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

[phoenix_ca]

Figured it out... I was still in Phys Timewarp x2. Dunno why it halves the output, but it does.

Anyway, here's the design:

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e146/_VaporTrail_/screenshot84_zps941f4ca5.png

Needs about 3x the EcC to make it actually work fully at that altitude... Pushing 200 parts on launch right now I think... But I should be able to tack on enough.

If I were you I'd just persistence edit one of its EC storage parts and give it some absurd amount of EC storage. The problem is caused by something that's going to be fixed in the next version, not by design.

[VaporTrail]

Actually, I like the bottleneck. It kinda gives a purpose to the huge storage batteries (NFP and HexCan are what I'm using) and makes the difficulty of actually building something that complex as small as possible a bit more. Not to say that I'm lobbying for it to stay... just that it isn't too broken.

Right now, only working in sandbox mode, so career might be quite a bit different... but once you've got Quantum Plasma thrusters, dropping anything into a near-Kerbol orbit is almost trivial.

[ABZB]

For myself, I made a module manager config for the Near Future Propulsion mod's capacitors - I remove the storedcharge resource, and instead they use the kethane converter to swap MegaJoules and electriccharge (using the 1:1000 exchange rate). I made the larger capacitors hold greater amounts of Megajoules and have faster rates of conversion. Since the kethane converter module auto-stops if the target resource is full, I simply add two kethane converters that convert at the same rate in opposite directions - as long as there is sufficient inflow of electriccharge, the excess goes straight into megajoules. The TAC converter also can do this, but it seems to only work if the ship has the whole tac module stuff going on, which seems to cause issues for probes.

[rpayne88]

Why is it that I can't even start the plasma thrusters despite having a s--- load of batteries on my spacecraft?

Sorry if its already been asked.

[phoenix_ca]

Why is it that I can't even start the plasma thrusters despite having a s--- load of batteries on my spacecraft?

Sorry if its already been asked.

Because they don't use EC. This is explained on the wiki. And in the OP. O.o

[Diashi]

Sorry for the image dump

I'm having a problem with a few of my crafts. I have a model X-Wing (and it also happened on my heavy lift spaceplane with also has 4 plasma engines) where the primary drive engine works fine, but when i switch over to the plasma thrusters only two of the four will fire. Always says "not enough power (megajoules)" instantly and shuts down two engines. Each of the 1.5 Plasmas has an attached generator and antimatter generator. Is there something i'm doing wrong with my build? As soon as i fire the plasma engines the megajoules drops to empty. There are four 1.5m Antimatter reactors with generators and a 2.5m AM reactor with attached generator

[Makeone]

Quite easy actually. Those plasma engines needs 25GW per engine at full power, that plus efficiency, so it is even more energy needed from generators. Now, a single 15GW antimatter reactor produces about 7.5 to 8 GW out as generators are only about 58% efficient. So all those four 1.25m AM reactors can power ONE plasma thruster. I can't quickly remember that 2.5m reactors thermal power, was it 75GW, but again, only 58% is good and only 60 to 90 per cent of that is really good for the thruster, depends on fuel used.

Also, i don't know why you have those intakes, just for the looks? As you got thermal rocket nozzle behind the reactor, intakes are not required. If you wish, there is the thermal hybrid jet that will act as thermal gas (like atmosphere) propulsion engine as well as thermal rocket.

Ways to fix things: 1) reduce the number of the plasma thrusters to two, or 2) use the 0.625m ones.

[Diashi]

Yeah. The intakes were just for looks. I changed the Xwing3 over to a Thermal Turbojet for MORE POWER! nearly 4000 Kilonewtons of thrust at throttle down instead of 1700 KiloNewtons

I set the thrust limiter on the 1.5m plasmas to 49.5% on all four. They worked just right. Only 170kN apiece, but still respectable for maneuvering and changing to Mono punches it up to 500kN apiece. Setting them to 50.5 would result in shutdown. I Just completed an orbit and target intercept and destruction.

I'm thinking of putting a generator on either side of the smaller AM reactors to generate some more MJs but as it is, it's a good heavy interceptor now.

Ironically with the odd wing configuration it's one of the most stable spaceplanes i've ever flown. Usually mechjeb'd be waggling the ailerons like crazy to maintain the stable flight. This one, i can fly to orbit manually.

Edited May 26, 2014 by Diashi

[Northstar1989]

@FractalUK

Fractal, you are familiar with the Krag's PlanetFactory mod which adds the "Sentar" gas giant and corresponding moons, yes?

(Here's a link if not)

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1q008p/expansionkrags_planetfactorysentar_system/

Well, I was wondering if you might be able to add some resources for the gas giant and moons of the Sentar system- which is supposed to be a (very rough/approximate) KSP player-made analog for Saturn and its moons...

I have no idea what resources might be appropriate for a Saturn analog, but you can PM me (so I won't miss a reply on this thread) if you'd like me to do some of the research for you on that...

Regards,

Northstar

[Fengist]

Has anyone come up with a solution, short of editing .cfg files, that solves the B9 Sabre overheating problem? I know B9 hasn't been updated since .22 but if I have a choice between Interstellar w/Exploding Sabres and keeping B9, Interstellar goes. I've updated firespitter and still the same problem. I hit 700m/s and overheating starts. By 1500 m/s, the engines detonate from overheating. I've tried radiators and precoolers. So far, nothing works.

[Haifi]

The Sabres produce heat, not wasteheat, so its partcount on the engines that matter, try to put 15 or 20 small objects on the sabre. I use the B9 lights normally to get rid of overheating engines.

Regards

Edit: And place the things directly onto the sabre itself, surface attached.

Edited May 26, 2014 by Haifi

[Fengist]

The Sabres produce heat, not wasteheat, so its partcount on the engines that matter, try to put 15 or 20 small objects on the sabre. I use the B9 lights normally to get rid of overheating engines.

Regards

Edit: And place the things directly onto the sabre itself, surface attached.

Right, understand it's not waste heat per Interstellar. However, if I uninstall Interstellar, the overheating goes away.

[nli2work]

Right, understand it's not waste heat per Interstellar. However, if I uninstall Interstellar, the overheating goes away.

Intake Precooler should reduce engine overheating for B9 engines. to completely get rid of it you have to edit B9aero.cfg file from Interstellar mod, the mod adds ModuleSabreHeating mechanism to all jet engines. Editing the cfg file will only affect B9 engines and won't affect anything else in B9 or Interstellar.

Edited May 26, 2014 by nli2work

[Fengist]

Intake Precooler should reduce engine overheating for B9 engines. to completely get rid of it you have to edit B9aero.cfg file from Interstellar mod, the mod adds ModuleSabreHeating mechanism to all jet engines. Editing the cfg file will only affect B9 engines and won't affect anything else in B9 or Interstellar.

Ok, found it. Thanks. But erm... why was that even added to Interstellar? I understand heat management is part of the mod but if there's no way to dissipate it and I'm guessing no way to use it with the generators, what's the purpose other than limiting your air speed (or creating pretty explosions)?

Oh, and the precooler... no effect. You right click on it during flight and it says "Offline". Did I miss some method of turning it on? I see this applies to rapiers as well.

Edited May 26, 2014 by Fengist

[nli2work]

Ok, found it. Thanks. But erm... why was that even added to Interstellar? I understand heat management is part of the mod but if there's no way to dissipate it and I'm guessing no way to use it with the generators, what's the purpose other than limiting your air speed (or creating pretty explosions)?

Oh, and the precooler... no effect. You right click on it during flight and it says "Offline". Did I miss some method of turning it on? I see this applies to rapiers as well.

Intake has to be directly attached to precooler. octostrut wont' work, radial intakes won't work. Only stack attachment will do. rapier.cfg adds the same mechanism to stock turbojets.

[Fengist]

Intake has to be directly attached to precooler. octostrut wont' work, radial intakes won't work. Only stack attachment will do. rapier.cfg adds the same mechanism to stock turbojets.

Well that answers it. Was using radials. I'll give it a try. Thanks.

[BigD145]

Has anyone come up with a solution, short of editing .cfg files, that solves the B9 Sabre overheating problem? I know B9 hasn't been updated since .22 but if I have a choice between Interstellar w/Exploding Sabres and keeping B9, Interstellar goes. I've updated firespitter and still the same problem. I hit 700m/s and overheating starts. By 1500 m/s, the engines detonate from overheating. I've tried radiators and precoolers. So far, nothing works.

B9 has been updated to .23.5, just not officially. There are at least two collections of the fixes.

[Northstar1989]

@FractalUK

Another problem with plasma thrusters producing asymmetric thrust:

I am aware that I don't have nearly enough power to run the two plasma thrusters continuously at full-throttle, but I am not attempting to. I am only trying to get an even low-throttle burn across both engines, recharging the two generators (whose internal cycle-speed I am using as form of energy-storage for beamed microwave power- think of it as high-density flywheel energy storage, like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_Power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel#Applications) from microwave beamed power produced by a nuclear ground-station near the KSC, and a a solar power satellite in orbit of Minmus...

The plasma thruster algorithm SHOULD be able to realistically handle distributing a limited supply of energy across the two thrusters at the throttle setting I had assigned here. At the throttle setting I was using, it should have taken several MINUTES to exhaust the vehicle's 2.6 GW of electrical storage (I intended to dial up the throttle, but start low after an earlier incident with asymmetrical engine cut-out at high throttle...)

By the way, here is what happened when I had the plasma thrusters dialed up to high throttle earlier:

As can be seen, one of the thrusters cut out WELL BEFORE the other, when there was still electricity left in storage... (both engines initially fired evenly- you can still see the remains of the starboard engine's flame trail here, as it had just cut out)

I'm considering this a bug, and would like to see a fix released for it soon if possible... I can submit my craft-file if necessary (how do I upload a craft file on the forums again?)

Regards,

Northstar

Edited May 26, 2014 by Northstar1989

[Northstar1989]

Now I feel silly- it appears I didn't realize that all I had to do was restart the starboard engine that cut out earlier, and keep them at low-throttle to delay asymmetrical shutoff. Still, the plasma thrusters shouldn't have cut out quite so early/asymmetrically like that...

Regards,

Northstar

EDIT: I'm still running version 0.10 of KSP-Interstellar. Is it possible this is one of the bugs fixed in 0.11?

Edited May 26, 2014 by Northstar1989

[SirusKing]

According to the KSP Wiki, at 0 AU solar panels will produce 10x their regular power output, however, in one of scott manleys IQ videos, he has a solar station produce about a gigawatt. Does KSPI use the IRL Inverse square law instead of stocks curve?

Edited May 27, 2014 by SirusKing

[ucarion]

Hi,

I just installed interstellar on a career game that I had already started (I have already bought a couple of things on the tech tree). Now my tech tree display lacks any arrows:

Should I be concerned? Or does interstellar only work if you start from a brand-new career game?

Thanks in advance.

[ArcFurnace]

You don't seem to have the extra tech tree nodes you should, in addition to the missing arrows. Did you get asked if you wanted to use the Interstellar tech tree by TreeLoader when you started up your save after installing Interstellar?

[smart013]

I have a question for warp-travel with the alcubierre drive.

Since your DV State is conserved when travelling under warp i tried to figure out how to calculate the direction and DV BEOFRE travelling to the selected planet. The Idea was to orbit the Warpship at home nearby a powerful enough Transmitterstation, burn the necessary DV to correct the difference to get near an orbit around the destination AT HOME with the power transmitted and then use warp to get to the other planet and hopefully only need small corrections. My Transmitterstations around Kerbin are more than capable enough to burn the potential 10-16k DV, but if i`m already at the destination the received Power there is rarely enough, or not in line of sight and so on.

Of course until now i failed miserably, and needed to pack antimatter and the reactor/engines into my ship to burn the resulting dv differences.

So ... how to calculate in a high orbit around kerbin WHERE to aim for the burn and HOW MUCH to burn for the right vel inside the target orbit / near orbit?

I`m horrible at math, sor right now you are my only hope

[philotical]

I have a question for warp-travel with the alcubierre drive.

Since your DV State is conserved when travelling under warp i tried to figure out how to calculate the direction and DV BEOFRE travelling to the selected planet. The Idea was to orbit the Warpship at home nearby a powerful enough Transmitterstation, burn the necessary DV to correct the difference to get near an orbit around the destination AT HOME with the power transmitted and then use warp to get to the other planet and hopefully only need small corrections. My Transmitterstations around Kerbin are more than capable enough to burn the potential 10-16k DV, but if i`m already at the destination the received Power there is rarely enough, or not in line of sight and so on.

Of course until now i failed miserably, and needed to pack antimatter and the reactor/engines into my ship to burn the resulting dv differences.

So ... how to calculate in a high orbit around kerbin WHERE to aim for the burn and HOW MUCH to burn for the right vel inside the target orbit / near orbit?

I`m horrible at math, sor right now you are my only hope

Let's use a jum from Kerbin to Duna as example:

Task: reach the target with as little velocity-difference as possible - right?

If I got it right in my tests, then your pre-jump vector aka velocity and direction needs to be the same as your targets vector relativ to the sun.

So, if you jump when duna is at his closest approach to Kerbin, you should burn in the oposite direction of Kerbins orbit around the sun because duna is slower than kerbin.

if it's on the oposite side of the sun, burn in the direction Kerbin flys..

If duna is 90° ahead, burn towards the sun etc..

HTH

To calculate the needed speed, it might help to compare the orbital velocity of Kerbin and Duna.

That won't be good enough for all cases - but maybe it helps to figure it out.

[Helix935]

hmm in the future, will the ability to have and name AIs for probes and the ability to transfer power be made as a completely separate mod?