This part pack is designed to provide some new nuclear thermal rockets for your spaceship-building pleasure. There are four new engines, two in the 2.5m size class and two in the 1.25m size class. They are fuelled with LiquidHydrogen, and in some cases can use Oxidizer to boost their thrust at the cost of specific impulse. Liquid Hydrogen is less dense than liquid fuel, so for the same Delta-V, you will need more tank volume.
To store your liquid hydrogen fuels, I've provided ModuleManager/InterstellarFuelSwitch configs that allow you to change the contents of stock tanks between LF/O, LH2/O, LF, O and LH2. These should work with most mod tanks, but no promises. However, Liquid Hydrogen is very temperamental and without the proper storage it will slowly evaporate ("boil off"). Therefore, I provide special cryogenic tanks bundled with the mod, that use a small amount of Electric Charge to stop the evaporation.
This mod is designed to synergize well with Cryogenic Engine 0.2.0+, and with the various Near Future Technologies mods I make.
Known Issues:
Future Plans:
- More work on engine FX
- Tighter integration with Near Future Electrical
Recent Changes (0.1.0, historical changelogs are included in the download):
- Initial Release
Tech Tree:
This pack is compatible with the 2.1+ release of the Community Tech Tree. When this version is released, the mod parts will automatically be placed in the correct nodes (high-tier nuclear rocketry). These parts appear in the stock tree in a giant blob at Nuclear Propulsion
License Info:
This mod redistributes two other mods:
Module Manager (v2.6.6) is distributed under its own licence (CC-SA). Please find source code and more details at https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager
InterstellarFuelSwitch is distributed under its own licence (CC-SA-NC). Please find source code and more details at https://github.com/sswelm/KSPInterstellar/tree/master/FuelSwitch
Source for the included plugin can be found at my GitHub page under CryoTanks and DeployableEngines
These are great parts! When running on LF they are effective and easy to use, and offer much higher efficiency than any regular chemical rocket; running on liquid hydrogen makes them more efficient but also a bit harder to use because liquid hydrogen is less dense and can boil off over time. I find it a bit odd that the stubber engine has its stats for LOx-enhanced mode first rather than second like the other engines but that's a minor quibble.
The engines advertise continuous power generation when activated, even at 0 thrust, but I've never seen any power generation from any of them. I also tried using the tie-in with NF electrical to run the engines like nuclear reactors, but that ended very poorly as everything bar the smallest engine tended to overheat spectacularly and quickly become useless.
I'd like to see the engines switchable between LF and liquid hydrogen, this would allow backwards compatibility with any saved craft if you were using either the add-in to make the KA engines use liquid fuel or other nuclear engines use liquid hydrogen as well as the flexibility to choose which one you wanted to use for any given engine.
this works with your other mods right?
the engines have ridiculously high thrust, like 10,000 for one of them and i dont know what is causing it.
This mod is really nice, love it. But it will replace the fuel from Liquid Fuel to Liquid Hydrogen for all NTRs by default (including the stock NTR). Although there is a patch in the Extra folder that revert the changes but we can only choose either one fuel type in-game.
Just a little enhancement recommendation...... It is glad if the fuel type of the NTRs can be switched (using the engine "switch mode"?) in-game between LF <=> LH2. Then there will be more flexible on the fuel tank arrangement, and also gives backward compatibility to the already launched NTR spacecrafts.
Hey, I'm posting this to report a possible bug in the mod. I am playing in career mode and purchased the Atomic engines upgrade in the R&D. I get the engines but there's no liquid hydrogen tanks or anything anywhere so I can't use the engines. Is there a way to fix this?
Did I miss something in the files?
I went into sandbox mode and couldn't find them either.
This mod is rather disappointing to me.
It's not that it seems low quality, I absolutely love the engines and the tank designs, they look great.
Rather it's the balancing. Simply put, these engines are useless.
They burn so much fuel for so little real benefit, they're no better to chemical rockets, the thrust is fine but they consume so many resources it's just useless.
I'm actually looking up how to edit the configuration files myself because it seems such a shame these great looking engines are made near worthless by their fuel-hog stats.
Tested it on clean install. Causes accepted mission contracts to disappear at random. Especially when entering the tracking station.
Download 0.3.1 whenever it gets approved. Current versions are already on the forums. Delete old version of the mod first.
Is it possible to make these engines work with liquid fuel as opposed to liquid hydrogen? I prefer to keep it simple for my current career.
Thanks!
i have a question/request.
could you give the ISP fuel usage in the description or screen shot the specs
due to the number of engine mods i would like to see which ones suit my style of KSP experiance.
thanks
P.S 1.1.3 update soon?
When update for 1.1.2?
For some reason the new engines only use liquid fuel and/or oxidiser, not liquid hydrogen which sort of destroys the whole purpose of having those awesome looking tanks. If you could fix this problem that would be great.
Also I have a suggestion, you could re-skin (make new skins) for the stock tanks in the game to make them match your cool design, im not a mod designer so I don't know if it would work or not, just a suggestion.
Pretty Good but i little laggy for a small computer or someone with a lot of mods.9/10 though