Bej Kerman

It's probably just that they're stylized drawings/paintings. That's literally nothing to do with what I said. It looks like they were drawn then stretched out.

I don't think thats right. If you travel 1ly at 10% the speed of light it still takes you 10 years to reach your destination, so you still need 10y of food and reactor fuel to keep the lights on. You still experience time as if nothing is amiss. Its that your experience of time is slightly different relative to everyone else. So compared to a game with no accounting for relativity your in-transit vessel would need exactly the same amount of food, instead you'd need a little more food for every other part of your program. At 1/10 or 1/5 the speed of light it also wouldn't be that noticeable. It's not until you get up to .6 or .7c where you start to see a meaningful percentage difference, the kind that might effect gameplay decisions. I think this is the reason the devs decided to avoid it--it just creates a lot of headaches for very little (if any) gameplay benefit. Just a brief interjection, they did say a significant fraction of c in the original message, rendering most of this message moot. Also worth noting, I highly doubt there will be any way of preventing players from reaching these velocities, and that as far as my little knowledge in game design goes it shouldn't be impossible to apply time warp to specific entities depending on focused vessel velocity to emulate special relativity.

They look a bit stretched to me. Is that normal?

I stand corrected - I still maintain that regular jets should not be capable of anything above Mach 2 on the basis of the planet being an entire 90% smaller than real scale. Scramjets would also be a nice thing for the more aviation-oriented players to have, as rockets seem a bit overkill for aircraft that aren't intended to reach space (but are still meant to go really fast). I also hope propellers (if in KSP 2) aren't capable of reaching excessive airspeeds as it seems people have done in KSP 1.

Forget being possible. I don't think there's a point to adding it. I have yet to see someone who asked for this describe how it's actually useful (rewarding or challenging), especially in a game like KSP. Let's remember that one of the first selling points of KSP 2 is that interstellar vessels can be built, and I highly doubt players won't find a way to attain near-lightspeed velocities with the available stock parts. KSP already has time acceleration, if you can figure out how to apply that to specific entities in the game then you can do special relativity.

I don’t think they should be THAT slow. Theres something special about seeing your plane glow up from the speed it’s at. A jet shouldn't be capable of getting you fast enough to make your aircraft glow. You should need scramjets for that.

I think the RAPIER shouldn't be a jet and rocket in one, that's a bit silly. Or at least the current RAPIER should be shunted forward in the tech tree with the following proposed engine taking its current place: a hybrid jet containing a jet capable of reaching Mach 2/3 and a scramjet (as opposed to a rocket) for reaching higher velocities in atmosphere once the temperatures needed to operate the scram are attained. Being able to "paint" on heat-resistant tiling a la SR-71 would help. Yes I know, but then there would be no point for a scramjet. Many of Kerbal’s engines are less powerful & less efficient than their irl counterparts for gameplay reasons. This should be no different for aircraft. And that's why I propose a velocity ceiling of Mach 2/3 instead of something more realistic - KSP isn't meant to be a simulation of reality, it's supposed to be an emulation from which people can learn about how reality works. Using a lower velocity ceiling means being able to demonstrate why scramjets are needed for these high velocities, otherwise you'll end up with players thinking a jet is sufficient to attain suborbital velocities. That's not true, and in order to get a more true-to-life behavior that also gives scramjets room for actual use, jet engines need to be nerfed.

You have to get through the corona first. I doubt we will ever build ships that could get anywhere near the photosphere anyway.

Define surface. Would you really need to get close enough to count as being on the "surface" to collect a useful amount of fuel?

And as far as I can tell, collecting fuel from larger mediums is a similar technology with far less problems. No, I won't drop the fixation.

Define casual

No-one has brought up harvesting stuff from the interplanetary/interstellar medium yet which is weird because the post has "Bussard Ramjet" in the name.

I think it would start out with at least basic prediction and you would just choose when to launch How does choosing when to launch protect a spacecraft intended to spend years in solar orbit? How does this make gameplay any more fun?

Bit late to be asking this. You don't have to look far to see that KSP 2 is in good hands.

The hype train is bad. It's all just a pointless echochamber that almost always results in harm and toxicity when the developers don't do something when people expect them to.

Can you link a paper that supports this? I doubt with how they actually work (and the fact we will inevitably come up with ways to counter the heat) that any of this would be 100% true. Burden of evidence is on you.

I don't have anything to reread. You applied the word Bussard ramjet to something that is mostly unrelated without clarifying that you were doing this because you didn't know a better word. It's not my fault for not understanding something you didn't make clear.

A Bussard ramjet is possible. In addition, they're meant to scoop up material from Interstellar space, and not planetary atmospheres. I know because this Wikipedia article actually cites papers, and the writers of this article know the physics of what they're talking about. I did my research. Just saying "a Bussard ramjet is meant to collect stuff from atmospheres, the Bussard ramjet wouldn't work, there's a tightrope etc." without any citations is conjecture, which in scientific terms means bologna. Please, research the topic to ensure your conclusions are accurate. This is proper physics and KSP 2 will be getting involved in actual physics, even if simplified somewhat. It's no use saying the ramjet won't work because your intuition says so, even if professional papers disagree.

Kind of a false dichotomy; I don't find anything wrong with the current animation, but I'd be happy to see a new one and the addition of a (not gory) marker Why does there need to be a new animation? I don't mind having a marker, I never said that is a bad thing. I'm saying the current poof works. It's not gory but the other ideas lack the graphicness of seeing the gray innards of your Kerbal exploding and briefly floating in the air from the impact, which should be perfect in establishing that they're now dead and won't come back. Goop sounds a bit too silly, especially the looney tunes idea which doesn't do much to establish that they're gone now. I'm just saying that the current death animation is really good, and as the saying goes, don't fix it if it isn't broken.

What's wrong with the current animation?

How new are you to the game?

This is supposed to be the way new players are introduced to KSP? It has to be laid out flat. Minmus on its own can be tilted so as to be an introduction to these concepts.

Agreed. Grass from the KSC grounds should not contribute to the development of heat shields for distant probes, in any shape or form - having different science types would help alleviate that silliness, I think. Grass from the KSC should only contribute to things regarding botany.

Why not just autogenerate it?

Hyperloop is an extremely flawed system - we've used ordinary trains and subways for centuries, usually for many good reasons.