Jump to content

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

Fractal_UK

By Fractal_UK
in KSP1 Mod Releases

 Share

Recommended Posts

Northstar1989

Northstar1989

Posted
Posted
Hey, I've had the intersteller mod for a while now and only just started trying out the plasma, atilla, and thermal thrusters.

I think there's some serious bug with them though.

Basically, they don't use electricity.

I can attach a FL-T400 fuel tank to a small probe body, add a 1.25m Thermal Rocket Nozzle and launch it. It'll fly fine, even with no electrical parts added, in fact it'll get a TWR of over 30 and leave the atmosphere in just seconds from launch. What's going on here? I want to use these parts but right now it'd basically be cheating.

http://s21.postimg.org/jvp0jxvhz/ISbug.png

Also, this is my first post on these forums afaik, so if I'm missing something obvious, let me know.

Thermal Rocket Nozzles don't use electricity, and aren't supposed to.

Instead they use "ThermalPower", which is one of two things: EITHER the heat produced by an attached nuclear reactor, OR the heat produced by a Thermal Receiver, which connects up to a Microwave Beamed Power network. In either case, they don't run off electricity, they run off heat...

If you put a Microwave Beamed Power infrastructure in place (that is, you have a Microwave Transceiver connected to a power-source somewhere in line-of-sight of the Thermal Receiver set to "Transmit" mode) you would be able to run a Thermal Rocket Nozzle with nothing but an attached Thermal Receiver. Certainly you wouldn't need any electricity (although you WOULD need a bigass reactor or solar farm somewhere transmitting to the Thermal Receiver). The Rocket Equation would still apply- it's not cheating, it's actually a real-world technology. (and besides, all you do with normal chemical rockets is attach an engine to fuel tanks to get thrust...)

However, you don't seem to have any Thermal Receiver OR reactor attached, and the Fuel Mode is showing up blank, so it DOES appear your installation is borked.

Regards,

Northstar

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Northstar1989

Northstar1989

Posted
Posted

@FractalUK

Two questions/comments:

First of all, I think SeventhArchitect might have made at least one good point. Many of the parts in KSP-Interstellar still seem to be using the smaller node sizes last I checked. Since the devs reformed the joint system and made rockets less floppy, this is a REALLY, REALLY, BAD thing. To get realistic stability for parts of the larger sizes, you really need to switch all the nodes over to the larger-sized nodes (size 2/3 nodes, rather than just using size 1 nodes for everything). They have a MUCH higher strength than the size 1 nodes now, and should be used on 2.5m/3.75m sized attachment surfaces, respectively...

Second, what are the chances of getting a KSP-Interstellar/Realfuels config released? I went and bugged NathanKell (the creator of RealFuels) about it, and now I'm also bugging you again.

There are more than just LiquidFuel --> LiquidHydrogen and Oxidizer --> LiquidOxygen that need to be re-named: Ammonia and Methane also both have differently-named counterparts in RealFuels (and are used for the RealFuels Stockalike-config LV-N's), and the densities of ALL of these resource pairs are different between RealFuels and KSP-Interstellar: so the engine fuel flow rates and fuel tank configs need to be significantly tweaked in order to work properly with the RealFuels densities

It makes more sense to change the KSP-Interstellar parts with ModuleManager in the alternate config, rather than the RealFuels parts, since there are *FAR* more parts in the three different RealFuels engine configs using LiquidHydrogen/LiquidOxygen alone than in KSP-Interstellar using *all* of the resource-pairs combined...

Other than a few engine-config and tank-capacity tweaks to bring KSP-Interstellar Ammonia/Methane/LiquidFuel/Oxidizer in line with RealFuels, the other major issue is the conversion rates for ISRU. Since LiquidMethane in RealFuels has a different density than methane in KSP-Interstellar, the Sabatier Reaction needs to produce it in different amounts, for instance...

As an addendum (I know I said only two comments/questions, but I can't help mentioning this as well), although this is lower on my list, if you ever get around to it, an integration config for TAC Life Support would be nice as well. Specifically, I am thinking of the issue of KSP-Interstellar water and TACLS water not being the same thing. But I also see no reason why the TAC Life Support Sabatier Reactor couldn't produce KSP-Interstellar or RealFuels methane...

Regards,

Northstar

Link to comment
Share on other sites
undercoveryankee

undercoveryankee

Posted
Posted

First of all, I think SeventhArchitect might have made at least one good point. Many of the parts in KSP-Interstellar still seem to be using the smaller node sizes last I checked. Since the devs reformed the joint system and made rockets less floppy, this is a REALLY, REALLY, BAD thing. To get realistic stability for parts of the larger sizes, you really need to switch all the nodes over to the larger-sized nodes (size 2/3 nodes, rather than just using size 1 nodes for everything). They have a MUCH higher strength than the size 1 nodes now, and should be used on 2.5m/3.75m sized attachment surfaces, respectively...

There's a ModuleManager patch for node sizes a few thousand posts back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-24-2-KSP-Interstellar-%28KSP-0-24-2-Support-25-09%29-Version-0-12-2?p=1093576&viewfull=1#post1093576. Anyone who's having trouble with node sizes can grab it, and it's probably a good place to start designing a native fix.

As an addendum (I know I said only two comments/questions, but I can't help mentioning this as well), although this is lower on my list, if you ever get around to it, an integration config for TAC Life Support would be nice as well. Specifically, I am thinking of the issue of KSP-Interstellar water and TACLS water not being the same thing. But I also see no reason why the TAC Life Support Sabatier Reactor couldn't produce KSP-Interstellar or RealFuels methane...

Since CRP gets its life support resources from TAC, Water integration is part of my CRP integration pack. Here's an edit of my file for use if you have only TACLS:


// KSPI/CRP Integration Pack
// Convert Water to the resource used by TAC Life Support.
@WARP_PLUGIN_SETTINGS:NEEDS[TacLifeSupport,WarpPlugin]:AFTER[WarpPlugin]
{
    @WaterResourceName = Water
}

@PART[*]:HAS[@RESOURCE[LqdWater]]:NEEDS[TacLifeSupport,WarpPlugin]:AFTER[WarpPlugin] {
    @RESOURCE[LqdWater] {
        @name = Water
    }
}

@BASIC_NTR_PROPELLANT[Water]:NEEDS[TacLifeSupport,WarpPlugin]:AFTER[WarpPlugin] {
    @PROPELLANT[LqdWater] {
        @name = Water
    }
}

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[FNModuleResourceExtraction]]:NEEDS[TacLifeSupport,WarpPlugin]:AFTER[WarpPlugin] {
    @MODULE[FNModuleResourceExtraction]:HAS[#resourceName[LqdWater]] {
        @resourceName = Water
    }
}

Link to comment
Share on other sites
WaveFunctionP

WaveFunctionP

Posted
Posted
Personally, I'm stoked about the magnetic nozzles! (it's something I started arguing for back when Interstellar-Lite came out, as it didn't make sense for the Thermal Rocket Nozzles to be so expensive) I think you're missing the single most important feature about them- which is balance. With the Magnetic Nozzles, it will now be possible for the Thermal Rocket Nozzles to be realistically cheap, while still having expensive Magnetic Nozzles for the super-hot gasses that would probably melt a traditional Thermal Rocket Nozzle anyways... The creator of Interstellar-Lite, on the other hand, made the (entirely inaccurate) assumption that ALL thermal nozzles were magnetic- and thus made the nozzles unbelievably expensive- even when used for Microwave Beamed Power... (which operates at LOWER temperatures than conventional chemical rocketry, and DOESN'T require magnetics in the rocket nozzle)

Regards,

Northstar

Actually, I made no assumption. The pseudo-science was completely irrelevant to my goal, which was to encourage interesting choices.

FractalUK is the realism guy, not me. I'm a gameplay guy. Nothing wrong with either approaches, but they will result in different experiences.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
WaveFunctionP

WaveFunctionP

Posted
Posted
Haven't switched back from Lite but I'm still following the parent's progress. How do you get He3 to make use of the magnetic nozzles?

He-3 is a very rare reactor fuel, not a propellant. You can add a line into the propellant's configs in the warpplugin directory should you wish to use it that way. the electric one is for the plasma drives and the other one is for the thermal nozzles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
bonesbro

bonesbro

Posted
Posted
He-3 is a very rare reactor fuel, not a propellant. You can add a line into the propellant's configs in the warpplugin directory should you wish to use it that way. the electric one is for the plasma drives and the other one is for the thermal nozzles.

Right. My point is, the magnetic nozzles are best used with lots of charged particles, right? And the reactors that generate lots of charged particles require He3 as a fuel. And I don't think the mod made He3 any more obtainable in .12, which means you're still required to, uh, scoop dive it for an hour from 500 meters above Jool's core in a fusion-powered SSTO?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Fractal_UK

Fractal_UK

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Right. My point is, the magnetic nozzles are best used with lots of charged particles, right? And the reactors that generate lots of charged particles require He3 as a fuel. And I don't think the mod made He3 any more obtainable in .12, which means you're still required to, uh, scoop dive it for an hour from 500 meters above Jool's core in a fusion-powered SSTO?

Diving Jool in a fusion SSTO is ideal. You can use DT fuel to power it, your tritium decays into helium-3 while you're doing it and you can use a thermal turbojet with the fusion reactor to fly through Jool's atmosphere so you don't even need much propellant. Not that it matters if you do because Jool is full of the stuff.

Interstellar makes Jool particularly into a massive resource farm.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
FumbeiNumbie

FumbeiNumbie

Posted
Posted (edited)

Hey, guys! Say, is there a way to recover the vehicle with antimatter and have that amount of antimatter in VAB? If not, how high are the chances to see this feature in the future? It's quite tedious to refuel my reusable crafts manually every time.

Also I thought helium3 should not be available in VAB right away. Yet I can fill antimatter initiated reactor to the top in the vehicle assembly. What am I doing wrong?

Edited by FumbeiNumbie
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Atrius129

Atrius129

Posted
Posted
Hey, guys! Say, is there a way to recover the vehicle with antimatter and have that amount of antimatter in VAB? If not, how high are the chances to see this feature in the future? It's quite tedious to refuel my reusable crafts manually every time.

Also I thought helium3 should not be available in VAB right away. Yet I can fill antimatter initiated reactor to the top in the vehicle assembly. What am I doing wrong?

Philotical went ahead and wrote a nice little mod to deal with this. No more landing pad refuel rovers!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
oktav

oktav

Posted
Posted

I was trying to create a fusion powered reactor+converter with the omega reactor but I am getting weird results, both at the launchpad and in orbit.

The reactor is connected to a direct converter and a KTEC converter

If the reactor is using D/T everything works, both the direct and the KTEC produce energy.

If I use D/He-3 or He-3 the theoretical power supply is much higher, but the direct converter doesn't produce energy at all...

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Northstar1989

Northstar1989

Posted
Posted (edited)

@FractalUK

Diving Jool in a fusion SSTO is ideal. You can use DT fuel to power it, your tritium decays into helium-3 while you're doing it and you can use a thermal turbojet with the fusion reactor to fly through Jool's atmosphere so you don't even need much propellant. Not that it matters if you do because Jool is full of the stuff.

Interstellar makes Jool particularly into a massive resource farm.

Karbonite mod introduced a "Particle Collector" part the allows players to collect atmospheric resources (just Karbonite with the mod, but should work equally well with He-3) from *just above* the atmosphere of a planet (by a couple hundred meters) as well as within it. This allows players to use MUCH higher time-warps if they are willing to go through the hassle of setting up a stable orbit that close to the atmosphere- with the possible risk of loading bugs causing the orbit to eventually decay into the atmosphere if they're not careful.

This would seem a realistic way to simulate atmospheric accumulators (proposals for which on Earth generally worked ABOVE the Karman Line) in KSP-Interstellar. Perhaps the Atmospheric Scoop parts could be endowed with the same functionality, so that players didn't have to sit for hours of 4x time-warp to accumulate the resources they desire? If the scooping function could even be made to work when the vessel were unloaded, then this would truly allow for low-hassle (and more realistic) He-3 collection...

Also, Fractal, I thought I should re-post this, so you know where might be a good place to start with fixing the node sizes in KSP-Interstellar:

There's a ModuleManager patch for node sizes a few thousand posts back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43839-0-24-2-KSP-Interstellar-%28KSP-0-24-2-Support-25-09%29-Version-0-12-2?p=1093576&viewfull=1#post1093576. Anyone who's having trouble with node sizes can grab it, and it's probably a good place to start designing a native fix.

EDIT: It seems the link I re-posted only links to the top of the appropriate page. Here is a link to the exact post with the fix.

Regards,

Northstar

Edited by Northstar1989
Link to comment
Share on other sites
simmy2109

simmy2109

Posted
Posted (edited)

So I hate to be that guy... but any thoughts on whether this will work in 0.25 (which is now available on Steam)? It doesn't seem like they really introduced anything that should really break any mods. It's been a while since I played KSP, 0.25 caught my attention and has me itching to play again, and KSPI is one of my favorite (really it's a must-have) mods.

EDIT: It doesn't/won't work without an update. Apparently there were some tweaks made to how parts are scaled. This is causing issues with most mods that include parts. I'll calm down and wait patiently on all you AWESOME modders. Keep up the good work Fractal!

Edited by simmy2109
Link to comment
Share on other sites
AetherGoddess

AetherGoddess

Posted
Posted
So I hate to be that guy... but any thoughts on whether this will work in 0.25 (which is now available on Steam)? It doesn't seem like they really introduced anything that should really break any mods. It's been a while since I played KSP, 0.25 caught my attention and has me itching to play again, and KSPI is one of my favorite (really it's a must-have) mods.

EDIT: It doesn't/won't work without an update. Apparently there were some tweaks made to how parts are scaled. This is causing issues with most mods that include parts. I'll calm down and wait patiently on all you AWESOME modders. Keep up the good work Fractal!

See this is doing it correctly. the awesome will flow as it can. three options: be patient and respectful (see above), or help (see GitHub), or stay out of the way (see

).
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Fractal_UK

Fractal_UK

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)
So I hate to be that guy... but any thoughts on whether this will work in 0.25 (which is now available on Steam)? It doesn't seem like they really introduced anything that should really break any mods. It's been a while since I played KSP, 0.25 caught my attention and has me itching to play again, and KSPI is one of my favorite (really it's a must-have) mods.

EDIT: It doesn't/won't work without an update. Apparently there were some tweaks made to how parts are scaled. This is causing issues with most mods that include parts. I'll calm down and wait patiently on all you AWESOME modders. Keep up the good work Fractal!

I've done my best to prepare for the update approaching so it should be out soon. Unfortunately, I have a very busy few days coming up so it basically has to be the next 30 mins or it won't be out for the next few days which is obviously not ideal because I won't have much time to document the changes but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out, it's not rocket science ;)

Edited by Fractal_UK
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Woodstar

Woodstar

Posted
Posted
I've done my best to prepare for the update approaching so it should be out soon. Unfortunately, I have a very busy few days coming up so it basically has to be the next 30 mins or it won't be out for the next few days which is obviously not ideal because I won't have much time to document the changes but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out, it's not rocket science ;)

So........ your uploading the new version? :D

I know it's called sarcasm. :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ABZB

ABZB

Posted
Posted

Fractal just wrote a commit to the github develop branch. He is presumably: not done committing, bug testing, [inclusive] or compiling a download. If no ready-made download appears, he presumably ran out of time, in which case that code can simply be compiled by others until his return.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Fractal_UK

Fractal_UK

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Version 0.13 Released

The gameplay changes are probably going to seem relatively significant in this version - fusion, particularly alternate fuel fusions, are going to take a huge leap in potency with many of the typical Interstellar huge specific impulses now suddenly only available from magnetic nozzles, electric engines and the DT Vista. Thermal rockets, on the other hand, suddenly becoming the high thrust option rather than simply the best option the majority of the time. This will bring the enormous advantages that antimatter power has had since the beginnings of Interstellar under control a little more. I'm pretty hopeful these changes will ultimately make Interstellar more challenging, more realistic, more varied and consequently more fun.


Version 0.13
-Added magnetic nozzles
-Capped thermal rockets at ~3000s Isp
-New refinery system with vastly improved GUI
-Integrated computer cores and AI with the stock science system
-Fusion reactor fuel scaling drastically changed to make alternative fuels more efficient
-Decreased fusion fuel consumption to more realistic values
-Attach node sizes fixed

Download links on the first page have been updated

Edited by Fractal_UK
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Woodstar

Woodstar

Posted
Posted
Version 0.13 Released


Version 0.13
-Added magnetic nozzles
-Capped thermal rockets at ~3000s Isp
-New refinery system with vastly improved GUI
-Integrated computer cores and AI with the stock science system
-Fusion reactor fuel scaling drastically changed to make alternative fuels more efficient
-Decreased fusion fuel consumption to more realistic values
-Attach node sizes fixed

Download links on the first page have been updated

NEVER fails to Impress, Fractal you are awesome!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Fractal_UK

Fractal_UK

Posted
  • Author
Posted
I'm not sure if I just had a bad install, but those new mag nozzles don't seem to be doing much of anything, also the scale seems to be a little off.

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/541880981147050751/70B0F3FC7471C032FC5891D2766F12A1EE757C79/1024x768.resizedimage

The scaling must be because I fixed all the node sizes right at the end, the larger node must be slightly out of position.

Don't expect to test those nozzles effectively on the launch pad though, they pretty much require vacuum to function.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...