Search the Community

prpretty self explanatory from the video, any idea what could be causing this and solutions to the issue? https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/295199794102796288/794310947475947560/Kerbal_Space_Program_2020-12-30_14-05-57_Trim.mp4 (video of issue)

I'm having a weird issue in v1.10.1 where my SSTO is constantly bouncing up and down on the runway upon loading, and refuses to stop for minutes, if ever. If I try to take off, even if the bouncing seems to have stopped, it starts to drift off the runway within seconds, and I inevitably over-correct resulting in a crash. You can see how the game registers a speed of 0.1 or 0.2m/s, which is entirely due to the bouncing. I've flown this design to orbit and back several times, so I know it isn't a design issue (although my other, smaller SSTO seems to be unaffected). No idea what the problem is, it just started happening last night and I haven't been able to launch one since.

Hello, this is my inaugural post on the KSP forum. To learn some more physics and calculus, I'm trying to create an analytical equation for the path of a solid fuel model rocket fired vertically. I first made an equation assuming no atmosphere and no orbital mechanics, which I am satisfied with. I'm currently making an equation that accounts for drag, and assumes there is no change in atmospheric density and no wind. The equation I am using is from Wikipedia, specifically vertical motion upward and vertical motion downward. I am not sure how to adapt this equation to work while the thrusters are still active. If anybody can help me with this, I would be extremely grateful. The work I have done so far is here: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/ncmd38rosu The Variables folder contains all variables, the No Drag folder contains a complete equation that I have made personally, and the drag folder contains what I have done so far to account for drag. I am more than happy to explain my thought process/reasoning on how I have come up with what is on there so far. Thanks, and I look forward to spending more time with the KSP community.

I am always wondering how aerodynamics is being calculated in KSP? For example, I want to know how does the game calculate the force produced by the wing(s) while flying in a specific speed. Any equations (as detailed as can be) will be appreciated.

PS4, Radial preset, in career mode. For context to give some idea where I am: n00b, maybe a month-2 months in (they're still reviewing my posts I'm so new, ha), having a blast - flags all over the Mun and Minmus, one unmanned rocket currently stuck around Duna (in accidentally polar orbit, probably enough fuel, and ferreting out how to get back). So I'm on a mission that requires a surface sample from 3 locations on the Munar surface (Alpha, Beta, Gamma), being quite new to this still I don't yet have a rover and not yet dialed in on landing at a desired spot, so on a mission like this I'm on foot (from various too-far distances like 7 km, 4 km, etc.). I have seen this every time, reproducible 100% for me. Upon returning to my lander each time so far (4 attempts), I find the lander has left the surface and is slowly tumbling and floating up and away (straight up) at .2 m/s. On 2 of the occasions I had enough MP left to get up to the lander, grab on, board, etc., however nothing affects it in any way, 100% thrust does nothing, it seems to be 'outside of physics' at that point, and I'm wondering if I've just gotten far enough away from my lander (or away too long? Maybe time is a factor?) that it maybe behaves the same way spent stages do when they get far enough away, which I've read means physics are no longer applied to an object beyond some x distance away. No screenshot handy but it's just a lander floating upside down 20 or so meters off the surface. No human is apt to attempt to reproduce this but am checking to see if anyone else has run into this - it's obviously a bug, and I'm at the point where I am not sure if I should keep trying to land closer to see if it's the distance or if I should skip it and move on. Overall I am enjoying this immensely (perfect quarantine filler!), some platform-specific idiosyncrasies aside I think they've done a beautiful job porting the controls over. Porting a keyboard to a PS4 controller can't be an easy thing to do.

So, yeah. I want the know how to build a missile that includes target functionality. Like you double click on something and it pulls up a target sas mode. I need an atmospheric and space faring version. Can both take down a building. (Any.) I'm quite new only 130-ish hours on KSP and I want this for my Kethane Wars video. Don't care how big. Make some physic-bug ones if you want and make sure it can fit in a 1.25 meter hull or mk2 payload. (Full size.)

Got a weird problem. I had a lander with a rover drone slung underneath landing on Minmus. After landing, I tried dropping the drone and then making it the target so I could send it on it's merry way. Instead of the drone the target jumps to the last fuel tank/engine combo I had discarded prior to landing. The combo had landed (apparently it was moving slow enough not to destruct on impact) 1.7km from my touchdown point. But now I'm stuck. trying to re-designate either the lander or the drone as the target from the discarded hardware results in the message given in the topic. Jumping to map and trying to select either the lander or the rover, same message. I'm trapped at the discarded hulk. Any ideas? EDIT: Ugh. Just realized I put this in the wrong category. Sorry.

I'm going to try to be as careful as I can with my phrasing here, because I really don't want to be misconstrued. (I tried asking this on one of the KSP groups on Facebook and it spiraled out of control pretty fast.) KSP2 developers stated that there will be no FTL drives in the game. I'm perfectly happy with this, and to be honest, would have been let down if they did add warp drives, wormholes, or other handwavium. Also, implementing full Special Relativity is way impractical for a game, and besides, the math gets hairy enough that I can't imagine a developer spending time trying to add proper SR into a game. However, it does occur to me that a developer could easily add the speed of light as an upper speed limit for ships, and also model acceleration so that, as your velocity is a larger and larger fraction of the speed of light, it becomes harder to accelerate faster. For stock KSP1, the parts are nowhere near powerful enough to reach sizable fractions of the speed of light with a reasonable fuel supply. However, they can in theory exceed the speed of light with the infinite fuel cheat, and with enough patience. Also, glitches can and have sent craft well exceeding the speed of light, as Danny2462 and others can attest. For KSP2, presuming that the Project Orion/Project Daedalus parts are similar to their real-world counterparts, they'd be able to reach a top speed in the neighborhood of 0.1c, but I can't hold myself to that presumption. It's entirely possible that these parts will perform more powerfully than their real-world equivalents, to reduce the travel time between stars. So having said that: What is the likelihood that KSP2 will have an upper speed limit? Do we even want an upper speed limit, as a community? (There are arguments for and against. I'd favor the realism of it taking a long while to reach other stars, even with advanced sublight drives, but I know some will insist on a mod that permits FTL travel, or think the concern is irrelevant.) I welcome your well-considered and respectful thoughts. Thanks. NOTE: I've updated the title and the post below to reflect that I was saying "General Relativity", but as @chaos_forge pointed out, Special Relativity is where the cosmic speed limit was first set. As SR is a special case of GR, my statement wasn't entirely inaccurate, but it was imprecise.

Hi there, I'm an aerodynamics student and am looking to do the same kind of medium-fidelity aero modelling that's done with Ferram Aerospace - the calculation of aerodynamic coefficients, stability derivatives, and the like for some arbitrary body, and as functions of Mach number, AoA, etc. Does anyone know if the developers compiled a bibliography/list of references/papers for the algorithms they implemented? If not, is there any information on how their algorithms work, or could anyone recommend some papers I can look at to get started? (I'm familiar with basic flight dynamics theory already, and am more interested in the actual computational component.) Thanks!

so i'm only really making a return because i have an ion-powered craft with burn times ~1 hour, but i can't enable physics warp for some reason. everyone says to do alt + . but it doesn't work for me for some reason. maybe because i'm on linux? i really don't know. (sorry if this is in the wrong place, only ~85% sure it should go here but i'm kinda desperate so :/)

I was reading an article (link below) on Reversing the thermodynamic arrow of time using quantum correlations. Bottom line of the paper from my understanding is the 2nd law of thermodynamics is reversed under certain conditions. It isn't a violation of the 2nd law as the particles have to be correlated and in the presence of a magnetic field. (2nd law does not cover this.) What do you guys think to the significance of the work and what future questions would like answering? I know this isn't spaceflight per say but very significant in this area of physics which of course makes spaceflight/travel possible for us mere humans(and kerbals:)) General article https://m.phys.org/news/2017-12-arrow-relative-concept-absolute.html Full paper can be found here https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.03323.pdf

Ok I'll put it out here, I am mad for quantum physics. It is such a new(ish) interesting and useful branch of science that it has me hooked. I love working on new ideas that will change the world of science, and I'm wondering, who else likes this subject and is as mad as me to like it!

This is a place to talk about anything from boringly tame to wildly enlightening theories you may have heard or thought of.

After having the beginnings of my first space station wobble into my own personal Kessler Syndrome, I've decided to look at other options to keep my creations stable. I previously only used EAS-4 Strut connectors, and they did just fine for keeping rockets and landers together. But my space station, having been composed entirely of Sr. docking ports and pieces which are entirely stable on their own, did not have this option. My searches suggest that Autostrutting may be the answer to my problem, but I'm having trouble getting clear info on it; Does Autostrutting dynamically change what an object is "attached" too depending on circumstance (docking/undocking, decoupling, explosive spontaneous deconstruction, etc.)? If not, what happens when the object strutted to is disconnected or destroyed? What do the various options do, and when are they best used? "disabled" is obvious of course, but the rest confuse me, especially since I'm not sure about the above two questions... Should Autostrutting be used to replace EAS-4 Strut connectors or supplement them? How effective is it at keeping space stations and other large docked up structures from destabilizing and damaging or destroying themselves? I've heard people sing it's praises, and I'd like to know why, but I'm just not sure how to make use of the feature, or even where to get good info on it. Also, I'm trying to go vanilla for now, so I'm avoiding mods; I've only just started, so simple things like bringing one-way payloads to planets and moons are still a real struggle to me. I'd like to really get to know the game before I mod it...

Dr. Jamie Farnes, a physicist at Oxford, has released a paper attempting to explain both Dark Matter and Dark Energy with a single substance producing negative gravitational attraction. Simulations of his model successfully accounted for the galaxy rotation problem that Dark Matter was introduced to account for, as well as the accelerating expansion of the Universe attributed to Dark Energy. Are there any major flaws with this model at present, either from observations or mathematics alone? How could such a model be verified or disproved? What would the implications be for the Standard Model? And, on the far edge of possibility: could this make an Alcubierre-style FTL drive workable? Article by the author: http://theconversation.com/bizarre-dark-fluid-with-negative-mass-could-dominate-the-universe-what-my-research-suggests-107922 Download for the paper itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.07962

I was wondering, does the KSP physics engine utilize the GPU processing capability and computational power? Or is it all CPU?

I would like this discussion to be a place to share personal interests related to KSP. Aerodynamics, rocket science, physics, chemistry, etc. People can ask questions about real life topics they're interested in and learn about things others are interested in.

Hey guys! So today I was playing some KSP and I built a rocket which is meant to orbit Kerbin at a low altitude first and then increase the Apoapsis up to 1 000 000 km (So I can get some sweet science from low and high Orbit). After having achieved the 1 mil km I did a stupid mistake and I had to revert to start.This time, I decided to go for a more lazy approach. I decided not to achieve Orbit and just fly straight up. Now something happened which doesnt make any sense in my current understanding of the world. I was only able to achieve about 400 000 km - less than half the amount I was able to reach when flying in orbit. I dont know how this can make any sense: In my first flight I was spending way more time in atmosphere, why I should have lost more speed than in my second attempt. Also I just dont understand how flying vertically results in much lower altitudes than flying horizontally "only". I would be very happy if someone could explain the mathematics behind that. TY very much in advance!

Hey. I'm having a massive FPS drop near space stations or planetary bases since KSP wants to calculate every single unit, making the game unplayable (docking at 10fps with only the first docking port unlocked was a nightmare!) I was thinking about some solutions, and 2 possible solutions came to mind, although the 1st is a more definitive one: Disable physics calculation for every single object. We simply don't need the game calculating everything in a base or station. So if I already have a base built or a station in orbit and stable for x seconds, the game should just stop calculating everything but the main parts (maybe this could be activated once we rename the ship and make it a station or a base, each having it's own parameters to disable physics calculation); Bring Max physics delta-time per frame back. Why is this not available in the console version of the game? We need more performance options in the game setting. For the ones that don't know what this is, it basically slows time down so the computer can better calculate the physics. For example, if the physics calculation is pretty heavy on the CPU and frames start to drop, the game will basically slow down time (so 1 second in game takes 10 seconds in real life). The problem with this is that it would take more time for things to happen, but the experience would be way smoother (no more trying to click on a tiny ship part at 10fps during emergencies with the cursor controlled by the analogue stick axis).

I have an equation that shows the target speed you need to reach to have a successful hohmann transfer: V = 1878968 * sqrt(2/RInitial-2/(RLowest + RHighest)) It's always worked in the past, but I recently tried to use it to find the target velocity for a transfer around the sun. When I plug in the numbers, I get a ridiculous answer of 16 m/s, and I don't know why. The weird thing is, I tried looking this formula up on Google to see if I missed something, and I cannot find it anywhere. Has anyone else used this formula?

So I'm in career mode and I've sent a couple of missions to the Mun. Only one probe was able to soft-land due to a bug I've had with my landers. For some reason they want to bounce back up, usually flipping over in the process. I have had this issue with both the smallest and the medium sized legs. I've also played a bit with the leg springs and dampeners. I lowered their tweakable settings. During that landing, the craft sank into the surface of the Mun and one of the legs exploded, requiring a revert. Mods in use: CKAN, Science Checklist, several flag mods, Contract Configurator with all of the Contract Packs, Kerbal Alarm Clock, EVE, Landing AIM, Modular Flight Integrator, Module Manager, TriggerAu's Flags, and Waypoint manager. This issue has only occurred since 1.4.1 and hasn't happened previously. I do own Making History. I'd love some help with this one, since I have several contracts that require soft landing!

So I wanted to use one of my premade planes but now when I try to fly them, they just spin out and go wild. Also I do use cheats in my science save cause why not. Though I only use Unbreakable Joints, No crash damage, Inf Electricity and Inf Propellant. I have accidentally click on the physics tab but went back. So I don't think I changed the aerodynamics myself as they worked the last time I play KSP. Was there a change I wasn't aware about? Also running 1.4.1

I understand waterskiing or hovercraft are not exactly core functionality for KSP but since I have struggled with this I'm going to list it anyway. Problem 1: Waterskiing When landing something on water, it immediately sinks in, which causes a massive drag spike. In reality, if you're going at all fast, water behaves more like a solid surface to start with: you would skip or ski on the surface until you slow down enough to sink. Consequently, things like seaplanes do not behave like in real life. If this was made more realistic, seaplanes, fast boats, and similar craft would become possible. Conversely, splashdowns might become more dangerous. Problem 2: Ground effect In real life, a plane flying close to the ground experiences a good deal of additional lift from an air cushion that forms beneath its wings. This makes aerodynamic landings easier and vessels like hovercraft or ekranoplans possible. Since KSP does not model ground effect, we can't do this. I think this would be a pretty simple change as you'd only need to adjust the amount of lift generated by distance to the surface up to 15 m or so to get close enough that it felt more or less right. This would significantly expand the range of craft we can make, as well as making planes easier to fly and things more realistic in general.

Yeah, so I would have liked to post this in the Addons section because I'm looking for help from coders and/or math geeks, but since it isn't really KSP-related, I decided on this place. Mods, please do move the topic if you feel it would fit in a more specialized section. Anyway. Here goes: I'm making a little 2D arcade space game that basically puts "Lunar Lander"-like elements in a tiny solar system with orbiting planets and moons. Fuel efficiency is obviously going to be an important gameplay point, and so I want players to use gravity assists etc. For that, I need to be able to show predicted trajectories. And that's where it gets complicated. I'm using Game Maker, and the tutorials, discussions or even marketplace scripts that I found on the topic rely on Game Maker's built-in physics. And those don't help me because obviously I don't have a constant "down" direction for gravity to pull in. I've only got relatively basic skills in GML (and I know even less about other languages) and while I'm not exactly sh!t at maths, high school was a long time ago. So I'm looking for help creating (or finding somewhere in the GM marketplace) something that will allow me to graphically display a projected trajectory. Since I'm not using GM's built-in physics, so far it's all just simple vector addition (current veloctiy + sun gravity + current grav-well gravity). But I have no idea how to draw a prediction, since my gravity direction changes constantly, and I have multiple sources of gravity AND distance thresholds at which they become active, like SOI's in KSP. Somehow I think that a frame-by-frame prediction of next x and next y over thousands of frames would kill most computers running this game. So. Is there anyone out there who... a) can point me to someone who knows this kind of stuff (the person/people who made MechJeb maybe?) b) can help me find something on GM Marketplace that would do the trick c) can help me directly with coding this d) ...has done this before and could help me port it into GML? Thanks very much.