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

[domassimo]

3 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

WIP mod is WIP. Use at own risk.

Oh, that risk falls squarely on the Kerbals going on the interstellar expedition (after signing the waiver)... ;-)

On a more serious note, I wonder if it would be possible (in general, not necessarily for the mods discussed here) to use heat sinks as used in Elite:Dangerous. In that game, a heat sink 'soaks up' all vessel heat and then gets ejected, instantly cooling the vessel. In KSP, a heat sink could be ejected automatically when coming out of time-warp, hopefully just one frame ahead of the inevitable heat-redistribution-instigated-mayhem. Presumably, that could work if there are gameplay tradeoffs, such as still needing the requisite radiators to 'load' the heat sink to avoid leaving them out. It's just an idea, not a suggestion, and ideally, a future version of KSP allows normal radiators to take care of it the proper way.

[Jimbodiah]

KSP can't handle current heat mechanics, let alone what you are suggesting    The bug is KSP related, not on the side of the modders.

[RedParadize]

2 hours ago, domassimo said:

Oh, that risk falls squarely on the Kerbals going on the interstellar expedition (after signing the waiver)... ;-)

On a more serious note, I wonder if it would be possible (in general, not necessarily for the mods discussed here) to use heat sinks as used in Elite:Dangerous. In that game, a heat sink 'soaks up' all vessel heat and then gets ejected, instantly cooling the vessel. In KSP, a heat sink could be ejected automatically when coming out of time-warp, hopefully just one frame ahead of the inevitable heat-redistribution-instigated-mayhem. Presumably, that could work if there are gameplay tradeoffs, such as still needing the requisite radiators to 'load' the heat sink to avoid leaving them out. It's just an idea, not a suggestion, and ideally, a future version of KSP allows normal radiators to take care of it the proper way.

Deep Space Exploration Vessels have a radiator that is a bit like that. By default it act like a normal radiator, but you can eject coolant to get a quick cool down. Obviously it won't do it on its own and doing it when coming out of warp would be too late, but you could do that before warping.

A simpler way to avoid explosion is to cut power of what's not needed. Then start warping slowly until heat dissipate (warp 4 and bellow), then go full warp.

[Xaryen]

Seems like the 2.5m logistics modules are, in terms of part mass per available volume, strictly worse than corresponding Kontainers from USI, specifically the "Kontainer Tank - Flat" that has very similar function.

I'm not sure what's your stance on balancing against other mods, but since USI seems fairly common I thought it was worth a mention.

[DStaal]

1 hour ago, Xaryen said:

Seems like the 2.5m logistics modules are, in terms of part mass per available volume, strictly worse than corresponding Kontainers from USI, specifically the "Kontainer Tank - Flat" that has very similar function.

I'm not sure what's your stance on balancing against other mods, but since USI seems fairly common I thought it was worth a mention.

Kontainers are known to typically be better than stock in terms of mass per available volume.  I believe they try to balance some with impact and heat tolerance.

[GrandProtectorDark]

So, After A random attempt to look if Far Future Technologies Functions with 1.4.1.
I can say, It sorta-ish does.
The Antimatter Factory loads and also produces antimatter, all engines actually produce thrust,, the Fusion reactor works fine, engine charging works flawless, and tranfering the antimatter into the ship on the launchpad also works fine.
I'm no expert, but there aren't any obvious problems. Don't know about the under the hood situation.

[JadeOfMaar]

6 hours ago, GrandProtectorDark said:

So, After A random attempt to look if Far Future Technologies Functions with 1.4.1.
I can say, It sorta-ish does.
The Antimatter Factory loads and also produces antimatter, all engines actually produce thrust,, the Fusion reactor works fine, engine charging works flawless, and tranfering the antimatter into the ship on the launchpad also works fine.
I'm no expert, but there aren't any obvious problems. Don't know about the under the hood situation.

FFT is in limbo because there is a major issue with the stock heat mechanic. It's not too bad for most mods that have things that get pretty hot, pretty fast, but for this mod it's a catastrophic-- unplayable level problem.

The thing is, once you do a really long burn, your engine and nearby parts build up tons of heat. When you enter and exit timewarp the total heat is averaged across all the parts in your craft. Parts with very low tolerance then instantly explode from heat they should never have been holding on to. These parts can include command chairs, wheels, solar panels, science experiments and the antimatter tanks.

I've read that you can guard against it by patching Nertea's radiators to only cool nearby parts and attach them all only to the reactors and engines. But I doubt anyone has done so.

[GrandProtectorDark]

8 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

FFT is in limbo because there is a major issue with the stock heat mechanic. It's not too bad for most mods that have things that get pretty hot, pretty fast, but for this mod it's a catastrophic-- unplayable level problem.

The thing is, once you do a really long burn, your engine and nearby parts build up tons of heat. When you enter and exit timewarp the total heat is averaged across all the parts in your craft. Parts with very low tolerance then instantly explode from heat they should never have been holding on to. These parts can include command chairs, wheels, solar panels, science experiments and the antimatter tanks.

I've read that you can guard against it by patching Nertea's radiators to only cool nearby parts and attach them all only to the reactors and engines. But I doubt anyone has done so.

I've already more or less known about the heating issue(and I'm playing with full awareness of that risk). I semi intended my message to anyone else, Using this WIP mod, but also To nertea, that it is still functional in 1.4.1. I do hope, That the Heat mechanic gets fixed one day, for know, Nothing has exploded yet, which can't be explained by a lack of a sufficient amount of radiators.

 

Edit: Shouldn't Antimatter tanks be the most resistant kind of parts?

Edited March 17, 2018 by GrandProtectorDark

[AmpCat]

To be honest, I've run several long distance missions with very long burns using FFT engines, and I've not had any real issues with heat. However, I also use a lot of stacked black heat radiators (the square or triangle sheet ones) from Nertea's mods. I also try to keep my thrust to weight ratio at better than 1 (which is probably overkill for deep space). But I did have a couple missions with it at 0.1, and even after 20min burns, I had no problems. I've not yet tried antimatter engines (because I'm in career mode and haven't gotten there yet), so maybe it's related to the later tech engines?

I do have a time warp mod which might be helping to alleviate this, as well as a physics stability mod.

[Jimbodiah]

Which timewarp mod?

[AmpCat]

BetterTimeWarpContinued

 

[Maffif]

I don't know if dev/anyone is interested, but I've written a very simple patch for Far Future Technologies and an extremely handy old mod called Persistent Thrust.  It works fine in 1.3.1, and enables far longer and (assuming you line it up right and don't overshoot) better burns than bettertimewarp, and also synergizes well with it.

 

I haven't done much beyond test flights, so I don't know how this works with the heat issues on long missions, but I've gotten crafts to 0.01c without exploding.

EDIT: Longer burns, carried out very quickly. Be wary of low thrust, it won't work over 1m/s2 and it's easy to accidentally go suborbital

Edited March 19, 2018 by Maffif

[GrandProtectorDark]

Btw, for when FarFutureTechnologies gets update in Soon™ amount of time. I found an error in the CTT patch file.
The Nuclear ISRU is patched to be unlocked via the "nuclearRefueling" Science node. I checked the CTT config I'm using as well as the newest available one.
There is no such tech-node as "nuclearRefueling".

[MrFancyPL]

On 16.03.2018 at 10:00 PM, GrandProtectorDark said:

So, After A random attempt to look if Far Future Technologies Functions with 1.4.1.
I can say, It sorta-ish does.
The Antimatter Factory loads and also produces antimatter, all engines actually produce thrust,, the Fusion reactor works fine, engine charging works flawless, and tranfering the antimatter into the ship on the launchpad also works fine.
I'm no expert, but there aren't any obvious problems. Don't know about the under the hood situation.

I don't think that fusion reactors work well, I have a bug that when i try to lower the thrust to 0 in electric engine also reactor disables and it's unable to be turned on again.

[AmpCat]

@Nertea, not sure if you're working on the FFT at the moment, but I was playing with the metallic hydrogen engine, and funny things happen when the mixing ratio is set to 0:

1. It does consume Metallic Hydrogen, as expected.
2. Addons still think it needs hydrogen when trying to calculate delta v and whatnot. Engine still runs fine with no hydrogen in game.
3. Doesn't create any heat. If I adjust the mixing ratio even a little, it suddenly generates tons of heat (as intended).
4. Thrust is 0, even though flames are coming out and the engine is running.

Perhaps this is working as intended, and I just shouldn't set it to 0, but I wasn't sure. If so, perhaps not letting it be set all the way to 0 would make more sense, unless that mode actually does something more than dump fuel.

Edit: Added consumption of Met.Hyd. note.

Edited April 18, 2018 by AmpCat

[Streetwind]

@AmpCat Any engine will run as long as it has a propellant. Any propellant will do, even electricCharge. However, electricCharge is a massless resource. Because of this, it will not produce thrust when consumed by an engine. It will simply do nothing. In order to get thrust, you need the engine to consume a resource with mass. Additionally, heat production scales proportionally with thrust production, so an engine producing no thrust also will not produce heat. All of this is stock KSP behavior, so essentially "working as intended".

It would indeed make sense to clamp the engine to a minimum hydrogen consumption value so that players don't run into this edge case. The reason it isn't yet is probably the giant "Work In Progress" tag stamped onto the mod  

Edited April 18, 2018 by Streetwind

[AmpCat]

33 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

@AmpCat Any engine will run as long as it has a propellant. Any propellant will do, even electricCharge. However, electricCharge is a massless resource. Because of this, it will not produce thrust when consumed by an engine. It will simply do nothing. In order to get thrust, you need the engine to consume a resource with mass. Additionally, heat production scales proportionally with thrust production, so an engine producing no thrust also will not produce heat. All of this is stock KSP behavior, so essentially "working as intended".

It would indeed make sense to clamp the engine to a minimum hydrogen consumption value so that players don't run into this edge case. The reason it isn't yet is probably the giant "Work In Progress" tag stamped onto the mod  

Well, the Metallic Hydrogen resource it IS consuming, has mass. Thus, it should be creating thrust and heat. This was more of a bug report so @Nertea can refine the work in progress. I assumed those reading would be familiar with the engine and I didn't need to specify that it was burning Metallic Hydrogen, as expected.

[domassimo]

On 4/13/2018 at 3:13 AM, MrFancyPL said:

I don't think that fusion reactors work well, I have a bug that when i try to lower the thrust to 0 in electric engine also reactor disables and it's unable to be turned on again.

For now, that seems 'working as intended.' The fusion reactors operate in a similar way to the chargeable engines, thus to start them, you need a significant electrical charge to begin with. This simulates the fact that a fusion reactor requires a high initial investment before it generates more energy than you put into it (this is the real-life challenge with them too, no sustained output yet that reliably overcomes the initial and continued power input). In the game, it simply means you'll always need a secondary power source to kickstart your fusion reactor. If you have large enough batteries, even a single RTG will do the trick.

The second issue is that the fusion reactor shuts off when it cannot deliver its electric power somewhere. Without load, it powers down and requires the restart charging again. This is why, when you shut off the engines, the fusion reactor also shut off. I'm not sure but I believe it needs a minimum load of 10% of its maximum capacity, which is around 400 EC/s I think. That's quite a hefty amount. Unless you have lots of cryo tanks to cool, life support and other things going on, most ships won't be able to accommodate that without electric engines running. Again, it seems that a fusion reactor is best supported by another smaller power source for sustained power, with the fusion reactor only active when large amounts of power are drawn. I don't know how the fusion reactor compares in terms of mass and fuel mass to the fission reactors of Near Future Electrical, I suppose a fusion reactor plus small fission reactor may be preferred over one heavier fission reactor and nuclear fuel reserves.

[MrFancyPL]

16 hours ago, domassimo said:

For now, that seems 'working as intended.' The fusion reactors operate in a similar way to the chargeable engines, thus to start them, you need a significant electrical charge to begin with. This simulates the fact that a fusion reactor requires a high initial investment before it generates more energy than you put into it (this is the real-life challenge with them too, no sustained output yet that reliably overcomes the initial and continued power input). In the game, it simply means you'll always need a secondary power source to kickstart your fusion reactor. If you have large enough batteries, even a single RTG will do the trick.

The second issue is that the fusion reactor shuts off when it cannot deliver its electric power somewhere. Without load, it powers down and requires the restart charging again. This is why, when you shut off the engines, the fusion reactor also shut off. I'm not sure but I believe it needs a minimum load of 10% of its maximum capacity, which is around 400 EC/s I think. That's quite a hefty amount. Unless you have lots of cryo tanks to cool, life support and other things going on, most ships won't be able to accommodate that without electric engines running. Again, it seems that a fusion reactor is best supported by another smaller power source for sustained power, with the fusion reactor only active when large amounts of power are drawn. I don't know how the fusion reactor compares in terms of mass and fuel mass to the fission reactors of Near Future Electrical, I suppose a fusion reactor plus small fission reactor may be preferred over one heavier fission reactor and nuclear fuel reserves.

But I can charge the reactors, but somehow when I press start the reactor It discharges and is not working.

[domassimo]

8 hours ago, MrFancyPL said:

But I can charge the reactors, but somehow when I press start the reactor It discharges and is not working.

Do you have something that actually would consume the energy? Are your engines running and requiring energy? If the answer is no, the reactor will indeed shut off right after it recharges the batteries (assuming the initial kickstart was done with battery power). If the answer is yes, maybe it's a bug. Still, even if it's the former, it can be a bit counterintuitive.

[AmpCat]

I just did a quick test with an FX-3 fusion reactor, and here's how it worked for me:

1. Have another power source to charge the capacitors. (Even the launch clamps on the ground will eventually provide enough charge.)
2. Start the reactor.
3. Shut off external power.
4. Reactor will recharge it's own starting caps again.
5. Reactor continues to run fine with a 0.04% load.

This was all on a launch pad with sufficient radiators and a deuterium tank.

Edit:

1. I shut down the reactor.
2. Power cap on the reactor completely emptied.
3. Need to provide external charge to recharge them again. Note, you can use @Nertea's NFE caps to do this.
4. Using only caps, I needed about 32,000 charge to charge the reactor's cap. The fusion reactor can recharge these caps fine.

So, in summary, you could use just NFE capacitors to keep the reactor going, but if something went wrong and your capacitors weren't fully charged or something, you'd be screwed. I'd have a small fission reactor or solar array as a backup. But, having 32,000 charge in capacitors is a handy thing to have. for the FX-3. Other reactors may require other amounts. I didn't see the amount on the part anywhere, this was just experimentation.

Edited April 20, 2018 by AmpCat

[Nertea]

Nooo stop armchair debugging everyone it's a bug, it doesn't need constant draw, KSP 1.4.x broke it.

[MaverickSawyer]

Soooo... you're saying the old adage about bugs and features is a lie?

Spoiler

JK, it's all good. I never used the reactors except for extremely high demand operations anyways.  

 

[Jimbodiah]

1.4.2 broke iself, let alone mods.  Here's to 1.4.5, may they get it right by then

[AmpCat]

@Nertea, maybe it's just me, or I have a different tolerance for bugs, but so far I haven't run into any bugs with FFT. Except the metallic hydrogen engine being set to pure metallic hydrogen fuel, but that's pretty minor.