Distance between star systems

[KerikBalm]

My guess is that time warp can go much higher. The game will still use patched conics, so with no SOI changes, you can calculate a ships poisition and velocity at any time, and thus time warp can be arbitrarily high (calculating positin at time step 10 years take as much cpu as calculating position at a time step of 1 second) for things on simple rails. 

It will just need to do a bit of extra work for SOI changes, but those can also be calculated precisely without needing time steps (I mean... they are doing things with collisions too to make sure that time-steps don't result in things phasing through each other).

That leaves the challenge of thrust on rails. IIRC, that isn't calculated so precisely, and must be done analytically (like an infinite series, the more calculations done, the smaller the error). My guess would be that as soon as the maneuver node planning is done, showing the planned trajectory, that trajectory can be stored, and used to quickly calculate the ships position at an arbitrarily high warp as well.

If the calculation can't be done quickly and accurately for the maneuver node, then these long burns are going to have use wildly off course, and it will be a mess. If the calculation can be done quickly and reasonably accurately, then there's already a pre-calculated trajectory, and the game just needs to refer to that each time step during warp.

So, I expect drives with less than .1G acceleration (only end game torchship antimatter drives going >1 G), distances about 1/10th scale, and higher time warp limits.

[J.Random]

Did developers ever actually state that there will be actual transit between systems? For all we know, it may end up being implemented as a "warp speed" loading screen with a He-Man theme playing in the background.

[The Aziz]

37 minutes ago, J.Random said:

Did developers ever actually state that there will be actual transit between systems? For all we know, it may end up being implemented as a "warp speed" loading screen with a He-Man theme playing in the background.

Simple answer: multiple missions in progress at the same time. Loading screen won't help you if you have yet another Eve-Jool resupply mission in progress, perhaps to build second interstellar ship.

[Bej Kerman]

9 hours ago, J.Random said:

Did developers ever actually state that there will be actual transit between systems? For all we know, it may end up being implemented as a "warp speed" loading screen with a He-Man theme playing in the background.

Are you joking? That would sort of defeat the entire purpose of KSP, wouldn't it? We know for a fact KSP 1 isn't separated by loading times when transferring between planets. This is a pretty silly concern to have.

[J.Random]

It kinda depends on distances and planned level of realism, isn't it? That famous Douglas Adams's quote is right on the money, and unless developers are planning to go into Star Trek space magic territory, it's kind of a problem. Wait times, required time warp levels (which may break local orbits), required precision (you may correct your course by 0.1 m/s in current KSP and miss the rendevouz if you're far enough, imagine the same at distances thousands of times farther away)... So I can easily imagine interstellar travel being implemented kinda like this: you build a ship which the game considers sufficient for interstellar travel, you launch it and point it at predefined point and you press a button. That's it, the game simply assumes you will hit your destination, stores the vessel and tells you it's "in transit, ETA x years". When it "arrives", the game informs you about it, and if you switch to a vessel in another system, you get a loading screen. To each system - its own map.

So unless developers explicitly stated that there will be controlled interstellar travel, I'm not holding my breath. And if they did, I'd certainly like to know more about implementation details.

Edited October 18, 2021 by J.Random

[shdwlrd]

10 minutes ago, J.Random said:

So unless developers explicitly stated that there will be controlled interstellar travel, I'm not holding my breath. And if they did, I'd certainly like to know more about implementation details.

It wouldn't be KSP without the ability to control every aspect of your flight. The devs also has said they increased the playable area substantially. Why increase the playable area if you were not going to utilize it?

[J.Random]

33 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

The devs also has said they increased the playable area substantially. Why increase the playable area if you were not going to utilize it?

"Playable area" is so vague of a term that it may mean anything. Even if "seamless" was implied (and afaik it never was), it could mean additional planets in the original system. It definitely could just mean additional system(s), but not necessarily as a single continuous area. It _could_ mean empty interstellar space, but it doesn't have to, especially when it would present almost no meaningful gameplay and a whole lot of potential issues. Hence the question. Without speculation or wishful thinking, what did devs actually say (if they ever did)?

[shdwlrd]

1 hour ago, J.Random said:

"Playable area" is so vague of a term that it may mean anything. Even if "seamless" was implied (and afaik it never was), it could mean additional planets in the original system. It definitely could just mean additional system(s), but not necessarily as a single continuous area. It _could_ mean empty interstellar space, but it doesn't have to, especially when it would present almost no meaningful gameplay and a whole lot of potential issues. Hence the question. Without speculation or wishful thinking, what did devs actually say (if they ever did)?

3rd paragraph, Paul discusses increasing the size of the playable space within the Kerbal universe to add more star systems to the game.

 

Edited October 18, 2021 by shdwlrd

[J.Random]

Ok, that's more helpful, thanks. Nothing specific, but singular "scene graph" kinda does imply seamlessness. No idea about implementation though, especially the "spatial" part of it.

[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, J.Random said:

Ok, that's more helpful, thanks. Nothing specific, but singular "scene graph" kinda does imply seamlessness. No idea about implementation though, especially the "spatial" part of it.

Sure, no problem. It's the same method that was used in KSP1.  Multiple detail levels for the objects in space. The best way to describe it is the way Google maps handles different zoom levels. (Street, neighborhood, city, county, state, region, country, continent, globe)

[J.Random]

No, that's just for rendering. He's talking about positional precision there, so I'm guessing it's basically SOI reimplementation. Probably splitting interstellar space into more manageable chunks, not even necessarily spherical.