Stationary Hover with Time warp functionality

[Gameslinx]

So I want to make a large, stationary landing pad above KSC on Kerbin

 

There's some things we need:

Option to set the craft to "hover mode" which is Drone core only. Drones have this ability today. The ship does just that - hovers until fuel runs out. With physics warp, it is put on rails but uses fuel 4x as fast for 4x warp.

For 10000x warp, it uses fuel 10,000 times as fast but stays perfectly still.

If you want to land on it, the drone will instantly adjust the thrust of engines to stabilise the landing zone like a VTOL. In the case it cannot do this, the craft will begin to lean.

What do we need?

Pipes. Pipes which can pump ore and process it at the top, turning it into fuel for the hovering landing pad.

Basically I think landing on artificial aircraft carriers should be a thing, but I'm not really sure how to go about this. I hope you understand

[pincushionman]

On 10/18/2016 at 4:52 PM, Gamel0rd1 said:

What do we need?

Well, for starters, a craft that is capable of maintaining hover indefinitely, which for large constructions (such as magic flying landing platforms) is no mean feat.

But looking beyond, you know, physics and reality, there are only a couple of cases (landed/splashed down) where time warp is allowed while the vessel is under load, and since you can ISRU, the mass of the vessel is allowed to change. It's conceivable you could trat it in the same manner as landed, but we do have the problem of the "ground" (jet) reactions changing as the mass changes, which changes the rate of change of mass, which is a little more complicated than true ground reactions. But not insurmountable.

But the biggest thing you would need would be a compelling reason for the developers to add and support such a special case. I don't see a very large market for skyhooks, especially given the design difficulty I noted above.

Edited October 19, 2016 by pincushionman