Guys, I need help.
Near Future Propulsion is too confusing.
I apparently need huge amounts of fuel with the hydrogen engines to get any amount of respectable delta-v, and the capacitators are confusing and how do the radiators and nuclear generators work and halp
EDIT
It appears that it is also derping Flight Engineer up. Adding four regular nuclear engines with a small amount of fuel makes it suddenly believe it has 17,000 m/s of delta-v (from 1,700).
Okay, in order.
Hydrogen is seriously
large at the moment. It's going to get an overhaul soon. For now you really need massive,
massive tanks of it in order to really go anywhere. The upside is that it's really lightweight, so the size is the only problem - you can increase your delta-v as long as you have somewhere to put more tanks, with little impact on TWR.
Capacitors store electric charge. You can see some detailed stats on exactly how much they store, release, and use up for charging, in their detailed stats screen. Pretty much they have eight times the energy density of regular batteries, so they store eight times the amount of ElectricCharge for a given mass.
To operate capacitors, you need to either use the right-click menu on them, or set up action groups. Capacitors can do two things: store charge, and release charge. You will want an action group that tells all your capacitors to start recharging, and any number of action groups to discharge your capacitors as appropriate. They start out fully charged, and not charging. When fully charged, the capacitor stops charging. When set to discharge (this can be done at any time) the capacitor begins converting its StoredCharge into ElectricCharge at a fixed rate, which goes into your regular batteries. The rate is such that a fully charged capacitor always fully discharges in exactly 10 seconds, and any charge that doesn't fit into your battery stores is lost.
The best use for capacitors is powering an energy-hungry thruster on a lightweight solar-powered ship, allowing for quick acceleration bursts.
Nuclear generators need two things to function. Fuel, and radiators. Each reactor starts out fully fueled, and at maximum power output every reactor lasts a few years at least, so it's not normally a problem to refuel. Radiators need to be placed on the reactor itself, and need to be extended to maximize their efficiency. There are two types of radiators. Standard radiators look like solar panels - big and blocky. These can be placed on any reactor as needed. Conforming radiators are more elaborately shaped, usually curved. These are reactor-specific, and it's usually obvious what size of reactor a given conforming radiator fits to. The conforming radiators should be placed with symmetry, so that they exactly cover the entire surface of the reactor - this ensures that the heat dissipation capacity exactly matches the requirements of the reactor.
In order to use the reactor, it needs to be powered up. This is a two-stage process for normal operation. First, right-click the reactor and use the option to unfold all attached radiators. Second, activate the reactor from the same menu. The reactor will gradually spool up to its nominal power output. More complex manipulations, including usage with insufficient radiators (or closed radiators) can be handled with the advanced reactor control panel available in the same menu.
The Kerbal Engineer has a little trouble with some resources at the moment. I believe there is an experimental branch of it with different staging and fuel flow simulation that fixes these issues.
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