Incarnation of Chaos

300MW PER NEWTON!? At that point you're better off just using the colossal nuclear/fusion reactor you have to boil water and send it out the back!

Pretty sure the more conventional idea for how the Piezoelectric drive supposedly works has something to do with quantum spin. So indeed, and i try to not be too stuffy about things like this. The only way we'll ever go beyond conventional physics, the standard model, etc. Is by pushing them to the absolute breaking points, and since there's no convenient way to access black holes, neutron stars or other similar objects near the solar system anything else that looks sufficiently novel should at least get a second look. I think the only reason I'm so hostile towards the EMdrive specifically is because of just how thoroughly it's been busted, and the even more frustrating fact that there's real propulsion technologies that could be developed with technology we have now instead. Everyone wants a quick fix, a silver bullet or some miracle, and honestly that to me is just missing the point entirely. We want Space for it's resources, those resources will allow further exploration etc. Brute-force isn't pretty, but at the end of the day getting to Mars and beyond with big dumb boosters is likely to catapult us further technologically than sitting around waiting for some "Magic technology" would. Assuming we stay, and don't lose sight of the ultimate objective in the end like what happened with Apollo. And if you make that step, then you likely won't have to wait as long in the first place is the most hilarious part.

I know what destructive interference is....i even mentioned it. I wasn't questioning if Gravity Waves could suffer from interference, i was questioning how Microwaves could affect them in the slightest. The piezoelectric one iv'e heard of, but the issue with it isn't the same as the EMdrive. They can demonstrate thrust, the results are repeatable. The explanation they're giving for why it's giving thrust is why they've been getting "Slammed", because it doesn't pass muster. As for the rest, i actually didn't have any issue with the idea of your test. I was mostly just saying there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be conducted on earth, even if the test needed a custom cavity. And i shouldn't have said "You", because i wasn't actually thinking you should sit down and do their work for them. So that's my bad, and the burden of proof is on them (The people who keep testing EMdrive) to write such equations and then demonstrate they have predictive power.

I really, REALLY want you to sit down and write up a mathematical formula for how spewing Microwaves with a wavelength measured in the Centimeters into a copper cone could interact with....gravity waves. Especially at differing frequencies that would cause destructive interference(Since the frequency of the microwave source wouldn't vary much, unless constructed intentionally to do so), and then get up on the wake and "Surf" on them, while also not falling off. Things we've detected so far that create gravity waves are incredibly large collisions between massive compact objects such as black holes, neutron stars etc. Or other cataclysmic events, such as the Big Bang or Supernova. And we know their directions pretty well, and mind you if any of this was true then we would've seen some significant changes in thrust regardless (Since there's stronger GW sources in some directions than others, so just by pointing it in different directions you would've measured changes). Also "Gravity Wave Highways"?....what? Like are we using Gravity waves as a stand-in for the Aether now? Even though that doesn't make any sense? Like this highlights my post pretty exceptionally well; what about any of this is testable/already hasn't been busted? What defines the behavior of "Engaging gravity waves"? What would even make you think that the behavior is related to Gravity waves in any way? There's multiple detectors around the world, and they would've noticed any anomalies during the testing. So this ad hoc hypothesis doesn't even stand up to the most basic of scrutiny, and the explanation of microwaved copper is still valid.

And there's been pretty exciting developments in Muon lasers recently.... Man i wish i could play with some of this stuff at some point; even though I'd imagine it would end up consuming more energy than it produced in the end xD. But back to the actual topic at hand, NASA tested this thing in a vacuum chamber with some of the most sensitive instruments to date a few years back. They were able to get a force, but noted that when rotating the "Drive" into various positions it didn't seem to change direction (Or something like that). Their conclusion was basically some imperfection in the cavity was causing more heating than average, and thus producing a tiny force. So that should've killed it, right there. But even if this thing worked, everyone ignores the simple fact that even the "designer" admits. The damn thing doesn't scale, and requires increasingly ludicrous amounts of energy to produce more thrust as you continue trying desperately to make it work. So even without the extra mass of propellant, it isn't this silver bullet to free humanity from the tyranny of the rocket equation. After a point; the weight of the generators completely dominates the thrust. Oh and it violates one of the core laws of physics, so there's that minor detail also. Mind you; that would actually be fine if a sufficient explanation backed up by extraordinary evidence was provided and repeatable (One of the things that the "Well we should have an open mind" people seem to forget). But it doesn't.... Special and General Relativity were "Crazy" ideas for their time, but Einstein didn't just go lay down and say **** you haters. Nah, he sent teams to observe eclipses and measure the difference in the position of stars that could only be explained by the sun's mass bending the light around it. He also showed that the anomalies in Mercuries orbit were explained by his model, and even today GPS has to account for tiny amounts of relativistic drift for it's calculations. EMdrive hasn't showed anything similar, and instead has failed every test thrown at it. Do i think that eventually, something will be found that's a departure from conventional physics? Absolutely, but EMdrive isn't going to be what finds it.

Yeah that has more to do with KSP's stock wheel implementation and the lack of tools to get them nice and perpendicular with the ground, but again there's mod(s) for thattm Biggest thing in FAR i found personally wasn't even takeoff, it was landing. The gears in stock have abysmally low collision tolerance, and will break at speeds >80-120m/s upon attempting a landing. I just used the same MM patch i implemented the KSPWheel stuff into and whacked in a section to increase their tolerance. IRL there's much heavier gear (though often at the cost of extra mass and volume, just look at the difference between carrier-bound and land aircraft for an extreme example). As for the teaching, absolutely. You'll likely find yourself actually looking at things like "What makes a classically stable aircraft" (One that attempts to return to level flight when the nose is pitched down, therefore resisting changes in pitch) or exploring things like how supersonic flow differs from subsonic and transonic. And how to shape an aircraft to get the best performance wherever you most want it. I don't think any less of anyone for not using FAR, i might cringe at Matt Lowne when he's desperately whacking nose cones into engines or intakes. But without a doubt i'd consider him a better player than me. I came from flight simulators, and therefore the egregious disparity between KSP stock aero and IRL aero bothered me significantly. But Stock Aero does the job fine for just lobbing rockets, so for the vast majority it's fine. If anything, I'm just glad the option is there in the form of mods for weirdos like me that want somewhat accurate behavior of planes in their space game.

A better solution (In terms of scalability and applicability to as many craft as possible), would be a series of parts to utilize a "Sweating" method. You could attach these to surfaces, and while idle they could also act as radiators. But when activated they would tap onboard propellant stores (Liquid Fuel) at a certain rate. While fed, they'd prevent heating from occurring much like a heat shield. A much more advanced version (Mod) could tie the consumption of resources to a mathematical function, and have a Maximum heat setting. Thus they would "Soak" if allowed to do so, and heating beyond that would cause parts to heat up once more. This could be changed by the user, but at the cost of using more resources. For an Aerodynamic solution; they could have parts with shapes more suited to planes. This does have the potential to become extremely cheaty, so it should definitely be a late-game unlock. Perhaps with the rapier engines (I think there's several hypersonic concepts IRL that had this in mind to prevent the plane from boiling away).

OP i was in your position back when i had gotten into KSP enough to start mucking about with planez a year or two ago. FAR was the first mod for KSP i ever downloaded. That being said; my experience was that it's a massive trap. Why? Well you're going to need more lifting area than stock to get planes in the air with "Reasonable" speeds, and thus you'll eventually be getting a mod for procedural wings. Then you'll realize that without the KSP stock fudge factor that makes all wings generate double or quadruple the lift (Something somewhere is squared, i forget what it is). That your mass ratios for larger planes are all outta wack, and thus will likely end up getting SMURFF. And then you'll realize stock engines aren't enough, nor are stock plane parts. So you'll download a variety of those part mods, then realize it would be nice to be able to power all of this stuff. Then you'll have Near Future Electric, and perhaps at that point would've gotten frustrated with the EXPLETIVE landing gear. So you'll go grab KSP wheel, roll some Stock Patches for the stock gears. Then you might find yourself needing some unusual sized bits, so now you have Tweakscale... Before you know it; you now have a 20-30 mod install just to feed the monster that is this incredible mod. I personally have no regrets, and while some people will say KSP "Aero modeling" has gotten better. The fact is that KSP doesn't attempt to even approximate how aerodynamics even works for aircraft, the implementation is mostly intended for rockets and was backported for aircraft only after people had expressed some interest in them. This leads to rather silly situations where people can take aircraft from low supersonic to hypersonic by just wacking nosecones into engines and intakes, because all KSP is looking at are integer values for Drag and Lift.... FAR isn't perfect, and it can be frustrating at times. But you don't need a degree in aeronautical engineering to use it, just patience. And once you do, you'll find the rewards far greater than anything stock Aero could ever provide.

Signal Delay really should be left for mods, and i really, really don't want to get into the whole "Realism" debate over it. KSP2 is still using scaled planets, scaled distances, and timewarp. So Signal Delay just becomes an annoyance rather than enhanced realism/drawback, and the whole "Why not just use a kerbal instead" thing really bothers me. There's plenty of applications where i cannot "Just use a kerbal" if i need instant control without significantly changing my design and bolting on a wack ton more dry mass. My 3-piece interplanetary mothership? Yeah i can't really "Just use a kerbal" to control the sections containing the engines and labs, nor can i really "Just use a kerbal" if i want to refuel it with an automated lander while my dudes are doing science on Duna. I don't want to write scripts to control all of this stuff because quite frankly.....there's really no need to. I want to make a flexible, multipurpose craft that i can decide to use for one-off missions should i choose. Not have to write page after page of useless, bespoke "Code" that doesn't even teach me programming because it's some garbled mess of other languages and custom API calls that the developers dared called their own. Or use a visual scripting language that while making it more accessible to beginners; doesn't do anything but get in my way. Mods that try to implement actually realistic things can implement Signal Delay, and that's for the best.

Well, that's at least something. Thanks!

Please use Spoilers for your videos, that one filled up a quarter of a page on a 21:9 Ultrawide o.o Secondly; iv'e seen more of Kurzgesagt's content than is likely healthy, and that includes that one. I'm aware of the "Surface" Neutron Stars have, but considering the Surface of the sun is actually far more realistically approached without losing your life i think the distinction is fairly academic. I was mostly curious about the Atmosphere claim, because that one i don't recall them mentioning at any point. Unless you're talking about a Neutron Star taking material off of a companion star before it goes bang in a Type 1 Supernova.

Are you using KJR or KJR-Next? That's really the only way iv'e found to make larger planes stable.

This is why i was confused tbh, i always assumed you'd orbit well outside a radius that tidal forces could tear you to bits (Or have better materials late-game which could resist them better, CNT's or Graphene.) What? Have we actually ever confirmed this via spectroscopy, or is this just speculation? Plus if you're going to say "Atmosphere, surface, core" make something planet-like, well then technically plain Stars meet that definition also....

You can always download the previous versions of it via beta tab on steam, or if you bought directly from squad all of them are available for download there too. So I don't see any reason why you're talking about potentially loosing access to older versions. As far as this entire debate in general. People, SQUAD has already made their decision. The last several updates have focused on graphics in one way or another. Get a better system, stay on a previous version, or get left behind.

What? Are you talking orbital or like standing on one?

Even if you could, you would break compatibility with all other KSP versions potentially. One of the main reasons they're making KSP2 however is because the code from KSP2 is not weighed down by the years of dependencies and cruft that KSP is, and these might very well prevent a backport of the feature to KSP1. There is plenty in the meantime that could be done to further optimize KSP1, but at this point I'm not even sure if SQUAD has the staff on hand. They seem to be in maintenance mode, rather than actively developing major features/changes to the game's core code. This would imply to me that anything of this magnitude is unlikely, but stranger things have happened in games. As for the last one... You'd have to give me the link (Unless it's that paper), because N-body isn't anything to do with calculating the interactions between parts. It's calculating interactions between massive bodies like planets, asteroids, and stars, with the vessel physics being somewhat separate. I say "Somewhat" because there is one case i could think of, which is where the craft is being pulled by multiple bodies. In an N-body simulation, this would just "Emerge" from the fact that the code is simulating how such a situation would play out IRL. Where in a Patched Conics Approximation, it would require special code to handle. But KSP doesn't deal with such situations at all, since it uses "Spheres of influence", and treats your ship as always being dominated by the influence of one gravity well. So i don't see that happening for KSP. KSP2 would have a situation like this at Rask and Rusk, but we'd have to see their solution there before calling it either way.

Pulsar are a very specific type of neutron star....they're to neutron stars what wormholes are to black holes. You can be a neutron star without being a pulsar, but pulsars are also neutron stars.

Rigid body simulation is the actual issue, as it requires knowing the previous state of the previous part. Which in English means that you cannot multithread it (well you technically could, but the result would be each thread waiting for the last in sequential order. So it would actually be SLOWER) You can do multi-core, multiple thread, gpu accelerated physics for ships, but it will require a different way of handling vessels, likely involving particles, and it would take time, money and specialized developers to make. Doing a full N-body simulation of the system in reality wouldn't be that computationally expensive if they developed it from the ground up, and used a system of culling like KSP2 where systems wouldn't be fully loaded until you encountered their outer boundaries (you'd still have to simulate the interactions with the system in the background, so I'm not actually sure how much you're saving ) The issues with n-body come mostly from the inherent chaotic nature, relative reference frames and etc. That would all be alien to anyone who hadn't touched principia in KSP, and it would also make orbits unstable. But you don't want to simulate the systems/celestials; you want the ships. And for that, it literally isn't even a talking point. There's ways to do it, but it has very little to do with n-body (this is referring to gravitation!). Where the ship physics has to do with forces, acceleration, joints, deformation etc. This has been beaten to death on multiple threads though, so to summarize the same conclusion that they all reached. It's not impossible, but it's not going to happen due to the breaking of compatibility, and the specialist resources needed. Especially anything on a GPU. The last nail in the coffin though? KSP2 is still using rigid body for vessels, but they've developed a system to treat large numbers of relatively static parts as a single one for the calculations. This will in their opinion allow part counts in the thousands. That remains to be seen, but they've been bullish about this from day one. And it doesn't require any fancy new physics or developer skills, just going from a naive implementation of the same code to a more well optimized version.

That's all completely reasonable. I'm by no means a biologist, so I was pretty sure that it wasn't ever as simple as "make plant go fast" but this was an absolutely fantastic reply!

Yeah I think I might have misled you with the "it's basically cheating" line. A three stage to orbit rocket will be much easier to construct and get to the surface intact in most cases. The hybrid plane is a much more advanced construction, but can do more once you're there. Also I wasn't thinking an SSTO, those wings are dead weight too much past 20km. Basically I was saying that a plane could potentially do in two stages what a conventional rocket could in 3 on Eve. SSTO from Eve with planes is still difficult, if not borderline. So definitely not recommended as your first ascent vehicle.

Firstly; this thread wasn't what i expected. And that's a good thing xD Secondly what would be stopping you from taking the next step and modifying the plant's cells to replicate faster? If it's just taking excess water up into it's cells and expanding the cell membrane/wall, then i could definitely see that being an issue for taste. You could also potentially look for the sequences that coded for the chemicals known to produce distinctive taste/smell/etc. and wack duplicates in there. There's also a third option, which would likely be the best. You could see why the plant was uptaking water and retaining it instead of using it for further division, and "Short-circuit" those pathways to cause it to encourage cell division after a certain threshold (There IS a reason plants like to retain water). Is it literally just "We wanted bigga fruit, we got bigga fruit, we stop" and there isn't any money in further exploration or is it something else? Plants are some of the most well-characterized organisms we have genetically, and they're not too difficult to modify especially with modern tools. You'd still need to look out for unknown/dangerous side effects, but that's why we test in the first place.

Go for Gilly first, and setup IRSU and a bit of infrastructure there. That way when your first expeditions to the surface inevitably fail, there's always something in orbit with plenty of DV to haul a rescue craft to Kerbin (Or give it a decent kick, depends on how you want to design). Since it takes so much DV to get off the surface, this'll simplify your mission planning sigifigantly. Oh, and pro tip. Forget proper "Landing" on Gilly, use Ze claw to make your life significantly easier. You can try to land on it "Conventionally", but i wasted more time than i care to admit trying to get something settled on it's surface. Haven't gone back since though, mostly because of the intense flashbacks of 1.6.1 legs + Gilly + me being impatient. And you can go pretty crazy mass-wise, since the gravity is so tiny that even hilariously large craft will have insane TWR with relatively small engines. For the recovery tug, it should be designed for Eve orbit, where TWR isn't nearly as forgiving. But since you'd be putting a station around Gilly anyway, you can figure that out afterwards. indeed just getting the station there is the hard part, Eve has 3X the gravity of Kerbin. So it's SOI dominates in comparison to Gilly, and due to Gilly's orbit being so inclined and far out it rarely enters a nice configuration for you to insert yourself directly into it's orbit. There's option #2 if you don't use FAR which is basically as good as straight up cheating. Make an Electric Plane, use it to haul a rocket up to 20K in eve's atmosphere. Profit. Atmospheric pressure at 20K is around 1ATM, so standard Kerbin launchers can work with a bit of finessing (You're still dealing with 3X Gravity). If you have Near Future Electric, this becomes even more insane due to the reactors. Even the most basic one can power a plane for a fraction of the mass of batteries. And it won't stop producing power until nearly 4 1/2 years assuming you're running it at full power, which is quite the loiter time.

:O But seriously, it seems me and the OP have a different definition. So i provided that reply for context more than anything else. Then why not just make it a neutron star with a massive debris field created by a planet that wandered too close and got wrenched apart by tidal forces using whatever procedural system Intercept is using for creating rings around gas giants? Since that would avoid any connotations of it being actually how black holes work and be a heck of a lot easier.

I took it as "The closest you can achieve replicating their observed behavior within the constraints of consumer hardware" tbh To get something really spectacular you'd need a fluid sim, potentially using particles and the like. And when they do sims of this stuff for academic purposes they generally have to let them cook for a while, so definitely not real-time. But things like Time Dilation, Accretion disks, slingshotting, mergers or even Einstein-Rosen Bridges (Wormholes) could all be fair game, especially with clever use of optimizations and approximations (Which really, it all goes to $h!t past the event horizon anyway. So Approximation is good enough for us plebeians). Which is why i voted no on all counts; the amount of work you'd need to do on the backend to make these things behave like people "Expect" is quite a bit. And that's before we even get into Issac Arthur territory, using them as Antimatter or heavy element factories and the like. So that to me seems more like "Expansion level" content than just "Eh, bolt this on while we're bored on a friday night" type of stuff.

Without a n-body implementation any potential black hole would just act like a normal planet with impossible gravity as you approach the center and a kill sphere when you get too close. My personal vote is no, but it's not like I think it's geninuely impossible. We don't know if the solution for Rask and Rusk will actually be a decent substitute for n-body. There's also the question of what it would really offer, what would it do that nothing else could? KSP2 needs to release and simmer for a while, and then black holes could perhaps come in a expansion.