sciencecompliance

After installing Parallax v. 2.0.4 to KSP v. 1.12.3 with CKAN v. 1.31.0, I'm getting EXTREMELY bad performance. The frame rate drops to a literal slideshow with an FPS < 1. My computer runs other games and base KSP or KSP with EVE perfectly fine. I have a Ryzen 7 5800x CPU, and an RTX 3080. I see people with worse system specs run Parallax perfectly fine-ish. I have new-ish drivers downloaded in the last couple of months for my GPU. I have tried installing multiple times and have deleted all other mods except for those on which Parallax is dependent. What the hell could be going wrong? Edit: Just performed a benchmark test with the free version of the 3DMark software, and my PC performed lower than average but within what appeared to be 1 standard deviation of the mean result for similar systems, and better than 85% of all systems tested using the software.

How does Earth vary more significantly than some other bodies that have seasons? Saturn changes quite drastically depending on the season, partially due to massive shadows that are cast by the rings that change dramatically over the course of a Saturnian year. Uranus would have even more extreme seasons since its nearly 90 degree axial tilt would mean one pole would be facing completely away from the sun for many (Earth) years. The only way I can think that Earth's seasons are some kind of wild outlier in their intensity is with the way the biosphere changes seasonally, but that's not really a climate thing. Actually, the presence of liquid water on Earth even mitigates seasonal changes in some places and creates microclimates. For instance, Seattle is at a higher latitude than Chicago but has less extreme seasons due to the effect of ocean currents.

I get that you're talking about the game's coordinate system and the fact that all the planets' poles point in the same direction, but, if you weren't aware, axial tilt in real astronomy is based on the angle of a body's axis relative to its own orbit around whatever body it's orbiting. I only say this because if the "axial tilt matches the orbital inclination", then that body actually has zero axial tilt (also known as obliquity) in real astronomical terms.

Is there any decent historical lore (official and/or fan-made) for Kerbals going back centuries or millennia? I think it would be fun to take a dive into someone's envisioning of the history of the peoples of Kerbin and how they got to the stage of technological development to have a space program. Someone has to have geeked out on this at some point. Any history majors out there?

The trojans are where they are BECAUSE of Jupiter's gravity. They are located around the Sun-Jupiter L4 and L5 Lagrange points. Even though there are issues with the IAU definition (as with any attempt to categorize reality into tidy little boxes), this is a poor case against it.

And probably wouldn't exist anywhere but on/above the surface of a massive body like a planet, as pressure in a gas will quickly push the particles away from each other without a force like gravity holding them together.

I just saw a funny Reddit post where someone made a hanging monorail in KSP1, and then it hit me: if KSP2 is going to put more emphasis on base-building, wouldn't it make sense to have trains/trams that can transport raw materials and Kerbals to different places around a celestial body? Say, if there is a big vein of some valuable material, you could run a rail from your base out to a mining outpost. Another idea would be to have your spaceport a little ways from your base to avoid any damage to your base from incoming or outgoing craft. Anyone know if there's been talk about this? I did a brief search through the forums and didn't see anything.

If this were to be done right, I'd think there'd have to certain conditions that would have to be met for this to be possible, both to avoid coding in ridiculous exploits and having stable solutions that aren't too computationally intensive. I kind of alluded to this in my original post where if you were to do this with ion engines, you would have to make sure that you had enough electrical power over the entire trajectory to maintain a certain level of thrust. If not, you would only be able to warp under thrust to the point at which the requisite conditions weren't met. You could also do this with the ship's dynamics under thrust to make sure that it didn't have some divergent control condition. Shouldn't be too difficult to determine whether a craft has enough attitude control authority to be dynamically stable and maintain a specified heading. I'm not saying this won't make the development more difficult--it certainly will--but it won't be so difficult as to make this problem someone's Ph.D. thesis. As long as you can maintain thrust along one of the cardinal directions (prograde, retrograde, radial out, radial in, normal, anti-normal), that would be enough for me. I just want to see technology like ion engines included in the game in a way that is both (relatively) true to reality and fun to play around with. As it currently stands in KSP 1, ion engines both have a lot more thrust than they do in reality and a lot less thrust than is necessary to make them fun.

I mostly agree with you and don't think the core game experience should prioritize the construction of airplanes, however, I still maintain that there should be science points in early game that would be easier to gain with an airplane / jet-powered craft and that there should be some tech tree nodes that can't be unlocked without accomplishments made with jets / air-breathing engines and possibly runway / horizontal landings. Think about it: does it make sense to make the RAPIER engines available to the player if they have never flown a jet engine at hypersonic speeds or in rarefied atmosphere? Not really. Does it make sense to make heavy landing gear available if the player has never made a runway / horizontal landing? Again, not really. In reality, accomplishments in rocketry and spaceflight will beget wisdom and further accomplishments along that technological trajectory. There may be some cross-pollination, say, if you've landed landers with landing struts and driven rovers around with pressurized tires and brakes, but the most optimized landing gear is going to be designed with data from that application specifically. If you think about rocket engines, too, many of the more efficient ones use turbopumps, which share a lot of commonality with jet engine technology. It would make sense to require experience with high pressure/temperature turbines to unlock those tech nodes or at least get you there more quickly for having made accomplishments with jet-powered craft.

Just because you can inappropriately extrapolate equations derived from empirical data about the physical universe does not mean that the Alcubierre drive is theoretically possible. I really wish this notion would stop being spread around. There is no basis for assuming the Alcubierre drive is theoretically possible. Equations are not evidence.

Please, for the love of science, no. The Alcubierre drive has no empirical grounding. Manipulating equations to achieve a desired outcome is not science and does not belong in a game like KSP that should be at least tethered to reality, if only tenuously in some cases.

I've seen a lot of great comments about how the science system should be improved for KSP2, but I have another issue with the science system / tech tree from KSP1. Having gone through almost the entire tech tree on hard mode, I've found airplanes to be almost entirely useless for gaining science and progressing through the tree. Why would I spend hours flying a jet airplane around Kerbin and collecting data from all the different biomes and then go through the difficulty of piloting an airplane safely to a runway / horizontal landing if I can fly an endless number of ballistic missiles on different trajectories around Kerbin much more quickly and use reliable drogue / parachute landings in a capsule with a payload bay containing experiments to quickly and easily farm science? There are also no achievements tied to aviation that will hold you back in the tree progression, so there is basically no reason to build airplanes if you are trying to optimize your speed of progression through the game. This also ties into another issue with science mode in KSP1 that people have touched on but I think underscores the point I'm trying to make about building airplanes: budget. I understand that budget is a consideration in career mode, but it should be a constraint in science mode as well. In reality, launching a lot of rockets around a planet to study all the different biomes / regions would be much more expensive than having science labs in a single airplane or a few airplanes that are flown around the planet to study the different biomes. Having some game mechanic that incentivized building airplanes rather than just rockets due to airplanes' relative cost effectiveness in certain applications would both be more realistic and force the player to explore the depth of aerospace technology as they are advancing through the game.

I have recently gotten fairly deep into KSP 1 and built a couple of ion (DAWN) engine-powered test probes to determine the viability of using ion engines in-game. I avoided using the ion engines for a while because I saw how little thrust they produce and just knew it would be tedious as hell to do long-duration burns before being able to time warp to the next maneuver / sphere of influence. Well, lo and behold, I was right. Ion enignes are virtually unplayable with the way KSP 1's game mechanics work. It got me thinking, though: why couldn't you just do a time warp with a trajectory that is integrated over the time of the burn or uses some discretized approximation so that a player doesn't have to be limited to the 4x physics warp and could actually let the player plan out a trajectory with a constant, low-thrust burn rather than winging it or waiting for a very long time for a burn to complete? Obviously, the game engine would have to be able to determine whether you would have enough electrical power and whether the solar panels would be occluded at any point in the trajectory. But, taking into account these considerations, I feel like there is a way that such maneuvers could be implemented that would be true to the real technology (and even more so than the current ion engines in KSP) and make them fun to play with rather than a tedious bore. Anyone have any thoughts? (Image included as an example of what a trajectory for such a transfer orbit would look like)