Does KSP have a time limit?

[The_8_Bit_Zombie]

Basically, is there a point in the game after X years where KSP no longer functions as normal? Or does it just loop back around without messing up anything?

Edited October 19, 2018 by The_8_Bit_Zombie

[KerbolExplorer]

I think it continues for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever......x 1000

Bassacly im saying its going to go on even if the numbers dont fit on the UI

[releansol]

Restricted by own passing.

[Gargamel]

1 hour ago, The_8_Bit_Zombie said:

Or does it just loop back around without messing up anything?

I mean, I guess this is possible.    But I have never heard of anybody hitting the high end of the time variable yet, so I don't know if anything would occur similar to a K2K (Kerbal 2000) problem. 

I curious myself, maybe somebody with more intimate knowledge of how KSP stores time data can speak up....

[KerbolExplorer]

4 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

But I have never heard of anybody hitting the high end of the time variable yet

[Norcalplanner]

There used to be an error with earlier versions that created some weirdness after a long time (I want to say 190 years or so) but that bug was squashed years ago

[Superfluous J]

Yeah it was 2^x seconds, where x is a number I'm not sure of that made the years big enough for most but easily reachable. I think 190 was around it.

I'm not 100% sure what the limit is now but IIRC you can't reach it at full time warp in your lifetime.

[Thygrrr]

There is a limit to the precision of the floating point numbers used that KSP utilizes to display dates.

 

At some point, the precision will be very jittery and that will cause orbital calculations to go haywire. Onrails stuff will break once the seconds in the game are above 100000000000000 seconds, which is a crazy long time. 12 million kerbin years, give or take.

Could happen 10x or 100x earlier, but at some point the precision will just still be good enough for the game to work.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

19 hours ago, The_8_Bit_Zombie said:

Basically, is there a point in the game after X years where KSP no longer functions as normal?

Of course!

After about 100 years the user dies.

Can't play if you're dead right?

Edited October 20, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[malkuth]

Well the time is actually calculated in seconds in code and uses a Double.  In c# a double can have a max size is well pretty large.  In fact if you do the math on it you start getting 2.083333333333e-5 days maximum in KSP.  Or 2.9761904761899998e-6 weeks.  Or 5.707762557076712e-8 years.  

Of course this math could be all wrong, since I used googles Seconds to days ---> Days to Weeks ---> and days to years calculations to get these numbers in which case it might not be capable of large numbers. In fact I know its wrong.  But I think you get the point.

Good luck hitting that.

Edited October 20, 2018 by malkuth

[KerbolExplorer]

2 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Of course!

After about 100 years the user dies.

Can't play if you're dead right?

Time warp??????

[Rocket In My Pocket]

13 minutes ago, KerbolExplorer said:

Time warp??????

You can't time warp in real life silly!

Edited October 20, 2018 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Gargamel]

6 hours ago, malkuth said:

since I used googles Seconds to days ---> Days to Weeks ---> and days to years calculations

But kerbal time is 6 hours to a day, not 24, so you'll have to throw in a x4 somewhere.    Plus, isn't a Kerbal year 400 days?   If so, you'll have to toss out the weeks too, and just go from days to years. 

 

5 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

You can't time warp in real life silly!

That's what naps are for!

[Chel]

Another way to find out is to simply go to the tracking station, time warp to max, and just let it run for like an hour.

[Bill Phil]

If KSP is migrating to 64 bit only (which is weird to me since I remember when that was way too unstable to be useful) then I don't think the limit will be hit even at timewarp, not before the user dies, I would wager.

[DeltaDizzy]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1848700/biggest-integer-that-can-be-stored-in-a-double
 

Quote

The biggest/largest integer that can be stored in a double without losing precision is the same as the largest possible value of a double. That is, DBL_MAX or approximately 1.8 × 10³⁰⁸ (if your double is an IEEE 754 64-bit double). It's an integer. It's represented exactly. What more do you want?

1.8 × 10³⁰⁸
For comparison, 3.1557 x 10¹¹ is 10,000 years of earth time. So TCIS's suggestion won't work.

2 hours ago, The_Cat_In_Space said:

Another way to find out is to simply go to the tracking station, time warp to max, and just let it run for like an hour.

 

Edited October 25, 2018 by DeltaDizzy

[swjr-swis]

The max time value is 2 147 483 647 years, 425 days(*), 5 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds (UT = 19760285526235197):

 

One second more (UT = 19760285526235198), and the time becomes negative - probably due to the year being calculated as a signed integer and at that point flipping over (dec 2147483648 = hex 0x80000000):

 

Which the game surprisingly still seems to be ok with for almost an entire year... at which point time stops completely. And the game, I might add:

 

(*: the save screen and MET indicators show days in ordinals, so it's 425 and not 426)

Edited October 25, 2018 by swjr-swis
425 vs 426

[Aeroboi]

@The_8_Bit_Zombie

Quote

Does KSP have a time limit?

Yes, it has this when parental control is activated in your Windows settings.

[Vexillar]

Negative years?  Have you uncovered a hitherto unannounced upcoming time travel capability? 

To the Tardis!! 

[Mrcarrot]

11 hours ago, Vexillar said:

Negative years?  Have you uncovered a hitherto unannounced upcoming time travel capability? 

To the Tardis!! 

A double works both ways...

[Gargamel]

16 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

probably due to the year being calculated as a signed integer

I find that kind of surprising.  For values that you don't want to ever be negative, why not force an unsigned int?   

Unless of course, the devs asked themselves "What fool would even reach that high of a value?  Let's leave it signed so we can have easier error handling!"

And the player base responded "That fool would be us!  Challenge accepted!"

 

If I have learned anything from playing KSP, is that the devs have designed this game to perform pretty well at reasonable activities, and us fools have shown them time and time again, that we do not do reasonable things. 

 

[swjr-swis]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

If I have learned anything from playing KSP, is that the devs have designed this game to perform pretty well at reasonable activities, and us fools have shown them time and time again, that we do not do reasonable things. 

If we all kept ourselves limited to what is generally considered 'reasonable', we'd never have tried flight, let alone space. Or a game about space.

 

Space. I like space. So much space. Space. Are we in space yet? Spaaace! Space.

[Gargamel]

Just now, swjr-swis said:

Space. I like space. So much space. Space. Are we in space yet? Spaaace! Space.

Well played, been trying to get that on here some how....