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

[DianonForce]

Kinda? there are certain parts that only work out past the stock tree locations (specifically fusion, antimatter, White-Alcubierre drives) and there are upgrades that look for those trees to be unlocked (like Quantum Vacuum fuel mode on electric thrusters). without the tree adjustments, those things will either be inaccessible or fail to function. in short: go carefully: unsupported grey zone,

Insert F-Word here

So i have to decide, KSPI or B9, that sucks.

I dont know what went wrong, yesterday all seemed fine, but today ... i dont know why all is broken, the last days it seems to work with all mods i have installed, then i have some bug that unlocked parts in r&d are relocked in the VAB and if i switched back to R&D they are twice.

It seems that i can unlock all the other parts if i start with notree.cfg and they are still there if i restart with tree.cfg to unlock KSPI parts. But this workaround is not comfortable at all.

[Atrius129]

Insert F-Word here

So i have to decide, KSPI or B9, that sucks.

I dont know what went wrong, yesterday all seemed fine, but today ... i dont know why all is broken, the last days it seems to work with all mods i have installed, then i have some bug that unlocked parts in r&d are relocked in the VAB and if i switched back to R&D they are twice.

It seems that i can unlock all the other parts if i start with notree.cfg and they are still there if i restart with tree.cfg to unlock KSPI parts. But this workaround is not comfortable at all.

B9 doesn't use Treeloader, so I'm not sure why you would need to choose between the two. The latest versions of B9 + KSPi work together perfectly for me.

Research Them All may at least help you out, in not having to click on every part to re-research it again.

[DianonForce]

B9 doesn't use Treeloader, so I'm not sure why you would need to choose between the two. The latest versions of B9 + KSPi work together perfectly for me.

Research Them All may at least help you out, in not having to click on every part to re-research it again.

They did worked for me well since today. If i put tree.cfg from warpplugin in my save, all parts from other mods disapeer in my currently not unlocked R&D nodes. After i unlock the parts they will stay after i reload with tree.cfg. I dont know how exactly the Siencetree is genereted, but i think anything went worng.

Edit: You right, B9 works fine, but still some Parts are missing, seems that i searched on the wrong end. thx.

Edited September 28, 2014 by DianonForce

[BigD145]

You have duplicate parts with the same name somewhere in your gamedata folder. That is why they show up multiple times when you try to unlock them in the tech tree. When you update any mods you need to delete the original folders from the early version of that mod and then copy in the new version.

[Lotabeer]

Fractal, I have a few bugs to report:

Radial helium 3 cryostats lose helium at a similar rate to when they are unpowered, if they are used to fuel a Fusion reactor (tested on 2.5m). When the reactor is used with D/T, no losses are present, yet if switched to a mode where it uses H3, the H3 is burned at almost 10x the rate that it is supposed to be, which seems to be exactly the sum of the amount burned in the fusion process along with the amount that evaporates if you leave the cryostats unpowered. I'd say they aren't getting power since the Megajoules power manager only shows enough energy being produced to fuel the fusion reactor, but it also says that if you burn D/T which causes no helium losses to evaporation. Just odd overall and makes H3 pretty much worthless as a fuel option.

Next up is the credit price of a few items, namely antimatter containers. The 1.25 one costs -48,188,400 credits... Which you can then recover the craft and wind up with getting it back as a gamebreakingly positive amount. Which is the only way to afford the 2.5m antimatter bottle, which is 385,533,800, and the 3.75 is similar. All of these say 0 credit cost until you try to put them on a craft, which is a stark contrast to the H3 cryostat which says it costs a ton but doesn't actually on the craft. Also maybe to note is the extreme cost of the warp drives, with exception of the 2.5m one which is about 40% of the cost of the other two sizes. I am sure pricing is very low priority since it's a pretty much trivial and uninteresting part of the game right now, but if the antimatter pricing was fixed so that it could be utilized in career mode, I would be pleased.

That's all I have for now, hopefully I wasn't too rambling and made my points. Thanks for your continued hard work and let me know if I can provide any more info!

[Lotabeer]

Also was playing around with fission reactors and the power seems to decay very quickly when using UF4 as a fuel. The wiki states that this should only happen with Thorium. I understand that it may just be outdated, but if so then what is the point of ever using Uranium when Thorium give better power anyways?

Edit: It seems the threshold for thorium to start losing power is about 1/2 the amount of actinides of Uranium, so there is a difference. However this is kind of pointless since even the shortest interplanetary windows will cause both types of fuel to hit this threshold, thus putting them back in the same boat.

Also when attempting to get the in-line ISRU refinery to reprocess nuclear fuels without a depleted fuels can available, it will display the error message once, but then work if you simply keep clicking it. I guess it just decides to vent them after a bit!

Edited September 29, 2014 by Lotabeer
New info

[oktav]

are you sure you have the _Emissive texture for the radiator in the mod's folders?

Without those it will make everything red instead of just the intended parts.

Hello and welcome back Fractal_UK! (Yeah, I know you are here for almost two weeks already, but still)

I would like to report a problem.

I'm experiencing an issue with a Nuclear Fission Reactor and Thermal Turbojet. The problem is, that when I attach the reactor with turbojet in double symetry, the reactor is not symetrically controling the output power. The first one is OK, but the second one is just stucked at 25.000% of the 500MW power, which should be available, which is then causing asymetrical thrust and that doesn't improve controlability too much. It happens to me since I updated to 0.12 from the WaveFunctionP's version (that before Lite).

Furthermore, I suggest a tweak to the system for making the radiators glow. Now, the whole radiator is turning red, not just the radiation section.

I thing images will make it more clear.

http://imgur.com/a/UUghd

Edited September 29, 2014 by oktav

[Sacnoth]

Hi Fractal, I seem to be having an issue with the sethlans type reactors somehow modifiing the radiator dissipation settings.

If I build a craft (in sandbox) and stick two small radiators on it, I get a dissipation of 1.70GW no matter what reactor I put on it.

Instead, If I take one of the Sethlans or Akula reactors the maximum dissipation somehow jumps down to 21.5MW.

This seems a little low, any idea what could be going on?

[hatterson]

If that would have happened, I had backup saves. Also, I could always just stick with Lite or start with full from scratch. It's not the end of the world if KSP crashes once.

Also, I did a bit of investigating on my own and matched up the radiators with their cousins from the lite version. That and one power reciever, and I was in the clear. A couple of ships have oversized receivers now, but I'll phase them out and replace them eventually. No explosions, no crashes, and KSP is happy as a clam.

I'm very happy to see that someone has been able to do this without (at least it sounds) a massive headache. My .24 save is on KSPI-l and I'd ideally like to move it to KSPI without resorting to rebuilding the ships and hyperediting them into their respective places. Given that I've yet to get too far into this playthrough, I don't believe I have many of the higher ups techs deployed yet (I really can't keep my saves straight sometimes )

I suppose worst case scenario would be to just restart, although it's annoying to re-do all the initial missions since I now have to figure out cost of items.

[undercoveryankee]

Hi Fractal, I seem to be having an issue with the sethlans type reactors somehow modifiing the radiator dissipation settings.

If I build a craft (in sandbox) and stick two small radiators on it, I get a dissipation of 1.70GW no matter what reactor I put on it.

Instead, If I take one of the Sethlans or Akula reactors the maximum dissipation somehow jumps down to 21.5MW.

This seems a little low, any idea what could be going on?

Just to confirm that I'm understanding this right, you're in career mode when you see the 21.5MW dissipation, correct?

This sounds like what happens when the reactor core temperature is lower than the maximum temperature of the radiators. If the radiators were running at their maximum temperature, they would dissipate 1.70GW. Cool them down to the temperature of the reactor, and at that temperature they dissipate only 21.5MW.

[Sacnoth]

Just to confirm that I'm understanding this right, you're in career mode when you see the 21.5MW dissipation, correct?

This sounds like what happens when the reactor core temperature is lower than the maximum temperature of the radiators. If the radiators were running at their maximum temperature, they would dissipate 1.70GW. Cool them down to the temperature of the reactor, and at that temperature they dissipate only 21.5MW.

I was testing this in sandbox actually, and it's happening in the VAB in the thermal helper window. The Maximum dissipation value suddenly drops to a fraction of the original value whenever I attach one of the Sethlans reactors to my craft. This happens with all radiator types, but none of the other fission or fusion or antimatter reactors do this. they all show 1,70GW as maximum dissipation value. It scales as well, for example, two small radial radiators drop from 4.25 MW to 53.68 kW. It seems to work normal in flight though. The waste heat balances out like normal in flight.

While testing I also noticed the two smaller fusion reactor shutdown whenever I use timewarp. Is this intentional?

[WhiteWeasel]

Just curious, where did you get all of this information from? I like how it's grounded in reality and want to know your sources.

[undercoveryankee]

I was testing this in sandbox actually, and it's happening in the VAB in the thermal helper window. The Maximum dissipation value suddenly drops to a fraction of the original value whenever I attach one of the Sethlans reactors to my craft. This happens with all radiator types, but none of the other fission or fusion or antimatter reactors do this. they all show 1,70GW as maximum dissipation value. It scales as well, for example, two small radial radiators drop from 4.25 MW to 53.68 kW. It seems to work normal in flight though. The waste heat balances out like normal in flight.

Still smells like a bug causing the thermal helper to use the unupgraded core temperature for the reactor. I'll try to reproduce and see if I can find any more clues.

While testing I also noticed the two smaller fusion reactor shutdown whenever I use timewarp. Is this intentional?

Sounds like the old glitch in 0.11 where the reactor would shut down if its power consumption in one frame exceeded the amount the ship could store. Not intentional, just a stock-game limitation that doesn't have a good workaround yet.

[Fractal_UK]

Sounds like the old glitch in 0.11 where the reactor would shut down if its power consumption in one frame exceeded the amount the ship could store. Not intentional, just a stock-game limitation that doesn't have a good workaround yet.

That shouldn't be the case in KSPI since the important resources use my resouce manager which keeps track of all the power being produced and consumed and updates the resources only with the net change. You can still have tricky situations if the net change becomes huge for some reason or if the amount of power being produced and consumed keeps changing really fast.

It's worth checking in this case if the fuel isn't just running out because there is only a tiny bit of tritium in the fusion reactors by default so a bit of timewarping could easily use it all up.

[undercoveryankee]

That shouldn't be the case in KSPI since the important resources use my resouce manager which keeps track of all the power being produced and consumed and updates the resources only with the net change. You can still have tricky situations if the net change becomes huge for some reason or if the amount of power being produced and consumed keeps changing really fast.

It's worth checking in this case if the fuel isn't just running out because there is only a tiny bit of tritium in the fusion reactors by default so a bit of timewarping could easily use it all up.

I have a couple of craft files where I come out of time warp and the 1.25m fusion that I thought was running has shut down, but there's still tritium and I can restart it. Pretty minimal ships. When the shutdown happens, the only loads are reactor draw and a few KW of DC electrical. I'll try to come up with more specific steps to reproduce.

[Fractal_UK]

I have a couple of craft files where I come out of time warp and the 1.25m fusion that I thought was running has shut down, but there's still tritium and I can restart it. Pretty minimal ships. When the shutdown happens, the only loads are reactor draw and a few KW of DC electrical. I'll try to come up with more specific steps to reproduce.

Cheers, it might just be that I need to revise the number of consecutive frames the reactor can go without power. Usually a change in timewarp speed results in one or two frames without power due to power being produced and then consumed at different time warp rates.

[ABZB]

I am playing around with the following Modulemanager cfg.

The idea is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy

I consider it mainly for very long-term probes in relatively early game, as well as a [rather small] megajoule power source for vessels operating very close to the sun (for example, for low-solar-orbit beamed power stations). The molten salt slowly cools off [the resource 'MoltenSalt' is reduced by 3.6/hour as of now [with no consumption by the reactor, the 20 units available in this 1.25 meter prototype will reach zero after a little more than 5.5 hours [5 hours, 33 minutes, and 20 seconds]]]. The cooling-off means that power can still available for production while not in direct sunlight. The reactor+panel cost is also much less than similarly-sized fission reactors.

The whole thing would be simpler and function more smoothly if the reactor module had the ability to produce byproducts [i annoted all of this in the MM below]. Such functionality would also be nice for the fusion reactors - some of the byproducts of the fusion reactions available are themselves usable resources already present in-game.

//Resources
//Heat from solar collector
RESOURCE_DEFINITION
{
	name = SolarHeat
	density = 0.0
	flowMode = ALL_VESSEL
	transfer = PUMP
	isTweakable = FALSE
	unitCost = 0
}
//solid salt
RESOURCE_DEFINITION
{
	name = SolidSalt
	density = 0.05
	flowMode = ALL_VESSEL
	transfer = PUMP
	isTweakable = TRUE
	unitCost = .01
}
//molten salt. The reactor module does not currently have the ability to produce byproducts - so I cannot have molten salt solidify except through a separate resource converter module, which would not be able to synch to the consumption rate. I band-aided this by having solid salt not be consumed when molten salt is produced.
RESOURCE_DEFINITION
{
	name = MoltenSalt
	density = 0
	flowMode = ALL_VESSEL
	transfer = PUMP
	isTweakable = FALSE
	unitCost = 0
}

REACTOR_FUEL_MODE
{
	name = SolarMoltenSaltReactor
	ReactorType = 256
	GUIName = Molten Salt
	ChargedParticleRatio = 0.0
	Aneutronic = True
	NormalisedReactionRate = 1.0
	NormalisedPowerConsumption = 1.0
	FUEL
	{
		name = Molten Salt
		FuelName = MoltenSalt
		UsagePerMW = 1
		Unit = l
	}
}
//used antimatter reactor model for no particular reason
+PART[AntimatterReactor125]
{
	@name = SolarMoltenSalt
	@author = Fractal, this MM by ABZB
	@TechRequired = largeElectrics
	@cost = 1500
	@mass = 1.0
	@title = 1.25m Solar Molten Salt Reactor
	@description = Melts salt using solar energy, and uses that molten salt to drive a heat engine for power generation.
	@MODULE[FNAntimatterReactor]
	{
		//stats less than 'weakest' fission reactor. not neccessarily balanced - just an idea/test
		@ReactorTemp = 800 
		@PowerOutput = .5
		@resourceRate = 1
		@originalName = Liquid Core
		@upgradedName = Gas Core
		@upgradedReactorTemp = 1200
		@upgradedPowerOutput = 1.5
		upgradeCost = 120
		@upgradedResourceRate = 1
		@upgradeTechReq = specializedElectrics
		animName = e5
		radius = 1.25
		consumeGlobal = true
		@reactorType = 256 //added reactor type for this [above] if a new reactor type is introduced with this id #, this should be changed to the next higher power of 2
	}
	RESOURCE
	{
		name = SolarHeat
		amount = 0
		maxAmount = 2000
	}
	RESOURCE
	{
		name = MoltenSalt
		amount = 0
		maxAmount = 20
	}
	RESOURCE
	{
		name = SolidSalt
		amount = 20
		maxAmount = 20
	}
	//consumes solar heat to produce molten salt. solidsalt is present on in and out equally (as band-aided above)
	MODULE
	{
		MODULE
		{
			 name = USI_Converter
			 converterName = Moltify Salt
			 conversionRate = 1
			 inputResources = SolarHeat,50,SolidSalt,.5
			 outputResources = MoltenSalt,.5,SolidSalt,.5,false
		}
	}
	//molten salt cools down. loss is 3.6 per hour. each unit of molten salt took 100 SolarHeat. on solidifying, you get back .1 units (maybe should be faster or slower, more or less heat recovery, or maybe have it go to wasteheat(I suspect that if I have this module produce wasteheat it might cause buggy things))
	MODULE
	{
		name = ModuleGenerator
		isAlwaysActive = true
		INPUT_RESOURCE
		{
			name = MoltenSalt
			rate = .001
		}
		OUTPUT_RESOURCE
		{
			name = SolarHeat
			rate = .0001
		}
	}
}
//MM'ed the two gigantic solar panels to produce solarheat instead of EC. Can be done to whatever panels one desires. (do a +PART to make a different panel instead of editing) According to [wikipedia] research I should properly have a parabolic or spherical setup for this. If someone who has modeling capabilities wants to try making something that might work - go right ahead! There are some circular solar panels floating around, I remember... I think that something along the lines of the larger Remotetech antennae models (except larger, if realism is desired) would be nice, given a reskin and addition of a raycasttransform.

@PART[Kosmos_Balka_PanelBlock1]
{
	@TechRequired = largeElectrics
	@MODULE[ModuleDeployableSolarPanel],*
	{
		@resourceName = SolarHeat
	}
}
@PART[Kosmos_Balka_PanelBlock1_Single]
{
	@MODEL
	{
		@model = KOSMOS/Kosmos_Balka_PanelBlock1/model_Single
	}
	@TechRequired = largeElectrics
	@MODULE[ModuleDeployableSolarPanel]
	{
		@resourceName = SolarHeat
	}
}

[Lotabeer]

Does anyone know of a way to view the current fuel mode of the green fission reactors? Currently in the VAB I am looking at 3 reactors that have Thorium fuel, which was added when I hit swap fuel, but when I launch them 2 are Uranium and there is no way to switch this outside the VAB... Where you never really know the mode they're in

This might be a problem with symmetry since I added 3 of them using three way sym, then clicked swap fuel on one of them, which added thorium fuel to all 3, but really only swapped the mode of the first one it would seem. Guess I'll rebuild without symmetry.

[fordskydog]

You might be missing fuel? The large fusion reactors only have Lithium now, they need an external supply of Deuterium/Tritium fuel. If you right click on the reactor, it should tell you if you are missing fuel.

YES! Thank you much. It works!

[blueskin]

Hello all,

Wondering if anyone can help me, I am having trouble getting interstellar to work. Using a clean install of KSP, with just interstellar installed into the correct folder /GameData it loads the game fine but when I start a new career/science and treeloader pops up, my two choices are select and reload list, with no insterstellar shown. What does happen is that another pop up appears the first time I run asking whether to update interstellars tree. Clicking yes or dismiss doesn't seem to affect the treeloaders options.

I read about how to manually edit the persistent.sfs but I have no idea what to change since I cant compare any saves with a working interstellar tech tree! Can anyone either advise me or tell me what to change in the save to force it to use the correct tree?

btw, tested whether tree was working but unlocking the first node, interstellar should then lead onto 2 more nodes where vanialla leads to 3 right?

Thanks in advance, been driving me mad for 2 days

[LucidPixels]

Whatever online service Treeloader uses for the selection process does not appear to be working. Copying the tree.cfg file from the WarpPlugin folder into your save folder, and deleting notree.cfg if present, should be enough to make it work.

[blueskin]

Whatever online service Treeloader uses for the selection process does not appear to be working. Copying the tree.cfg file from the WarpPlugin folder into your save folder, and deleting notree.cfg if present, should be enough to make it work.

OK I tried this, started a completely fresh install with just interstellar installed, new game then exited and copied tree from WarpPlugin to the corresponding save. Went back in and collected science from the launch pad such that I can unlock the 1st node. There are still 3 branches from there: General Rocketry, Stability and Survivorbility, which I think is still the stock tree right?

Thanks for the help, am I still doing something wrong?

[Fractal_UK]

OK I tried this, started a completely fresh install with just interstellar installed, new game then exited and copied tree from WarpPlugin to the corresponding save. Went back in and collected science from the launch pad such that I can unlock the 1st node. There are still 3 branches from there: General Rocketry, Stability and Survivorbility, which I think is still the stock tree right?

Thanks for the help, am I still doing something wrong?

The tree should be exactly the same as the stock tree until you get to the very end.

[bartekkru99]

I can't get my fiission reactor working. There are "NaN" values all over the place...

[bartekkru99]