Person012345

Sure, an accelerometer, anything that can measure the gravitation/acceleration on your craft. An accelerometer does measure gravity (albeit maybe not "directly"). If your rocket is in freefall and not in orbit then I imagine something has probably gone wrong. Once the meter has no reading, you'll know you're at apogee and you can make your pre-calculated burn. You'll know you're in orbit because you worked it all out beforehand. Or something.

also remember that what lags up ksp when it's using 1/4 - 1/8th of most modern cpus is not rendering the map screen. It's calculating in real time the physical effects of all the forces on every part of your ship. Real life doesn't need help doing this (and a rocket will just follow a pre-programmed trajectory that was all calculated out in advance taking whatever time they wanted) I guess. With small adjustments if the aforementioned radar/whatever is detecting its course detects that it's a little off course. I'm not a rocket scientist though.

I'm not saying it's how they do it, but it would be doable with a simple gravity meter (a spring loaded pressure sensor and an object with a reasonable mass on a pendulum) I imagine. I doubt it needs super advanced computing. Although as mentioned above it's probably done with radars or signals irl.

And yes I think putting the nearest star at a couple of hundred KU (kerbonomical units) or whatever from the sun (as opposed to closer to 253,000) would be more of a crime than a warp drive.

that seems a little overkill for a single bear.

Imagine jool. Ok, now imagine 5 - 6 times that. Now we have a pluto analogue. Would anyone realistically want to do this? Eh, maybe, as you say we'll have a timer in the future, we could do other stuff whilst it's happening. Now imagine 50,593 times as far as to jool. Now we have our alpha centauri analogue. We're not talking about "waiting a similar amount of time". Interstellar spaces are -vast-. Yes they'll be scaled down for the kerbals, but they're still ridiculously vast if we want any semblance of authenticity and not to make it a glorified, shiny outer planet with a bunch of large moons.

And yeah, we've seen gravitational lensing. I recommend watching the whole talk, but starting there is the section relevant to dark matter (and if you keep watching he explains why they think the universe is flat and not open).

We know how many protons and neutrons there are in the universe apparently. Regular matter doesn't account for it.

Mass is a measurement of the energy in a system. They are the same. The op is like saying "what if X was 100% weight 0% grams". It doesn't make any sense. Photons have a REST mass of 0 (theoretically although this isn't 100% confirmed, it's possible they have a tiny mass and that light is slower than c). If they have a rest mass of 0 then if they are at rest they presumably also have an energy of 0 (since, y'know...).

yeah, the SoI model in ksp is massively simplified because n-body physics are hard. It doesn't work quite that way in real life.

mass and energy are the same thing.

Think of it this way: Energy and mass are the same thing (E=mc^2). As you gain more energy you also gain more mass. There is a point where you have such huge amounts of inertia that you need to add tremendous amounts of energy just to accelerate by a little bit. Except the weight of the energy you just added makes the return from the energy even lower. It increases in such a way that there is a speed you will never be able to reach because your returns from your energy are so small and diminish with every bit of energy you add. That speed is c. It's true that you can always accelerate, but you will never reach that magic number. Or beyond. To do so would require infinite (or more than infinite respectively) amounts of energy. This isn't a precise explanation as the real one is mathematical and has to do with spacetime warping, but it's a decent explanation (since mass warps spacetime anyway).

No, that's wrong. To accelerate past c (even if we could magically somehow skip c) requires more than infinite energy according to GR. The way around it is not to somehow "skip" c, but rather to not accelerate (as in the alcubierre drive for example).

Who the **** would give $1 for that? That's douchebaggery, unless they have some good reason for it, especially since it's going to charity instead of EA. I'm considering throwing $50 - $100 at it, but I really don't like the idea of having to use origin if I do.

Like what exactly?

I upgraded and my save game was fine. Make a copy so you still have the old file when you try to upgrade.

They're also predicted by relativity.

0.1/10 Because I've seen you in this thread (now)

I would not care if there was an option. Just don't make it default.

If you enter the event horizon at the speed at light (in an orbital path as per the OP), then you already have infinite energy. If that infinite energy can't carry you through, then how much energy will you burn to pull you out? Infinity+1?

This. Also I'm not aware that spacetime falls into a black hole, seems like an odd way of phrasing it.

Or you could just learn the system. No offence intended, it's just that if it's changed 90% of the community who are already familiar with the current system will suddenly find themselves burning the wrong retrograde because they're used to it auto changing. It didn't auto change for me once and I ended up posting a help topic about it and thought that the fact that I was burning retrograde and my orbit was increasing was a bug until the navball mode was pointed out to me.

I don't know what he's talking about but we already think that faster than light speeds are theoretically possible with spacetime warping anyway, but that's "cheating". Distorting the fabric of spacetime so that something arrives somewhere faster than a beam of light outside that spacetime isn't really "faster than light" in the sense that any beam of light passing through the same area will be observed moving faster than the "faster than light" object. Right? Or am I wrong?

If by "a fair bit" you mean "the entire sum of which couldn't power a light bulb for 10 minutes" then sure.

To accelerate faster than light conventionally would require more than infinite energy. Which doesn't make sense.