Hi, all. Here's a short love letter to KSP. I've been playing casually for 6 months or so, mostly on the difficulty setting of "I have a full-time job and a family," which means that I'm quick to put an extra gallon of fuel in my ships with Hyperedit to prevent having to redo a mission, and that I sometimes allow myself to warp ships directly from the launch pad into orbit because building launch vehicles and making an efficient gravity turn feels time-consuming now that I've done it a few dozen times. :-) Still, I get TONS out of this game.
I didn't sleep well last night so I was killing the wee hours fiddling around with KSP aircraft. I've been playing the Laythe Space Program mod because I hadn't gotten to the Jool system yet in the stock game, and because launching ships from Laythe provides instant gratification as I play pinball around the big guy's moons. So I had a new jet plane sitting on the Laythe runway, Jeb and Val at he controls, and it was dark out. So I sped up time to get to daylight, watching the plane's shadows appear on the runway... and it was still really dim. I thought "dangit, it always seems dim on Laythe -- is it because I'm so far away from the sun?"
So I rotate the camera to look up at the sun, which should be high in the sky by this time, and I see that Jool is eclipsing the sun. Boom -- mind blown.
On Earth and Kerbin, there's a simple day/night cycle. It's a little strange on Earth because the incline of the planet on its axis means that days are a little longer at some times of the year and a little shorter at others, but that's a small, incremental change through the seasons. Eclipses are rare and short. On Laythe, living things have to deal with a multi-factor cycle. There are days with full sunlight and nights with full darkness, but also significant time in daylight eclipsed by Jool, and other times in darkness with bright Jool-light (or Tylo-light) lighting up the night. I also imagine that most real bodies would have seasons like Earth does. Thus Jool would have sun-revolution-seasons, and Laythe would have Jool-revolution-seasons. Just figuring out how much light a spot on Laythe gets throughout Jool's year would take a hugely complicated calendar.
It put me in awe of the universe (and here I stress that I was completely sober) to think about what life would be like on Laythe. On Earth, for example, living things act differently at night, dawn, day, and dusk, and in the different seasons. Would Laythe have plants that bloom only just at the beginning of a Jool-clipse in Jool-revolution-spring? Would Laythe have animals that have evolved to see well in green light and thus wake up only when the only light was the green reflection of Jool?
Humans evolved to sleep in the dark for whatever reason, and today sleeping at night is deeply ingrained in our social customs. Would Laythians have different social customs for full-day, full-night, Jool-clipse, and Jool-lit-night? They might take more risks during the full-day and hole up completely during full-night, because unless you've got mastery of the calendar, who knows if it's the time of Jool-revolution-year that the bandersnatches come out to hunt?
It reminds me of the great Asimov story Nightfall, about a planet in a six-star solar system. He doesn't get too far into what it would mean to live in constant daylight, though the story implies that the inhabitants of Lagash have a deeply flawed knowledge of science and astronomy because they're always in daylight and can't observe anything astronomical except the movements of their six suns. (Astronomers on Lagash didn't even know that their planet had a moon until just before it eclipsed one of the stars, because they couldn't see it in the blinding multi-starlight.)
It comes down to this: experiencing and dealing with the Kerbol system has been a more immersive and awe-inspiring than any sci-fi movie, and has stirred up more wonder, too. Loving it.
