Is there an 'end' to the Kerbol universe?

[Chel]

Is there like a solid barrier to the Kerbol system? Like a giant impassable wall or something? Or does it just go on forever. Thanks, TCIS

[Hotaru]

If you mean how high above the sun can you get, then no, there's no barrier: Kerbol's sphere of influence is infinite. In practice once you get far enough (as in, orders of magnitude farther out than the farthest planets, distances not practical to achieve at sub-light speed) you might get attacked by the Kraken though.

[GarrisonChisholm]

Yes, even the Demo is boundless.  I sent a Kerbal on a one-way trip with the demo and just ran it on and on until I got bored.  Still not even a tenth of a light year though.

With mods you can quite easily have a fascinating and explorable universe.  I have @GregroxMun's End planet-9 analog as my most distant explorable object, and then I have the Valentine system orbiting a trillion km away just to show me that there is more out there, even if I can't get there (not doing a warp mod), and running my PC for 4 *real* months to get there isn't going to happen until I have another pc.  to use in the mean time.

Edited August 24, 2017 by GarrisonChisholm

[Whirligig Girl]

You can go as far as you want, but for really large distances on the order of lightyears, things get buggy. There is no boundary to the universe though aside from the 64 bit limit to whatever number KSP uses deep down as the smallest distance. 1.8e19 or so?

[wumpus]

15 hours ago, GregroxMun said:

You can go as far as you want, but for really large distances on the order of lightyears, things get buggy. There is no boundary to the universe though aside from the 64 bit limit to whatever number KSP uses deep down as the smallest distance. 1.8e19 or so?

That number is almost certainly 32 bit (or rounded to 32 bits in an important place somewhere).  This is where the kraken steps in: your spaceship resides in the center of a 32 bit reference system bubble defined relative to a 32 bit reference system defined by Kerbol.  These were sufficient to slay the kraken for any standard use of KSP, but really pushing the boundaries might raise the kraken.

The whole kludge is due to Unity using only 32 bit floats.  It was built to be for highly portable games (don't try doubles on phones, old [non-x86] consoles, or GPUs) and not scientific calculations (which nearly always use 64 bit doubles).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSaNhyzfNFk

(Scott Manley explains 64 bit in KSP and Star Citizen.  Note he's not a hardware guy so I don't think this is *quite* right, but it is close enough down to roughly the assembler level).

[ble210]

On 8/24/2017 at 4:17 PM, GarrisonChisholm said:

Yes, even the Demo is boundless.  I sent a Kerbal on a one-way trip with the demo and just ran it on and on until I got bored.  Still not even a tenth of a light year though.

With mods you can quite easily have a fascinating and explorable universe.  I have @GregroxMun's End planet-9 analog as my most distant explorable object, and then I have the Valentine system orbiting a trillion km away just to show me that there is more out there, even if I can't get there (not doing a warp mod), and running my PC for 4 *real* months to get there isn't going to happen until I have another pc.  to use in the mean time.

What analog of planet-9 are you referring to?  I can't find it under Gregrox Mun's posts- can you provide a link?

[Gaarst]

1 hour ago, ble210 said:

What analog of planet-9 are you referring to?  I can't find it under Gregrox Mun's posts- can you provide a link?

I guess the one from this thread:

Sadly, the download was hosted on Kerbalstuff. @GregroxMun might still have the file available somewhere if you're interested.

Edited September 3, 2017 by Gaarst

[Whirligig Girl]

This is the updated version of the mod/challenge.

[ble210]

Thank you!!