more engines

[BlockGaming06]

They should add some sort of wormhole jump gate or a allcubire warp drive it would be very cool to go ftl.

[prestja]

I disagree, I'd like Kerbal engines to stay sub-FTL, although I do think FTL travel is within the realm of mods should you want those types of engines. In KSP 1 you can download Interstellar Extended for Alcubierre drives and Event Horizon for wormholes. I see no reason why mods of that ilk wouldn't appear for KSP 2.

[SpartanJack17]

The Devs have said quite a few times that they're not adding warp drives, warp gates, or anything of the sort.  The furthest future technologies they're interested in are fission and fusion engines, anything past those they consider too speculative for ksp.

[mcwaffles2003]

3 hours ago, BlockGaming06 said:

They should add some sort of wormhole jump gate or a allcubire warp drive it would be very cool to go ftl.

Please no

[Dirkidirk]

4 hours ago, BlockGaming06 said:

They should add some sort of wormhole jump gate or a alcubierre warp drive it would be very cool to go ftl.

alcubierre drives are purely in the realm of science fiction. Wormholes too, although they could be added to the game if left behind by some extinct, hyper advanced aliens as a way to travel to distant parts of the galaxy. kerbals building them themselves though is a BIG NO NO! 

[shdwlrd]

The closest sci-fi tech I can see possibly being added is the Star Trek style impulse engine. It's basically a fusion engine with magnetic driver coils to increase the exhaust velocity. (I know, they say warp driver coils, but to keep the idea in the realm of plausibly, I'm saying magnetic driver coils.)

Edited March 2, 2020 by shdwlrd

[KSK]

Well gosh. It's a good thing that KSP2 isn't going to include any propulsion systems that may not even be mathematically possible let alone practical. Or engines which work on paper but which come with a bucket of unsolved engineering problems.

I think that a non kerbal-made  jumpgate would be good idea actually. Have a single sci-fi plot device for enabling interstellar travel and dial back all the crazytech interstellar rocket engines that may as well be sci-fi anyway.

But it looks like that boat has sailed. Bring on the metallic hydrogen engines and torchships! 

 

[Guest]

If you're doing interstellar colonisation you've already softened your sci-fi a fair bit. Even people like Alastair Reynolds have to hand-wave sometimes to make their space opera work.

If they do introduce overtly hand-wavey things like non-Newtonian drives or wormholes you can actually travel through, I hope it's in a clearly sci-fi context. For example, if they decide to make the late game about discovering and colonising the ruins of an alien supercivilisation, and doing enough research on that lets you travel through one of their wormholes or recreate one of their warp drives, then that could be very cool. But it would feel wrong to have stuff like that sprinkled in the tech tree to be unlocked as a matter of course.

[KSK]

Quick follow up.

For clarity, I'm fine - and in fact pleased - that the developers seem to have a vision with KSP2 which they're sticking to. Based on what we know at the moment it's not one that I'm particularly excited by, but that's my problem.

But there's no getting around the fact that much of what we've seen so far is firmly in the realms of science-fiction anyway, so I'm amused by the 'this sci-fi OK, that sci-fi is sci-fi' responses to the OP.

Edit - what Brikoleur said. This sort of interstellar travel should be an external factor (as far as the kerbals are concerned) to discover and use, rather than something that appears in the tech tree.

Edited March 2, 2020 by KSK

[Guest]

19 minutes ago, KSK said:

I'm amused by the 'this sci-fi OK, that sci-fi is sci-fi' responses to the OP.

When you're worldbuilding, whether it's a sci-fi world or a fantasy one, your world needs to have internally consistent rules and stick to them. This is what creates verisimilitude. Good sci-worlds are consistent in this way.

Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space world, for example, has magic nanotech, traversable wormholes created by ancient supercivilisations, and the possibility to upload your personality into a computer, but its space travel is otherwise strictly relativistic and causality follows the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Therefore, in his universe, a sentient AI manipulating smart matter to create a perfect facsimile of Earth in the 21st century would be perfectly OK, but a Star Trek style FTL drive or a time machine where you save the world by going back to kill the evil overlord's mom before she gives birth to him would not.

To pick an example from the opposite extreme, Star Wars laughs at your silly science and physics but has this thing called the Force which has a light side and a dark side and holds the Universe together. So WW1 style dogfights with spaceships and lasers or medieval-style pitched battles with robo-horses and laser swords are perfectly fine, but, say, a benevolent, kind, good guy Sith Lord is not.

So while the discussion may be amusing, it's nevertheless important. KSP2 needs to figure out what the laws governing its universe are, and then stick to them. If it wants to be a game about interstellar colonisation it is necessarily going to have to take some liberties with how we know stuff works; if it wants to be believable, it has to be thoughtful and consistent about the liberties it takes. 

Edited March 2, 2020 by Guest

[KSK]

Yup - and consistency can really help that worldbuilding as well. As a writer I’ve found that figuring out the consequences of the rules you’ve already established can be an incredibly useful way of figuring out where the story goes.

Incidentally your last few comments are why I’m not particularly excited about interstellar flight in KSP2. One of the reasons, in fact the main reason, that I liked KSP is that it’s spaceflight as we know it, albeit with a considerable amount of abstraction and some exaggeratedly effective parts (reaction wheels, ion thrusters, solar panels) included for gameplay balance. The near future elements have real life counterparts that have either been thoroughly proven on the ground (LV-Ns) or have met a key development milestone that suggests that the whole concept could work (RAPIER). 

KSP2 is far more of a science-fiction game and so - for me - loses much of that ‘spaceflight as we know it’ charm. As you point out, it’s also going to require some liberties to be taken, which personally I’m finding a bit hard to swallow.

TL:DR It’s science fiction anyway, so dismissing an idea out of hand as ‘purely in the realms of science fiction’ is amusing. Dismissing the idea because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the game would be more reasonable. 

And actually I think that either an Alcubierre Drive (especially a non superluminal one) or an alien wormhole jumpgate would work quite well. The first is just one more sci-fi engine to add to the pile (unless there’s a solid gameplay reason why interstellar flight at high fractions of c is any better or worse than interstellar flight at low multiples of c), and the other would let you take far fewer technical liberties (which may be a good thing for the rest of the game) at the expense of including a very obvious sci-fi element.

[Dirkidirk]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

TL:DR It’s science fiction anyway, so dismissing an idea out of hand as ‘purely in the realms of science fiction’ is amusing.

Yes it is

[KerbMav]

I see a difference between simplifying and exaggerating.

[KerikBalm]

3 hours ago, KSK said:

I'm amused by the 'this sci-fi OK, that sci-fi is sci-fi' responses to the OP.

There's obviously a spectrum as to how "hard" the sci-fi is. I don't see why its amusing that there are differences in how far along the spectrum people are willing to go.

If something is shown to be pretty much impossible, and there is no science to support its possibility, it shouldn't be in. I'm looking at metallic hydrogen and FTL here.

Even a torchship engine has antimatter to fall back on, what does a warp drive or metallic hydrogen have to fall back on? (scientifically speaking)

[The Aziz]

Nate said it in the last interview. He found out that a tiny amount of metallic hydrogen was synthesised, even for a brief second (isn't that correct?), and that was enough for them. Same goes for antimatter - I've read that scientists were able to create and contain a bit of antiatoms in a lab.

So I suppose, if humanity creates something that can go faster than light without creating a black hole which would eat our planet from the inside - because that's what we probably need, a super strong gravitational pull, and that happens within few months, PD could think about adding ftl engine.

There is their limit.

Edited March 2, 2020 by The Aziz

[BlockGaming06]

12 hours ago, Dirkidirk said:

alcubierre drives are purely in the realm of science fiction. Wormholes too, although they could be added to the game if left behind by some extinct, hyper advanced aliens as a way to travel to distant parts of the galaxy. kerbals building them themselves though is a BIG NO NO! 

Not exactly they have a possiblity of existing/workimng.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Nate said it in the last interview. He found out that a tiny amount of metallic hydrogen was synthesised, even for a brief second (isn't that correct?), and that was enough for them. Same goes for antimatter - I've read that scientists were able to create and contain a bit of antiatoms in a lab.

So I suppose, if humanity creates something that can go faster than light without creating a black hole which would eat our planet from the inside - because that's what we probably need, a super strong gravitational pull, and that happens within few months, PD could think about adding ftl engine.

There is their limit.

These are different things, though. Antimatter is well established to exist and is, in fact, pretty straightforward when it comes to actually using it in, for example, a rocket engine. You chuck it into propellant and it heats it up, then the results go out of the nozzle. It's making enough of the stuff to be of any use that's the problem. Metallic hydrogen, on the other hand, has not been proven to have the properties that the hypothetical engines are relying on. The former is science fiction, the latter is science fantasy. So, if we allow for the latter, then FTL shouldn't be a problem, either. Of course, we don't actually know the devs' philosophy on that matter, since they don't seem to be aware of recent developments on MetH2, and nobody asked them the one time they were actually answering questions.

[KerikBalm]

5 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Nate said it in the last interview. He found out that a tiny amount of metallic hydrogen was synthesised, even for a brief second (isn't that correct?), and that was enough for them.

Which shows that he doesn't understand the basics of the science behind what he's putting in the game.

The question is if it is substantially metastable, not if it exists.

The question is about the material's inherent properties. You can no more solve it than make water liquid in a vacuum.

It only works if it is metastable, and its not.

[MechBFP]

The horse has turned into a fine mist. 

[DunaManiac]

19 hours ago, BlockGaming06 said:

They should add some sort of wormhole jump gate or a allcubire warp drive it would be very cool to go ftl.

They have said specifically no FTL drives. I personally don't have a problem with FTL but it would be nice if there would be a mod for it eventually.

[prestja]

2 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

It only works if it is metastable, and its not.

We haven't yet seen it metastable here on planet Earth, but things work a little differently in the Kerbolar System  

[Bill Phil]

Almost all FTL schemes are problematic on the scales necessary since our theories don’t work on those scales. Warp drives require spacetime structures so small that GR doesn’t adequately describe them. Similar issue with almost every other FTL system.

Our theories literally don’t describe these situations - impossible or not, we can’t really model them. Quantum gravity would help a lot, but it may not be enough.

We may never have an answer...

Or maybe we’ll get one in 50 years.

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, prestja said:

We haven't yet seen it metastable here on planet Earth, but things work a little differently in the Kerbolar System  

And so might popcorn. I demand they include my popcorn drive!

Its equally scientific.

(I'm referring to my posts in the metallic hydrogen discussion thread, which is sort of where this thread is going, but with FTL mixed in too)

Edited March 2, 2020 by KerikBalm

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

And so might popcorn. I demand they include my popcorn drive!

Its equally scientific.

It doesn't matter if KSP2's MetH engines are scientific or not. The only thing that matters is that KSP2's sci-fi is internally consistent. They could have decided just as well that matter with negative mass can be manufactured and allowed Alcubierre drives, or that wormholes are traversable and allowed for those -- or for your popcorn drive for that matter. Instead they've decided that in the kerbal universe MetH is metastable. End of discussion.

There really isn't any point that I can see to polluting every single thread that's about propulsion in KSP2 with whining about how unSCIEntific it is. There is a thread just for that purpose here after all. The only remotely worthwhile discussion to be had on this side of that fence about MetH rockets is how accurately they're portrayed if MetH was metastable.

[The Aziz]

Popcorn or not popcorn, I think the point is, that some of the crucial elements are bent for gameplay. Two most common examples: Kerbol, aka the Sun, physically is too small to be a star. And planets have ridiculous density, Kerbin for example, over 58000kg/m3 (this is the density we would see in cores of some stars). I mean, Earthlike gravity on a planet 1/10 of its size? Yeah sure.

This is why some materials could exist in their universe, because they fit there.