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

[WaveFunctionP]

HELP!!! I've got a craft landed on one of Duna's ice caps, and i have an inline refinery and a nuclear reactor+electrical generator. I can turn on the refinery and use the water electrolysis option, and it draw megajoules from my generator, but nothing happens! I don't get any fuel! I have a liquid engine, and unless i can refuel it i can't get back home since i only have 10% fuel left. My refinery is attached directly to my liquid fuel tank, but no matter how long i run the electrolysis option i don't get any fuel.

You need to have a supply of water to electrolyze. So you need to turn activate water extraction to get any from the ice caps. Assuming you are in an area that has water. If not, you won't get the option.

[WaveFunctionP]

Yes, He3 is very hard to get, but with the upgraded power generators, a He3 powered fusion genetator is the most powerful reactor per unit mass until you unlock anti-matter. I could be mistaken, but I believe that if you are in a sub-orbital flight with an atmospheric scoop in Jool's atmosphere you can obtain He3. I haven't yet gotten around to messing with fusion yet so I can't really tell you more.

I created my own github account so I could mess around with a copy of the wiki, I hope to improve it by a large margin but it will definitely take me a while. I've never edited a wiki before but I'm great at organizing thoughts and ideas. Once I'm done I'll present it to Fractal for him to judge if its good enough to put up.

Just start editing the official wiki. That is why it is a wiki. There are few of us that work on it when we get time. Make sure to make use the edit comments. And small progressive changes are easier to track than whole cloth edits. No one will be "judging" your edits, it's a collaborative process. If you are incorrect about something, and someone edits it, don't worry about it, that what peer review is all about.

Edited April 19, 2014 by WaveFunctionP

[phoenix_ca]

How about a part that would act as EC storage, with capacity equal to one game tick's worth of energy based on its MJ/s rating? Anything entering it is made available as MJ. As long as it's the lowest priority part (do sources have prio too, or only sinks?), it shouldn't set up an infinite loop with MJ->EC conversion. Maybe. I think.

A one-way converter would be nifty. Flick it on, override default behaviour of using excess EC only for MJ and instead dump all EC to MJ. Flick it off, it sits there and stares at you blankly. Could be helpful for solar power stations, definitely useful for mod interoperability with things like Near Future capacitors, and at the same time give users more feedback about what's happening, by associating a function/feature of the mod with a part. And there'd be no need for fudging. Or, less need for fudging maybe.

[undercoveryankee]

Is there any way for one part to act as both a reactor and a thermal nozzle?

I tried to convert the LV-N to act like an Interstellar thermal rocket by adding modules FNNozzleController and FNNuclearReactor to it. It seems to work as a nuclear reactor, but it won't run as an engine because "no reactor attached."

[WaveFunctionP]

Is there any way for one part to act as both a reactor and a thermal nozzle?

I tried to convert the LV-N to act like an Interstellar thermal rocket by adding modules FNNozzleController and FNNuclearReactor to it. It seems to work as a nuclear reactor, but it won't run as an engine because "no reactor attached."

The engine module does a check for connected parts with certain modules, you'd need to modify the code for warpplugin, as I do not believe there is a config setting to override the behavior. There is a similar check for generators.

[phoenix_ca]

So do electric generators work by converting ThermalPower or ChargedParticles in a connected reactor part first to ElectricCharge, and once that's full, MegaJoules? That's what it looks like to me but I'd like to confirm.

[Tristavius]

Yes, He3 is very hard to get, but with the upgraded power generators, a He3 powered fusion genetator is the most powerful reactor per unit mass until you unlock anti-matter. I could be mistaken, but I believe that if you are in a sub-orbital flight with an atmospheric scoop in Jool's atmosphere you can obtain He3. I haven't yet gotten around to messing with fusion yet so I can't really tell you more.

I created my own github account so I could mess around with a copy of the wiki, I hope to improve it by a large margin but it will definitely take me a while. I've never edited a wiki before but I'm great at organizing thoughts and ideas. Once I'm done I'll present it to Fractal for him to judge if its good enough to put up.

Yeup! Jool ram scoop is the way to go! Meant to post a picture of mine before I left for holiday, will do so when I get back.

In short, strap a LOAD of big intakes onto a craft (mine uses 16) and dive ALL the way down... 500m is a good altitude. Using a thermal jet engine running on atmosphere you should be able to thrust at 5000+ kn giving an awesomely fast speed of around 80m/s. Can fill a he3 tank in 40 mins or so and I can afk on mine for that time.

Ascent is a three part process, just gun for space on atmosphere intake as long as it gives more thrust than liquid fuel before switching. When it's liquid time open all intakes to Hydrogen and even on a wisp of atmosphere the tanks will stay full. By the time the hydrogen isn't coming in, 90% + of the delta v has been spent, complete and circularize on the stored fuel.

My ship uses a 2.5m antimatter reactor and 2.5m thermal turbojet which makes it easy; like REALLY easy. Would bet fusion would be possible but more challenging.

Will post pictures when I get home, just 5 more countries to go!

[Fractal_UK]

So do electric generators work by converting ThermalPower or ChargedParticles in a connected reactor part first to ElectricCharge, and once that's full, MegaJoules? That's what it looks like to me but I'd like to confirm.

No, Thermal Power and Charged Particles are converted directly into Megajoules, then the Megajoule Resource Manager decides how many megajoules need converting into Electric Charge to keep the bar full.

The key difference is that managed resources are an Interstellar thing so there is much more information available about power supply and demand compared to the stock resource system, which just naively adds and subtracts. Since it's easy to go from more information to less, it's trivial to convert MJ into EC but very difficult to do so in the other direction. The best solution is to supplement or replace modules to make them produce MJ instead.

[phoenix_ca]

Well that clears that up. It's difficult to tell because once a generator dumps EC out, it can fill piles and piles and piles of batteries pretty much instantaneously. O.O

My ship uses a 2.5m antimatter reactor and 2.5m thermal turbojet which makes it easy; like REALLY easy. Would bet fusion would be possible but more challenging.

Well it kinda defeats the purpose of building it if it depends on using an antimatter reactor, no?

...

What about SABRE engines? I haven't used the scoops before. I assume that "Hydrogen" is just KSPI renaming the in-game LiquidFuel resource to that, if the ElectricEnginePropellants.cfg is anything to go on. SABRE engines from B9 or the stock RAPIER might be self-sustaining in that environment. Maybe. And then you could (potentially) completely avoid the use of a heavy reactor as part of the design; just use batteries, or a very tiny reactor to keep the lights on.

Edited April 19, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[epicsockzebra]

Hey, can anyone help me. I'm trying to swap fuel modes on my fusion reactors, I'd like to swap them to He-3 and I looked on the wiki and it says that as long as I have enough of each fuel, I should be fine. I have around 1.5(units?) of helium 3.

[WaveFunctionP]

Hey, can anyone help me. I'm trying to swap fuel modes on my fusion reactors, I'd like to swap them to He-3 and I looked on the wiki and it says that as long as I have enough of each fuel, I should be fine. I have around 1.5(units?) of helium 3.

You need advanced fusion (High-Q Tokomax) to swap fuel modes, I believe.

[Rabada]

Quick question, is there a limit to the number of anti-matter collectors you can have on one ship for them to be effective? In my practice sandbox game I origionally had just 1 antimatter collector up at 900km with 20 collectors and a 2.5m antimatter reactor and generator to generate beamed power. It produces 1.2 GW total. That wasn't enough power so I edited a massive 100 collector station with the same 2.5m reactor and generator into orbit. I figured with 5 times as many collectors it should put out 6 GW according to the Power Management Display, however, it is only putting out 2.68 GW.

I am running Insterstellar .10 on KSP .23. This could easily be my fault because I'm running a lot of mods and I have messed around a lot with the game files on that particular installation, I'm just curious if anyone has come across this issue.

[pantheis]

So I just unlocked warp drive finally (yay!), engaged it and noticed the textures for the effect are all black. I believe I saw mention of this being a problem due to the active texture management addon and that some file needed to be edited to add a specific exemption. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?

Found it:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-23-5-KSP-Interstellar-%28Toolbar-Integration-New-Models-New-Tech%29-Version-0-11?p=967466&viewfull=1#post967466

However, making that edit doesn't restore the warp effect. It's still all black.

Edited April 20, 2014 by pantheis

[Sokar408]

You need advanced fusion (High-Q Tokomax) to swap fuel modes, I believe.

How do I know if a module is upgraded or not, and where do I see which nodes upgrades what modules? :S

EDIT: Found it on the frontpage. I still think it should be clearly stated somewhere in the game though.

Also, could you please take the time to tell me what radiation actually does? I can see that crew has life time doses in the persists file, so I assume it does something but what? Does it kill the Kerbals X level of exposure, and if so, what level of exposure, how do I know if a Kerbal is getting close to it, and how do I lower the dose?

Edited April 19, 2014 by Sokar408

[WaveFunctionP]

How do I know if a module is upgraded or not, and where do I see which nodes upgrades what modules? :S

EDIT: Found it on the frontpage. I still think it should be clearly stated somewhere in the game though.

Also, could you please take the time to tell me what radiation actually does? I can see that crew has life time doses in the persists file, so I assume it does something but what? Does it kill the Kerbals X level of exposure, and if so, what level of exposure, how do I know if a Kerbal is getting close to it, and how do I lower the dose?

There's been some work to put this information in-game, but as yet the priority has been on new features and bug fixes, and not player messaging, balance or polish though.

Only Fractal knows what his final plan for radiation exposure will mean, for now, it is only a tooltip. There are no effects associated with exposure right now, and the numbers are not yet balanced.

[Donziboy2]

Quick question, is there a limit to the number of anti-matter collectors you can have on one ship for them to be effective? In my practice sandbox game I origionally had just 1 antimatter collector up at 900km with 20 collectors and a 2.5m antimatter reactor and generator to generate beamed power. It produces 1.2 GW total. That wasn't enough power so I edited a massive 100 collector station with the same 2.5m reactor and generator into orbit. I figured with 5 times as many collectors it should put out 6 GW according to the Power Management Display, however, it is only putting out 2.68 GW.

I am running Insterstellar .10 on KSP .23. This could easily be my fault because I'm running a lot of mods and I have messed around a lot with the game files on that particular installation, I'm just curious if anyone has come across this issue.

Snipped Delusional Banter.... I was drowsy the first try lol.....

Lets try it again below.

Well from what I can tell AM Collection and AM Reactors are acting pretty screwy.....

Item number one, a 10 Collector AM sat with a 2.5 AM Reactor. As you can see its putting out 1.4GW of Thermal Power, now look at the AM Collector, it is collecting 4.612306e-5 AM per second. Now lets do the math here....

(AM Collection amount x Seconds in a day x number of collectors) 4.612306e-5 * 86400 * 10 = 39.85mg/day

Ok now the reactor can use up to 3.324 mg/second and output 120GW of power or 36.1011GW/mg

Now lets do some more math here... (GW per mg * mg / seconds in a day) 36.1011 * 39.85 / 86400 = 0.01665GW/second Thermal Power

So the math says 16.65MW per second but the part says 1.4GW per second???????

Item number 2.

Now lets try this with 100 collectors..

We get 4.5GW Thermal Power, we are in the same 900K orbit so the amount we are collecting per collector is the same but instead of 10 we have 100 collectors. 398.503mg/day and the same 36.1011GW/mg

(GW per mg * mg / seconds in a day) 36.1011 * 398.503 / 86400 = 0.1665GW/second Thermal Power

So hmm, math says 166.5MW and part says 4.5GW.....

Item number 3

Lets try a more extreme location and hit Jool.

So lets see, 54GW Thermal Power looks pretty awesome right? But wait why does it say 19.981% that cant be right???? I mean think about it 19.981% of 120GW is 23.977GW not 54GW!!!

So lets do the math....

(AM Collection amount x Seconds in a day x number of collectors) 6.64172e-3 * 86400 * 100 = 57384.461mg/day

(GW per mg * mg / seconds in a day) 36.1011 * 57384.461 / 86400 = 23.977GW/second Thermal Power

So now the math says 23.977GW and the part says 54GW.....

I even tested with my large 226 AM collector and had similar results.

Kerbin orbit, math says 376.31MW and part says 6.7GW.

Jool orbit, math says 46.484GW and part says 81GW.

Edited April 20, 2014 by Donziboy2

[Einarr]

Any tips for using the Solar Sail? I expect MJ would have some issues with automatically making maneuvers using it due to the extremely tiny thrust...

[Rabada]

Snip

Ah, perhaps I have discovered a bug. I think that it might just be for Kerbin. I did legitimately put a 80 collector station around Urania, which is about the same as Jool, and now I'm getting 50-60 GW in LKO.

[Donziboy2]

Ah, perhaps I have discovered a bug. I think that it might just be for Kerbin. I did legitimately put a 80 collector station around Urania, which is about the same as Jool, and now I'm getting 50-60 GW in LKO.

No your definitely onto something, after writing that large post and making pictures I noticed the math was not adding up so I started all over again.

[WaveFunctionP]

Any tips for using the Solar Sail? I expect MJ would have some issues with automatically making maneuvers using it due to the extremely tiny thrust...

The solar sail and warp drive are really outside of the type of engines that MJ can handle.

[Rabada]

No your definitely onto something, after writing that large post and making pictures I noticed the math was not adding up so I started all over again.

Out of curiousity, what is the optimal orbit for collecting anti-matter from Jool, and how much antimatter does each collector get?

[ABZB]

http://imgur.com/a/g313g#4

Based on these graphs, somewhere between 7500 and 10000 km, (with an inclination of 0 degrees) yielding somewhat more than .006 mg per second

Edited April 20, 2014 by ABZB

[pantheis]

http://imgur.com/a/g313g#4

Based on these graphs, somewhere between 7500 and 10000 km, (with an inclination of 0 degrees) yielding somewhat more than .006 mg per second

I still have no clue how to actually read those graphs.

[DrNuke]

I still have no clue how to actually read those graphs.

The x-axis is the altitude away from Kerbin in the directly away from the ground direction (NADIR) and the y-axis is if you have any inclination (i.e. anything other than an equatorial orbit). So for best collection, you want to be in an equatorial orbit. The best antimatter collection will be in the dark red section of the graph.

I really should redo those as a contour plot.

Edited April 20, 2014 by DrNuke
clarity

[ABZB]

I still have no clue how to actually read those graphs.

Simply, the best orbit is with an inclination of 0 degrees. The best orbit stays exactly over the equator of the planet. I am not certain exactly what 'Polar Altitude' is measuring. I know that the value indicates deviation from the optimal equatorial orbit by some measure. So, basically, just look along the line of 'Polar Orbit' = 0 (the horizontal line in the middle of image). The darkest red is the best harvest rate. Then look down and see (kind of guess, really) the orbital altitude that is indicated below on the horizontal axis. When I set up around a planet for the first time, I usually start at my lowest or highest estimate, and slowly work my way up or down respectively in altitude until the harvest rate starts to go down again, thereby informing me of the maximum.

Ninja'd (watching BBC show about the history of science fiction)