Inertia negation (not to be confused with Inertia damper)

[Seeker89]

I was hoping for a mod that would reduce the mass of a craft as a whole with the cost of power. Reducing the mass would make TWR higher, and making those 100+ ton crafts get to orbit easier...

Is this out there? or would someone be interested in making it?

[Randazzo]

This would be extraordinarily tricky, and it's probably impossible with stock mechanics. Anything that reduced the mass of the ship would have to exclude the fuel, as the less mass the fuel has, the less energy it has, thereby making the overall lowered mass pointless.

This is overlooking the fact that it would be breaking the laws of physics in ways I can't even imagine, and probably do similar things to the game.

[Feradose]

How about a part with tweakable/auto set, toggleable negative mass? I cant see how it would work, but if it does it would be definitely cool OP

[Seeker89]

I did play with parts with negative mass when I first started playing KSP... It didn't turn out well...

My idea steams from this:

We have mods/plugins that can tell how much a whole craft is... example:

A Mk1 Command Pod

A FL-T100 Fuel Tank

A LV-909

The mass of that craft is 1.903 tons.

Mechjeb, Void, KER will all find that number.

What I want is a mod that will change that number as a whole by a tweakable percent, and temporarily.

Or a mod that will change all the mass of each part like a toggleable MM.

On a side note, I thought the power we get from fuel is based on units not mass.

[Randazzo]

On a side note, I thought the power we get from fuel is based on units not mass.

Units have a density that correlates to mass. Cut the density of LF and OX in half in your resources config if you want to test it out.

[Windspren]

What if you had a part that generates a resource, say MagicStuffs, out of electricCharge. It could use the Stock resource converter. You could define that resource, in this case MagicStuffs, to have a negative mass. So you power up your generator, and you ship magically uses mass.

[arkie87]

I was hoping for a mod that would reduce the mass of a craft as a whole with the cost of power. Reducing the mass would make TWR higher, and making those 100+ ton crafts get to orbit easier...

Is this out there? or would someone be interested in making it?

What is the physical rationale for this? It seems to me like this would violate the laws of physics...

Why not just make an "afterburner" mod which reduces ISP but increases thrust?

[SAI Peregrinus]

What is the physical rationale for this? It seems to me like this would violate the laws of physics...

Why not just make an "afterburner" mod which reduces ISP but increases thrust?

We already have Alcubierre drive mods, they use negative mass "exotic matter", so worrying about a physics rationale seems a bit silly. Just make a mod that makes them need a negative mass fuel.

[Sma]

Plus, it only violates physics as we know it . With the Higgs Boson, if it is indeed responsible for giving things mass, maybe there is a way to manipulate it to negate it's effect, and lower the mass of the vessel in question, at the expense of electricity of course.

[Seeker89]

So how about a mod that reduces mass, boosts ISP and thrust? We do have to remember that this is a game. it could be fun!

[sarbian]

Next we would just need a mod to pilot for you

[Seeker89]

Is this mod really impossible to try to make? I wasn't thinking down to negative numbers, just 25% to 50%

[1of6Billion]

Pretty SciFi, I you ask me.

I was thinking about this the other day. Have 2 parts that generate a "Gravioli Dampening Field" that reduces the mass between the parts (to 0). At the expense of a ludicrous amount of energy.

Lacking all necessary skills, both patience, coding and part making, I decided to wait for someone else to come up with the idea

[aquilux]

Unfortunately, this mod would actually be rather difficult to make. First off, you never have a -whole- ship as it's own item in physics. A ship is always a collection of parts, stuck together, so you'll always have to apply this to all parts on the ship. Second, the part value may be labeled "mass", but the way the physics calculations work in game, it works more like density, and this quirk complicates things.

There is another density related issue that may not be obvious. Most of your ship's mass will usually be fuel. Well, the math behind any engine's operation is actually highly dependent on its density. If you try to reduce a fuel's density, you suddenly throw all the listed values for engine thrust and efficiency out the window.

All in all, it would be possible, but you are asking for -SIGNIFICANTLY- more than you realise. It's like the problem of image identification by computers. Everyone thought that it'd be simple to do once we started putting pictures on computers because hey, it's so easy for us right? Well, it's been decades, and imagine how much time and money companies like google have been putting into the problem. Let's just say there was a reason that google being able to teach a computer to recognise a cat made it onto national news even though no one understands how hard t is. Yeah, you're not asking for something that hard, but you're not paying millions and hiring hundreds to get it

[sarbian]

ok, if you want the keep the thread serious I'll indulge : no, it is not that hard. you have to change each of the parts rigidBody mass. This is not hard to do since mods run after the game itself change that value.

But that would mess up a lot of mod.

[Seeker89]

Pretty SciFi, I you ask me.

I was thinking about this the other day. Have 2 parts that generate a "Gravioli Dampening Field" that reduces the mass between the parts (to 0). At the expense of a ludicrous amount of energy.

Lacking all necessary skills, both patience, coding and part making, I decided to wait for someone else to come up with the idea

I was thinking something like this too. Like a field, or everything in a faring. Other way around it would be something like the Hanger mod, where it would store the craft but without the transferring weight.

ok, if you want the keep the thread serious I'll indulge : no, it is not that hard. you have to change each of the parts rigidBody mass. This is not hard to do since mods run after the game itself change that value.

But that would mess up a lot of mod.

That wouldn't be good.... mods are the reason I would want this type of mod. Like the other day I made a mining rig/lander with Roverdude mods, it weights 88 tons without fuel.

For being serious: Over all, I'm not good at modding, This was only an idea and I don't know how it would work. I would be grateful for someone to try it and if it doesn't work that fine. I would still be happier then people just saying that it can't happen.

[Dedjal]

How did that mod with airballons work?

Hooligans labs I think it was called.

That mod was somehow able to create negative mass in order to simulate a airballon, did it not?

[seanmcdougall]

I've been tinkering around with this, and it may not be such a crazy idea after all. I've put together a proof-of-concept mod called the "Gravioli Core" that adds a new utility part that looks suspiciously like a recycled gravioli detector...

Adding this to your vessel will let you dynamically scale the mass of every part of the current vessel (either increasing or decreasing it). The scale and polarity are tweakable in the right-click menu. So setting the scale to "5" and the polarity to "negative" will decrease the mass of your vessel by roughly 5 times. I say "roughly" because this mod only operates on the parts themselves, not any resources contained within.

Download: https://github.com/seanmcdougall/GravioliCore/raw/master/releases/GravioliCore-latest.zip

Source: https://github.com/seanmcdougall/GravioliCore

License: GPLv3

Some observations:

- scaling the mass will also scale your Delta-V and TWR by a similar factor (Kerbal Engineer is handy to see the effects)

- using large scale factors (especially on larger craft) will cause Bad Things to happen (mostly right when enabling/disabling the Gravioli Core). I may be able to help with this by ramping up the effect gradually instead of changing the mass immediately. Until then, keeping the scale under 10-20x seems to work fairly well.

- since resource masses aren't scaled, enabling the Gravioli Core can cause your centre of mass to change. This can have rather disastrous (yet humorous) effects on aircraft.

If there's interest, I may polish this up and turn it into a proper mod. That would mainly involve making it less "cheaty" by default... it should require large amounts of electric charge to run (which would increase with the scale factor and the original mass of the vessel) and also generate large amounts of waste heat that would need to be dealt with.

[Svm420]

Sounds interesting if it can be debugged a bit more I would be interested in it if only of sandbox. Would pair nicely with the jump drive mods that scale based on mass. This could a high tech level solution for massive ships. Does this also allow mass increases not that i can think of ause currently, but who knows, and if not no loss.

[seanmcdougall]

Yup, there's a "Polarity" toggle... Positive will increase the mass, Negative will reduce it. I haven't tried yet, but I'm wondering if increasing the mass will help keep a Gilly lander grounded...

[Svm420]

Ah that would be a good use. Thinking more about this could be fundamental if anyone make a mass effect mod.

[seanmcdougall]

Yeah, I had thought about calling this a Mass Effect Core instead of a Gravioli Core but wasn't sure if any lawyers would object...

[Svm420]

Fair use and all that. Pretty sure as long as you don't go trying to make money with the mod. Otherwise just kerbalize/parody the names. Massaphex industries sounds kinda cool.

[Seeker89]

I've been tinkering around with this, and it may not be such a crazy idea after all. I've put together a proof-of-concept mod called the "Gravioli Core" that adds a new utility part that looks suspiciously like a recycled gravioli detector...

Adding this to your vessel will let you dynamically scale the mass of every part of the current vessel (either increasing or decreasing it). The scale and polarity are tweakable in the right-click menu. So setting the scale to "5" and the polarity to "negative" will decrease the mass of your vessel by roughly 5 times. I say "roughly" because this mod only operates on the parts themselves, not any resources contained within.

Download: https://github.com/seanmcdougall/GravioliCore/raw/master/releases/GravioliCore-latest.zip

Source: https://github.com/seanmcdougall/GravioliCore

License: GPLv3

Some observations:

- scaling the mass will also scale your Delta-V and TWR by a similar factor (Kerbal Engineer is handy to see the effects)

- using large scale factors (especially on larger craft) will cause Bad Things to happen (mostly right when enabling/disabling the Gravioli Core). I may be able to help with this by ramping up the effect gradually instead of changing the mass immediately. Until then, keeping the scale under 10-20x seems to work fairly well.

- since resource masses aren't scaled, enabling the Gravioli Core can cause your centre of mass to change. This can have rather disastrous (yet humorous) effects on aircraft.

If there's interest, I may polish this up and turn it into a proper mod. That would mainly involve making it less "cheaty" by default... it should require large amounts of electric charge to run (which would increase with the scale factor and the original mass of the vessel) and also generate large amounts of waste heat that would need to be dealt with.

That so awesome, good job.