Strange looking asteroid

[jbdenney]

I have wrangled 3 asteroids into Kerbin orbit - 1 Class B and 2 Class A. I just noticed something odd. The B and 1 of the As is flat gray. But the other Class A has cracks with a orange/yellow bright glow showing through the cracks. Is this just an interesting pattern or does this means something significant?

Thanks

Bruce

[archiebald]

having only just started to bother with asteroid mining, I haven't seen one yet but it is one of these.

 

[bestPlayer_xu]

it might be a magic boulder (not significant, just an easter egg) - but a magic boulder is an asteroid with green lines

[jimmymcgoochie]

1 hour ago, bestPlayer_xu said:

it might be a magic boulder (not significant, just an easter egg) - but a magic boulder is an asteroid with green lines

Not true- I got one that had glowing blue lines.

 

@jbdenney on rare occasions asteroids have glowing lines on them, it’s purely visual and makes no difference to the asteroid’s properties (mass, ore content etc) but they look nice. I think it’s a 4% chance or something like that? From what I’ve read there was a ‘magic boulder’ that floated around Ike in a very early version of the game, which was subsequently removed and then when asteroids were added the ‘magic boulder’ effect was added randomly to some rare asteroids instead as an Easter egg.

[bestPlayer_xu]

1 minute ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Not true- I got one that had glowing blue lines.

 

@jbdenney on rare occasions asteroids have glowing lines on them, it’s purely visual and makes no difference to the asteroid’s properties (mass, ore content etc) but they look nice. I think it’s a 4% chance or something like that? From what I’ve read there was a ‘magic boulder’ that floated around Ike in a very early version of the game, which was subsequently removed and then when asteroids were added the ‘magic boulder’ effect was added randomly to some rare asteroids instead as an Easter egg.

ok, never seen it except on an accidental orbital cheat ... but on some pictures it seems to be green (this is green:  

and this is blue - OMG: https://imgur.com/ZignP2n

[Zhetaan]

6 hours ago, jbdenney said:

Is this just an interesting pattern or does this means something significant?

Both?  It doesn't confer any special abilities or composition (you don't get any extra-energetic fuel from the strangely-glowing rocks, for example), but whether the visual effect is is significant depends, I think, on how much you like the story behind Magic Boulder's history.

6 hours ago, archiebald said:

having only just started to bother with asteroid mining, I haven't seen one yet but it is one of these.

 

5 hours ago, bestPlayer_xu said:

it might be a magic boulder (not significant, just an easter egg) - but a magic boulder is an asteroid with green lines

 

4 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Not true- I got one that had glowing blue lines.

 

@jbdenney on rare occasions asteroids have glowing lines on them, it’s purely visual and makes no difference to the asteroid’s properties (mass, ore content etc) but they look nice. I think it’s a 4% chance or something like that? From what I’ve read there was a ‘magic boulder’ that floated around Ike in a very early version of the game, which was subsequently removed and then when asteroids were added the ‘magic boulder’ effect was added randomly to some rare asteroids instead as an Easter egg.

 

3 hours ago, bestPlayer_xu said:

ok, never seen it except on an accidental orbital cheat ... but on some pictures it seems to be green (this is green: 

and this is blue - OMG: https://imgur.com/ZignP2n

It is indeed a magic boulder, but since there seems to be some confusion about both the origins and the nature of the rocks, I thought to add a bit of history for clarity:

Originally, Magic Boulder was a rock at Ike in a very polar, very low orbit.  It was not ninety degrees and it was not advertised (it did not show up in the Tracking Station, for example), which meant that just about the only way to find it was to land at Ike and watch the sky for a while--this happened by chance more often than you might think, because Ike, being tidally locked to Duna but in a both slightly elliptic and slightly inclined orbit, offers a chance to study something called libration, which is the 'wobble' that you see when tidally locked bodies don't have circular, equatorial orbits.

Magic Boulder had a Monolith on it and glowing green bits exposed through its crust, but the current Magic Asteroids have no Monoliths and come in many colours.  I have seen green, blue, orange, red, yellow, and white.  I have heard of pink and purple, but have not seen them for myself.

The other interesting characteristic of Magic Boulder was that it had a broken collision mesh, which meant that what visually appeared to be its surface was simply an illusion to the game, and you could fly through it--except that what the game considered the actual surface had no visual indicator, so on approaching Magic Boulder, you could possibly fly through its surface, or else randomly explode by collision with what appeared to be nothing at all.  The 'randomly explode' part was easily the most interesting thing about it, because that showed that the collision mesh was not merely misaligned with the visual surface (you can land on an invisible surface without issue so long as you do not crash into it--though this is admittedly tricky to do), but rather that the 'surface' generated was, in places, instantly lethal to contact.

Also, Magic Boulder is the official name--or, at least, that's the name used for it in the game's files, so it's as official as it gets for an unannounced Easter Egg.  Note that the forum convention is (or was, I suppose) to always capitalise the words and treat it as a proper name; one does not speak of approaching the Magic Boulder any more than one speaks of landing on the Duna.  This convention is reinforced, perhaps, by the forum's insistence on ascribing a sense of intent to the random mesh problems ('Magic Boulder ate my ship!', for example).

Many people believe that Magic Boulder went away with the Asteroid Redirect Mission update (alpha version 0.23.5), but it was missing for some time before that.  I am not in a position to say anything about the developers' motives, but my understanding is that it was removed by accident; its code, as anyone who has actually encountered the thing knows, was a bit weird.  The story goes that since the Tracking Station will automatically show anything that is either a vessel or a celestial body, Magic Boulder could not be either of those, but some of the updates to the game in version 0.19 meant that the game would refuse to load anything that was not either a vessel or a celestial body.  Not being a coder, myself, I can only say that it sounds plausible, but I lack both the professional expertise and the insider knowledge to verify it.  I do know that current asteroids (meaning the post-alpha 0.23.5 asteroids with which we are presently familiar) are technically regarded as vessel parts, which is why you can dock to them and move them about, and, presumably, why they show up in the Tracking Station.

It is also true that other planets were added in alpha version 0.17, so Magic Boulder was not in the game for very long.  Assuming the wiki is correct--I certainly don't remember the dates--version 0.17 was released on 19 Sep 2012, and version 0.19 was released on 16 Mar 2013, so it would have been in the game for not quite six months.

Edited May 22, 2020 by Zhetaan