up and the transmiter sends off all active power and does not reserve anything for maintaining the ship the RTG's should keep it active. I remember that being the solution a few versions back for low kerbol solar stations that ended up haveing the transmiter starve the probe core into inactivity although not sure if that particular bug persists.