Rapier (SABRE) but no VASIMIR?

[wumpus]

25 minutes ago, Gaarst said:

Squad can't even properly program burn times. We'll end up with something a) terribly broken, or b) absorbing all your CPU whenever you have more than 2 ships flying. (Logical "or" here: both at the same time is possible)

I put quotes in for a reason.  I assumed that had it really been all that easy, somebody would have done it (if only as a mod, and probably part of the real gravity mod) already.  My guess was that somehow Squad's implementation made it much harder than I thought (the implementation *has* to be pretty weird: it relies on keeping the active "physics bubble" at the origin of the coordinate system and moving the rest of the solar system in some sort of Ptolemaic system around it).

Unfortunately, I think ion engines are too important to simply ignore (and they are probably the key to exploring the solar system, especially by caching fuel at higher delta-vs for human exploration).  Although it wouldn't necessarily be wrong if they were only useful with the real gravity mod, 3-body gravity tricks are pretty much the rule with such slow orbital progression.

[Jonfliesgoats]

Solar sails too, but that may require too much in the way of new physics.

Edited November 30, 2016 by Jonfliesgoats

[SR]

But then you could argue that any engine that has been tested should be in.

Including an EM drive.

[Wjolcz]

On 05/01/2017 at 9:17 PM, SR said:

But then you could argue that any engine that has been tested should be in.

Including an EM drive.

That one is unproven to work in space. Either that or they simply don't know how it works. Anyway, my point is we really could have anything in the game since we have the RAPIER aka SABRE. I haven't seen a functional prototype of that one yet, so by that logic why not have a bunch of sci-fi things in the game? Not like they differ in any way from SABRE: they haven't been built yet.

[SR]

Has a VASMIR been tested in space?