Bacterius

That is a common misunderstanding, actually. Even though the SOI of Kerbol is infinite, by virtue of being the main celestial body, it nevertheless has an escape velocity, above which you will assume a hyperbolic trajectory to infinity.

Stupidity in general. I have been told it is infinite.

How is the gravity so weak underwater? I am guessing the science gizmo is trying to measure gravitational acceleration which the buoyancy force on the ship skews...

Well I once put hundreds of debris in a retrograde orbit to simulate a Kessler syndrome but regrettably they have never collided with me yet.

What, you don't want to see the fireworks? I kinda feel like I'd at least want to watch that before burning up.

Thank you for proving my point. "You are being lazy, there is a limit, just accept it and move on". I am really tired of people constantly perceiving opinions as complaints. Of course everyone needs to work within their current limit, because they simply have to if they don't want to be playing a slideshow, thank you for stating the obvious. I was saying that the limit is uncomfortably low for what it could - and should - be. Also, nice strawman, converting the problem into a "technical challenge". Sometimes it's not about setting challenges or achieving a goal, you know - sometimes we just want to launch big things with lots of parts to have fun, maybe that is what we find enjoyable? Of course not, you've just turned the argument into "this game is about achieving more with the least amount of parts, and you're doing it wrong if you're wasting resources and using more parts than required". Well done. Your reply is completely missing the point of what I was trying to convey, and insulting at that. In any case, let's not derail the thread. We all know how internet arguments usually end.

To add my data point (for what it's worth), I have an i5 at 3.7GHz with a beefy - but AMD - graphics card and the stock version of the game becomes unplayable, as in, less than 5 frames per second (which I consider to be too slow and unresponsive to be fun) after around 300-400 parts. I usually don't launch such big rockets, but station part count adds up pretty quickly, which is frustrating. I won't make any in-depth comments as to the current state of KSP performance and how it affects players because on this forum it will evidently just be met with "buy a better computer", "it's still in development" or even "you don't know what you're talking about" and so on, but suffice it to say, I am not happy with it and am hoping that things will get better eventually. There's a lot of hardware potential which KSP and/or the underlying Unity engine is not making use of, and while it doesn't need to be the most optimized game of all time, let's say it's a bit on the slowish side at the moment, and it's getting on many people's nerves. There's nothing worse than being creatively hindered in a sandbox by a technical difficulty which clearly should not exist in the first place.

What's wrong with dreaming?

Same here. I didn't know about gravity turns so getting into orbit to me was a matter of getting high enough, rotating 90 degrees, and burning until I got an orbit on the map. Really inefficient, but it did get the job done!

I agree. Once the cat dies from lateral g-forces, it will no longer act to counterbalance the toast, and the system will fall butter face down, just as thermodynamics predicted. The video just isn't long enough to reveal the obvious flaw.

Well probably not the forum. For a request of this magnitude (particularly the subscription part) you are better off mailing Squad directly to discuss your proposition, perhaps support@kerbalspaceprogram.com is appropriate, but look on the Contact section of the main website. After all, depending on the specifics of your project, this might fall under partnership, sponsoring, etc.. which can't just be handwaved but needs to be formally handled on some level. Assuming your business model is sound, though, there is the problem of you needing to associate a real identity (for the subscription) to one or more game accounts, which can be problematic legally. Then there's the whole cheating aspect, it is unclear how you would prevent someone cheating his way to the prize by getting all the achievements one way or the other.. I am not sure how big an issue it would be on this scale but it can't be ignored. I am not sure how far along your company is, but I just hope you've carefully evaluated your business strategy, which would seem ripe for abuse to me given your description.

Because a ring around Kerbin is huge. And we like to build huge things

I made a SpaceX Grasshopper replica today. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's an early design of reusable booster stage. Here's in action in some cool tests. Anyway, it's not 100% accurate because of some part limitations, and is not particularly functional (it works fairly well for small payloads, and has low part count, but it has rather low TWR so larger payloads don't even get off the ground) but I think the basic idea is there. All the steering was done manually, which has probably halved my F9 key's lifespan, but I didn't want Mechjeb to do it all for me. Actually, taking all the screenshots probably took longer than designing and balancing the craft itself.This is a maneuverability test similar to the video linked above: And this is the booster replica in action lifting a small-sized payload:

Mechjeb, Ioncross, Deadly Reentry, B9, KW Rocketry, and perhaps a few extra parts here and there that I can't recall.

A recent thread asks roughly the same question, perhaps you would like to check it out: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/47093-globe-encompassing-station

Arguably, space could be considered an environment. There's a lot of space to pollute, but that's ok - we'll just find more debris. And.. well.. space hippies? Green satellites using ionized weed as reaction mass?

I add boosters to my struts.

What about a vertical truss attached to a docking node with docking ports on them? It would be small enough to fit in a fairing (at the top of the rocket) so no aerodynamism problems there, and lets you connect more trusses later on. The only problem is you might have to make it shorter than you wanted, as rockets tend to get very unstable as they get higher. But for a truss or two it's definitely doable.

Yeah.. thanks. I was actually making a joke, and I meant 9m11s as the constant

He didn't. He said "come close to infinite energy, at least from a human perspective".

I think what he meant was that it is practically infinite, as in "we will never need that much". Of course, history has shown that this is usually not the case - whenever we find more power, we also find creative ways to waste even more of it.

You could've dragged it along using the plane (without taking off). You would've probably scraped off a lot of parts but perhaps it could've worked.

So today I learned it takes precisely 9 minutes and 11 seconds to travel NaN metres. Anyone want to give this new universal constant a name?

Yes. It's an unstable equilibrium. It would work - if the ring was strong enough and in a high enough orbit - if it were in a perfectly circular orbit where the net gravitational force would be zero, however as soon as the orbit becomes even slightly elliptical, the periapsis (being closer) is pulled in slightly more than the apoapsis (being further away), bringing the periapsis in closer and thus pushing the apoapsis further away, eventually resulting in the ring colliding with the planet and causing immense damage to the atmosphere. I really can't see what kind of propulsion engine could do any meaningful orbital correction for a structure of that scale, so it doesn't seem feasible physically (I mean, ignoring all the other engineering problems). Interestingly, the opposite (a repulsive force on a surrounding ring) is stable, which I believe is used in some applications of electromagnetism. That said, it could work and achieve pretty much the same function if you instead had a lot of disconnected mini-stations all orbiting close together at the same altitude behind one another. You could freely move from one to the next with a tiny burn/retroburn (like jetpack, or even jumping if they are close enough) and only minor orbital corrections to account for momentum transfer. Actually, that would kind of work in KSP, though you'd be constantly loading parts of the station and it would be very fragile. But.. it would work on some level. (I assume you would edit the parts into orbit automatically, doing it by hand would be near impossible to get accurate enough and very time-consuming).

How do you manage that? My kerbals die when they fall off the launchpad, I doubt they would survive atmospheric free fall. Though perhaps they could on Eve.. with some luck..