What ever happened to Ion Engines?

[CreepyD]

Sunjumper has it spot on:

If high physics warp could reduce all the part masses to a single point mass, and then have the thrust act on this point only, it may be possible to complete ion burns in a few minutes of play time.

I've been wondering why this hasn't been modded yet, unless it's more complex than it sounds to implement.

Add this in and let us ramp the physics warp up more than 4x and voila, usable ion engines for everyone, not to mention time savings on other long burns.

[KerbMav]

As I see it, they are more precise than RCS to get that GSO satellite exact to the second in its orbital period - without pressing the thruster keys with minutely varying "force" back and forth.

So, maybe they are also good for precise changes in trajectory during interstellar travel - if rails/timewarp would not kill any precision again anyway.

[WafflesToo]

Everyone else is right, their to weak, (it's better to use a NERVA) and the do have approximately 69 times more thrust than the real one

Please correct the math if it's incorrect.

I love how people like this can make such an absolutist statement with the incorrect assumption that their point of view is the only point of view.

Ion engines reward the patient. If you do not have it then they are not the engine for you.

[Madrias]

I've found the Ion Engines to be rather not useful to me. Not enough thrust for a ship of moderate size, I don't lob small probes often, and when I do lob probes from the back of my spaceplanes, I've found packing enough liquid fuel and one of those Ant engines is worth the weight, and then I don't have an engine eating up my power supply. And I don't have to waste mass on 50 solar panels.

So in the end, I'm not patient enough to use the Ion Engine without modifications. Strapping a modified Xenon tank to it (I added some power generation while removing the Xenon, making a nice RTG out of it.) along with some actual Xenon, along with making the Ion Engine output 3kN of thrust instead of 0.5kN, I find myself using them everywhere.

[Bishop149]

The whole ion engine thing is a little silly.

They are in the game, their power may have been increased from real life equivalents in order to make them less of a pain to use.

Nonetheless no one really uses them because burns are still long enough to be a royal pain in ass even with 4x physical warp

So for ion engines at least Squad should look into allowing automated burns to take place with time warp. A burn may take hours or days but its still nothing compared to the years the whole flight might take, so we really should be using the lovely high ISP Ions.

I made one attempt at an Ion powered manned exploration craft taking it out to Pol. It worked really very well and looked rather nice too. but was too slow for me to have much inclination to revisit it!

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/740008303649718783/D21711B9A949E6A79BBE9E06AFC814991420F455/

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/720868720354110081/6063AF2523ACE3063B60783B6E2185E6A7677DC0/

[SlyReaper]

The whole ion engine thing is a little silly.

They are in the game, their power may have been increased from real life equivalents in order to make them less of a pain to use.

Nonetheless no one really uses them because burns are still long enough to be a royal pain in ass even with 4x physical warp

So for ion engines at least Squad should look into allowing automated burns to take place with time warp. A burn may take hours or days but its still nothing compared to the years the whole flight might take, so we really should be using the lovely high ISP Ions.

I made one attempt at an Ion powered manned exploration craft taking it out to Pol. It worked really very well and looked rather nice too. but was too slow for me to have much inclination to revisit it!

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/740008303649718783/D21711B9A949E6A79BBE9E06AFC814991420F455/

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/720868720354110081/6063AF2523ACE3063B60783B6E2185E6A7677DC0/

I like my solution better:

The ship doesn't need to land on Pol. The kerbal just jetpacks down to the surface and jetpacks back up again.

[Bishop149]

I like my solution better:

The ship doesn't need to land on Pol. The kerbal just jetpacks down to the surface and jetpacks back up again.

I made something similar in the past:

Like yours but three ion engines and 4 panels.

I refuse to jetpack up and down. . . its just silly.

So yeah the large size of the other craft was mainly due to lugging the fuel and engine required for a powered landing. . . and all the sodding landing gear. . . oh and I wanted to fly two Kerbs.

[mvronsky]

I am reading this as my ion probe lander is doing a half hour burn to get to Jool...

[Bothersome]

I'd like to see ANYONE put a liquid fuel powerd craft in orbit around the sun at say less than 50 million meters altitude circular orbit (without cheating of course). Then you'll know where Ions are needed.

[The Jedi Master]

Ions suck. Ions are so incredibly slow as to be almost useless. Just go for the nuke engines.

[Commander Zoom]

my Janet series probes use a transfer stage (one or two regular tanks and a 909) to get them where they're going, and then cast off and make any necessary orbital adjustments with their ion engine - 4k delta v means a LOT of inclination and height changes, and can even make the difference between a Moho flyby and a capture.

[Spatzimaus]

Just go for the nuke engines.

As has been said many times already, you can make an entire interplanetary ion probe for half the weight of a single LV-N engine (to say nothing of the fuel). If you go back to my post on the second page, the mapping probe there has a weight of 1.4675 tons, and the only reason it's even THAT large is because I'm carrying so many sensor packages from mods. So no, nukes aren't an option for anything that small, especially if you want it to be carried to orbit on a spaceplane instead of requiring its own dedicated rocket launch.

Besides, even an LV-N doesn't come close to ions for fuel efficiency. Consider the spaceplane I posted a picture of in that same post; for an investment of ~1.7 tons, I added two ion propulsion pods that in total add about ~2000m/s of delta-V, and my most recent versions up this to about 4000 by adding another 1.2 tons of xenon. This makes getting to Laythe much, much easier. Getting a comparable delta-V from an LV-N would require another 9-10 tons in fuel tanks (or 20+ to replace my newer ion pods), which a spaceplane simply can't handle without its size spiraling far out of control; a rocket is a bit less problematic there, although the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation still makes the size snowball quickly.

Sure, it takes a long time to expend all that xenon, but it means I can do the intermediate stage of a trip to Laythe without dipping into my liquid fuel supply, and it's a negligible mass addition to a plane that already weighs over 30 tons. I just turn on the ions, jack up the physics acceleration, and go watch TV for an hour or so.

[Cydonian Monk]

Ions suck. Ions are so incredibly slow as to be almost useless. Just go for the nuke engines.

Ions are amazing. Not as clumsy or random as a nuke; they're an elegant engine for a more civilized age. For over a thousand hours, the Ion probes were guardians of patience and efficiency in the Kerbol System. Before the dark times. Before we got tired of waiting.

[Tank Buddy]

I use them for and ONLY for maneuvering and landing on and around Gilly. Then have a TWR of roughly 40 there, so they are more practical than chemical rockets. Otherwise, they are impractical because I don't wan't to spend more than 5 minutes on a burn.

[DJEN]

Ions suck. Ions are so incredibly slow as to be almost useless. Just go for the nuke engines.

The real problem is the game's system, not the engine.

[Hodo]

I have two currently in use ion powered craft.

XI-3

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And XI-2

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Both have been to Eve and back. Sure the burns were stupid long, but I use nukes as auxiliary engines to help do orbital burns.