Show and Tell - Ovin

[Wizard Kerbal]

Why was the youtube video deleted?

[TheOrbitalMechanic]

7 minutes ago, Wizard Kerbal said:

Why was the youtube video deleted?

I think the video is unlisted on their channel, but the link here still works for me.

[Bej Kerman]

On 10/16/2021 at 10:37 PM, t_v said:

It would be really easy for the devs to simply map the rings to the equator, but here you can see that their orbital inclination is not the same as the direction that the planet is rotating in.

That's not realistic - the rings should stay locked to the equator due to frame dragging effects. The planets' axis aren't gonna be locked like the original KSP, they will be tilted and this is evident in Ovin's rings.

On 10/17/2021 at 12:39 PM, KerikBalm said:

But KSP2 has mmH engines.

This is indicating to me that we are seeing severe "power creep", which is generally regarded as bad game design.

You're out for those mmH engines, aren't you?

[t_v]

38 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

The planets' axis aren't gonna be locked like the original KSP

Ok, first of all, I am going to be discounting arguments about the rings being dragged to the equator, I have already demonstrated that I understand and agree with those physics principles. The miscommunication that I think is going on in this quote is that you think I think that the planet has no axial tilt. This is untrue, as I am aware that in KSP 2, planets will indeed have axial tilt. Clear? If you dislike or disagree with my position that in KSP 2, the rings on a planet are not necessarily bound to the equator, it cannot be based on what happens in real life or based on arguments surrounding axial tilt. 
 

the reason I am happy about this is that aligning with the rings is not as simple as launching from the equator and going east, but instead, you can use a variety of latitudes and angles, which you will have to adjust for when launching. I would expect this added complexity to be present in the hardest of planets, like ovin, which would also add a navigational challenge to what is otherwise a big flat ball.

[The Aziz]

44 minutes ago, t_v said:

the reason I am happy about this is that aligning with the rings is not as simple as launching from the equator and going east, but instead, you can use a variety of latitudes and angles, which you will have to adjust for when launching. I would expect this added complexity to be present in the hardest of planets, like ovin, which would also add a navigational challenge to what is otherwise a big flat ball.

Not as simple but also not exactly hard. Just set up a launchpad on the highest/lowest possible latitude below the rings. And launch east when aligned with them. I've done that hundreds of times on Kerbin, as I set my station in highly inclined orbit crossing the Woomerang LC area. Minor inclination corrections needed, if any at all.

Now I'm not sure if axial tilt affects that, because once you're in the air, you're not really affected by the planet. Sure you may have some speed in certain direction due to planet's rotation but that's not much (unless the planet spins really fast) and could be omitted.

[KerikBalm]

9 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

You're out for those mmH engines, aren't you?

Yea, because I don't see any reason or good coming from them.

They aren't realistic, and they make gameplay trivial, as the calculations here for Ovin show, even after they made Ovin unrealistic in terms of density, and a very improbable size relative to Kerbin.

The only way to salvage them is to make them and other things unrealistic too.

It's not taking things in a good direction

[Guest]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Yea, because I don't see any reason or good coming from them.

They aren't realistic, and they make gameplay trivial, as the calculations here for Ovin show, even after they made Ovin unrealistic in terms of density, and a very improbable size relative to Kerbin.

The only way to salvage them is to make them and other things unrealistic too.

It's not taking things in a good direction

Add a little boiloff to mmH and now your lander tanks won't survive the interstellar transfer, now you need to build the whole colonial infrastructure to manufacture mmH in the target system, make that costly enough and you now have 2 possible outcomes for an Ovin mission:

• Use a conventional chemical lander, let's say methalox or hydrolox, the IRSU plant required is the easiest one and can fit in the lander itself (like in the Martian) or assembled in place with minimal equipment (let's assume just another lander worth of equipment and a Kerbal engineer to assemble the thing).
• Use mmH: You literally need one of the biggest third tier (1 land,2 assemble, 3 build in place) colonial factories and also one of the most power hungry ones, even if you can transfer mmH over interstellar distances is not a smart move, it just means you're doing an interstellar expendable mission with your fuel source for landing operations being half a century of transfer time away from where you're actually operating.

Remember this?

The smallest is the methalox fuel plant, the biggest the mmH, not exactly convenient or portable.

You're forgetting the gameplay aspect of the matter, there are a ton of ways to make the pixie dust engine only viable as a late game colonial cargo lander option while also making it not practical for exploration purposes.

[KerikBalm]

45 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Add a little boiloff to mmH and now your lander tanks won't survive the interstellar transfer, now you need to build the whole colonial infrastructure to manufacture mmH in the target system, make that costly enough and you now have 2 possible outcomes for an Ovin mission:

• Use a conventional chemical lander, let's say methalox or hydrolox, 

Hydrolox would suffer from boiloff, mmH wouldn't, no more than diamond (a metastable compund) does. Even liquid oxygen for methalox suffers boiloff.

Your solution is to compound the lack of realism by just making mmH even more unrealistic.

Also, I doubt that the first body that you colonize in that system after the interstellar journey will be Ovin.

And it's just a matter of scaling up the lander, as far as I can tell...

We still need details on the atmosphere, if there's a sufficient one, dropping lots of equipment will be easy

[Guest]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

Hydrolox would suffer from boiloff, mmH wouldn't, no more than diamond (a metastable compund) does. Even liquid oxygen for methalox suffers boiloff.

How safe it is to store it for months? For years? Decades?

Hydrolox is relatively easy to procure in a new system, ideally hydrolox and methalox would be the two kind of fuels that are refineable with portable enough equipment given the right raw resources.

How complex is the equipment to manufacture the stuff? How much resources does it require? (we already know that's the biggest building between factories) how long to build it? How much power and raw resources does it consume? How fast it is?

There's going to be a difference (I hope) between bringing low tier simple fuel production equipment and kick-starting a whole self sufficient colony just to have the fuel to land on a planet.

 

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

And it's just a matter of scaling up the lander, as far as I can tell...

As far as you can tell, by ignoring all the possible gameplay implications of a fuel choice.

The gameplay requirements are all that matters for every different kind of fuel, the game doesn't need to have kerolox, methalox and hydrolox if they all behave the same and are all obtained in the same way.

It's useless to have helium-3 fusion drives, antimatter torches and nuclear Orion pogo sticks if you make the fuel for those engines in the same way by simply putting a straw in a random asteroid to suck out a magic do-it-all "ore" to turn into the relevant fuel with an universal generic "IRSU" module.

The logistical and manufacturing gameplay differences between them it's all that is going to matter when it comes to fuel choice, because if the difference it's just performance then you could just make different kinds of engines using the same fuel and save that complexity for other parts of the game.

At least that's what I hope, because if you can easily make all the fuels the same way, and you can just plop a fully grown colony wherever you want with just an oversized lander the last problem KSP2 is going to have is an OP mmH one, but a generic lack of any kind of difficulty or balance while still having an overly cluttered gameplay.

[Bej Kerman]

15 hours ago, t_v said:

the rings on a planet are not necessarily bound to the equator, it cannot be based on what happens in real life or based on arguments surrounding axial tilt. 

But KSP 2 is based on real-life (albeit downscaled for floating point errors) and the rings will not deviate from the equator. I'm clueless where you got the idea that the rings aren't aligned with the planet.

6 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

They aren't realistic, and they make gameplay trivial, as the calculations here for Ovin show, even after they made Ovin unrealistic in terms of density, and a very improbable size relative to Kerbin.

Let's just forget about the Daedalus engines, capable of burning for years, and that there are planets IRL much denser, lighter, bigger and smaller than Earth, so you can keep wailing on this tiny and comparatively terrible engine along with the planet you think best suits it.

[KerikBalm]

3 hours ago, Master39 said:

You're forgetting the gameplay aspect of the matter, there are a ton of ways to make the pixie dust engine only viable as a late game colonial cargo lander option while also making it not practical for exploration purposes.

I'd rather not have arbitrary limitations for gameplay, that's getting quite far from ksp's realism with simplifications for gameplay.

 

9 minutes ago, Master39 said:

How safe it is to store it for months? For years? Decades?

Well, we are talking about something that can't be stored in real life. So this question is a bit invalid from the start.

Assuming that it is useable at all, then I have to assume that any spontaneous decomposition would set off a chain reaction, making the entire thing go boom.

If it is safe to go on a hohman transfer to something like Plock, then it should be safe for a trip to the next star at .1c with a fusion engine.

If your ships don't go boom when forgetting about them in orbit, then I see no reason that you can't bring a good supply of it to the next star system... Other than some arbitrary unrealistic gameplay constraint.

9 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Hydrolox is relatively easy to procure in a new system, ideally hydrolox and methalox would be the two kind of fuels that are refineable with portable enough equipment given the right raw resources.

How complex is the equipment to manufacture the stuff? How much resources does it require? (we already know that's the biggest building between factories) how long to build it? 

I mean, mH is just made by diamond vices here on earth, they fit in a room, scaling that up to make it in large quantities is another thing... But the raw material for mH is just hydrogen, found almost everywhere, unlike He3

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Hydrolox would suffer from boiloff, mmH wouldn't, no more than diamond (a metastable compund) does. Even liquid oxygen for methalox suffers boiloff.

Forgive me Im not an expert on all this—why would mmh not boil off? Its a supersolid condensate, right? Wouldn’t that require a huge amount of power to store it near 0 degrees K?

[KerikBalm]

17 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Its a supersolid condensate, right? 

Not to my understanding. mH is formed well above 0k at very high pressure. Helium forms a solid condensate just by cooling it for comparison

The idea was that you could compress it and it stays compressed, like turning graphite to diamond

 

[SOXBLOX]

My philosophy on mmH was and still is, "Who cares?" If it adds to the game without damaging the "Kerbal-ness" of the project, I'm fine having it in the game. mmH isn't so unrealistic that it makes the game feel fake. Plus, as Master39 et al have pointed out, it will have major limitations as a fuel. It's not gonna be a Mary Sue fuel.

[Guest]

22 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I'd rather not have arbitrary limitations for gameplay, that's getting quite far from ksp's realism with simplifications for gameplay.

If there's no arbitrary gameplay limitation in a fuel there's no reason to have that specific fuel in the first place.

Example:

- Kerolox has slightly more powerful engines, but it's available only on Kerbin and that's limits it's usage to the early game.

- Hydrolox is slightly worse but you can manufacture it with an IRSU unit.

If the devs don't need the "slightly stronger but only available on Kerbin" fuel niche in their gameplay vision then there's no need to have two fuels there, no matter how cool  or realistic it is.

Without its own gameplay niche it's any different fuel is just useless clutter (and this is valid for any "realism for realism's sake" feature).

 

24 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Well, we are talking about something that can't be stored in real life.

 

25 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I mean, mH is just made by diamond vices here on earth, they fit in a room, scaling that up to make it in large quantities is another thing...

So making it and storing it it's just fanta-engineering at this point, we can assume it would be relatively easy (just like we do with fusion engines, ignoring all the possible engineering problems) or we can make up owr own realistic-ish limits to make that specific fuel fits the gameplay niche it was created for.

Remember that this is a sequel of KSP, if they just needed the kind of performance to fit the engine power progression they had in mind they could have just picked up one of the exotic nuclear thermal designs and made them work with "liquid fuel" produced by sucking with a straw from any random rock laying around and ignoring any radiation concern.

 

[Pthigrivi]

Here's what some probably knowledgeable internet randos think: https://smg.quora.com/Would-metallic-hydrogen-remain-solid-when-returned-to-a-low-pressure-state?ch=1&share=254d11d8

"Hypothetically, metallic hydrogen could be metastable at room temperature and pressure if there is a large enough energy barrier for the nucleation of a bubble of molecular hydrogen. If the barrier is very large compared to the thermal energy, then it will take a very long time for metallic hydrogen to transform into molecular hydrogen.

However, I don’t know of any compelling reason to expect metallic hydrogen to last very long at room temperature and pressure. One theoretical study even estimated that metallic hydrogen would rapidly transform back to molecular hydrogen when the pressure dropped below ~100,000 atmospheres [1].

I think the media (and perhaps some scientists) have exaggerated the possibility of metallic hydrogen being metastable under ambient conditions, especially after recent experiments reporting metallic hydrogen received a lot of publicity [2]. The myth of room temperature/pressure metallic hydrogen can be traced back, at least in part, to theoretical studies that, in essence, predicted metallic hydrogen to be metastable at zero temperature [3]. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for metallic hydrogren to have an appreciable lifetime at room temperature."

So, my layman's understanding of this is that maintaining high pressures, low temperatures, and thermal/kinetic isolation would probably be important to keep it from sublimating. With the constraints unknown the in-game storage tanks are going to be somewhat magic black boxes, but it's not unreasonable to assume they'd require a lot of power or risk boil off or outright explosion. Antimatter containment would probably also require a lot of energy to store, so keeping a powerful reactor on board could be a design constraint for these high tier fuels. If the reactors are chewing through their own fuels over time this could create a manageable shelf-life for exotic fuels. 

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

- Kerolox has slightly more powerful engines, but it's available only on Kerbin and that's limits it's usage to the early game.

- Hydrolox is slightly worse but you can manufacture it with an IRSU unit.

That's not even how those fuels compare. Also, they are apparently using methalox in KSP2, not kerlix. I would expect to be able to obtain that off kerbin.

If they don't just use one fuel in real life, then realism provides the gameplay reason

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Without its own gameplay niche it's any different fuel is just useless clutter (and this is valid for any "realism for realism's sake" feature).

And realism already provides for that.

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

So making it and storing it it's just fanta-engineering at this point,

No, it's not, it's not an engineering problem at all. It's a fundamental physics problem, it's not possible.

but this is going off topic to old threads

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

just like we do with fusion engines, ignoring all the possible engineering problems 

The difference is that we know fusion works, and it is just an engineering problem, not a fundamental problem of trying to make a material which can not exist.

 

Back to Ovin, it's denser and relatively larger (assuming Kerbin-earth equivalency) than any know planet. The closest is a planet orbiting a star more massive than ours in just 4 days, making Mercury look cold.

So why have such an extreme planet like nothing observed, if not for an arbitrary challenge for an OP engine?

[Guest]

29 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

That's not even how those fuels compare. Also, they are apparently using methalox in KSP2, not kerlix. I would expect to be able to obtain that off kerbin.

If they don't just use one fuel in real life, then realism provides the gameplay reason

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Without its own gameplay niche it's any different fuel is just useless clutter (and this is valid for any "realism for realism's sake" feature).

And realism already provides for that.

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

So making it and storing it it's just fanta-engineering at this point,

No, it's not, it's not an engineering problem at all. It's a fundamental physics problem, it's not possible.

but this is going off topic to old threads

Honestly you just seem to be blind to anything strictly gameplay-related, to the point of trying to correct the scientific accuracy of random examples completely missing the point one is trying to make.

Go back to my comments and replace every IRL substance with a purely ficional one, if you can make sense of the gameplay message then come back to me with an answer.

If you can't do that then there's no point in further continuing this discussion.

 

29 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

So why have such an extreme planet like nothing observed, if not for an arbitrary challenge for an OP engine?

When all you have is an hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[Pthigrivi]

Leaving aside formation questions for the moment, would Ovin's density be plausible if it were like 90% iron? 

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Honestly you just seem to be blind to anything strictly gameplay-related, 

You seem to be blind to my point about use of different fuels in the real world.

The great thing about the KSP setting is that in most cases, you can copy-paste realism in to get interesting gameplay choices. This extends to hypothetical engines like nuclear fission/fusion, beamed power, etc.

57 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Leaving aside formation questions for the moment, would Ovin's density be plausible if it were like 90% iron? 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2-38b 

That's beyond my knowledge, since gravitational compaction must be taken into account. The linked planet above is the closest known example, and is only 75% the surface gravity. It's also only 7 earth masses, as opposed to >10 kerbin masses for Ovin. It's also ridiculously close to a star larger than Earth's sun, explaining how it wasn't able to hold on to lighter elements, despite it's mass.

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

According to that, they should only for very close to their stars, which is what is observed for K2-38b.

I see no indication that Ovin is super close to it's star, to the point that just getting into orbit around the planet from a higher orbit around it's parent star is a problem - the dV just to capture would make moho capture a joke ( but ok, you came in an interstellar torchship, or at least with an Orion drive) - but how you avoid your ship melting that close to the star... I don't know what they might have to allow you to get that close to a star 

Edited October 22, 2021 by KerikBalm

[t_v]

@Bej Kerman it seems that we have come to an understanding. The only difference between our standpoints is that I’m seeing a drift across the planet and you are not, and at the resolutions that we are looking at, it is easy to be mistaken either way. We both agree that rings are around the equator in real life and should be that way in most parts of the stock system. I appreciate the fact that on the software side, rings are not bound and when people are making planet mods they can experiment with weird rings ignoring realism, and because you do not see the rings drifting, this point is irrelevant to you. Thanks for resolving this in a civil manner and I’m glad I could explain. 

[Alexoff]

On 10/17/2021 at 1:42 PM, The Aziz said:

I've said that a dozen of times already elsewhere, but you should probably know that recording a test scene directly from unity editor (and it most likely is that) won't give you a great performance in terms of framerate, even on beefy pc. I know because I've tried. Hell, even if it was straight from the test build, there's still plenty of debugging tools and other stuff running underneath.

You shouldn't be saying this to me at all. We should inform the developers that they can show us objects not from the editor with a bad frame rate, but directly from the game with good performance. After all, this is nonsense - to spread a teaser of a game object with a low FPS! Hundreds of games have been made on the same engine, but no one has posted teasers with low fps yet. Well, a year before the release, it would be nice to show something that was not in KSP 1 - a working colony, a huge interstellar ship like from a trailer, a metal hydrogen engine, an auto supply system between colonies, something about multiplayer...

[The Aziz]

15 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

Hundreds of games have been made on the same engine, but no one has posted teasers with low fps yet.

How many before-release-teasers from games made in unity have you seen? Of those that are not in Early Access release model?

17 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

would be nice to show something that was not in KSP 1 - a working colony, a huge interstellar ship like from a trailer, a metal hydrogen engine

We've seen all those long ago. Ksp2 feature videos, in most if not all cases.

[shdwlrd]

@AlexoffDo you know most other teaser images and videos from game titles are heavily edited. They are captured from the game engine and run through some Adobe product to remove all the imperfections with the captured material. Look at CyberPunk for examples of this. All the teasers and "play through" videos released were all running very smooth, no hiccups. Then the game was released, we all know the story about performance after that.

We should be happy Intercept is willing to show us their progress warts and all throughout the project. Because most other studios would be editing the hell out of these "peeks" of new assets.

Also, are you ignoring the pre-alpha notes that are on all the videos and pictures Intercept releases? Do you know what pre-alpha means?

[SOXBLOX]

On 10/22/2021 at 12:06 PM, KerikBalm said:

Back to Ovin, it's denser and relatively larger (assuming Kerbin-earth equivalency) than any know planet. The closest is a planet orbiting a star more massive than ours in just 4 days, making Mercury look cold.

So why have such an extreme planet like nothing observed, if not for an arbitrary challenge for an OP engine?

Did you account for KSP's different scale in your calculations?