ChrisSpace

Antimatter and Black Hole engines as an extremely late-game thing could be added. Also, basically everything shown in here: https://imgur.com/a/9q74GFS

Adding terrain like that would be quite difficult but I wouldn't say it's impossible.

I like this idea but it sounds rather difficult to implement. It also raises a good question: How fast will interstellar travel actually be? Since the correlation between Dv and speed changes a bit at relativistic velocities, and then a lot at near the speed of light, I don't think it'll be common to go beyond 0.05c.

There's no reason someone can't begin work on that now.

Angular distance, rotation and so on don't matter here. What matters is that the innermost ring begins to disappear behind the planet over the course of the clip, meaning the ship must have travelled at least half a dozen kilometres, potentially much more.

So, I think I've figured out what the Epstein Drive equivalent is going to be. Look closely at this part of the video: The rocket is decelerating quite far from the planet's moon, so it must need a long distance to slow down, so either it has a low acceleration or it's going very fast on a torchship trajectory. Now look more closely at the innermost ring and the planet's surface. At the start of the clip they're barely touching, if at all. But later on they intersect much more clearly, so the rocket's position has changed noticeably in those two or so seconds. So it must be going quite fast, and to slow down at the moon it needs to have a significant acceleration. And considering how subtle this detail is, I don't think it was just put in there for cinematic purposes. In conclusion, I think this here is the KSP2 version of the Epstein drive.

Or, taking this a little further, have each planet's SOI hemispherical, intersecting at the barycentre, surrounded by the barycentre's SOI.

I don't think this engine has been shown here yet: It's clearly some magnetic nozzle, referring to the screenshot selection (https://imgur.com/a/9q74GFS) it seems to be either: A plasma-core antimatter engine (unlikely, not enough radiators) A mirror cell fusion engine A small Tomahawk fusion engine Or an antimatter-induced fusion engine

IMO the "craziest" engines on that list are the antimatter ones. I like this idea. Can someone please line up screenshots or something of all the engines in these so we can easily compare them to what we see? Edit: Already been done. Personally I'd put Daedalus in the fourth era, with the fourth era being set aside for stuff that'll either be at the very end of the tech tree or added in mods (antimatter, black hole starships, etc).

So my day in KSP has been quite, uhhh… entertaining. Today I was testing one of my combat spacecraft designs in KSP and since things went so hilariously wrong and while I initially didn't want to discuss it here, I might as well tell y'all about it too. Here's the vehicle I was testing, the IDFS X-Wing. A good blend of aesthetics and functionality, using an open-cycle gas-core nuclear engine. The first test flight began quite well, as usual the launch vehicle consisted only of an Orion engine, nuke tank, fairing and decoupler. It was about here that I lost all control of the vessel. Only later did I realize that this was because there's something in the spacecraft sucking up over 20kW of power. And it's entirely solar powered. And I launched it at nighttime. The Orion engine was still on and I had no way to shut it off, nor could I open the fairing or deploy the solar panels. At this point I calculated that the spacecraft would shoot back through Earth's atmosphere for a bit before accelerating back into space and out of the solar system Solomon-Epstein-style. Instead, the X-Wing and fairing broke apart and crashed down into what must've either been Xinjang or eastern Kazakhstan. The Hydrogen tank was the last bit to survive. But the Orion engine had other plans. Still attached to it's nuke tank and nothing else, it accelerated back into space while spinning around. Again I thought it would be lost to the void, never to be seen again, considering that it's Dv would be a three-digit number of km/s. Instead it began to descend again, giving everyone in southern China a really bad day. I thought that it would crash into the ground, ending this nonsense. Instead, the aerodynamic forces straightened it out, and after coming within a few kilometres of the mountaintops it shot back up into space. Again, it began to descend, still firing at full throttle. At this point I was trying to calculate just how much of the world would be wiped clean before the engine ran out of nukes. I thought the next target would be either Mongolia, Manchuria or the Korean peninsula. Thankfully it crashed into the ground, bringing the initial test to an end. The second test was more successful since I made sure to launch in the early morning and deploy the solar panels as soon as I left the atmosphere. On the way to orbit I realized that with the Dv of the Orion stage I could go much further than Low Earth Orbit. And since the Moon was straight above, I decided to go there instead. I used the Orion engine for most of the deceleration burn but finished it off with the X-Wing's own nuclear engine, since testing it was part of the mission goal. Finally I tested the landing gear just to make sure it worked. So, yeah, that's what I did in KSP today. Made it to deep space for the first time in Real Solar System, and learned to be more careful about energy consumption. I don't know if there's a moral to this story.

So, now, who's going to start updating the KSP wiki?

That was my mother's favourite part of it when I showed her the trailer. THIS. For years we've all wanted things like high-tech engines, multiplayer, colonisation, interstellar travel, more worlds to explore etc. And now we're finally getting it. Well, not now but rather late next year. Still, good enough.

This aged brilliantly

So, after re-watching the trailer, here's everything new I noticed: 0:12 New lens flare? Also clouds but I have my doubts they'll be in the game. 0:24 Some new engine on the orbiter vehicle? 0:48 Landing feet push up the soil a bit. I have doubts about this. 1:03 Valentina looks different, but I can't quite tell how. The hair I think? 1:19 New engine flame appearance? 1:24 Snowflake things falling off the rocket, probably not going to be in the game. 1:25 Sonic boom thing, idk what it's called. 1:28 Gravity-style collision with some part of a space station shattering into lots of little pieces. 1:29 Buildings?! That can't be for real. 1:36 Spinning habitat, new spaceplane parts. 1:38 New surface terrain on Duna, plus the colony obviously. 1:40 New rover parts. 1:42 Nuclear pulse propulsion, looks too good to be true so I have my doubts. 1:43 An asteroid field or planetary rings or something? Maybe this is inside the rings of that planet we see later in the trailer? 1:45 Jool looks way better. 1:47 Fusion-drive spacecraft over Jool, maybe Jool is the only place where you can mine fusion fuels like Helium-3? 1:54 Two volcanic bois. IIRC there used to be a plan to add lava lakes to Moho, looks like we're finally getting them somewhere. 1:56 Another new engine type, plus a new spacecraft module with sparks flying out of it. 1:58 New gas giant, presumably not in the Kerbol system since it has a moon with liquid water. 2:02 So it looks like this is going to be the Laythe of KSP2. I mean, Laythe will still presumably exist but this'll be the next habitable world. Also note that the landmasses appear to be covered in snow. 2:06 Glacial surface terrain. 2:10 Big domes with plants in them. Possibly the largest colony modules in the game. 2:15 All the domes appear elevated above the ground. I can't tell why. In the end, I'm guessing 40-50% of these things are actually going to be in the game.

Clouds were shown in early official art for KSP1 too.

How much thermal energy would I have to give the asteroid Eunomia in order to make it glow as hot as possible (without the asteroid melting/evaporating)?

Is this just an estimate or did you calculate it?

It's part of a spaceborne creature design I'm working on as part of Spaceception's novel project. Since the creature's main body is basically a sphere, I figured this'd be a good way to determine what kind of metabolic rate it would need to have to maintain it's core body temperature. And as for my second question, I'm trying to figure out how the [REDACTED] the Morrigan-class patrol destroyer from The Expanse can hold over 28000 metric tons of propellant in it's little body, as stated on the wiki. Liquid Mercury is the densest liquid I can think of, so... Well, that's a problem. Is there any other really-high-density propellant (over 10g/cm^3) that could do better? What about Ruthenium or Rhodium or Molybdenum?

Thanks. So, another question I have is this: Let's say I've got a rocket engine design that works by heating up liquid mercury and shooting it out the back, like an NTR but much hotter. If the mercury is heated to 100 million K, what should the expected exhaust velocity be?

This one may seem a bit odd out of context, so bear with me: Let's say that there's a sphere 70 meters in diameter orbiting as far from the sun as saturn, with a density and thermal conductivity comparable to living flesh. How much extra thermal energy (In W or kW) does the interior of this sphere need to produce to maintain an average temperature somewhere in the range of 10-40 degrees celsius?