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I'm going to try to be as careful as I can with my phrasing here, because I really don't want to be misconstrued. (I tried asking this on one of the KSP groups on Facebook and it spiraled out of control pretty fast.) KSP2 developers stated that there will be no FTL drives in the game. I'm perfectly happy with this, and to be honest, would have been let down if they did add warp drives, wormholes, or other handwavium. Also, implementing full Special Relativity is way impractical for a game, and besides, the math gets hairy enough that I can't imagine a developer spending time trying to add proper SR into a game. However, it does occur to me that a developer could easily add the speed of light as an upper speed limit for ships, and also model acceleration so that, as your velocity is a larger and larger fraction of the speed of light, it becomes harder to accelerate faster. For stock KSP1, the parts are nowhere near powerful enough to reach sizable fractions of the speed of light with a reasonable fuel supply. However, they can in theory exceed the speed of light with the infinite fuel cheat, and with enough patience. Also, glitches can and have sent craft well exceeding the speed of light, as Danny2462 and others can attest. For KSP2, presuming that the Project Orion/Project Daedalus parts are similar to their real-world counterparts, they'd be able to reach a top speed in the neighborhood of 0.1c, but I can't hold myself to that presumption. It's entirely possible that these parts will perform more powerfully than their real-world equivalents, to reduce the travel time between stars. So having said that: What is the likelihood that KSP2 will have an upper speed limit? Do we even want an upper speed limit, as a community? (There are arguments for and against. I'd favor the realism of it taking a long while to reach other stars, even with advanced sublight drives, but I know some will insist on a mod that permits FTL travel, or think the concern is irrelevant.) I welcome your well-considered and respectful thoughts. Thanks. NOTE: I've updated the title and the post below to reflect that I was saying "General Relativity", but as @chaos_forge pointed out, Special Relativity is where the cosmic speed limit was first set. As SR is a special case of GR, my statement wasn't entirely inaccurate, but it was imprecise.

I'm back for a short stint to clear stuff up. Hi. We seem to have been told that the escape velocity of a black hole at a certain altitude reaches the speed of light. But if the escape velocity is the speed of light, what stops us from being in orbit around a black hole, dipping our periapsis through the event horizon and recording data, then after exiting the event horizon at a higher altitude escape the black hole where the escape velocity is manageable? Or is the orbital velocity at that altitude faster than the speed of light? Has it been an issue of semantics? If things get heavier the faster we go could we plunge towards a black hole, reach the same mass as one near the speed of light, and become a black hole? Or would we sling the black hole away at high speed? What would happen? I'll post more badly formed questions a bit later once I think of some

Sol and Alpha Centauri duke it out in the 31st century. No other colonized systems because magic radiation stops them. No FTL. Systems are completely colonized and exploited. War is to the death. How is the war fought? Who wins?

Recently, I have been crafting a cinematic-movie style Kerbal series called Kerbalkind. I have been longing for a good plot, or cool focus on a part of science that hasn't been explored much; instead of just planets something like black holes or wormholes. However, I thought a pulsar would be pretty awesome. So as for the science, 1) Do Pulsars have a low enough radius and high enough mass so that General Relativity is noticeable? 2) Could a Pulsar orbit Kerbin far away (Taking account for being 10x smaller) or would it just completely wreck the system? Thanks, John

Over the last couple months I have been working on a paper on Relativity for school. It stands at 20 pages and Is the hardest and longest thing I have done so far. I would love it if I could get some feedback on it. also please dont feel like you need to read it all. Just pick a page and read it. Thanks! https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxvqPGLKDZJQcnJORlNhUm4xOWc

When things move at relativistic speeds their inertial mass increases, is this true for gravitational masses as well?