Time warp physics

[Ethanadams]

We should have the ability to time warp under acceleration to get rid a really long burns

[jlo96]

You CAN do this up to TWx4 by using Alt+. (Alt+,). Going beyond that becomes tricky, since TWx5, TWx50, etc. are all On-Rails calculations (the orbits are unchangeable, and basically only looked at by the code once). In order to burn while in high TW, they would have to always be off-rails calculations. KSP is essentially runnable because only your active flight is calculated off-rails. Calculating multiple flights off-rails would make your game into a slideshow, and probably crash it instantly.

And besides, you wouldn't want to have the super-human reflexes nessesary to cancel a burn at the right time in 100000xTW, would you?

[Sirrobert]

We have.

Hold alt when you timewarp to use physics warp instead of regular timewarp

[TheMoonRover]

But with low TWR vessels, in particular ion probes, it can take several minutes to perform a large engine burn. For that sort of thing, 4x Physics Warp is not enough.

Conversely, for very high TWR vessels, precise manoeuvres can be difficult. And very large ships tend to lag a lot. For both of these things, fractional time warps would be useful.

There is or was a mod called TimeControl which could do both of those things, but I've no idea if it's still being maintained or not. It'd be nice to see something similar in stock. (I was using the mod a while ago but got rid of it when trying to determine what was causing a weird bug. It turned out to be the fault of Windows 64-bit KSP, but I never got round to reinstalling the mod again)

[Master Tao]

Looks like Xaiier has resumed work on [thread=69363]TimeControl[/thread] – no updated release yet, though.

Also, HoneyFox was working on physicsless warp ion engine control in the [thread=70881]Orbit Manipulator Series[/thread].

I believe the major problems with thrust during timewarp are that you either have to:

• Lengthen the physics calculation time step (i.e., higher physics warp rates), which can break things in unpredictable ways
  
• Change the orbit according the thrust-to-mass ratio during on-rails timewarp, which requires a ton of work if you have asymmetric thrust