Mikki

I think a species capable of interstellar travel at c or faster (... ) would use very, very small projectiles i.e. tungsten micro slugs accelerated to 99% the speed of light. Clubs may be able to destroy this weapon but throwing the clubs at the weapon, which is sure kept far out of reach in high orbit, makes this difficult. Alien AI identifies in seconds billions of targets at the surface including incoming clubs and takes all targets down in a few minutes, depending on the feed rate of said autogun. Hitscan weapons are a divine gift so to say. After saturating one side of the planet, the other half will get the same treatment. When the aliens are unsure of their successfull raid, they leave the autogun active for some years scanning for any human activity. If aliens show no interest at all in earth they one-shot the planet from a convenient distance like moon or further with a few grams of micro slugs, but the speed ramped up to 99.99% c. The solar system has now a new dust cloud and a rogue moon.

I am very fond of procedural wings and made a XB-70 kerbal style... First landing was bouncy but pilot got away.

Upvoted, this should be disconnected from throttle.

After replacing my cpu cooler i play again with 40-60+ fps, with medium graphics and high cloud setting, it is very good i think.

This looks like a accurate depiction of the thermosphere, i think it is okay.

...hm... this relates colorfull to some certain persons i`ve met...

Oh yeah this very true, i did not remember that. It spells "brachistochrone", btw , you are correct about the layout for a understandable traveltime comparison for respective velocity... Another chart with some travel times could fit beneath the first. I will look deeper into this tomorrow, and your example is very helpfull. I would go for the shortest distance in orbit, since it happens at least once in a year for the planets which is sufficient i think...

You may have definetly found some kind of bug here, and it is very hard to tell what is going on here in your trial. Trying to land a craft as yours is legit in my opinion, and the heat system may be unfinished in some or the other way, or simply unbalanced at this stage of development. Maybe we all be forced to rethink our approach to land such massive objects in the future. Or other means of protection will be added, like functional expandable heatshields in other shapes as we know of in stock game... The lack of robotics does not help either in such a situation. I am worried nonetheless, but the heat system is due to change as the devs stated, so we have to come around it until something changes. Thank you for the research on this issue, there are few people engaging in such bugs in this depth.

@Kerbart and @cocoscacao, thank you for your input, this will be considered soon and the sources mentioned, clearly high speeds are hard to imagine, i hope the forumers can extract here some common conclusion what a QoL extension would look like to the given speed indicator in the game. Travel time to a certain celestial body is as we all know more ore less given by the phase angle when executing a Hohmann transfer, so i`d have to think about and calculate brachistochrone trajectories given the propulsion methods with higher specific impulse, which we don`t know by this moment... But some examples could be made nonetheless, i`d still have to explain what brachistochrone means and make a new chart. This is a bit too much, i`d like to keep the conversion chart as light as it is at the moment, but anyway it is a very good idea...

Thank you for your input, my chart is quite simple since i didn`t want to go too deep in details, but all the above is true, clearly. I`ll change the chart to conform to your correction, thank you! I¨ll mention your additions too.

I have allways this ballistic shape in mind, its a quarter of an ellipse and not perfectly ballistic but pretty well enough. And 1.4 TWR is sufficient for me to launch my rockets, too much thrust at start can get you in trouble. And i keep mostly full throttle all the way up therefore. This is an example of an unpropelled projectile`s ballistic curve:

Are we back now? Looking fine

So you can drive your car/bike with a tachometer in m/s? Wow, me not!

@DibzNr I have read your answer, might be an oversight somehow, hard to tell what wing parts consider in the game code.

SPEED CHART ... Conversion and conclusions (Updated) I have calculated the given speed indication of m/s (meters per second) into some better digestible units, so people can better imagine what they are doing to their Kerbals (and mostly the crafts) in atmospheric conditions... I added Mach numbers for the technical intrigued. @PDCWolf mentioned correctly: "The sound barrier is dependent on the medium, this varies by atmospheric pressure (which can be modulated by altitude and temperature) so whilst Mach 1 is always the sound barrier, the speed in kmh and mph can vary a lot (1234kmh at sea level, 1060kmh at altitude, 5309kmh in water). Atmospheric heating mostly comes from the shock bow in front of the body compressing the air, not friction." 10 m/s 36 km/h 22 mph Mach 0.03 A fresh breeze in your face 25m/s 90 km/h 55 mph Mach 0.07 Falling from a motorcycle really hurts, gentle landing with lighter aircrafts 50 m/s 180 km/h 112 mph Mach 0.15 Heavy speed fines, take off speed light aircraft 100 m/s 360 km/h 225 mph Mach 0.3 Top speed of F1 race cars on the longest straights 300 m/s 1`080 km/h 670 mph Mach 0.9 Civil jet top speed, close to supersonic. Fighterjet in cruise mode 600 m/s 2`160 km/h 1`350 mph Mach 1.7 Fighterjet with afterburner, top speed SR-71 is Mach 3.3, "Turbo Jets" 1`500 m/s 5`400 km/h 3`360 mph Mach 4.4 Multiple supersonic speed, aluminium and mild steel melt due to compression heating in atmosphere, "Ram Jets", X-15 at Mach 6.7 rocket propelled 3`000 m/s 10`800 km/h 6`720 mph Mach 8.8 "Hypersonic regime", steel alloys melt, titanium alloys may still stay solid, "Scram Jets", rocket propulsion 6`000 m/s 21`600 km/h 13`440 mph Mach 17.6 This speed in atmosphere is not sustainable, 2/3 to low earth orbital velocity, "Scram Jets"?, rocket propusion, meteorites 15`000 m/s 54`000 km/h 33`600 mph Mach 44 This speed in atmosphere evaporates basically any material in seconds, fast meteorites 30`000 m/s 108`000 km/h 67`000 mph Mach 88 This is 0.0001 c, or a ten-thousands the speed of light, Parker Solar Probe at 86`000 km/h or 54`000 mph, fastest man made object ever 100`000 m/s 360`000 km/h 224`000 mph Mach 294 0.0033 c. Three-thousands the speed of light in vacuum. Not fast enough to get to proxima Any thoughts? I think we need speed conversion in the game at some point. Thanks to PDCWolf for some corrective input in the chart. @cocoscacao added to the chart.

@DibzNr Your plane is hitting Mach 5.5 (6`700 km/h) at 10 km altitude, on earth steel alloys melt away and even titanium planes melt away at this altitude... it is correctly calculated by a engineer. Downvoted, sorry

To you i would suggest that your watercooler or the RTX is running faulty, i just had the same issue with an i7 11700F with similar specs...

@bigwhitey95 Hi again, i have swapped my watercooling with the intel OEM cooler and i have discovered that my watercooler runned faulty and evaporated quite alot coolant. However, i had aswell in october/november issues with ram overflow, this may have been the point where my system began to struggle with the CPU temperature... Check your CPU temperature, install maybe "ThrottleStop", a free software to observe ALL Mobo components and regulate cpu speed, i can very recommend this piece of software. You have the ram at the right place mounted? Check your mobo manual (online) for the correct slots... You can run Throttlestop from the download folder, just open the exe. I hope you get this fixed, greetings

Hi there, i have a similar issue since the update... First for reference i use an 1 1/2 year Windows 11pro PC with i7 11700F (2.5 gh base clock) and RTX 3060 with 16 gb ram and 20 gb vram. When i start KSP2 offline from exe. it uses about 4 gb ram ( This goes up to max 8 gb) and 6 gb vram on the RTX with "medium pc" setting. I noticed a performance decrease after the update in december, and i have not found any solution myself. My system throttles down the CPU speed and the framerates go down aswell, i updated every driver even intel chipset but nothing helps. I am suspecting an issue from the update along certain multicore cpus, because my cpu never surpasses overall 15% load while running the game. RTX has about 30% load which is due to the throttling of the CPU i guess... But i have also a somehow faulty Asus BIOS in the moment, i swear the armoury crate software is a hoax to the customer... I used to run KSP2 overclocked with watercooling with 4.5 gh on the CPU and very high framerate (50-60fps), until the last update or something around this date broke something. I play now with 3.0 gh and lower framerate (20-25fps) but the performance is to low for my taste nontheless. I can also imagine a certain win11 update took the performance down. I appreciate any hint or help in this situation aswell.

I am thrilled. I have researched the speeds in general and temparature limits of the parts and the devs have accuratly mirrored reallife metals and their capabilitys. Obviously the only parts made out of titanium are certain parachute shells and the nerv engines (maybe fairings aswell), most other parts are made of steel and aluminium alloys. I am happy to see that it is no more possible to reach fantastic velocitys without damaging the craft, atmospheres seem to reflect true drag and friction, surface modelling is just amazing, no goofy planets anymore, clouds are top. Heatshields are very nice, i love to estimate the required amount of ablative material. Science game is a true challenge even for seasoned players, i took a break after going to Eve, it is quite a stress on the brain.

Not today but during holidays, i flew a jet (Rafale style) in the western deserts... And my Rover travelled about 80 km (!) across Eve, some parts are allways showing heatbars, well Eve is supposed to have more than 150° celsius at daytime. I have a small reaction wheel underneath the body which helps turning back when the rover flips. The landscape is a challenge to navigate, i am trying to reach the "Explodium Sea" in the west but it is still some 200 km away. The heatbar in the background is from my powered descent pod i used, after 50km distance the label disappeard. And then i lost control due to Eve advancing too far in its orbit, i have to wait a few months to come back to this rover and move on. More valleys ahead...

And your capsule is going MACH 9, or better, 11`000 km/h. Might have a titanium shell on top. Altimeter shows 26`000 above sea ground btw...

Engine bells are cooled while running, aluminium starts melting at 650° celsius, steel keeps melting at 1`400° celsius, titanium at 1`700°. All is well in the KSP fact check... Remember, 340 m/s is Mach 1, - 680 m/s is Mach 2, - 1`020 m/s equals Mach 3 (Aluminium starts to get mushy)... and so on. Mach 5 and higher allready melts steel away by the way... ("Hypersonic Area*) Entering Jool at a common 8`800 m/s orbital velocity is how fast? Yes, way over Mach 25, equals 31`680 km/h or imperial 19`685 Miles per hour. I would like to see mach number and km/h or mph for US people, it does confuse me all the time how fast the vessel is since we have no better other clues to determine the speed. Easy. And friction by drag inreases squared, which makes this discussion quite obsolete since it is implemented by an engineer at the devs iirc. Like double the speed, friction increases squared... let this sink in or read about it...

@Audaylon great race! thanks for sharing!

Using stockparts the way you want is not cheating, just cheesing. I`ll have a look into this and share my findings too.