Max warp speed ahead... slowly...

[regex]

I've had trouble with 1,000,000x warp doing strange things but 500,000x seems to work fine, and should be the upper end in stock. Get rid of 5x warp because it's useless, make KAC stock, call it good.

[temetvince]

Thanks for all the discussion!

Personally, I dislike it when people feel "entitled" like the developers owe them something; I *love* KSP and think it's great. That being said, I think saying that a person should multitask in a sandbox game is perhaps a little limiting. I could see it in other games, but as a whole, sandbox really should be open to different styles of play. What if your kid is playing this game to learn about orbital mechanics, or is being played by someone who has adhd and can't multitask well? This game is enjoyed by a wide audience, some of which will be single tasking. And who said we have to run a space program? Perhaps someone wants to be a pilot/astronaut role play instead! But I don't feel entitled to a faster option; It would just be nice.

As for technical limitations, as a programmer I get that. While I personally think there are some definite programming shortcuts to avoid physics errors for long flights, I am certain that the amount of time it would take to write that code (and debug it) would be better spent elsewhere for more needed/desired functionality. If the 100,000x limit could be raised without a serious time commitment, however, then that would be great. Perhaps it could be an option in the settings menu for faster cpus (hey, I still play games from the 90s, who said I won't be playing KSP on a supercomputer in the future!)

[samstarman5]

If you are a sandbox or science player, then there really is no reason not to want a bit more time warp. You aren't going to miss anything back home during that time.

However, career is a different story, as it would be silly to ride a long-term mission alone the whole way, missing valuable contracts that may come up that could be done in the timeframe and benefit your space program greatly.

If it was possible to add one more step to time warp without breaking the game or causing the chance of ruining something, I don't mind if it goes in. I won't have to use it.

[eddiew]

I reduced my max warp to 25,000 because I simply don't want it to go that fast...

I currently have 4 ships on the way to Duna, one to Mun, one to Minmus, and some local satellite missions ready to launch. Meantime I have a cloud of probes just arrived at Jool that need intermittent tweaking to send them to the different moons

Soon as your interplanetary is outside of Kerbin's SOI, you can ignore it and do other things ^^

[celem]

Im just not fathoming how the curent max-warp can be too slow for anything, but I guess we all have different attention spans. The current max-warp is useless inside kerbins SOI (barring a few extreme elliptical moon returns) Even trying to use it will likely lead to the physics step ignoring your aerobrake entirely and teleporting you through the atmospheric part of your trajectory. Its so fast that even warp-at-altitude throttling wont step it down, the physics step can entirely bypass low space on such an elliptical course.

The only time I ever use that top notch is if for some reason i insist on riding a jool/eeloo mission, but even then i need KAC running. While even top warp can feel slow over certain portions of an orbit (usually when you are elliptical and passing apex) it leaps so fast once you pick up any kind of speed that stopping for a particular date is practically impossible.

So, long story short, I dont even use the top warp we have, I never find myself needing to pass that much time, even if I do then i'll use the speed 10x slower than max to avoid the massively long physics steps

edit: changing the warp speeds available in the game may not be trivial, but is certainly possible. A number of mods that rework the kerbal system also rework the warp speeds to allow for the larger volumes. Im sure i remember the first planet factory releases (not krags, but the first contributors) including another warp above stock max.

[merendel]

I think that the max timewarp is fine for realtime display of the orbits, if anything its too fast if your moderately close to a planet. However I would appreciate the ability to simply increment the universe time to whatever arbitrary point in the future you pick. For example you could be on Y1D1 and decide you really want to jump to some window comeing up on Y3D50. You punch in what day you want to jump to, everything is placed on rails and the status of all orbits are updated as if the persist file had been edited to advance time.

[problemecium]

I'm in favor of a 1-million-x warp, but I do recognize the value of having a cap to encourage players to respect their Kerbals' patience at least a trifle and run multiple missions while waiting for an interplanetary encounter. Of course this would be facilitated much more effectively by simply making Kerbal Alarm Clock part of the stock game. And I still want a 1000000x warp anyway for those times when I'm feeling particularly impatient and can't be bothered to stare at the screen for 30 seconds waiting for a week to go by.

[temetvince]

The planetary mission of the real life Voyager, if my calcs are correct, would take over 17 minutes of 100,000x kerbal time warp.

I can see how if you are good at the game 100,000x could seem fine in all or most situations. But what if you're keeping in the spirit of the game, building a rocket by eyeballing it and launching to even something close like Duna? It could take *several* years of orbiting the sun before getting the intercept with Duna to line up correctly. We're not talking 30 seconds of 100,000x. We're talking 15-30 minutes sometimes.

Edited March 4, 2015 by temetvince

[Gerandar]

The planetary mission of the real life Voyager, if my calcs are correct, would take over 17 minutes of 100,000x kerbal time warp.

I can see how if you are good at the game 100,000x could seem fine in all or most situations. But what if you're keeping in the spirit of the game, building a rocket by eyeballing it and launching to even something close like Duna? It could take *several* years of orbiting the sun before getting the intercept with Duna to line up correctly. We're not talking 30 seconds of 100,000x. We're talking 15-30 minutes sometimes.

I wouldn't say the person who just "eyeballed" it was keeping to anything close to the spirit of the game space agency's wont just "eyeball" it they would do the math to get a rough idea of how much dV they need/ life support they need to drag with them.

[Bobdabiulder]

Maybe a 500,000x time warp would be good.  On second thought, this could drastically lag the game or cause inaccurate physics calculations, and send Kerbin into Kerbol at high speed >:)

[Madscientist16180]

I'm on the side of those who rule out the long warp "problem" by doing something else in between. I once launched 13 interplanetary probe all one after the other. And while the were awaiting the window to leave for their destinations, i was fullfilling contracts. 

Works for me. For sure you need KAC to do this, but it works fine.

Never playing sandbox, i must say thatmaybe those players have a point. If you focus on a single ship, it might get boring, i do not know.