Project hawking

[-YLLogicaL-]

So what is this thing?

An on-going project to design and build a series of massive ships (I call them "Light Speeders" or "Time Travellers") capable of travelling at (or almost at) the speed of light thus allowing the Kerbals to travel to the future (feature not implemented yet), given that the Space Kraken is now sealed inside Kerbol and will not be able to interfere people who want to go as fast as they want anymore.

Project inspired by the video below. More information can be found there about this concept.

So what's the progress so far?

Due to the projected sizes of these ships, memory constraint will be an expected problem, given that I only have 3GB RAM for use (I badly need expansion, I know).

Also, I need to modify some parts beyond their standard values (particularly the LFE power, RCS, and tank capacities) to cope with the weight constraints,but never pushing them beyond points of imbalance. I've built one ship so far that managed to go off the launch pad after a handful of attempts.

Genesis

One of the handful in-flight screenshot I've taken (including the one on my sig), due to lag and tendency to go full retard on the launchpad. No VAB shot due to its size. Lightspeed capability can't be seen yet, due to poor controls.

.craft file now attached. Requires version 0.17, KW Challenger 0.5, Latest NovaPunch, and Project Kebylon. Read "Important details" first. It has ~430 parts, so get ready.

[ATTACH]33686[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]33685[/ATTACH]

Will be updated soon.

Edited September 27, 2012 by -YLLogicaL-

[Angelmoon]

I love that video, saw it a few months ago, fantastic idea for a ship.

[-YLLogicaL-]

Yup, and I've decided to take it to Kerbin and see what I can do.

[ElJugador]

Mods used? .craft file?

[Cooly568]

I got 8GB ram and a i5 and gtx 550. I could give the rocket a spin on my computer

[Companion]

this is so amazing!

[-YLLogicaL-]

Thanks guys!

EDIT: .craft file for the Genesis is now attached.

[Hammaneggs]

Try making a stock version!

[-YLLogicaL-]

Try making a stock version!

Modes used for increased aesthetics.

And you'll also end up editing some parts if you tried

[phoenix_ca]

Okay, this is a very neat project. (And hell, I really loved that series by Hawking, especially the creation of the universe part. Such an elegant, simple answer to why the universe can be created from naught. Math is quite incredible.)

Regarding memory consumption, that isn't the limiting factor on performance. The limiting factor is the fastest single CPU core available. KSP is single-threaded, and 32-bit. The most RAM is eaten-up on loading, when it reads part files from the HD and allocates all that data to memory, but if you have enough RAM to load KSP, it's safe to say you have enough to run it. The upper limit on this is a bit over 3GB, because of the limitations of 32-bit memory addresses. Doesn't matter if you have a 64-bit processor and OS, the program is 32-bit, thus the memory limit. Since it's single threaded, only one CPU core can be used at any one time, meaning that there is no benefit from having two, four, or eight cores: KSP's performance is limited to how fast one core can execute all of the calculations, in sequence. There are good development reasons to avoid the pain of multi-threading, not the least of which is that it's incredibly complicated to write multi-threaded software, and Squad isn't a huge company that can just toss a whole team of programmers at the problem.

So, in short: If you want more performance from KSP, a CPU upgrade is in order. Increases in clock speed are better than increases in number of cores. Overclocking the CPU would also help, though it's a bad idea to do that if you don't know what you're doing. (Ideally to run KSP, you'd get the highest-clocked processor you can find, with two cores so that KSP can easily monopolize one core without freezing the system, and then liquid-cooling it so that it can be OC'd to absurdity.)

Now that I've straightened that out, here's what I suggest to improve performance of the ship:

1. Don't even try to get it off the launch pad. Just skip launching it. "Construct" it in orbit. When docking is completed you might be able to do this in a non-haxxy way, but for the time being, either hack the thing into the persistence file by launching a smaller ship that'll launch without issue into orbit and then replacing that ship's data in the persistence file with the data from your project ship. That, or use the Orbital Construction mod if you feel that's "cheating". (Though it's extremely unlikely that we'd ever launch something so massive from the ground in the first place, so claims that hacking the persistence file in such a way is "unrealistic" is just silly.)

2. Reduce the number of parts required by creating new parts, and/or using parts that already fill this role. Gaby's payloads mod has a huuuuuge fuel tank that is just one part, but the equivalent of a lot of NP tanks + struts. So it's the stupid number of tanks, without the lag.

3. Straight-up cfg edit things to your will (edit: even more than you've already done). Make the tanks hold lotsa fuel, or more realistically, make the engines have very, very high vac Isp. (Any such ship would need to have such engines.) Some judicious edits to those files would let you keep the look of the thing, without needing to go overboard with parts. Setting a parts-budget goal of around 200 would be a good target if you want to share it.

[-YLLogicaL-]

Tips taken. I'll try the persistence edit method on the next ship I'll do

[phoenix_ca]

Persistence edits are wacky, just a word of caution. Do a back-up before trying it...it has a tendancy to either ruin your staging, or spread debris all over the system...probably both. >.>