Yoha

Lightspeed; derived from theoretical models, themselves derived from various empirical observations [1]. It is usually seen as particles (gravitons) going being emitted from one body in all directions and being caught by the other; when caught, they transmit a slight amount of momentum in the opposite direction of their own velocity (for some reason). This explain the m1 × m2 in the gravitation formula (the amount of graviton emitted is proportional to the quantity of mass, and the probability that an object catch gravitons is proportional to its mass). The "÷ r²" comes from the fact that gravitons are emitted in all directions at the time; so, all gravitons emitted at time t form a sphere whose surface is proportional to r² where r is the distance traveled by the gravitation since t (the radius of the sphere). The "G" constant handles the 4À factor for the area of a sphere and unit conversions. “naïve†→ are you French by any chance? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity

It's xkcd, otherwise, it does not mean anything. /s

There are not a lot of answers to this thread but I think that this is the kind of detail that makes a good game great. However, it would be more logical for it to be included in the main game I think.

I really like the idea. It solve all the previous issues of having few stars in a galaxy, too long burns or traveling distances, and avoid having a binary system (which would imply a rethink of a part of KSP's engine): the whole thing should be relatively easy to implement by adding one more level of orbit. The celestials bodies on the map are obviously not to scale but the distances between the stars still seems a little short compared to the ones of the planets.

I will try again with the Mesa driver when I get the occasion then.

Thanks for the info. I think that quite a lot of the compatibility issues come from the use of Unity through Mono, which is has some trouble imitating .Net . However, I also understand that switching to another language/library would take far more time =/ . If there are some coders around there. What language would you use for coding KSP? Which libraries? Personally, I like to reinvent the wheel so I would go for C99 and base libraries (GL,GLU,glut/glew,etc), but I would not make it past the KSC interface in a reasonable amount of time.

Hi. I am genuinely curious to know if the developers of KSP intend to release the source code or part of it under any license (be it FLOSS or not). If it is envisioned, do they have some kind of condition like having sold that much licenses, or being famous enough (like, not to be threatened by plagiarism like Candy Swipe)? I remember that Notched said that the code of Minecraft was to be released at some point in the future but nothing happened eventually. All I could find on the subject is this not very informative thread. As it is quite probable that the game will remain fully closed-source, I would like to know more on the development process: language, libraries, do the developers prefer to code under Windows or Linux, which VCS, IDE/editor, etc? From what I have read here and there, I would guess that the code was written in C#, so probably on Windows using VS. I also understand that it makes some use of Unity. Is it right?

I think a simpler way to see it is to consider sub-parts of the satellite. If your satellite is orbiting around Kerbin, its two halves are as well, and at the same speed, even though they each weight less than the total.

This is actually a pretty good idea. Considering the plausible sizes for stars, it would be possible in reality even though I do not think we have observed such a situation (which may incentive the developers not to accept it).

About rovers, it would be handy not to have to manually control them over kilometers. I do not find them really helpful in their current state.

Quick report: Debian unstable with Radeon HD 4350 (oldish video card) using driver fglrx-legacy-driver from the repositories → black screen (but loads correctly otherwise, according to logs and sound). Applying LC_ALL=C will not fix the issue. Neither will LANG=C and LANGUAGE=C, neither combined, neither applied for Steam start as well. Game runs almost fine through Wine though.

Oh, I had not seen there was an advanced mode for editing post as well. Thanks for the tip.

Oh right! I did that *AGAIN* (did it too for satellite placement taking communication range into account). Thanks for taking the time of noticing this! For the record: >>> from math import * >>> a=(758815+740092)/2. + 600e3 >>> mu=3.5316e12 >>> 2*pi*sqrt(a**3/mu) 5241.203234619301 >>> 2*pi*sqrt(a**3/mu) / T # relative error (closer to one = better; between 0.95 and 1.05 is pretty good) 1.0000006171524272 I'll put a warning in my original post and fix the tag. Edit: I guess it's up to moderators to update the tag

Thanks! I have come to accept that I hate the games I play. I do not hate them because they are particularly bad games, but any game as quirks, and by playing it, I am exposed to them. So, if I hate a game, it must be pretty good. I would no bother with a bad games. On the other hand, I have also being playing intentionally-unplayable games such as Dwarf Fortress so I may be biased. Any way, I am very glad to see such a good community and numerous resources for the game still under development! You may be referring to this thread. The missions they are imagining seems more like research projects. I was thinking of something more along the lines of: permanently connect two points on Kerbin by radio communications have a satellite constantly above this area send so many kerbals to there and have them survive (assuming Life support), or bring a "drilling unit" and have it powered (not necessarily operable by the player) keep a constant connection with our extra-kerbalial (?) settlement The original thread seems quite old now, though.

WARNING: I had forgotten to take into account the radius of Kerbin as Claw noticed. I leave the original post for consistency. The correct way of computing the period can be found my latter post I want to use the predict the orbital period of my future satellites. For instance, I currently have a satellite around Kerbin (triple checked) with apoapsis 758,815m, periapsis 740,092m and orbital period 1:27:21.2. According to [1], the formula for the orbital period is: T = 2À √(a³/µ) with T being the orbital period in seconds → (1×60 + 27)×60 + 21.2 = 5,241.2s À the usual mathematical constant ~3.14159265358979323842… a being the semi-major axis, namely the mean between apo- and periapsis → a = (758815+740092) ∕ 2 = 749,453m µ being the standard gravitational parameter, namely G×M with G the universe's gravitational constant and M the mass of the planet G = 6.67×10−11 N·(m/kg)² IRL but it may be different in the Kerbal universe M = 5.2915793×1022 kg according to [2] µ = 3.5316000×1012 m3/s² again according to [2] (implying G is actually the same as IRL) Keeping in mind that 1N = 1kgâ‹…m/s² it is not hard to check the homogeneity of the formula and to have the right orders for our variables. Now, fire up Python and compute T according to the formula: >>> from math import * >>> pi 3.141592653589793 >>> T=(1*60+27)*60+21.2 >>> T 5241.2 >>> a=(758815+740092)/2. >>> mu=3.5316e12 >>> 2*pi*sqrt(a**3/mu) 2169.2555530227874 The only tabulated value is µ, so let us assume that it is not right and instead compute it from what is measured: µ = a³ / ( T/(2À) )² or, for readability: µ = 4 À² a³ / T² >>> mu2=4 * pi**2 * a**3 / T**2 >>> mu2 604966712992.4885 So µ = 6.0497×1011 m³/s². Then, again, at either: M = µ/G = 9.06×1021 and the wiki is wrong here too G = µ/M = 1.14×10-11 which is roughly six times less than IRL both the wiki is wrong and G is not the same as IRL Well, to check this, we need more Science! So, next experiment: another satellite probe around the Mün. >>> T=(11*60+19)*60+37.8 >>> T 40777.8 >>> a=(1215e3+1185e3)/2 >>> mu=6.5138398e10 #according to [3] >>> 2*pi*sqrt(a**3/mu) 32361.839579790507 Again, different result; again, let us compute µ according to the experimental measures: >>> mu2=4 * pi**2 * a**3 / T**2 >>> mu2 41025689794.07226 Which gives us M = µ/G = 6.15×1020 (not so much off) or G = µ/M = 4.20×10-11 which is very different than found earlier. From this, I conclude either that: the tabulated values for µ on the wiki are wrong and, most likely, so are the masses of the celestial bodies (at least for Kerbin and the Mün) the game does not use the right values/formulas (we can see it either way even if the game fixes the rules after all) I missed something trivial and am utterly stupid (orbital physics are not funny if you do not forget a zero sometimes) Again, I did proof read this myself, but I may have forgot something so if you see something strange, please make me now! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period#Small_body_orbiting_a_central_body [2] http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbin [3] http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Mun

Well, actually, you would only need two satellites around the planet to transmit data. Three is better as it allows you to have them regularly spaced and to cover all the surface (for allowing connections to KSC for example). For the design, you just put one omni-directional antenna for communications with the surface, between the satellite of the planet and close ships, and as many dish antennas as you want targets. For instance, you could just put one dish antenna to track your active vessel; I usually put two so that my probes can target the Mün as well.

Well, that's all things RemoteTech does. Additionally, it also takes into account signal delay (negligible within Kerbin SoI) and differentiates between two kinds of antennas: omni-directional have short range but can communicate with any other omni-directional antenna in range while dish antenna must be targeted at a specific direction (Active Vessel, Kerbin, that probe, etc). https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1rml0r/tutorial_complete_novices_guide_to_remotetech_2/

Nine days ago, I used to only be another earthling, crawling on the surface this planet populated by Kerbal-like beings but for the bada55 skin color. However, when the steam powered cars brought the recruiters seeking for new guineap heroes to experiment with a steroid (or something of the kind), I immediately enrolled. Now, I have been to Mün en Minmus and set up communication satellites, and I have yet to visit another traveler of the sky. </rp> For who may be interested, here are some technical details of my hardware configuration: GA-MA770T-UD3P Phenom II X2 550 (two cores at 3.1GHz) 2GB of RAM Radeon HD 4350 (a kind of old video card with 512MB of dedicated DDR2 RAM) You could say that this set up is quite outdated (especially the video card) and it would be a fair assessment. However, I have been to most game I want to play (Half Life 2, Portal 1 and 2, Counter Strike Source, Mirror's Edge), with some tweaking of the settings. As a matter of fact, my troubles were more akin to be linked to running them on a GNU/Linux system (Debian) than to performance issues. Then, despite my repeated and airy efforts to have Mirror's Edge running, I finally accepted to install an inferior Operating System (Windows Seven) alongside my true setup. This parenthesis explains that I am arguably a power user an that KSP is not the first game I have to deal with on my config. This is why I do know that, in this instance, most of the issues I have met must be due to incompatibility and performance limitations. Nonetheless, I shall a few of the ones I encountered (notice that this is not a bug report, but if developers or other players are interested, I would be glad to discuss or investigate them). the game won't run soundly on Linux: the native version will run, but the renderer will become pitch black after loading some sounds right when the log file display that the game requested a resizing (for any configuration, LC_ALL=C won't help); the Windows version ran through Wine will work (yay! just got it to) or have the renderer freeze depending on the configuration; I experience regular bugs where the game becomes unplayable and need to be restarted entirely: switched to nothing, Kerbin texture glitching causing ship to completely explode even at low speed (after having manually deployed all chutes), high speed explosions virtually freezing the game (I don't have an indicator but probably around 0.05 FPS), quickload unusable before restart (in these situation going back to Space Center will display a blue circular figure (center of Kerbin I guess) instead and clicking on a building will either fail or get me to another blocked situation); unstable orbits (almost circular orbits will have their periapsis and apoapsis moving randomly, orbital period in Engineer Redux won't have stable least significant digits either); an asteroid I approached started warping around (usually going along its orbit, and at some point teleporting back to where it used to be); a very specific bug at the KSC: the light green area wobbles over the dark green area when I move the camera duplication bug. From what I understand, the launch problem is due to compatiblity issues from my video card and the unstable or warping stuff may be due to unsufficient float precision in the internal registers of my video card (depending how KSP internally works). Because the game is usually able to gracefully exit, I don't have much crash report or error logs to post. It turns out that some memory dumps have appeared in the KSP folder in the last few days, but I do not to which bug they are related (I have to restart fairly often and do not track their date and time). Well, that was for the negative stuff. I had quite a lot of bugs but I know that the game is still in the development process. Moreover, the fact that I am still playing despite all this really shows how much interesting this game can be. I even think I will be starting another Career mode with a Life Support mod in addition to RemoteTech. I will be posting a few suggestion once I have checked which one were already submitted but here is a quicklist not to forget: more modular building in VAB/SPH timestamped screenshots chosing the crew on launchpad/runway (I know Crew Manifest does this, but it is convoluted) cancel launch without having to get back to VAB/SPH or "clean" afterwards getting rid of all debris in Tracking Station reducing the disparities between the two kinds of time warp save selected target (I have seen it be proposed somewhere) commercial contracts (not just "get to the Mün and plant a flag") correctly handling event passing (mouse wheel impacting both zoom and scrolling, click will sometime both act on the chosen button and select a part behind) a way to remember positions (not flags) All in all, this game is great, and I look forward for its future development.