One of the interesting things about nuclear engines is that the fuel can be basically anything we don’t have to carry chemically reactive fuel and oxidizer like a traditional rocket. Unfortunately, this didn’t generate enough power to be interesting, so I moved on to other things. Since carrying power generation equipment (reactors, generators, etc) is expensive, we can build more efficient ion-engine probes by leaving all that out, and relying on the microwave network for our power needs. In essence, this station is an orbital fission power plant, capable of delivering microwave energy to small craft anywhere in line-of-sight. This station also carries a hexagonal microwave transceiver, which can either beam or receive power from other microwave transceivers in the network.
The dim red glow is the hot coolant fluid from the electric generator, which circulates through the fins, shedding heat to space.
Ksp jettison fuel full#
Once in space, the fins can unfurl to their full glory. Because they’re so big, they’d snap under atmospheric forces, so we have to fold them up for launch & reentry. In space, however, we have no medium for convection, and must rely on direct radiative cooling.īasically, once you leave atmo, spacecraft need fins. In the plane above, small radiator modules are located around the reactor core, and use airflow for convective cooling. The difficulty is what to do with the waste heat all that nuclear power has to go somewhere. You can also attach generators to reactors to obtain electric power, which can run various types of electric rocket engines. Rockets and jet engines can be attached directly to nuclear fission (and eventually, fusion & antimatter) reactors of various sizes and with varying fuel processes to leverage their heat for propulsion. In Interstellar, you manage electric and thermal power. Kerbals, however, like to live dangerously.
We didn’t, because crashes would cover the landscape in radioactive fallout. For instance, you can attach a small nuclear reactor to a thermal nozzle, and fly a small plane for several years continuously, using only air for fuel.īelieve it or not, this is something we actually thought about doing. In February of 2014, I discovered KSP Interstellar, which adds a broad array of hypothetical technologies to Kerbal Space Program.
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