[WIP] Nert's Dev Thread - Current: various updates

[spaceabove]

As someone in academia, I am very happy to hear you use the original paper.

 I assume you up things like thrust as squad does with ion engines to make them fun in gameplay time levels? 

[theJesuit]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

It's really not, especially when they add random pointless things like a flag-covered kickback and I need to figure out how to roll that into my vision. 

I'm not sure that flag covered parts are all that necessary.   I mean they are they are really there as RL advertising, which is the biggest departure from stock that squad ever made.  As I don't run my games as real world analogue, it breaks immersion IMHO.

Given that there are stock decals people can add their own flags as they want.  Or whitelist that part. 

My two cents, and doesn't bring about a sense of completeness in the sense of scope for ReStock or for your own satisfaction I'm sure.

Peace.

[Nertea]

4 hours ago, spaceabove said:

As someone in academia, I am very happy to hear you use the original paper.

 I assume you up things like thrust as squad does with ion engines to make them fun in gameplay time levels? 

Winchell Chung is usually pretty good but sometimes his performance aggregations are confusing and going back to the document is clearer.

Yes I have to compress the thrust range, which is challenging, because I have to take into account the compression done with NFP and KA. So the end result should in terms of vague ratios be 'realistic' but the numbers won't be. Nobody wants a 80t engine with 120t of radiators that produces 10N of thrust (the FFRE)

Edited July 27, 2020 by Nertea

[ra4nd0m]

It looks like we should install persistent trust to fully utilize what FFT had to offer.

BTW is that afterburning fission fragment engine is dusty plasma fission fragment engine or it is separate part?

Cause I always thought that dusty plasma would had pretty big trust with high ISP which essentially makes it more viable than fusion engines.

Edited July 27, 2020 by ra4nd0m

[Nertea]

13 minutes ago, ra4nd0m said:

It looks like we should install persistent trust to fully utilize what FFT had to offer.

BTW is that afterburning fission fragment engine is dusty plasma fission fragment engine or it is separate part?

Cause I always thought that dusty plasma would had pretty big trust with high ISP which essentially makes it more viable than fusion engines.

It's a dusty plasma engine, with a mode switch for afterburning.

The HOPE FFRE proposal (the often cited dusty plasma design) presents the following parameters

• 113 tons of engine
• 527,000s of specific impulse
• 43 N of thrust. 

's not great in terms of thrust ;). 

 

 

[Captain Sierra]

6 hours ago, Nertea said:

especially when they add random pointless things like a flag-covered kickback and I need to figure out how to roll that into my vision. 

Ah yes ... delightful. And of course the changes to fairings no doubt broke things pretty heavily for Restock and people don't like having to wait to update.

 

And was I seeing a launch-capable fusion aerospike earlier? Do you know how expensive it will be to fully radiation-shield the KSC from that?

Really glad to see the AMCF coming back. I had a soft spot for that engine and it looks absolutely stunning. I do hope the beam-core comes back eventually. Yes it's obscenely overpowered, that's why we love it. I can literally have 1 million dV in a propulsion bus.

[alberro+]

I'm loving FFT, beatiful engines and tanks. I have only one question though, how do I get antimatter? Maybe i'm just dumb and can't figure it out, but I'd appreciate any help.

[Nertea]

On 7/28/2020 at 12:46 AM, alberro+ said:

I'm loving FFT, beatiful engines and tanks. I have only one question though, how do I get antimatter? Maybe i'm just dumb and can't figure it out, but I'd appreciate any help.

If you're using the plugin in any modern KSP version, I don't expect it to work.

[Akira_R]

Wow... Spent a couple hours reading the thread from where you announced you were working on FFT again. I'm still playing on a 1.3.1 install and am running the old FFT, I mainly came on to see if this was a good time to build out another install but looks like I'm going to be waiting around a bit longer lol.

When you said that the models and stuff from old FFT weren't very good I was like "what is this guy talking about, he's a modeling beast and they look great!" But now I see a lot has changed in the 2+ years I have been away, my goodness Nertea your modeling skills have really become next level. It is really awesome to see you are still enjoying your hobby, I've been following your mods since you first started working on the Near Future series of mods, I don't even know how many years ago that was now but I've been using your mods for longer than I've known my fiance, man how time flies. Keep it up mate.

[WarriorSabe]

Do your FFT plans include something like MARAUDER, or would it overlap with other pulsed engines too much? MARAUDER being a coaxial plasma railgun with extremely high muzzle velocities that thus would have really good Isp when used as a thruster. 

[Nertea]

So, just a note about the upcoming FFT version. There will be zero backwards compatibility. That means:

1. Plugin components for things like the antimatter factory will not exist
2. Part names and sizes will change
3. There will be no legacy or deprecated parts from the old mod shipped. 

 

10 hours ago, WarriorSabe said:

Do your FFT plans include something like MARAUDER, or would it overlap with other pulsed engines too much? MARAUDER being a coaxial plasma railgun with extremely high muzzle velocities that thus would have really good Isp when used as a thruster. 

That'd be weird, that's just a pulsed magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. You'd have to run the numbers specifically, but a quick google told me...

• 3000 km/s projectiles
• ~10 MJ/projectile
• A bit of math indicates projectile mass of 3e-6 kg, assuming a 3000 km/s projectile with an energy of 10 MJ.

So firing at 1 Hz, you're creating an engine with an Isp of 300,000s (not bad), a mass flow rate of .000003 kg/s (less good). That's basically an FFRE, minuscule thrust. You're going to need a big nuclear reactor to fire that fast anyways - I couldn't find numbers on how efficient the railgun is, but I would bet it is quite low (<30%). I suspect if you ran the math on that all the way, the plasma thrusters in NFE would come out looking better. 

 

 

 

Edited August 2, 2020 by Nertea

[WarriorSabe]

6 hours ago, Nertea said:

That'd be weird, that's just a pulsed magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. You'd have to run the numbers specifically, but a quick google told me...

• 3000 km/s projectiles
• ~10 MJ/projectile
• A bit of math indicates projectile mass of 3e-6 kg, assuming a 3000 km/s projectile with an energy of 10 MJ.

So firing at 1 Hz, you're creating an engine with an Isp of 300,000s (not bad), a mass flow rate of .000003 kg/s (less good). That's basically an FFRE, minuscule thrust. You're going to need a big nuclear reactor to fire that fast anyways - I couldn't find numbers on how efficient the railgun is, but I would bet it is quite low (<30%). I suspect if you ran the math on that all the way, the plasma thrusters in NFE would come out looking better. 

I was thinking of it as like the pulsed fusion engines but less good (like, in a transitionary tech regime between NF and FFT), but, yeah, when you put it that way, that does make sense.

[GigFiz]

I have a (potentially dumb) question for anyone who wants to field it:

At the deep end of the tech tree (With CTT and all of Nert's mods and more), the choice of engine gets a bit overwhelming (and here comes FFT to make it even more so ). When there are a bunch of ion, lithium, plasma, and nuclear options, plus the regular engines, it starts to get really hard to differentiate enough to know what to use and when. I was hoping for some knowledge so that I am able to make actually meaningful choices, that would be much appreciated (or if some of it is for flavor/realism/variety).

On 7/27/2020 at 12:43 PM, theJesuit said:

I'm not sure that flag covered parts are all that necessary.   I mean they are they are really there as RL advertising, which is the biggest departure from stock that squad ever made.  As I don't run my games as real world analogue, it breaks immersion IMHO.

Given that there are stock decals people can add their own flags as they want.  Or whitelist that part. 

My two cents, and doesn't bring about a sense of completeness in the sense of scope for ReStock or for your own satisfaction I'm sure.

Peace.

Yeah, I was extremely underwhelmed by the "new parts" in 1.10

 

[theJesuit]

6 minutes ago, GigFiz said:

I have a (potentially dumb) question for anyone who wants to field it:

At the deep end of the tech tree (With CTT and all of Nert's mods and more), the choice of engine gets a bit overwhelming (and here comes FFT to make it even more so ). When there are a bunch of ion, lithium, plasma, and nuclear options, plus the regular engines, it starts to get really hard to differentiate enough to know what to use and when. I was hoping for some knowledge so that I am able to make actually meaningful choices, that would be much appreciated (or if some of it is for flavor/realism/variety).

I guess, sometimes it really depends on how pedantic you wish to be in maximising TWR against ISP.  Playing around with KER to design craft for specific purposes, with different engines and fuel variations is exciting for some people.

I have to say I prefer simply to use mostly stock engines for the challenge of them, but then I don't end up at the far end of tech trees in career/ science modes very often as I get distracted by updates and modding.  And making sense of the variety was a reason to create the Tetrix TechTree (#shamelessplug) and i do have amy own MM patch that removes the Making History engines and some of the Restock Plus if I have them installed.

 

 

 

[Akira_R]

On 8/2/2020 at 12:30 PM, Nertea said:

So, just a note about the upcoming FFT version. There will be zero backwards compatibility. That means:

1. Plugin components for things like the antimatter factory will not exist
2. Part names and sizes will change
3. There will be no legacy or deprecated parts from the old mod shipped. 

 

*snip*

 

 

 

Question about the upcoming testing release, are you planning on releasing it for 1.9.1 or 1.10?

[Nertea]

4 hours ago, Akira_R said:

Question about the upcoming testing release, are you planning on releasing it for 1.9.1 or 1.10?

Nominally 1.10.1, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work as far back as 1.8.x

[GigFiz]

I've been recently been making an effort to check out all the IVA's on the parts you make and, holy crap this doesn't get said enough, they are absolutely ridiculous. Not just the quality, but all the little touches: The notes, the actually animated swimming fish, everything. I just saw the holographic planet in the 3.75m cupola.

Bloody awe inspiring.

[Nertea]

19 hours ago, GigFiz said:

I've been recently been making an effort to check out all the IVA's on the parts you make and, holy crap this doesn't get said enough, they are absolutely ridiculous. Not just the quality, but all the little touches: The notes, the actually animated swimming fish, everything. I just saw the holographic planet in the 3.75m cupola.

Bloody awe inspiring.

Thanks! Yeah there are lots of easter eggs...

[Shoujo Q]

Hi Nertea, just wanted to pop in to say thanks so much for all the modding work you do for KSP - I use a bunch of your mods, and they greatly enhance my experience with the game.

[Kunosheru]

 will be happy to participate in the localization of this mod! thanks for development of the mod!

[Nertea]

Er, so I've got most of the suite done for 1.10.1 so somewhat back to this. A few thing I've been working on:

Antimatter Loading

I removed the old system for simplification. No more factory, no more handling of that. Antimatter costs science (as previously discussed), and when you load to the pad a popup comes up asking you if you want to launch. 

System Heat

As described in the SH thread, it's coming along. If you, as a user, want to speed up the release of FFT, go there and test it. 

Space Dust

I resumed work on the final piece of the puzzle, which is the atmospheric and exospheric harvesting system. I wrote the resource distribution and sampling code and am working on the visualizations, which are being a pain to port from Unity to the game. Took a break to model the two revised instruments, the antimatter detector (now based on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory's EGRET instrument) and the atmospheric scanner (now based on Cassini's UVIS instrument). 

 

[WarriorSabe]

How would it costing science work in a science-mode game? Without contracts or strategies, science is a non-renewable resource. Is it just a thing you have to be measured with, or does it function differently in science mode?

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

• 113 tons of engine
• 527,000s of specific impulse
• 43 N of thrust. 

looking at numbers like this really makes the idea of atomic bomb pulse propulsion seem more reasonable hah

[theJesuit]

2 hours ago, WarriorSabe said:

How would it costing science work in a science-mode game? Without contracts or strategies, science is a non-renewable resource. Is it just a thing you have to be measured with, or does it function differently in science mode?

Science Labs in Stock can be gamed for infinite science.

[WarriorSabe]

Just now, theJesuit said:

Science Labs in Stock can be gamed for infinite science.

Infinite? Are they really that unbalanced? I thought it was just a like sevenfold multiplier or something