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

[nli2work]

First off, let me apologize if this has been answered before, but with 950 pages, and the search function bringing me to about page 600, I don't have time to read ~350 pages of thread to find the answer.

Is there any way to make the data gained from an impact collectable? I've tried modifying the science.cfg to simply add the "dataIsCollectable = True" and other lines from other parts, but to no avail. Like a dumbass I didn't put an antenna on my ship and have 875 science just sitting there...

if you have KAS, you can add an antenna to the vehicle. If you are collecting the date, you'd be close enough to add the antenna. You may have to add the line to the part on the vehicle in flightstate instead of the config file.

[BigD145]

I edited my origional post with a work-around that I figured out. It was able to fix my sat!

Yes it does work. Although I doubt it's ideal.

[LinAGKar]

After I installed this the game keeps crashing for me during startup. I'm on openSUSE 13.1 64-bit and plays the game through Steam.

[Threadsinger]

Inspired by Manley's satellite... How big can a solar satellite be?

http://i7.minus.com/iZBBo7v3Q4I8B.png

Foldable, of course.

That seems... excessive.

/very cool!

[Rabada]

Yes it does work. Although I doubt it's ideal.

Thankyou for the link!! You are correct that it is not ideal, I was having issues with some of the solar panels saying that they were blocked from sunlight when they clearly were not. I was planning on having several solar sats around Kerbin anyways, so my Mark 2 sat uses the single Balka solar panels. It is also much much more stable, because I was able to strut it much better than my mk 1 sat.

Here's a pic from a test flight of my solar power sat mk. 2:

It's Simple but it works.

Thankyou for the advice also!!

[cy-one]

I have a question about the storage of tritium and deuterium. I just send a small unmanned mission to my minmus-base, carrying deuterium and tritium in those hexacans. The deuterium didn't get fewer, but the Tritium seems to have degraded a little bit.

How fast does that happen and does it happen slower with that cryotank-thingy?

[Rabada]

I have a question about the storage of tritium and deuterium. I just send a small unmanned mission to my minmus-base, carrying deuterium and tritium in those hexacans. The deuterium didn't get fewer, but the Tritium seems to have degraded a little bit.

How fast does that happen and does it happen slower with that cryotank-thingy?

Tritium decays into Helium 3 at a very slow rate. Helium 3 is great for fusion reactors. Note: This only happens on focused ships, to avoid having this happen, time warp with a flag or something then go back to your ship when you need to. I believe that Helium 3 has the potential to produce more power in fusion reactors than tritium, so what I would suggest you do is to keep a helium 3 container on your ship. I believe tritium yields Helium 3 in a 1:1 ratio.

Edit: I should also point out that the cryotank is used for the IR telescope only. Also Tritium has a half life of 12.32 years so after that amount of time you should loose half your tritium.

[ArcFurnace]

There's a cryogenic D-T tank as well as the Helium Cryostat. The D-T cryogenic tank holds more deuterium and tritium than the radial-mount tank (lower tank mass per amount stored), but requires power to keep it refrigerated, otherwise both resources will boil off. I believe the powered boil-off is zero. Tritium decay will be unaffected.

I think tritium may actually still decay while the vessel is unfocused, but it doesn't properly produce Helium-3 like it should. If you timewarp for long periods of time with the vessel focused you should be able to see the tritum decaying into Helium-3.

Helium-3 is only useful for the inertial confinement fusion reactors (the 0.625m and 1.25m ones). In those, pure He-3 fusion produces 100% Charged Particles, which can be converted into electricity by a Direct Conversion generator at 85% efficiency. For the larger tokamaks, it still produces 100% Charged Particles, but it also causes a massive drop in overall power output due to the increased difficulty of the fusion reaction over D-T.

You can also use D/He-3 fusion, which produces 80% charged particles but is otherwise similar to He-3 fusion.

Edited May 21, 2014 by ArcFurnace

[phoenix_ca]

Tritium decay into He-3 doesn't work unless the ship is focused. The tritium will decay but no He-3 is produced. This makes it effectively a non-feature. It happens, but not in any appreciable amounts.

Edited May 21, 2014 by phoenix_ca

[cy-one]

the 2.5m fusion reactor has not the right energy priority. It's 1, the same as (for example) the plasmathruster... Which means, I get warnings for the plasmaheating of the reactor.

Is there a way to change the priority inside a cfg?

[Alewx]

Are you ready for the awesome sat?

Except the solar panels it is just slightly too big in diameter for the 3.75m fairings

The ion engines are able to speed it up with 1m/s at a weight of 60t. The construction began as an overpowered communicationrelay, but it is easy to be used as a solarsat.

Also the wasteheat management is still untested, that might cause some problems. Does anyone have a basic formula for me about which radiators would be best/needed?

[cy-one]

In addition to my tokamak-priority-problem, my antimatter collectors do not work.

This

is currently orbiting Kerbin on a 900km orbit. Several days, not a single drop of antimatter.

What am I doing wrong?

[DaveStrider]

You probably need some fuel lines to the antimatter tanks, as those collectors aren't in the same stack as the tanks.

[cy-one]

Would it suffice to put lines from the collectors to the girder where they are mounted on? The station is modular, so a line directly to the tanks wouldn't work at this time.

Also, KAS claims pipes also work as fuel lines... Does somebody know if I can retrofit that station that way?

[phoenix_ca]

@RESOURCE_DEFINITION[Antimatter]
{
  @flowMode = ALL_VESSEL
}

Enjoy no more antimatter fuel-routing shenanigans.

That's my solution anyway. Don't want to put-up with this nonsense.

[cy-one]

Thank you, added it to my patch, works :3

[Einarr]

So WaveFunctionP, how goes your Grand Tour Ship?

Mine's essentially complete and waiting for the transfer window to Duna. Got a rover and everything...though technically that rover would be a problem if I were using FAR...and I'm not certain how well it would survive Deadly reentry. I'll be taking it on a shakedown cruise to the Mun and/or Minmus here shortly.

I'm not happy with the rover itself, or the placement, but the crane is nifty.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Atrius129]

Yes it does work. Although I doubt it's ideal.

Thank you for posting that. You fixed my Balkas!

[tmbomber]

[bUG] - My 3.75m fusion powered MW power station has stopped working. I was on a long mission and it was breeding tritium. I had 2 tanks of lithium and enough D/T tanks to hold all the trit that could be produced by the Li. When I returned I noticed I had no MW power so I checked and the fusion reactor was shutdown. Waste Heat is green. But the reactor and all the D/T tanks show completely full but have values of NaN/100 for the D/T tanks and NaN/800 for the reactor. I suspect they filled to overflow and there is a floating point issue in the code that could not deal with >100% capacity.

My ship mass is also showing NaN t.

Is there anyway to fix this?

I ran into this one just last night...

I have several orbital 3.75m fusion power stations. They're identical and were put up within a few hours of each other. Last night I noticed the power levels I was receiving was lower than expected so I went around checking fuel levels. One of my power stations was showing NaN for tritium and deuterium.

I exited the game and fixed the values in the sfs file as suggested in post #8768. Tritium and deuterium levels on the other stations were somewhere around 60%, so I changed the NaN values to match, so my stations are back on line and everything's back to normal.

I can tell you that only one of the stations went off line and that the other stations had nothing unusual going on.

No idea why or how it happened, but I can confirm the bug exists.

[cernakus]

Hello, my problem is underpowered VISTA DT engine. As 3,75m part it really should gives more thrust then it does. (Idea is, that as open-cycle fusion engine, the delivered power should be more then 85GW, witch is less then closed cycle antimatter reactors). As an "Endgame" content engine it should have parameters to compensate momentum transition caused by Warpdrive jumps. As in view of Isp, it is OK, behemont size interplanetary ship can easily achieve 100+km/s delta-v, so plenty delta-v for several jumps across solar system. But acceleration is bad. Normally values around 1m/s-2 is quite enough, but not when you want to compensate 5km/s speed. It takes around 1,5 hours of real-time and with behemont size ships is hard to use physical time warp. Also 20 minutes real-time burn is not my idea of good game experience (that is why I dislike electric engines in KSP, yes it is realistic, but I really do not want an "another Orbiter game" made from KSP).

So, my question is - will be possible to make Vista DT engine more powerful (even by mandatory upgrade like by large computer core)? Double, or triple thrust output should be fine.

Also I tried to do it by myself, but Vista DT thrust limit is hardcoded in WarpPlugin.dll. I checked sources and find out, that in source code is defined as conditional constant. So I tried to located this constant (1100 in dec, 44C in hex) in WarpPlugin.dll (there was luckily only one such value) and change to more convenient values (898 in hex). But result was disappointment. Luckily, I didnt damage warpplugin, but neither there was no change in Vista DT thrust.

Is any easy way to modify this? Because honestly, I can somewhat understand c++ syntax but I not sure that I am capable to take sources, change same values and compile them to "my own" WarpPlugin.dll (I assume that there are some dependencies which must be in compilation defined?).

Any help or response will be appreciate. Also I am sorry in advance for my English skill, it is not my native language.

PS: I can override DT Vista dependency on VistaEngineController and give more thrust in part.cfg, but then I lost radiation bio-hazard and also fancy variable specific impulse.

[Rabada]

Is there a limit on the inverse square law for solar panels in interstellar? I was bored so I turned on infinite fuel and brought one of my solar panel satellite to 100km above Kerbol. I was a little disapointed that the transitter on my sat never put out more than 1.22 GW. The same amount of power it puts out at 250Mm.

[phoenix_ca]

That's a stock mechanic. I'm pretty sure that the max output is the output value specified in the solar panel's part.cfg.

[Rabada]

That's a stock mechanic. I'm pretty sure that the max output is the output value specified in the solar panel's part.cfg.

My Solar Sat uses 12 single Balka panels from Kosmos. I pulled up the .cfg, the word output was not in it, nor did I see anything similiar. I have not tried to use stock solar panels.

When my sat was very low above Kerbol, the energy flow and the heat production of my panels both increased however my power transmission did not.

[Alewx]

I know the formula for calculating the space that is needed by the radiators is in the wiki of Interstellar, but how do I determine the temperatur at an specific orbit in the system, without having something there?

[phoenix_ca]

part.cfg from solarPanels1 (squad)

MODULE
{
	name = ModuleDeployableSolarPanel

	animationName = solarpanels

	resourceName = ElectricCharge

	[b][size=6]chargeRate = 2[/size][/b]

	powerCurve
 	{
		key = 206000000000 0 0 0
		key = 13599840256 1 0 0
		key = 68773560320 0.5 0 0
		key = 0 10 0 0
 	}
}