Best way to cool mainsails attached to big brown tanks?

[tfabris]

If you attach a mainsail engine to one of the big brown tanks, it will have a tendency to overheat, so you can't run the mainsails at full thrust for long periods. (At least, it was true in 0.21, I haven't actually tried it in 0.22 yet, but I'm assuming it's the same.)

If, instead, you use two of the tanks that are half the size of the big brown tanks, then you get the same weight and fuel capacity without the overheating. So in my heavy lifter designs, that's exactly what I'm doing: I'm using doubled-up tanks in place of big brown tanks. This works.

But that's a terrible inconvenience. For large and complex designs, it requires more structural supports to keep the tanks tied together, increasing weight and drag. And the increased partcount makes the physics more complicated, slowing the frame rate and increasing the chance of structural failure.

Are there any construction tricks that would allow me to use mainsails with the big brown tanks, and still run them at full thrust?

*EDIT* Answer:

- Supposedly they changed this in 0.22 so the mainsails don't overheat as badly. I haven't tried it myself yet though.

Edited October 21, 2013 by tfabris

[briansun1]

you mean the orange tanks? and all you have to do is throttle down 1 ish %(look at how mechjeb dose it if you need to)

[UmbralRaptor]

The Mainsail's heat production was reduced in 0.22 to specifically avoid the heat transfer bugs that large parts (eg: orange tanks) see.

[tfabris]

The Mainsail's heat production was reduced in 0.22 to specifically avoid the heat transfer bugs that large parts (eg: orange tanks) see.

That'll teach me to make assumptions. THANK YOU!

[Oddible]

Best way to cool mainsails

Take them to space, I hear its cold up there.

[briansun1]

Take them to space, I hear its cold up there.

depends on where you are

[Dave Kerbin]

No. There are actually a few issues with the big orange tanks that can be solved by either replacing them with a combination of smaller tanks or sticking a single small tank between them and the engine.

The reason has to do with the Unity physic engine. I believe there where apparently some limitations with regard to distance between rigid parts when calculating heat and forces - basically the orange tank is long enough that when forces are applied at one end the other is too far away to be included in some immediate balancing calculations and this results in some force/heat not being uniformly dispersed. Increasing the distance would fix that, but only by sacrificing some decimal places which would lead to physics oddities at smaller scales (tiny probe parts would experience bigger rounding errors when interacting) and more CPU load.

[Dun Kirk]

put a silver tank under them .... the orange tanks retain heat it says in the description.

[Sirrobert]

Putting a small tank between the mainsail and the orange tank always fixed it

[Scarecrow88]

Listen to UmbralRaptor. Since 0.22 it's no longer necessary to fanny about fitting any sort of silver tank between a mainsail and a jumbo tank, as they no longer overheat to the point of exploding as they used to previously.

[SRV Ron]

No. There are actually a few issues with the big orange tanks that can be solved by either replacing them with a combination of smaller tanks or sticking a single small tank between them and the engine.

The reason has to do with the Unity physic engine. I believe there where apparently some limitations with regard to distance between rigid parts when calculating heat and forces - basically the orange tank is long enough that when forces are applied at one end the other is too far away to be included in some immediate balancing calculations and this results in some force/heat not being uniformly dispersed. Increasing the distance would fix that, but only by sacrificing some decimal places which would lead to physics oddities at smaller scales (tiny probe parts would experience bigger rounding errors when interacting) and more CPU load.

The same issue happens with some of the big Nova Punch tanks as well. Placing a squat tank under the big long ones resolves the overheating issue.