So the Ion engines...

[Ahlywog]

...seem to be pretty much worthless now? Maybe I'm missing something?

I was playing around with a probe. I wanted to see if I could land one, using 8x Ion engines, on Minmus, refuel (Kethane mod) then take off again only to notice 3.88 u/s fuel consumption. 16 KN/s thrust with 3.88 units of Xenon gas/sec?

Thoughts?

[merendel]

they get the same amount of delta V they got before the patch. They just have 4 times the thrust now which results in burning the fuel off faster. Basicly if it took you 20 minutes before to do your compleat burn and use up your full you'll compleat the same burn in 5 minutes.

[Pthigrivi]

They also use significantly less power, which means much less weight and headaches with solar panels. 2 gigantors now power 4 Ion engines. Seriously people don't even get how fun these are now, and just how efficiently you can move around the system if you plan things right.

Think about it this way--you can do a 4 man Duna mission with an 8 Ion tug and only enough LFO to ascend out of duna's atmosphere. You can go to Jool on less than 1t in fuel. Leave Kerbin on a sundive trajectory and then drop half your panels and use OX-STATS close to kerbol to do ultra-fast transfer to wherever you want. It's great stuff.

[lammatt]

if you are stacking ion engines, you are probably having a wrong idea about the use of it.

[Albert VDS]

This patch converted them from eon engines to ion engines and I very much like that.

[Streetwind]

...seem to be pretty much worthless now? Maybe I'm missing something?

I was playing around with a probe. I wanted to see if I could land one, using 8x Ion engines, on Minmus, refuel (Kethane mod) then take off again only to notice 3.88 u/s fuel consumption. 16 KN/s thrust with 3.88 units of Xenon gas/sec?

Thoughts?

Have you built the same setup in a .23 install? Have you checked what the numbers were then? By all rights, xenon consumption is the only thing that was not changed in this patch, everything else got buffed. Massively. Like, power consumption per kN of thrust got reduced by 85%. Thrust itself got increased to 400% of what it was before.

Really, complaining that "ion engines are pretty much useless now" is just like trading your Smart car in for a 16-seater bus and complaining that you "can't transport any real amount of people now". I'm just like, wut?

However, if you can prove that xenon consumption for a given ion-powered craft increased beyond what it should, then you may have found a bug that's worth reporting in the appropriate subforum (not in this one). If you have a craft with 8 ion engines in .23.5 and in consumes 3.88 xenon per second, then the same craft in .23 should be consuming 0.97 xenon per second. If this is true, then everything works as intended. If the .23 vessel consumes less than 0.97, something odd is going on.

[Pthigrivi]

Lammatt, you've got to think about how these actually work in practice. Very often, especially on burns to outer planets, the most efficient ejection angle puts you very close Kerbin's shadow. Even with multiple oberth passes it behooves you to get more thrust over a shorter period of time before the sun sets. The same can happen around Joolian moons when timely captures are much more critical and you need more weight in panels to power them. I'm moving landers and science labs around this way, sometimes you need 8.

[Superluminaut]

I feel like ion engines need an "ion warp", something that produces an on rails spiraling orbit. So you can go into very high warp and watch your orbit change. This way you could even drop the ion engine thrust to something real life like.

[SSSPutnik]

A nuclear reactor add on would have been a better fix...

[Thiel]

How would that help?

[SeventhArchitect]

Amp up the engines.

120 kn thrust, ISP to be made the msot efficient of all parts ingame without it actually being OP, and make a vessel that way. It'd have to be big, with lots of panels. Multiparts here I come.