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Kerbetti Machines


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Anything you can handle without breaking game physics or gameplay, especially in multiplayer, would be lackluster and boring.

In principle, you can have stellar mass compact objects, be they neutron stars or black holes, but the reason these don't present a problem is because your ship will get destroyed by tidal forces way before you get to relativistic velocities and start causing problems. And that's why it doesn't matter much if it's a black hole or a neutron star from that distance - you are nowhere near the surface of a stellar mass neutron star, let alone the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole at that point. So it's just a compact object you wouldn't even be able to see that you can maybe use for an extreme Oberth maneuver.

A supermassive black hole is far more exciting, as you can traverse its event horizon in one piece, but that comes with all sorts of technical problems. Orbits near event horizon aren't conic sections, so you have to properly integrate them as if you were doing n-body physics, and even then, doing so with relativity in mind is problematic. Time dilation alone, which diverges at actual event horizon, seems like an absolute gameplay barrier.

So compact objects effectively come in two varieties, as far as implementing them in KSP goes. Game-breaking or boring.

That said, one thing that might actually be exciting is a red giant / neutron star binary, with giant's atmosphere being swirled into the neutron star. And though you probably couldn't get close enough to that neutron star to have any real gameplay reason to do so, because yikes, it would, at very least, look absolutely spectacular, and could still be an interesting star system to explore. That's the only kind of stellar mass compact object that'd be worth having in KSP2, in my opinion.

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