The size of Spore's Planets.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, DAL59 said:

KSC is not rescaled.  It would float above the planet.

KerbalKonstructs allows to create as small alternative KSCs as you need.

[Ultimate Steve]

Hmm, at this scale, I wonder which would be more practical, a space elevator or a space escalator?

[WinkAllKerb'']

thoose planet are 2008 cpu gpu sized ^^ 2008 right ? (( :3 :3 :3 really enjoyed the game a few month back thks to some ksp forum m8 than make me discover it on the very late ))

still that's a lot of planets ^^

Edited November 11, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[NSEP]

Holy mother of all donkeys. Spore's planets are painfully small.

I actually went into orbit with those jump booster things once. Its quite easy. And fun.

[ChrisSpace]

16 hours ago, GregroxMun said:

However, with the tiny size of spore planets, you don't really need a space drive. With only a few days of travel time, you can get anywhere in the galaxy with a small rocket ship, less than you would really even need for an Apollo-type moon mission. The exploration and colonization of the planets within your own solar system ought to have been started in the early civilization stage, with the first interstellar missions being run in the mid-to-late game.

The Civ stage does feature nukes near the end, so I'm guessing that the interplanetary drive is something like the V-2's engine or the propulsion system used in the BIS' 1939 study on a manned expedition to the moon. The interstellar drive is probably similar to the liquid-fuelled propulsion seen in KSP, or maybe Solid-Core NTRs.

16 hours ago, GregroxMun said:

Even inter*galactic* distances are achievable with modern real world technology.

Unless the Spore galaxy is the only really tiny one.

[Whirligig Girl]

1 hour ago, ChrisSpace said:

Uness the Spore galaxy is the only really tiny one.

Well we see that they aren't in the opening to the game as you scroll in through various regions of intergalactic material and voids.

On 6/1/2016 at 4:06 AM, kerbiloid said:

Kopernicus mod rescales planets and orbits. Someone would create configs for it.

I tried this (actually 10 times the scale) a while ago, but if you wanted to do it now, Sigma Dimensions is now capable of resizing the KSC--that would be your best bet for trying this.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

Spore's planets are painfully small.

No-no-no! They are exactly how big should be a nice comfortable planet for your own!

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

I actually went into orbit with those jump booster things once. Its quite easy. And fun.

You can be a Emperor Ming and fly between the planets in "Flash Gordon" style in your personal aerospaceship.

[ChrisSpace]

On 11 November 2017 at 7:33 AM, GregroxMun said:

Using this calculator, where s is how far we've traveled at half way (64 kilometers), u = 0 m/s starting velocity, t = 1 second travel time. Acceleration is 128000 m/s^(2).

That's *Thirteen thousand gees!* That's insane!

Electronics built into artillery shells can handle up to 15500g. But I've always thought that travel between stars isn't shown in real-time. For comparison, a 5g brachistochrone trajectory over 128km would take less than 2 minutes and reach a maximum velocity of about 2.5km/s.

18 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Hmm, at this scale, I wonder which would be more practical, a space elevator or a space escalator?

Considering that geostationary orbit is 1.01km above sea level, something similar to the Burj Khalifa would do just as well. But considering that solar escape velocity from the homeworld's orbit is just 169m/s, things like that probably wouldn't be needed.

[Ultimate Steve]

28 minutes ago, ChrisSpace said:

Electronics built into artillery shells can handle up to 15500g. But I've always thought that travel between stars isn't shown in real-time. For comparison, a 5g brachistochrone trajectory over 128km would take less than 2 minutes and reach a maximum velocity of about 2.5km/s.

Considering that geostationary orbit is 1.01km above sea level, something similar to the Burj Khalifa would do just as well. But considering that solar escape velocity from the homeworld's orbit is just 169m/s, things like that probably wouldn't be needed.

Spore, where you can launch a decently sized model rocket to escape velocity...

[Urses]

19 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Hmm, at this scale, I wonder which would be more practical, a space elevator or a space escalator?

Get a kerbyogi and let him do the rope trick?

44 minutes ago, ChrisSpace said:

Considering that geostationary orbit is 1.01km above sea level, something similar to the Burj Khalifa would do just as well. But considering that solar escape velocity from the homeworld's orbit is just 169m/s, things like that probably wouldn't be needed.

A trampolin as lifter? How kerbal sir

[kerbiloid]

Btw, we can presume that 14 seconds on the galaxy map is a ship onboard time, compressed by Lorentz factor
Then, probably, it is possible to estimate the spore lightspeed.
(It can vary depending on distance from the galaxy center).

If so, we can have at least two fundamental constants of the spore universe: G and c.

Edited November 12, 2017 by kerbiloid

[WinkAllKerb'']

planet scale are unrelated to fun , and all and all they may grant ^^ meeeeeeeehhhhhh :3

Edited November 12, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[ChrisSpace]

On ‎12‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 1:48 AM, kerbiloid said:

No-no-no! They are exactly how big should be a nice comfortable planet for your own!

This size range actually isn't too uncommon in space games. Other examples of small solar systems that I can find, ordered by size, include (Spore being rank 2):

1. Outer Wilds: The sun is 4km in diameter, the moon is 79m in radius, Timber Hearth has a radius of 154 or 203m and orbits at 7 or 8 km, and the comet orbits from 0.4km to 22km from the sun's surface.

3. Galacticraft mod in Minecraft: Karman line appears to be less than 1200 meters above sea level. I know it isn't a very "intellectual" game but I figured it's worth mentioning.

4. This: 

5. Every single "build a rocket and fly into space" in-browser game that has ever been made (Into Space 2 was my favourite as a little kid, where I measured the Karman line to be 6873m above the ground, and the top of Mars' atmosphere to be 22909m above the ground)

6. Space Engineers: Planets are 19-120km in diameter, "Earth" and "Mars" are 2000-4000km apart.

7. Toy Solar System mod in KSP: All planet sizes and distances are scaled down to 1/10th of their normal values. Interestingly, this is the only example that scales down the planets/moons and the distances between them by the same amount, so the distances relative to the sizes stay the same.

On a side note, worlds like this open an interesting possibility of a "rocketpunk" world where even a few teenagers would be able to build something that can fly between planets. An interesting sci-fi setting I'm thinking of is perhaps one where the surface of an Earthlike planet in a Sporelike galaxy is connected to Earth in a nearby abandoned warehouse or something.

Edited December 14, 2017 by ChrisSpace

[kerbiloid]

I would add Little Big Adventure (LBA) 1 & 2.
Though you can't move across the whole planet, but islands (= continents) are nearly the same like in Spore.

Planet >1..2 km is too big. One will get tired walking around.

Edited November 13, 2017 by kerbiloid

[ChrisSpace]

By the way, I calculated that the average "sunlike" star must have an energy output of 613GW to provide the same amount of energy to a planet one 25-millionth of an AU away as Earth gets from Sol. So by Spore standards we're above K2 status.

[Whirligig Girl]

On 11/13/2017 at 11:02 PM, ChrisSpace said:

By the way, I calculated that the average "sunlike" star must have an energy output of 613GW to provide the same amount of energy to a planet one 25-millionth of an AU away as Earth gets from Sol. So by Spore standards we're above K2 status.

Certainly the surface brightness of spore suns must be much lower than real stars.

[kerbiloid]

27 minutes ago, GregroxMun said:

Certainly the surface brightness of spore suns must be much lower than real stars.

But their colors (i.e. peak wavelength) are the same like irl, as well as the planets temperature.

Stefan-Boltzmann law tells:
star_luminosity = 4*pi*sigma*star_radius²*T_star⁴.
Also:
star_luminosity = 4*pi*sigma*planetary_orbit_radius²*T_planet⁴.
So,
T_star = T_planet * sqrt(planetary_orbit_radius / star_radius);

Presuming that the habitable planet temperature is nearly equal to the Earth conditions. we can calculate the Spore star surface temperature.

Wien displacement law tells:
peak_wavelength = (c*h/(k*a))/T
Here: c — light speed, h — Planck constant, k — Boltzmann constant, a (2.821439) — the root of the equation:  a/3 = 1 - exp(-a).
So, as we have calculated c before, and a is constant, we can say that

(h/k) = (a/c) * T * peak_wavelength

Here we get a h/k ratio.

[ChrisSpace]

Weather update: I think I've figured out how this all works! In Isaac Arthur's new video "Mega Earths", he mentions that an artificial planet could be made by placing a "shell" of orbital rings around a black hole, and then placing a layer of dirt, rocks etc on top of that to create a world vastly different in size to any natural planets. For an Earthlike planet in Spore, such a black hole would have a radius of 0.03759644 nanometers, a hawking radiation energy output of 0.5558304 W, and a lifetime far exceeding the age of the universe. Of course, this only solves the problem of gravity, not how the planets hold onto their atmospheres, or how the orbits can remain stable considering that the ratio of planet-moon, planet-star and interstellar distances.

[Matuchkin]

Just gross. Claim to make a game about evolution, and use your advertisement as bait to lead customers to your collection of average minigames. Then claim that you have planets, and make something so pathetically sized that you can circumnavigate it in two minutes. I really don't respect the studio that created Spore.

I consider the bottom-line for planet size to be something like the Mun. You can actually explore it, go on huge voyages, establish bases, make a survival game out of it even, but it doesn't take years of travel.

Edited November 22, 2017 by Matuchkin

[ChrisSpace]

1 hour ago, Matuchkin said:

I consider the bottom-line for planet size to be something like the Mun. You can actually explore it, go on huge voyages, establish bases, make a survival game out of it even, but it doesn't take years of travel.

I personally don't mind it at all. There is still plenty to explore even on such small planets, in theory at least. Plus it makes civilian space travel easier, not to mention the short travel times. At the very least it would make a nice game setting.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Matuchkin said:

to make a game about evolution

And this is exactly that what the authors have failed. No evolution, just a piece of putty.

6 hours ago, ChrisSpace said:

There is still plenty to explore even on such small planets, in theory at least.

+1

Also Spore fills that UFO things (such as crop circles, etc) with sense.

Edited November 23, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Odin-Gaming]

Interesting! I wonder what the implications are for the physics of the Spore universe...

[kerbiloid]

20 hours ago, Odin-Gaming said:

what the implications are for the physics of the Spore universe...

If we ever discover how to change the physical constants. we'll be able to build comfy personal universes and sell them.

Edited December 5, 2017 by kerbiloid

[Odin-Gaming]

@kerbiloid That's a dangerous proposition! I wonder if there is another set of values the physical constants could take and result in a complex universe that can harbour life. As in, I know that as things stand, we'd be pretty much screwed if the physical constants wavered even a tiny bit outside of their current values. But if we swung them all enough, in the right directions, is there another "ideal" set of values?

[kerbiloid]

18 minutes ago, Odin-Gaming said:

That's a dangerous proposition! I wonder if there is another set of values the physical constants could take and result in a complex universe that can harbour life. As in, I know that as things stand, we'd be pretty much screwed if the physical constants wavered even a tiny bit outside of their current values. But if we swung them all enough, in the right directions, is there another "ideal" set of values?

I would mention again the mentioned Raft novel.
Also there are two most common hypotheses of tiny KSP planets: 1) superdense rocks, 2) superhigh gravitational constant.
Notice that the first one in turn should require several more fundamental constants to be changed.