So, what about FTL Drives in KSP 2 Stock game?

[Catto]

Idk, Burning's a thing.

[shdwlrd]

Why even discuss warp drives? It has been said already; no warp drives, jump drives, worm holes, star gates, basically no FTL drives or ways to circumvent the hard way to travel to new star systems will be added into the game. FTL travel will be mods only.

[K^2]

On 3/18/2022 at 4:12 PM, Pthigrivi said:

@K^2 What do you think about superdeterminism?

Nothing that I can say in a polite company.

As for lower limits on energy for FTL, you need to have at least enough negative energy to compensate for the mass of the ship. The net mass of the ship + warp bubble has to be precisely zero. This is often overlooked, because most simulations simply take mass of the ship is negligible. But in order for a warp ship to go FTL, you have to have the space-time go to flat beyond the bubble, and that requires net energy to be zero within some boundary around the bubble. Even if you only want to use warp for sublight, if this doesn't happen, you'll be generating gravity waves that will be sapping a lot of energy on acceleration, and at that point, you're better off with a photon drive.

So you have to have at least enough negative energy to compensate for the ship. The rest depends on how thin you can make the bubble, and there might be limits to that from quantum gravity which, needless to say... nervous laughter.

And when you create the bubble, how much energy do you need to make a given quantity of negative energy? Well, we don't know what the mechanism for that would even be, but you're at least leaving the equivalent amount of positive energy behind, so more energy than the mass of the ship, that's for sure. And on arrival, when the bubble collapses, that negative energy has to be compensated with the positive energy, which will require every bit of positive energy you have, including all of your mass energy of the ship. So that is a problem. Unless you have some sacrificial matter at destination, you literally have to annihilate the ship and the crew on arrival.

Point is, if you're making an FTL mod, you can basically just make up numbers that work for gameplay purposes. We don't have anything like remotely practical mathematical model that gives numbers you can possibly use in a game.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

Nothing that I can say in a polite company.

But given recent Bell tests isn't that really the only logical explanation? 

[K^2]

40 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

But given recent Bell tests isn't that really the only logical explanation? 

There are no tests of Bell's Theorem that I'm aware of that disagree with Many Worlds interpretation, and MWI is mathematically equivalent to Copenhagen. There are cases where Copenhagen can look contradictory (see EPR, Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, etc,) but that's really just a side effect of us thinking with classical determinism mentality.

Quantum Mechanics, in its standard interpretations, is deterministic, self-consistent, and agrees with experiments to precision matched only by tests of General Relativity. The ad-hoc fixes like hidden variable and superdeterminism only serve to make people feel better about their bad intuition on quantum phenomena. They don't fix any real faults in the theory.

[Bej Kerman]

On 3/18/2022 at 11:12 PM, Pthigrivi said:

Neet! Source?

Alright

Quote

In 2012, physicist Harold White and collaborators announced that modifying the geometry of exotic matter could reduce the mass–energy requirements for a macroscopic space ship from the equivalent of the planet Jupiter to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (c. 700 kg)[12] or less,[30] and stated their intent to perform small-scale experiments in constructing warp fields.[12] White proposed to thicken the extremely thin wall of the warp bubble, so the energy is focused in a larger volume, but the overall peak energy density is actually smaller. In a flat 2D representation, the ring of positive and negative energy, initially very thin, becomes a larger, fuzzy donut shape. However, as this less energetic warp bubble also thickens toward the interior region, it leaves less flat space to house the spacecraft, which has to be smaller.[31] Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warp can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more.[12] According to White, a modified Michelson–Morley interferometer could test the idea: one of the legs of the interferometer would appear to have a slightly different length when the test devices were energised.[30][32] Alcubierre has expressed skepticism about the experiment, saying: "from my understanding there is no way it can be done, probably not for centuries if at all".[33][34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

[KerikBalm]

On 3/16/2022 at 11:54 PM, Bej Kerman said:

It only takes 4 years to reach Alpha Centauri, at 0.25c that's only just under twice the amount of time it took New Horizons to get to Pluto, a much closer target.

Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away. This it takes over 9 years Earth relative time at .25c

Ship relative time is nearly 97% of that at .25c

https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation

But a hohman transfer to Eeloo apoapsis takes a similar amount of time, so we only need another 10-100x more time warp for ships traveling at .02 c or even 0.002c

Edited March 21, 2022 by KerikBalm

[SciMan]

IDK why this surfaced again after a year, but that's neither here nor there. Here's my thoughts, since I have strong feelings on the issue.

No method to make matter travel faster than the speed of light will be included in stock KSP 2. None of them.

If the "slower-than-light" drives we're getting seem advanced, they look like stone tools compared to the theoretical ways to get matter to travel faster than the speed of light.

As it is right now, we simply haven't advanced science to the point that we even know the entirety of how it works and what its effects are.

Don't you think it would be kind of important to know how something works before you try to build one?
You can't build an internal combustion engine if you haven't even discovered how to harness fire or simple machines yet.

Space games only need FTL travel for one or both of two reasons:
1. The game has no time-warp mechanic to speed up the "waiting time" on slower-than-light transfers between planets (think like Elite Dangerous, tho in that game the FTL mechanics also tie into the instanced nature of how that game is coded, much like other MMO's set in space).
2. The "interesting places" are so far apart that it takes hours to get anywhere interesting from any other interesting place at sub-light speeds, even with time warp (without the appropriate mods, KSP RSS can be like this, as max warp makes a day pass in roughly a second, and typical transfer times to get to the outer planets are on the order of several years when limited to chemical propulsion, leading to the wait time being ~= ((transfer-time in years) * 365) = seconds you have to wait to do anything after your escape burn.

Judging by what I know of KSP 2 so far, what we're getting in KSP 2 is extremely high performance "reaction engine"-type propulsion (they shoot something out the back really fast to push the ship forward), combined with the ability to use said propulsion while in time warp, combined with the time warp itself being upgraded to have more levels at the top end of it so that transfers between the stars using an appropriately high performance propulsion system can take a reasonable amount of play-time to reach their destination.

So, you'll get your "it only takes a minute or two of RL time to get there" effects as if you had FTL travel, however the ship will never have exceeded the speed of light.

 

I do hope that we are able to unlock an antimatter based reaction engine at some point, be that solid core, plasma core, or beam core.
Beam core antimatter drives that don't choose to inject any additional propellant (usually Hydrogen) into the exhaust are basically propelled by an exhaust purely composed of gamma rays and Pions (Pions being short-lived high energy subatomic particles created by only a few kinds of extremely energetic physical phenomena, one of which is the matter-antimatter annihilation reaction).
And even then, while Antimatter drives have spectacular specific impulse, the total system efficiency (energy input vs propulsive energy output) is actually incredibly BAD. That means that any vessel using such an antimatter drive must have a composition by mass of mostly heat radiators, in order to dissipate the truly spectacular amount of waste heat produced.

[Maria Sirona]

There's no need for them (fractions like 1/10th of lightspeed are fast enough) and it has already been confirmed warp will not be a thing in KSP-2. 

Sorry, no intentional (cough cough Danny2462) stock FTL coming to KSP-2.

[KerikBalm]

I don't see why we'd want time travel or how they could implement it anyway....

[Gargamel]

6 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I don't see why we'd want time travel

You think they have trouble working out the bugs in multiplayer now......

[Newgame space program]

 

Does not work man, this video explains why.

[SciMan]

May I counter that with this: People kept proposing so-called scientific "facts" that supposedly proved that people could not fly like a bird, no matter the cleverness of their inventions.

And then in 1903, the Wright brothers invented manned powered flight. So then Man could Fly.

And then later on, we invented Ornithopters, which in fact do "fly like a bird", in that they create sufficient amounts of both Lift and Thrust simply thru the motions of their articulated wings.

It's only a matter of time before we make an Ornithopter so large that it is able to carry a person inside.
We've already managed to make bird-sized and roughly-bird-shaped RC ornithopters, in fact they're in somewhat common usage around airports (with more conventional fixed-wing aircraft) in order to provide a rather good mimic of a bird of prey in order to scare away migratory birds from becoming a hazard to aviation.

The point I'm trying to make is that we still don't know enough about so-called Alcubierre drives to know if they're even possible or not. With every refinement we make to the equations, it seems they get more and more plausible. Who knows how to make the operating elements of it, but those will stem from the equations I'm sure, once those equations are sufficiently refined.

But do I think we'll have them flying around within the next 100 years? No. Next 500? Only the slimmest of chances. Next 1000 years? Well, actually let me stop your train of thought right there, because you're asking the wrong line of questions.

The point of how far in the future it is is basically moot, because of one critical fact, and that is this:
Even with the best assistance humans are capable of providing, no human or group of humans or human-created device is capable of predicting the trend of future events beyond about 5 years, even if they should continue without any unexpected interruptions like the recent one that started around February 2020 (Covid-19). And we REALLY can't predict the unexpected events like that one I just mentioned.

And when I say "predict" I mean the kind of prediction you can act on, like it gives you a date a time and an event, and then it happens. Not some kind of "perhaps" answer.