Kerbol star system (HIP 442101)

[StinkyAce]

I don't know if this has been asked, but here goes.

Is there a reason that the whole system is grossly underscaled?

I am a curious physicist. 

 

 

[Helmetman]

This is a game, not a simulator. (besides it simulating things, that's just aside)

If it were 1:1 we would need 10 minutes to get anything into orbit, which is very tedious for most people. I include myself into this category because I don't want to waste to much time on this.
The Delta V requirements in 1:1 are also much greater. It requires very complex staging to do things efficiently and to get the same things done in the regular KSP. 
KSP has to be dumbed down so everyone with some faint interest in spaceflight can play it, not just the physicist and the aero engineer.

19 minutes ago, StinkyAce said:

I am a curious physicist. 

Most people on here are, but not everyone is.
If your into realism you can download RSS/RO.

 

Edited November 27, 2017 by Helmetman

[StinkyAce]

16 minutes ago, Helmetman said:

This is a game, not a simulator. (besides it simulating things, that's just aside)

If it were 1:1 we would need 10 minutes to get anything into orbit, which is very tedious for most people. I include myself into this category because I don't want to waste to much time on this.
The Delta V requirements in 1:1 are also much greater. It requires very complex staging to do things efficiently and to get the same things done in the regular KSP. 
KSP has to be dumbed down so everyone with some faint interest in spaceflight can play it, not just the physicist and the aero engineer.

Most people on here are, but not everyone is.
If your into realism you can download RSS/RO.

 

I kind of figured it was a time issue. Was just being curious.

[Starman4308]

There's also a legacy reason:

Most of Unity works in single-precision floating-point, which is fine for most games; not so much for a game like KSP which has an entire solar system to model. Originally, part of the 1:10 modeling was to reduce the size of Kerbin so the floating-point rounding errors had less effect on the game.

If you used the center of Kerbin as the origin, single-precision has an uncertainty of +/- 1.8 cm in your position; at full scale, that would be +/- 18 cm.

While KSP still runs primarily on single-precision, the rounding errors are largely dealt with via the Krakensbane update; the origin of the game's coordinate system is no longer the center of Kerbin, but starts centered on your vessel, and if you move far enough away from the origin, KSP pauses, and moves everything else in the game with respect to you.

I still wish there was a full double-precision mode.