Do you consider ions + massless electric systems an exploit?

[AustralianFries]

Boxman, your join date is April of 2013. I'm also going to assume your account was deleted and you had joined even before that. That means you've been playing this game, at the very least (even if my assumption is incorrect), for a year. You know damned well that when new parts are released, specifically engines, they aren't tuned right and tend to be very unbalanced. Nothing is different with the Nasa parts. The Ion engines and electrical parts will most likely be changed back to have mass, they just need to be balanced accordingly.

There's no need for all of this hooplah about "the future of KSP". I get that you're bothered by some of the recent changes, but you've been here long enough to know that the game will balance out over time. We're playing in alpha, remember. Changes will come.

[boxman]

Boxman, your join date is April of 2013. I'm also going to assume your account was deleted and you had joined even before that. That means you've been playing this game, at the very least (even if my assumption is incorrect), for a year. You know damned well that when new parts are released, specifically engines, they aren't tuned right and tend to be very unbalanced. Nothing is different with the Nasa parts. The Ion engines and electrical parts will most likely be changed back to have mass, they just need to be balanced accordingly.

There's no need for all of this hooplah about "the future of KSP". I get that you're bothered by some of the recent changes, but you've been here long enough to know that the game will balance out over time. We're playing in alpha, remember. Changes will come.

But never has it been done on purpose like with the ion engines and nasa parts. The little unbalance we had in past at least since i started playing this game has been usually the opposite way. But I hope you are right and that they will change it back eventually.

[Superfluous J]

Nobody has explained to my satisfaction how this destroys how much fun I have in the game.

[BudgetHedgehog]

Nobody has explained to my satisfaction how this destroys how much fun I have in the game.

THANK YOU! For gods sake, the old ion engines could barely lift its own fuel and power generation methods. I don't care if things are overpowered or an exploit - if I make something and have fun with it, while you're all moaning about how I shouldn't have been able to and I 'cheated'.. who's the loser here?

[PB666]

While true electrons have almost no mass, you cannot endlessly accelerate electrons without protons since you will simply charge your craft and it will want to recoil in the direction of thrust. Therefore you have to have mass in an ion acceleration system. You can minimize mass by making a superconducting mass accelerator theoretically you can accelerate a proton to have the energy of a baseball. This requires an intense investment in mass for equipment and wasted electricity for acceleration. You can theoretically use an alternating charge plasma ion collector to harvest protons and hydride ions from space at a very low rate, this requires some sort of charging system and massive collectors. Any difference in the velocity of ions colllected and motion of the craft is going to alter the spacecrafts motion (like a solar sail) so that if it is big enought to collect it is also big enough to get pushed.

[PB666]

Let's face it, 0.23.5 is rather unbalanced.

Lets talk about balance a sec. Earths atmosphere is about 10 times thicker than kerban, and gravity drops off 10 times as fast. And yet you need to asparagas the hell out of 1M form factor to get decent payloads into space (Does NASA actually asparagas? I don't think so).

More balance? I made a 10M tank that kept exploding on the launch pad. So I made the strength really strong and set it on a transition (1/4). No engines nothing else. It started hoping around like a jumping bean, it jumped off the launch pad and started jumping in the direction of the coast. It finally jumped about 150 meters into the air and hit the ground exploding. The tank was full of fuel and the transition was weighted according to new mass = old mass * relative radius^3 (good ole Version 23)

How about that for realism.

More balance? I made small rocket and put the delta-wings on the top (4), got it about 6,000 feet in the air. Then I jettisoned the rockets leaving an empty fuel tank a controller and some solar panels. Hit the "E" to spin and it spun itself into orbit no fuel, weeeeeeeeeeeee. Stock parts. Version 23

More balance. Some of the rockets I made need a final solar input to place them into stable orbit. So I warped night launches to midday. When warping back to 1X the rockets would simply explode. Version 23

More balance. Gigantor Solar panels will break apart if you open them in low atmosphere at any speed above 15 knots. But no amount of non-colliding acceleration in space will cause the panels to break apart when they are open. Version 23

More balance. Collision meshes cannot be concave. So that when you strut to engines or add fuel lines they actually attach to thin air unless to strut to the top of the engine. Amazingly you can have struts and fuel lines dangling meters between two parts as you are flying through the atmosphere at 400 m/sec. . . .like that happens in real life. And with many platforms you must do this or the gremlins will rip the launch apart

If you place 2 two-meter stack separator in the same stack but not close together and dont duct tape the hell out of it the launch will start dancing like a flaminko dancer and blow apart. I actually created a low mass strut (called packaging tape) that can only be extended 1 meter to deal with this special reality.

The radioactive engine (that runs on LF and OX) doesn't actually exist. Nor does a propulsion system that runs ejects radioactive fuels that is actually stable and safe. You can however use radioactivity to create power and you can mass accelerate used radioactivity, but you need a built in mass spectrometer or centrifuges to separate used fuel from new feul). There is a critical mass to most run-away nuclear process that is high and controllability is low (the minimal explosion force exceeds the ability for rocket engines to contain and direct the force). There is a website describing the late 1950s prompt critical event that occurred in an early nuclear reactor. The bottom line is that for a true nuclear explosion (ejecting particles at 30,000 M/S is more or less an explosion) to occur, you have to have such an inward force of pressure (moment of heat, pressure and/or neutrons) that a significant nuclear reaction occurs before the reaction blows the radioactive substances so far apart that they can no longer explosively interact. In this instance the run away reaction instantly vaporized the water which then blew the fuel apart and impaling the operator with the fuel controller and essential wasted most of the fuel.

More Balance. The solid rocket fuel boosters can be stacked, and timed to separate from each other, but if you add certain unrelated parts to the space craft they become very stable and difficult (wasteful) to stack and autoseparate.

I like the Nasa rockets, they get a payload up without all the pesky gremlins. I don't want to spend all my time making launch platforms, and fighting launch gremlins and bad physics. It was fun for a while, now its not. The interesting parts of the game are what happens in space.

The most efficient practical systems are the ion drives, but they lag behind the desired efficiency because of the problem of directing charges and damaging the ion drivers (those plates/grids at then end of the drive that impart ions with the ability to generate thrust). NASA may already have effective solutions for this problem that is not yet operational. They are however potentially much more efficient and they can potentially have infinitely higher specific impulse. (right now the known limit on ion accelerators is around 300 gigaelectron volts in the superconducting collider) a protons mass is thus increased several magnitudes while it is being accelerated infinitesimally close to the speed of light. I would argue that the most useful system combines a thermonuclear power generator, solar cells and an efficient and stable ion drive system in which the fuel weight is not of consideration. Its a matter right now of the technology catching up with the need. Theoretically if you could find a way of compactly making a TNFR or increase the EM radiation delivered to solar panels you could probably create an ION drive that has (given the weight of stuff to make electricity) a much lower (weight to force ratio). But of course you have to accelerate the payload, that one can never get away from, we all know this is not science fiction (heh-heh).

As soon as I get Blender to work on some fuel stuff, I'm going to make a high efficiency ion engine that weighs more than the stock part, but actually looks like a mass accelerator. Not going to consider it an exploit either. In the process of making some more efficient platforms for those engines and maybe a 'realistic' plasma harvester for a fuel supply.

When you can land and create a space colony on Eve, (Venus) that has a surface temp (really of 500'C) and you can walk around like its a beach, see the sun, we are not going to worry to much about "balance".

[SofusRud]

The radioactive engine (that runs on LF and OX) doesn't actually exist. Nor does a propulsion system that runs ejects radioactive fuels that is actually stable and safe. You can however use radioactivity to create power and you can mass accelerate used radioactivity, but you need a built in mass spectrometer or centrifuges to separate used fuel from new feul). There is a critical mass to most run-away nuclear process that is high and controllability is low (the minimal explosion force exceeds the ability for rocket engines to contain and direct the force). There is a website describing the late 1950s prompt critical event that occurred in an early nuclear reactor. The bottom line is that for a true nuclear explosion (ejecting particles at 30,000 M/S is more or less an explosion) to occur, you have to have such an inward force of pressure (moment of heat, pressure and/or neutrons) that a significant nuclear reaction occurs before the reaction blows the radioactive substances so far apart that they can no longer explosively interact. In this instance the run away reaction instantly vaporized the water which then blew the fuel apart and impaling the operator with the fuel controller and essential wasted most of the fuel.

You seem to be confusing the LV-N with some other, hypothetical engine. The LV-N is based on the NERVA engine, which does not, as you put it, eject radioactive fuel. What it does is that it uses the nuclear reactor, functioning in a closed and stable system, to heat up fuel passing through. The Fuel expands as it passes through the engine and is expelled out the back. It is NOT expelling a radioactive substance, but rather just a very hot one. Squad is also very aware that the engine works this way, but keeps it using the same Liquid Fuel/Oxidiser combo as a placeholder.

The LV-N is rather balanced in terms of its TWR, because basing it on the performance of the real NERVA would have made it the best engine for all possible scenarios

[Jouni]

Lets talk about balance a sec. Earths atmosphere is about 10 times thicker than kerban, and gravity drops off 10 times as fast. And yet you need to asparagas the hell out of 1M form factor to get decent payloads into space (Does NASA actually asparagas? I don't think so).

There was never any need to use asparagus staging for launching decent payloads. You only needed it for maximal efficiency and huge payloads.

The two lower stages of this thing (55 parts without struts) can lift over 100 tonnes to LKO. It would probably have been possible in 0.23 with a bit more strutting.

[PB666]

You seem to be confusing the LV-N with some other, hypothetical engine.

This was a concept of space travel back in the 50s to 70s it has largely been discounted because of the inability to produce small yet efficient thermonuclear explosions. NASA on their website has further discredited the model because the maximum level of mass to energy conversion is a small percentage of total mass (E=MC^2). Therefore you can't convert enough mass to get energy required to accelerate the mass of nuclear material, let alone any payload into to the 10^6 + m/s range required. If you read the site carefully NASA explains they simply do not have a high efficiency propulsion system capable of any practical means of interstellar travel.

The LV-N is based on the NERVA engine, which does not, as you put it, eject radioactive fuel. What it does is that it uses the nuclear reactor, functioning in a closed and stable system, to heat up fuel passing through. The Fuel expands as it passes through the engine and is expelled out the back. It is NOT expelling a radioactive substance, but rather just a very hot one. Squad is also very aware that the engine works this way, but keeps it using the same Liquid Fuel/Oxidiser combo as a placeholder.

The LV-N is rather balanced in terms of its TWR, because basing it on the performance of the real NERVA would have made it the best engine for all possible scenarios

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Both major space agencies had this type of nuclear engine. Neither implemented the technology. Just about every space agency has some form of Ion Drive. The Russians have used hall effect engines. The US has use both electromagnetic and electrostatic. Not to mention the fact that NASA has greatly improved the ISP and has demonstrated 3 years of continued use.

The problem with rocket engines in space is that they are non-serviceable and non-maintainable. Once they are launched there is very little you can do remotely to alter problems that might come up. To understand why this rocket may not have been used we have ask the first question

What is a nuclear reactor? In particular why is uranium selected as a nuclear reactant. Most nuclear decays occur by a process known as spontaneous decay. The nucleotide I work with generates a gamma ray (1/2 every 60 days) as it decays (makes your Geiger counter click), others generate beta particles (electrons) or alpha particles (protons). Uranium is capable of generating a variable number of neutrons. Uranium is also capable of absorbing a neutron and as a consequence is capable of undergoing accelerated nuclear decay. Hydrogen and carbon can also absorb neutrons, but the hydrogen isotope is stable (2H) and the carbon isotope (13C) are also stable, the unstable isotopes (H3) has a half-life of 12 years and 14C has a half-life of less than 5000 years, some 236U that is created by neutron absorption will immediately spontaneously decay releasing as much as 3 neutrons. Because uranium can absorb a neutron and because it can release more than one neutron it has the potential of achieving supercriticality. Because it can achieve supercriticality it is a variably exploitable nuclear material. It has a wide range of applications; I used to use it coating electron microscope grids for atomic scale visualization of biological molecules. It can also be used as a passive heat source (e.g. heating the center of the earth, a cause of plate tectonics and volcanism), a scalable power supply (nuclear reactor), as an explosive (little boy-Hiroshima) and as a neutron source for other types of bombs.

There is actually very little difference between a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor. We have heard of nuclear meltdown at reactors (Fukushima and Chernobyl) but we seldom hear of reactors that went supercritical. That is because modern nuclear have designed out the sets of circumstances that could cause prompt critical (i.e. the conversion of a stable reactor into a bomb-like state). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

Summarizing: The rods in this reactor were move 3.26 inches too far. The very small reactor went prompt critical in 4 milliseconds producing 20 Gigawatts of power, this fortunately blew the fuel apart and just as quickly ceased the reaction. In other words the difference between a stable heat generating nuclear reaction and a run-away event that atomizes/disintegrates your fuel is relatively speaking, small. It was essentially a dirty bomb.

In fact it takes as little as 15 lbs of uranium (basically two hands full) to make a nuclear bomb out of 235U.

There is a critical problem with isolated engines that use accelerated uranium decay, you cannot effectively control for unexpected variances once launched. Why is this true, to achieve efficiency and power you need to approach supercriticality. However as the fuel decays supercriticality is lost because you simultaneously have less fuel to burn. In a reactor they change the position of the fuel rods, until the rods can no longer be moved, and after this the rods need to be removed and replaced. Therefore in a reactor you start with a supercritical mass of isotope, but as you are adding fuel you are also increasing (poisioning) the reaction with neutron absorbers.

_____So now you are going to place a suppresed supercritical dry uranium reactor on top of a Saturn V rocket, launch the engine approaching 2g thrust to weight ratio, on the way up you are going to earthquake magnitude lateral accelerations. In addition on the way up there may be unrelated failures (say at 15,000 meters) over the Eastern Seaboard of the US, what is going to happen to the core of reactor when this happens:___

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Challenger_breakup.jpg + suppressed nuclear core --law of unintended consequences -> ?NASA?

"At one point in 1965, during a test at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the liquid hydrogen storage at Test Cell #2 was accidentally allowed to run dry ; the core overheated and ejected on to the floor of the Nevada desert." wiki-NERVA <-- not going to be able to do this in low earth orbit without political consequences.

That is prolly why no-one uses nuclear engines. All the used decay-based generators are incapable of reaching criticality, relying on simple radioactive decay. That does not mean that small uranium reactors cannot or should not be used in space. Such reactors should be used on deep space missions, particularly if humans are in the payload. This issue is to keep the density of fuel at subcritical densities (or alternatively massively over-engineering the control mass) until the craft is outside of earths SOI. Nuclear accidents will occur in deep space, but the risk associated with not using them are greater than the risks associated with using them.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Lets put some reality into KSP and get that lost balance back

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

After launching, you briefly see a SRB in back of your rocket starting to separate and accelerate in the direction of your payload. Your rocket disintegrates in mid-flight and you are briefly see a white flash and in a whitish cloud that surrounds your point of view, your screen goes blank and then reappears you see a weeded over KASA (the name of your space center). Bare earth circles are seen off in the distance, at the horizon you see the jagged silhouette of red trees. In the foreground you see rare kerbolian wolves stalking antelope and wild horses and other animals rarely seen around hungry kerbals. Along the shore you see the carcasses of dead pelagic predator wash up on shore, a large felid sniffs the remains and then moves on. You look up at your timer and almost 2 years have been added.

you hit F3 and get the following report.

"T + 15sec ....Failure of the lower left strut at the big orange fuel tank . . . . ."

"T + 16sec .... Separation of the left SRB"

"T + 17sec .... Collision of uncontrolled SRB into second stage LF-Ox tank"

"T + 18sec .... Explosion of second stage LF-Ox tank and destruction of 2nd to 3rd stage stack separator.

"T + 18sec .... Shearing of 3rd stage nuclear engine nozzle from 3rd stage nuclear engine by the stack separated and forces created by the SRB and exploding LF-Ox tanks."

"T + 18sec .... Separation of control graphite initiators from nuclear engine core"

"T + 18sec .... Core supercriticality . . . .

"T + 18sec .... Disentigration of 3rd stage and rocket payload"

"T + 18sec .... Bob Kerman was vaporized, leaving a shadow on the nose wall of his command capsule."

"T + 200 sec .... Remnants of rocket land on KSP"

"T + 3 days ... Kerbals living in and around KSP begin dying of unknown wasting disease associated with intense burns"

"T +5 days ... Jebediah dies of idiopathic disease"

"T + 1 month .... After repeated attempts to use KSP the launch facility is closed."

"T + 1 year 8 months ..... Investigation of the sickness revealed that:

- the lack of water and high heat tolerance of uranyl-graphide matrix meant that very high nuetron densities were achieved before explosive disintegration. In this process there was: an unexpected high production of fission productsl; as these densities were achieved the control carbon vaporized (3642'C) and the uranium congealed breifly before it reached its own vaporization point (4131'C). As the uranium vaporized at the core subcriticality was achieved but at the margins (now expanding at 1000 m/sec) chucks of material continue fission at near supercriticality due to secondary nuclear reactions. It is unclear whether heat generated by the SRBs at 5000'C added to carbon vaporization or whether the carbon vaporization is an intrinsic weakness of the nuclear engine.

- debris from the rocket had, as always fallen back onto the center

- debris was contaminated with fission products from the core of the nuclear engine

- the contamination ended up sickening cadets making them unsuitable for space flight; most left, those that remained died.

- without cadets the program could no longer continue

- the contamination also sickened the engineering staff, because their exposure was much higher, their deaths effectively ended rocket assembly.

- Jeb died, because of the extensive scarring on his brain, his brain could not be transplanted into MechJeb, thus MechJeb addon was removed from the tech tree.

-Your tech tree has been transformed

Recommendation, relocate KSP and discontinue use of nuclear engines. "

Return to space center, only now its a wooden construction outhouse on a differen continent. Your options are to assemble contruction office. Once you complete this you are then given the option of building runways, cadet training centers, launch platforms, vehical assembly buildings, ...... saws, nails, sand, pebble and cement.

Your new space center is called NFASA for nuclear-free aeronautics and space agency and recruits begin reappearing on your training screne. They are burly looking kerbals withn bodies suited for construction, fearless of the danger that awaits them as they move up a prolonged training regime that includes amoung other courses, radiation safety.

You ponder why you did not create an orbital VAB say around the mun prior to attempting to use a nuclear engine.

In addition as your grunts are building you see mutants appear at night that begin to steal your supplies and resouces. A new brutal race of kerbals appear, they are called Korcs, and they are developing their own competitive space program.

NOW the game is balanced. :^) .

[boxman]

Lets talk about balance a sec. Earths atmosphere is about 10 times thicker than kerban, and gravity drops off 10 times as fast. And yet you need to asparagas the hell out of 1M form factor to get decent payloads into space (Does NASA actually asparagas? I don't think so).

If you make a "normal" sized payload like the ones nasa send up then you would not have to do this. The only reason we have to resort to aspargus systems is because we send unrealistically big/heavy payloads compared to what we do in real world where limited budgets and more realistic aerodynamics are a thing.

If you have to use asparagus for normal sized payloads then you are doing something very wrong.

[MarvinKitFox]

deleted, talking to myself. sigh.

Edited April 20, 2014 by MarvinKitFox

[NecroBones]

question:did the devs make some parts massless to somehow ease the burden on the cpu?

This is a great point.

Originally I chimed in and said that yes, I think this is very exploity. But the cases of exploiting it are going to be infrequent, in the sense that most players probably won't even notice, and it'll help newbie players keep from building an imbalanced rocket.

But I'm changing my mind and starting to think this could be a very positive change, because if these items truly are being treated as NON-PHYSICS attachments, then they're going to improve game performance by not having to do calculations on tons of little parts. If you spam RCS thrusters all over your rocket, for instance, you're still not going to get better ISP out of the monopropellant, but excluding those thruster units from calculations, in terms of mass and attachment strength, could save a lot of CPU cycles.

[r4pt0r]

i do like the suggestion of adding the massless parts cumulative mass to the cg

[NecroBones]

i do like the suggestion of adding the massless parts cumulative mass to the cg

Personally, I think this would be the best of both worlds. Make the radial-mounted parts into non-physics components, but add their mass to a "floating" placeholder, at the center-of-mass, so that it's not exploitable.

[Technical Ben]

Ok, this I can agree with. Making batteries + panels massless seems a problem. Making other parts massless is fine (say lights, antennas etc, possibly, though consideration is needed). But panels and batteries are as important as fuel tanks.

Hope this gets sorted.

PS, if it's too technical a challenge, it could be added to the likes of "first tree part connected". So if you connect to a command pod, it's mass goes up (but autobalances, or does not change, COM to the pod). If you add it to a fuel tank, likewise only the tank goes up in COM. You'd still need to "balance", but on a scale that can be done by hand.

This also fits some reality. As tweakables are added, it's also about how parts are made "custom", and balancing is done separate from general part arrangement at times.

Edited April 20, 2014 by Technical Ben

[Arsonik]

I think all you nay-sayers can turn the physics back on for these parts in the part.cfg

I would even do it for you but I don't think I'm allowed to redistribute stock parts.

Good luck.

[Superfluous J]

I think all you nay-sayers can turn the physics back on for these parts in the part.cfg

I would even do it for you but I don't think I'm allowed to redistribute stock parts.

Good luck.

A ModuleManager config would do the trick. I'd set one up but I can handle avoiding the temptation of making a "cheaty" Grand Tour rocket out of 8 billion massless struts, batteries, solar panels, and an ion engine.

[Red Iron Crown]

This thread went some places I wasn't expecting, but any discussion is generally good.

I think the general consensus seems to be "exploit".

Odd that, since starting playing KSP, I've gone from bending parts to tasks they weren't designed for to make up for holes in the lineup, to avoiding certain parts because they're exploity or unbalanced.

[Jouni]

I'm getting increasingly annoyed with the massless parts, as I learn almost every day that some new part has become massless. That increases the amount of worthless trivia I have to remember when designing ships, because the construction interface lies to me about their mass.

As I see, there are basically four options:

1. Every part should have mass. I would prefer this, as it's the least arbitrary of the options.
   
2. Change the mass of every physicsless part to 0 in VAB. This is at least honest.
   
3. If a part doesn't have mass, it doesn't exist, so it should be deleted.
   
4. Making a part physicsless changes its mass to 5000 tonnes. Then I would at least see immediately when I'm lied to, instead of waiting until halfway through the mission, when a ship starts behaving badly.
   

I hope that Squad implements one of these as soon as possible.

[MrOnak]

The title of this thread is "Do you consider ions + massless electric systems an exploit?".

Well... lets just say they're unbalanced.

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/xgml8/embed"></iframe>

That was imense fun though

[Franklin]

1. Every part should have mass. I would prefer this, as it's the least arbitrary of the options.
   
2. Change the mass of every physicsless part to 0 in VAB. This is at least honest.
   
3. If a part doesn't have mass, it doesn't exist, so it should be deleted.
   
4. Making a part physicsless changes its mass to 5000 tonnes. Then I would at least see immediately when I'm lied to, instead of waiting until halfway through the mission, when a ship starts behaving badly.
   

While I don't agree with your last two points, the first two absolutely. At very least they need to be honest with the part numbers shown in-game. I can't tell you how long I tried balancing out a tiny ship with OX-STAT panels, have it never be balanced, tear my hair out then think, 'Wait, do these things actually weigh anything?'

It causes a lot of frustration in a game that's predominantly played by people with OCD, and when you get right down to it everything should have a 'negative' balancing element, like size, weight, cost or drag. If something gives you a positive but no negative it's a haven for exploit.

[Franklin]

I also have a hard time believing OX-STAT panels specifically were such a common and direct strain on the majority of player's performances that it had to be removed from the physics engine. Who's covering their entire ships with these panels that Squad saw a need for the change?

[MartGonzo]

question:did the devs make some parts massless to somehow ease the burden on the cpu?

would massless parts reduce the load on the cpu?

surely all the parts with fixed mass are just combined into a single number?

[Red Iron Crown]

would massless parts reduce the load on the cpu?

surely all the parts with fixed mass are just combined into a single number?

Definitely not, they all have individual inertia that affects the structure of the craft.

[Kasuha]

I may go against the flow here but I think changes in 0.23.5 did not make the game less fun than it was before. Ion engines were critically underused, most people did not even consider them for any designs, scared by excessively long burn times in case any substantial dv needed to be applied. This update made them useful.

Massless solar panels are still limited by the ship's surface area and they don't make solar power any less intermittent than it already is.