Is the game stable enough to play in realtime?

[beeblebrox]

I've played this fantastic game for about two weeks now. My greatest achievment so far is to land on Eve with pod and parachute.

While doing orbital changes in the Eve mission I got a perhaps crazy idea. I had a burn comming up at ascending node to align with Eve's orbit and just briefly noticed that reaching the burn point in real time would take approx 50 days.

The thought of doing a mission in realtime is blowing my mind. It would mean launching from Kerbin and then waiting ~5 minutes until I reach AP to burn into orbit. I can make pasta while waiting. It would mean waiting ~5 hours for mun encounter. It would mean waiting perhaps a month to do a correction burn while orbiting the sun.

Depending on the mission one could look at completing it in say 6 months, perhaps even a year for some missions. Blog and all.

Having a windows computer up and running for such length and not rebooting it is a mission in itself I guess. Having a dedicated machine for this mission is probably a nice idea. Not being able to reboot my everyday working machine is unrealistic.

But let's disregard all that practical stuff (like having to wake up in the middle of the night when I reach Jool encounter).

The main question is - has anybody tried this? Is the game stable enough to be up and running for months?

Thanks

Bib

[Stealth2668]

Probably but i don't see how that's fun. If you wanna sit around and wait, you can pour water on the floor and wait till it dries before doing it again xD

[Lunniy Korabl]

I think people have done realtime mun missions in earlier versions. I can see how that could be fun. Interplanetary missions? Good luck!

[beeblebrox]

Probably but i don't see how that's fun. If you wanna sit around and wait, you can pour water on the floor and wait till it dries before doing it again xD

It will be like growing a plant, I agree. Absolutely thrilling.

And failing at the final descent, I would probably commit suicide. A truly hazardous mission.

[erkha343]

Well, there was a time when we had no timewarp!

[Astrobug]

Dang, I kinda want to try this now...

with a simpit...

Naturally, I think I'd be sticking with LKO operations, though.

[Brabbit1987]

I have thought about this before, then decided against it. Why? Because this already being done by all the space programs that exist in real life. This means while I may not be in charge of those space programs, I already am experiencing such a thing, and honestly it's boring. Waiting for the next opportunity would just simply suck. It means you couldn't play the game until certain windows of opportunity and those windows could very well be only a few minutes.

[artao]

you're not REALLY playing KSP unless you do it in real-time. Timewarp is a cheat.

..

heh heh heh

[Camelotking524]

you're not REALLY playing KSP unless you do it in real-time. Timewarp is a cheat.

..

heh heh heh

Then I'm a pumpkin eater

[paleorob]

No timewarp mean no magical rotation stoppage. That is a challenge unto itself right there.

[FlamedSteak]

Ha. Love the timewarp SAS.

Seriously though what is the average time to Mun? About 8 hours there?

My last trip to Eve would have been pushing into the weeks (maybe even months?) in real time. Granted my intercept was pretty average, but still.

[Deadweasel]

you're not REALLY playing KSP unless you do it in real-time. Timewarp is a cheat.

..

heh heh heh

You want realism? Play an interplanetary mission in realtime, sure, but before you start, hit the local military surplus store. Stock up on MREs.

Now, after launch, when you're on your optimal trajectory, commence living your days waiting by a strict schedule. You get three MREs and a set amount of ounces of water per day. When it comes time to... "offload excess moisture/redundant mass", make sure you capture the liquid for recycling, and the solids go into a baggie, unless you have a toilet with a "slinger" available in your home bathroom.

And if you have a slinger-equipped toilet, can I come stay at your place for a while? I'll be navigator!

[HavinAlmassi]

you're not REALLY playing KSP unless you do it in real-time. Timewarp is a cheat.

..

heh heh heh

Oh man, you purists.

[Scrogdog]

Heh. This reminds me of the time that some guy claimed he was playing a campaign of Silent Hunter III in real time.

Not sure many believed him, including myself, but the stories were great! The guy was obviously RPing the thing to the max. Go for it!

[Cipher29]

I don't like to timewarp for too long, which is the main reason I haven't done a manned landing on Duna. I mainly timewarp between trips to the Mun/Minmus while maintaining my space stations and bases until the phase angles allow for interplanetary travel. I don't consider it very realistic for your space program to do nothing for months at a time while waiting for a probe to land. This is probably is why I've had 5 probes en route to other planets for about a month now.

[-RanZ-]

my game crashes occasionally if I leave it open and lock my PC. I am not trying to play in real time though... that does not sound appealing to me what so ever

[Sabor]

I used to do long flights in Flight Simulator 98, 2002 and 2004, generally no more than 3000NM, but I've done Aussie to Cali and the likes before, and real time at that. The majority of it was playing around on the internet and doing other stuff while it did it in the background, and then came back whenever I needed to. Doing them online was better as you had people to talk to and they were doing their own flights. Other programs that worked with the game and websites let you log your hours, earn ranks and ribbons, and even displayed your flight data in real time to anyone who wanted to view it.

But Some missions in Kerbal are easily a year's worth of days. I would not want to do that in real time. Though there's nothing stopping you from doing a year's worth of in-game days of other projects while it's on its flight, but to never use time warp? Good Luck

[stibbons]

KSP on Linux has been rock-solid for me during 12 hour play sessions (long weekends + nothing else to do...). For longer, I'd make sure I was quick-saving a couple of times a day, and maybe restarting KSP and rebooting every few days to be on the safe side. Losing 8 hours in a crash is fine by me, I think.

Somewhere on my list of things to do is hack the Kerbal Alarm Clock plugin to add the ability to make web calls when alarms occur. That, combined with a service like IFTTT, will mean I can get notifications on my phone of things happening in KSP when I'm AFK.

Once I've got that in place, I'm going to start doing real-time (or at least, only sped up 5x or 10x) missions.

[dharak1]

I avoid shutting off mt computer, too much work to re open everything even with taskbar pins.

[Twistedpear]

I

Having a windows computer up and running for such length and not rebooting it is a mission in itself I guess. Having a dedicated machine for this mission is probably a nice idea. Not being able to reboot my everyday working machine is unrealistic.

THe game also has mac and linux clients, so you don't have to run it on a windows box

[Deadweasel]

THe game also has mac and linux clients, so you don't have to run it on a windows box

Because running Mac or Linux machines makes the user completely impervious to power outages, hardware failures, OS updates forcing reboots at inopportune/unanticipated times, and malicious/inept/conflicting code bugs.

[stibbons]

Because running Mac or Linux machines makes the user completely impervious to power outages, hardware failures, OS updates forcing reboots at inopportune/unanticipated times, and malicious/inept/conflicting code bugs.

Only one of those is relevant to the question. But given some of the bugs that popped up in the 0.20 release on Linux, it is something worth considering.

[Deadweasel]

Only one of those is relevant to the question. But given some of the bugs that popped up in the 0.20 release on Linux, it is something worth considering.

It's okay, no flame intended. It was all tongue-in-cheek anyway. I run all three here so it's all good.

[stibbons]

I run all three here so it's all good.

Yeah, I didn't mean to sound that harsh either. I envy your ability to use a scroll wheel.

[sadron]

Sure, if you don't mind being bored for months. A lot of you people don't seem to have a concept of how big space actually is, it's already compressed in Kerbal Space Program as Kerbin's only 10% the size of Earth. Do you seriously want to have your game sit for months on end doing nothing?