List of new propulsion systems

[Danielle]

One thing that would be striking in KSP 2 once they've implemented the nuclear engines is the radiation, crew safety but also what happens when these engines fail/degrade.

[K^2]

On 6/19/2020 at 3:02 PM, SOXBLOX said:

Oh, goodie. The engineering should be fairly trivial, though, for people (Kerbals, rather) who can produce and store large quantities of AM. Don't really know whether I want it in the game regardless.

Antimatter engine is actually a fairly complicated proposition even if we disregard storage problem. It's actually very similar to how a rocket engine is way harder to make than it sounds. At face value, pour fuel and oxidizer into combustion chamber, let hot gases exit through exhaust, what can be simpler? Except then you start actually considering plumbing, cooling of the chamber, resonances, exhaust flow through the nozzle, the bell on the nozzle... Suddenly, it's a very complicated problem.

Likewise, if you simply throw a proton and anti-proton together, you're going to get a blast of high energy gamma radiation with a mix of mesons and leptons for good measure that are going to wreak havoc not only with your shielding, but also with whatever injection system you use to actually deliver both matter and antimatter to the propulsion unit. And then there is matter of waste heat. Because there's no such thing as a mirror for these energy ranges, your shielding is going to absorb almost half of the energy produced in the reaction and less than 1/4 of the impulse. So that's 600MW of waste heat for every 1N of thrust. So at 10N of thrust, a little over two pounds of force, you have to get rid of about as much waste heat as typical nuclear power plant. And you can't exactly set up evaporative cooling towers in space. I mean, you could, and they will actually be pretty effective, but the rate at which you'll be losing water will mean you lost every advantage using antimatter gave you, so you're back to radiative cooling... It's actually a very hard problem to solve.

Personally, if I had any hope of collecting, I would bet my money on black hole drives becoming practical before pure matter-antimatter propulsion. That said, some sort of a hybrid system that uses antimatter as an energy source and majority of your propellant is still ordinary matter is viable. So I wouldn't disregard the concept all together.

[SOXBLOX]

Which is why we'd be using AM catalyzed fusion or something, not a pure matter-antimatter rocket. The small quantities of untouchable material should make the problems easier.

Also, I didn't say trivial for us. I was pointing out the fact that if anyone is capable of handling, say, 100 grams of AM, they won't need to worry much about the engineering of such an engine.

 

[KerikBalm]

On 7/22/2020 at 1:01 AM, Danielle said:

One thing that would be striking in KSP 2 once they've implemented the nuclear engines is the radiation, crew safety but also what happens when these engines fail/degrade.

Well, what happens when any engine fails? One of the (IMO acceptable) breaks of reality in the first KSP is the lack of part wear/fatigue, a part never wears out.

Most solid core, closed cycle designs wouldn't be very prone to leakage, but it would be interesting if each LV-N (and similar engine) had a certain Uranium stock, and then after that you'd need to bring it in for overhaul/fuel reprocessing/replacement. Currently you can just keep pumping LF through the same engine ad infinitum (and LFO through non-nuclear engines).

Open cycle designs would be even worse.

[Danielle]

4 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Most solid core, closed cycle designs wouldn't be very prone to leakage, but it would be interesting if each LV-N (and similar engine) had a certain Uranium stock, and then after that you'd need to bring it in for overhaul/fuel reprocessing/replacement. Currently you can just keep pumping LF through the same engine ad infinitum (and LFO through non-nuclear engines).

Yep, having to do maintenance for your vehicles would be adding another edge for the Kerbal adventure. I've played with Engine Ignitor and Kerbalism and it does quite infuriate/challenge you when you have to compensate for the broken engine.

[OOM]

On 7/24/2020 at 10:36 AM, KerikBalm said:

Well, what happens when any engine fails? One of the (IMO acceptable) breaks of reality in the first KSP is the lack of part wear/fatigue, a part never wears out.

I think that after every interorbital flight, the spacecraft should be checked and repaired by robots that are part of the local orbital station. In the end, just replacing the engine if it has reached its end of life. The worst thing is when the engine breaks down during flight. But I don't want to think about it.

 

[Dr. Kerbal]

Well. here is a list of engines i want there to be in ksp2:

Mamoth Engine

Rhino engine

Nerv Nuclear Engine

Orion Drive

MAinsial engine

nuclear engines

rappier engine

and all oter engines in ksp1

 

[Starhelperdude]

1 hour ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

Well. here is a list of engines i want there to be in ksp2:

Mamoth Engine

Rhino engine

Nerv Nuclear Engine

Orion Drive

MAinsial engine

nuclear engines

rappier engine

and all oter engines in ksp1

 

all ksp1 engines will probably be in ksp2

[Guest]

16 hours ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

Well. here is a list of engines i want there to be in ksp2:

Mamoth Engine

Rhino engine

Nerv Nuclear Engine

Orion Drive

MAinsial engine

nuclear engines

rappier engine

and all oter engines in ksp1

 

I wish they also had Magnetoplasmadynamic engines like the Near Future Propusion mod.

[sawg]

With the new Spherical fuel tanks, I'm going to try and build the ISV Venture star from Avatar. With the powerful engines aswell, it could (hopefully) be a functional ship aswell travelling to the other star systems.

[Dr. Kerbal]

I’m going to use interstellar ships for interplanetary travel.

[Bej Kerman]

16 hours ago, Starhelperdude said:

all ksp1 engines will probably be in ksp2

For a start, the Mammoth engine has been made redundant and won't be in KSP 2.

[Chilkoot]

2 hours ago, gabo04 said:

I wish they also had Magnetoplasmadynamic engines like the Near Future Propusion mod.

The Xenon-based engines in KSP 1 would fall into the magnetoplasmadynamic bucket, and I wouldn't be surprised to see those make an appearance in KSP 2 for lightweight probes, etc. There appear to be magnetically propelled plasma-type engines in the trailer and other vids, but not sure if we've heard anything specific about xenon/argon/litium/etc propellants yet.

Edited September 18, 2020 by Chilkoot

[magnemoe]

On 9/18/2020 at 2:54 PM, Depressed Sock said:

With the new Spherical fuel tanks, I'm going to try and build the ISV Venture star from Avatar. With the powerful engines aswell, it could (hopefully) be a functional ship aswell travelling to the other star systems.

Venture star is awesome, however braking is anti matter engines,  it pushed up to speed by an gigantic laser probably solar pumped. 

And you don't push an starship to .2c if you are short of energy, that ship would use more energy than earth does today just to push it up to speed.  
So the backstory flops a bit.
Not saying earth would be an paradise but it would not be short of energy, heat pollution might be an issue however and you will still have hell holes as you have lots areas other states don't want to touch unless they tries to start an world war against them like isil. 
 

[Dr. Kerbal]

On 9/18/2020 at 7:33 AM, Bej Kerman said:

For a start, the Mammoth engine has been made redundant and won't be in KSP 2.

Why???

[magnemoe]

On 9/18/2020 at 4:38 PM, Chilkoot said:

The Xenon-based engines in KSP 1 would fall into the magnetoplasmadynamic bucket, and I wouldn't be surprised to see those make an appearance in KSP 2 for lightweight probes, etc. There appear to be magnetically propelled plasma-type engines in the trailer and other vids, but not sure if we've heard anything specific about xenon/argon/litium/etc propellants yet.

Yes electrical engines work well, the problem is the power source, they don't scale up very well. 

1 minute ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

Why???

Because you can use an engine plate and 4 shuttle engines, or 8 if you prefer  
 

[Dr. Kerbal]

Oh.

[DStaal]

To add to that: Besides adding engine plates, they've also said they're addressing some of the issues with high part count ships, so using an engine plate with 4 engines (5 parts) instead of the one-part combined engine will still be reasonable performance wise - even if you scale that type of thinking up to rest of the ship as well.

[Popestar]

Once again, apologies if this has already been asked.

Are solar sails a possible propulsion system to be revealed in KSP2?  You see them in science fiction all the time, and the technology was actually put into practice in 2010 on IKAROS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS

Edited October 8, 2020 by Popestar

[DStaal]

12 hours ago, Popestar said:

Once again, apologies if this has already been asked.

Are solar sails a possible propulsion system to be revealed in KSP2?  You see them in science fiction all the time, and the technology was actually put into practice in 2010 on IKAROS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS

I don't think anything specific has been said announcing solar sails - however they *have* mentioned being able to handle thrust while on-rails or even in the background, and that they'll have better tools for managing such burns.  Those are the biggest issues with solar sails in KSP1, so whether or not they're officially part of KSP2 they'll be a lot easier to add via mods and work with.

[Dr. Kerbal]

I don’t know but. Will there be an Antimatter Engine in KSP2?

[OvinandRusk]

That's a good question

[MirageGrim]

I'm suprised there isn't an Alcubierre drive in the trailer and will be more suprised if one didn't make it into the game.

[t_v]

16 minutes ago, MirageGrim said:

I'm suprised there isn't an Alcubierre drive in the trailer and will be more suprised if one didn't make it into the game.

They have already stated that there will be no warp drives, at least until someone actually engineers one. And as for the main discussion, I’d like engines to not break down over time, but maybe some of them have interesting properties if they crash into terrain. 

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, MirageGrim said:

I'm suprised there isn't an Alcubierre drive in the trailer and will be more suprised if one didn't make it into the game.

Why? Alcubierre drives are as good as magic at the moment, relying on a made-up resource with "negative mass".