Debdeb will be ~4 lightyears away from Kerbol System (Speculation)

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, SolarAdmiral said:

maybe it would be better for us in the long term if we started using something other than the light year for distances in space

The parsec makes a bit more sense at those distances.  

Still, I like the idea of a kid in 4378 living in an O'Neill cylinder near Jupiter wondering why light years are the way they are and ends up finding out a lot of history about the planet his species came from from that initial question.

I like that we can see the French, Saxon, German, etc influence in English by way of curious spellings, pronunciations, and a cornucopia vocabulary to choose from because of the historic mixing

Edited January 2, 2023 by darthgently

[Drakenred65]

GUYS. GET REAL.

 

KSP is a game that has small non human sentients who are able to come back from the dead at the flic of an menus option,

 

live on a planet that has a atmosphere, because it does, despite having a diameter smaller than the moon.

 

is also less less than one  Earth AU from its primary.

 

in a star system that has ALL known planets less than 1 AU from its Primary.

 

whoes orbits apparently has no basis on what would work in a real solar system. 
 

never mind how freaky Kerbol  and it’s orbit itself is. Or it’s fairly fast Rotation. Or it’s 2 moons.

 

has no other *Anything* indicating a space fairing civilization beyond some random aerospace related structures scattered all over the planet( untill KSP 2 anyway)  and are abandoned untill you find them. Then Poof! Instant useable base!

 

never mind that you can drop crew anyplace on the planet no matter how far away and Poof! There in you Astronaut  pool and ready to whatever.

 

seriously they can seemingly Teleport from everywhere to KSP on  Kerbin  . That or they are some kind of slime with the ability to mind transfer into a patch of green goo at KSP,  if they die they can apparently  transfer to I assume a random part of Kerbin, it’s just going to take longer for them to get there act together after “death”

Edited January 2, 2023 by Drakenred65

[Missingno200]

I'll also just chuck in, a little offhandedly, that the human brain isn't wired to think in SI. Most people still use imperial in their day to day lives, including in England, because imperial is based on human frame of references.
Also, the pixels you view this from are based on imperial. The official standard of a pixel is 1/96th of an inch.

This whole conversation makes no sense honestly. Light years are likely to be based on their SI equivalent, which we've already established is the distance light travels over the course of 31,556,952 seconds. This entire conversation about resizing the light year for Kerbal years is like if we decided to resize the meters in KSP because the planets are much smaller than they should be. A 3 meter diameter part in KSP is going to be equivalent to 3 meters in diameter in real life, guys.

[Drakenred65]

Most people still use imperial? Dude I’m a bloody minded American and even I suspect metric is used by most of the planet!

[Pthigrivi]

Wow yall. This is maybe the silliest argument on this board since the great Barn debacle. Asking why kerbals use meters and light years is kind of like asking why hobbits wear waistcoats. 

Edited January 2, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Missingno200]

5 hours ago, Drakenred65 said:

Most people still use imperial? Dude I’m a bloody minded American and even I suspect metric is used by most of the planet!

Well ignoring the fact that Asia's imperial is quite literally metric, yes.
Celsius is how hot water feels, so it doesn't much too much sense to ask a human how hot they are in Celsius. A lot of countries still use Fahrenheit from day to day as a result.
Outside of Fahrenheit, all of my European friends I can talk to right now have a pretty damn good understanding of kvarters, feet and pied. Even those who don't understand imperial measurements of length all understand fluids. Liter's too much(and makes you pay way too much for gasoline,) milliliter's too small, but a pint(or the pretty much identical unit of chopine) is a good size for a beer.

Pretty much the only country I can think of to really benefit from metric-standardization is Germany, and that's because Germany tinkered with its unit specifications about as often as its tank specifications. Seriously, go look at any page of German imperial units, it varied pretty much from city to city, even well into the age where the Swedish and British Empires had these all standardized.
Napoleon brought it due to English mockery of them since the French pied du roi was a bit bigger than the English foot, which led to much mockery and misconceptions about Napoleon's height. If you count not being mocked by the British as a "benefit" then I guess France would be the second country to benefit from metric-standardization.

Edited January 2, 2023 by Missingno200
No, the Asian imperial system is NOT the metric system. Thanks US middleschool education.

[tstein]

3 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

Well ignoring the fact that Asia's imperial is quite literally metric, yes.
Celsius is how hot water feels, so it doesn't much too much sense to ask a human how hot they are in Celsius. A lot of countries still use Fahrenheit from day to day as a result.
Outside of Fahrenheit, all of my European friends I can talk to right now have a pretty damn good understanding of kvarters, feet and pied. Even those who don't understand imperial measurements of length all understand fluids. Liter's too much(and makes you pay way too much for gasoline,) milliliter's too small, but a pint(or the pretty much identical unit of chopine) is a good size for a beer.

Pretty much the only country I can think of to really benefit from metric-standardization is Germany, and that's because Germany tinkered with its unit specifications about as often as its tank specifications. Seriously, go look at any page of German imperial units, it varied pretty much from city to city, even well into the age where the Swedish and British Empires had these all standardized.
Napoleon brought it due to English mockery of them since the French pied du roi was a bit bigger than the English foot, which led to much mockery and misconceptions about Napoleon's height. If you count not being mocked by the British as a "benefit" then I guess France would be the second country to benefit from metric-standardization.

IF it was not for the SI we woudl surely  also have a japanese a chinese system and a weird south american one based on soccer field dimensions

[Missingno200]

5 minutes ago, tstein said:

IF it was not for the SI we woudl surely  also have a japanese a chinese system and a weird south american one based on soccer field dimensions

I mean, maybe? SI ultimately was made because we needed a way to standardize science. It's fine to use SI for science and maybe engineering, but using it for every day casual conversation makes it hard to visualize things. If your frame of reference is shaku, and a soccer field, then that makes it easier to communicate to another local about it, and have the same idea about the distances. Everyone knows how long a soccer field is, it's the nation's national past time sport! It's much harder when your only frame of reference for measurement is a ruler.

I do want to make a correction real quick:US history taught me that metric had evolved in Asia before being adopted and refined by France. It was not. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be an invention of the French. I don't know where that Asia story came from, but it does annoy me that I have been taught incorrect information. Looking into the Chinese system, it's possible metric was adopted from the chi system, as the Chinese imperial was standardized based on astronomical measurements, which are fairly stagnant, but that is still not the metric system.

[The Aziz]

6 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

Also, the pixels you view this from are based on imperial. The official standard of a pixel is 1/96th of an inch.

Screen size is the only day to day (sort of) application of imperial units I can think of.

4 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

Celsius is how hot water feels, so it doesn't much too much sense to ask a human how hot they are in Celsius.

36.6 is the normal human body temperature. Also *very* hot outside. At zero water freezes so if you see zero on outside thermometer, you can expect ice. At 100 water in your kettle is ready to make tea. And Fahrenheit was based on nothing related to normal life. Now? Surprise, it's based on Celsius. How hot a human feels? Referring back to nominal temperature - it's not even equal to 100F because Fahrenheit screwed it up.

4 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

Outside of Fahrenheit, all of my European friends I can talk to right now have a pretty damn good understanding of kvarters, feet and pied. Even those who don't understand imperial measurements of length all understand fluids. Liter's too much(and makes you pay way too much for gasoline,) milliliter's too small, but a pint(or the pretty much identical unit of chopine) is a good size for a beer.

Are they all British?

Also, if a Litre is too much - 0.7, 0.5 or 0.3 is fine. We can use fractions. At least they always are a some-tenth of 1. Easier than some 1/12th of a queen's beard.

1 hour ago, Missingno200 said:

It's fine to use SI for science and maybe engineering, but using it for every day casual conversation makes it hard to visualize things. If your frame of reference is shaku, and a soccer field, then that makes it easier to communicate to another local about it, and have the same idea about the distances. Everyone knows how long a soccer field is, it's the nation's national past time sport!

What is shaku, what is soccer (that says a lot about a person's location) field? A small boulder the size of a large boulder? 580 washing machines long? Sure, *everyone* knows how big a soccer field is. Aside from the entire rest of the world that plays football instead of soccer and don't have to remember such insignificant things like length of a field (because why would they, it's just a sport, not a unit you learn in primary school). Every single country in the world would have to come up with their own "measurements" and that would lead nowhere.

[SolarAdmiral]

13 hours ago, Missingno200 said:

I'll also just chuck in, a little offhandedly, that the human brain isn't wired to think in SI. Most people still use imperial in their day to day lives, including in England, because imperial is based on human frame of references.

I have to hard disagree. I think it's entirely based on what you're raised with. People in countries with metric still use some imperial measures because they linger in cultural places and because their parents used them. Anyone raised with metric has an intrinsic understanding of metric and would say the human brain isn't wired to think in imperial.

I 100% think and visualize in metric, and the little imperial I do know is due to it still being used in some places or because it is equivalent to something in metric. I know a foot is roughly 30cm because of rulers that have it on one side. I know inches because that's what warhammer 40k uses. I give my height in feet and inches because that's what everyone here does, but if asked how wide, long, tall something is, I'd give an approximate answer in meters or centimeters. I know a gallon is about 4 liters because of a big milk jug. I don't know what a pop can is in imperial, but it is 355 milliliters. A small bottle of pop is 590 mL, large ones are 2 liters. I have no idea what a pint is. Go to the candy store, you pay by 100 grams. I fill up my car with liters, and I know how many liters the tank holds. I would have to convert it with a calculator if asked for it in gallons. Gravity is 9.81 m/s^2. I know how far things are in kilometers. I know miles are a bit larger, but couldn't tell you exactly off the top of my head. The only Fahrenheit I know is that the oven is at 350 or 450, because the ovens we get are the same ones sold in the US, 32F is 0c, and -40 is the same in both. But I couldn't say what is hot or cold without converting to Celsius. Ask me what is a cold day, I'll say below -20C, ask me what is a very cold day I'll say -40C. Ask me room temperature, 20C. Ask me a hot day I say above 30C. No idea what those are in F unless I look it up. 

This extends to places you might not expect. A few years ago I was out on an industrial worksite for the first time, and expected the guys might be more familiar with feet and inches. To my surprise, everyone just wanted the measures in millimeters same as supplied on the drawings. And I was informed that all the work they do now is in mills, nobody wanted to deal with feet and inches. Makes sense, most of the guys are the same age as me now and grew up with metric more than imperial. I ask them to measure something for me, without prompting I get the answer in mills.

And this is from a Canadian engineer who works often on US projects, where I do my work in metric before converting to imperial to give it to them, because its way easier to make mistakes in imperial. I constantly try to just give them measurements in decimal feet, because why bother with feet and inches and fractions.

Edited January 2, 2023 by SolarAdmiral

[Bej Kerman]

On 1/1/2023 at 2:09 AM, The Aziz said:

It's not based on any Earth's calendar. Or the time it takes to orbit the Sun. Read up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_year_(astronomy)

Kerbals don't use Julian years though.

And as an additional point, we wouldn't measure light years based on how long it takes Proxima Centauri B to go around its star just because the species there prefer to use Proxima B years.

[Missingno200]

You know what? No. I had a whole argument laid out, about how imperial made more sense from a daily lives perspective, after all it's a system of measurements designed around the every day life rather than every day life being designed around a system of measurements, but frankly, this conversation could go on for eons, and I'm stubborn, but I'm not that stubborn. Consider this a victory if you want, I'm considering this as a draw. There's reasons to use metric over imperial, especially for science and engineering.
I'm going to make this absolutely clear though, under no circumstances do I ever believe that a species should be using one system of measurement. That suggests something catastrophic has happened to the species, like a global dictatorship, or the complete destruction of individuality.

By the ways, it was because of Canadians that we crashed Mars Climate Orbiter with different systems of measurements, that's why all of the engineering fields now use metric. Thanks for that.

7 minutes ago, SolarAdmiral said:

And also, pixels aren't the same size. It depends on the size and resolution of the monitor or tv. 

I'd prove you wrong with the actual IEEE/ISO standard but my googlefu wasn't up to snuff, so have the next best thing.

 

25 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Kerbals don't use Julian years though.

And neither does the SI light year, it's only named a light year because of the Julian year, but it's based on a constant length!

 

[Bej Kerman]

20 minutes ago, Missingno200 said:

51 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Kerbals don't use Julian years though.

And neither does the SI light year, it's only named a light year because of the Julian year, but it's based on a constant length!

If Earth's orbital period was any different, it would have a direct impact on the length of a light year. Guess why

[SolarAdmiral]

27 minutes ago, Missingno200 said:

You know what? No. I had a whole argument laid out, about how imperial made more sense from a daily lives perspective, after all it's a system of measurements designed around the every day life rather than every day life being designed around a system of measurements, but frankly, this conversation could go on for eons,

I'd prove you wrong with the actual IEEE/ISO standard but my googlefu wasn't up to snuff, so have the next best thing.

I agree, we could argue it forever. But I stand by it all depends what you were raised with. Imperial seems natural to use for things you were taught to use it for by your schooling and family. Metric seems natural to use for things you were taught it for. It is pretty apparent when you grow up in a place where both are used. I have no idea what a pint is or fahrenheit feels like. I wouldn't be able to use gallons for anything useful. I use inches and feet only for people's height, but not anywhere else.

And imperial measurements have been slowly dying out in Canada, noticeable even over my lifetime. (Since the 1990s) No longer due to government mandate, but as the people who grew up with metric age to be the main user base and find metric easier to use.

 

I'm just arguing that it depends with what you grew up with. Not that humans are hard coded to understand one better than the other.

 

And frankly I always see the argument that imperial is easier to use in day to day life and find it baffling. And I've never heard it explained in a way other than these are the units I know. You could just as easily come up with "a human frame of reference" for any metric measure. A centimeter is approximately the width of a finger. A person is between 1.5 m and 2 m tall.

 

What is so different about measures in feet and inches than meters and centimeters? Approximations in centimeters would yield numbers  approximately x2.5 the number in inches. Meters are approximately x3 feet or about 1 yard. Do you also argue that feet are easier to understand than yards?

 

 

 

Further, for "the whole species using one system of measurements" that is kind of the case right now. As even the US now uses metric to officially define their measurements. 

29 minutes ago, Missingno200 said:

By the ways, it was because of Canadians that we crashed Mars Climate Orbiter with different systems of measurements, that's why all of the engineering fields now use metric. Thanks for that.

Was it? The cause of the accident was that Lockheed Martin provided figures in US Customary units, despite the NASA contract officially requiring the units to be metric. Lockheed was responsible contractually because they provided old customary units when asked for metric. It's possible there was a Canadian engineer working for one of the companies, but the fact remains it was two US companies and organizations and the error was caused by incorrectly using US customary.

 

But maybe that's why you crossed this out?

Edited January 2, 2023 by SolarAdmiral

[Pthigrivi]

We should also keep in mind that kerbals have 4 fingers, not 5, so it's much more likely they'd rely on a base 8 number system rather than base 10. Kerbals stand at .75 human meters, with their heads taking up half that. That would suggest to me that 1 kermeter is .375 human meters, and is broken into 8 parts. Kerbals also speak backwards spanish, so the units would be known as "Ortems" (.357m), "Ortemovatcos"(4.68cm), Ortemotco's" (3m), "Ortemotnehcos"(24m) etc. Because Kerbin has no tilt they would experience no noticeable seasons, so their year would also likely be broken into 8 "Sems", each 53.25 kerbin days and 13.31 human days long. The kerbin day is 21600 human seconds long, so their time would be broken into 45m "arohs", 5.6m "otunims", and 42s "adnuges". The speed of light then would be 19,374,920 ortemolek's per adnuges, and a kerbal light year would be about 178 ortemnollirtuacs, equivalent to .291 human light years. Of course you'd need to convert all these numbers to base 8 lotco oremuns so....

Edited January 2, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[The Aziz]

And this is why we shouldn't kerbalize any units whatsoever.

[SolarAdmiral]

3 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

We should also keep in mind that kerbals have 4 fingers, not 5, so it's much more likely they'd rely on a base 8 number system rather than base 10. 

Yes in KSP1, we used meters and seconds, gravity was 9.81m/s2.

But, the KSP1 team wasn't afraid to change other things. The size and distance of all the planets was changed. And biggest of all, kerbals have a 6 hour day and a 426 day year.

It's a game. Some things will need to be changed to service gameplay. The choice of what to keep the same and what to change should be a choice of what services the gameplay.

Meters and seconds stay the same because they are useful to us and easy to understand. The size of the planets and their orbits change to make the gameplay quicker and more fun.

My guess, is that KSP is already very comfortable with greatly scaling down sizes and distances. The whole ksp system fits inside one AU of earth's orbit.

This is how I imagine the game design discussion might go.

What gameplay purpose does separating tiny 1 AU star systems by 4 real scale light years serve? Except to make players wait longer to arrive. KSP2 is going to have an improved time warp, hopefully with faster options. But whatever the speed of the time warp, traveling between systems won't be instant.

So does it make good gameplay sense to have players wait fifty or one hundred years in game, maybe five to ten minutes at max time warp, doing nothing as their ship travels to another system.

Does it make sense for them to abandon all their local ships and colonies and stations for fifty to one hundred years to warp their ship to the next star. Or run fifty to one hundred years of missions at home waiting for it to arrive.

Or does it make sense to make the player scroll out 10 times further from a system just to show more and more empty space before the next star becomes visible on the map.

Or does it make sense to use the computing resources it would take making all ths figures for distance ten times larger?

Does the game gain anything by keeping the real world length of a light year and distance between systems, enough to outweigh the possible problems.

So to fix this, let's do what we did before. Cut all the distances by 1/10 th or some other figure. Now, it's 5 years, 10 years. A couple minutes of time warp. Still a long time, and still a long distance, enough to impress that space is massive.

But now we have a problem. Now, the nearest star will say distance 0.4 light years. Obviously this won't work, because everyone knows the nearest start is 4 light years away. Nate Simpson even said four light years himself.

So, we make a kerbal light year. We make it suitably smaller. We make the distance between systems smaller, easier to manage for the gameplay.

Because everyone knows what a meter is. But only a fraction know what length a lightyear is off the top of their head. 90% of players probably wouldn't even notice if the game used a different length for a lightyear. Because even if they know how long a lightyear is off by heart, the game doesn't need to display meters and lightyears side by side. Meters could be used inside a system SOI and lightyears outside it between them.

 

I'm not saying I am absolutely correct. I'm not even really arguing, I just enjoy the discussion. This is just my best guess based on what gameplay design courses I have taken and how KSP 1 did it.

And if the KSP2 devs decide that the game is better with smaller distances between stars. If they decide it saves them computing power to improve performance and stability, it saves players time, it makes the game more enjoyable. If they decide making the change makes KSP2 a better game. If they decide that the only thing lost is extra empty space and wasted time. If they decide to make up a kerbal version of the light year to make it all make sense. I don't want people to tear them apart over it. Because "Thats not what the length of a light year is".

 

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, SolarAdmiral said:

So to fix this, let's do what we did before. Cut all the distances by 1/10 th or some other figure. Now, it's 5 years, 10 years. A couple minutes of time warp. Still a long time, and still a long distance, enough to impress that space is massive.

If you'd asked me last year cutting the distance by a factor of 10 would have been my guess, but Nate did suggest its light years away as a teaching moment so I probably would have been wrong about that. The thing is kerbals are fictional. Everything about this problem is just whatever the devs want it to be. The actual driver will probably be computing power and just how many time-warp factors are possible given the number of vessels that need to be updated in a relatively complicated save. None of us knows what the actual programming solutions are so there's just no way for us to know. We also don't know what kinds of speeds the new interstellar drives will be capable of reaching so there's no way to know how long the journeys will be. Maybe its 10 or 20% C and its a few decades to the nearest system. Maybe it's .5c or .9c and its even less. Because we're walking in sci-fi territory that's also kind of whatever the devs want it to be. I would however suggest that the general assumption is that we are viewing the kerbal world through a universal translator, and units in-game will mirror units in our world so players can go on wiki and make 1:1 comparisons. 

[SolarAdmiral]

4 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

If you'd asked me last year cutting the distance by a factor of 10 would have been my guess, but Nate did suggest its light years away as a teaching moment so I probably would have been wrong about that. The thing is kerbals are fictional. 

Agreed. Which is why my guess would be a scaled down distance and smaller kerbal sized light years as a measurement scaled down by about the same amount.

I think based on what he said, the game will definitely place Debdeb at 4 ish in game light years. But will that be a real sized one or a kerbalized one?

Not to mention, all of KSPs engines and fuels have been balanced to make sense in KSPs tiny solar system. If they use real scale ly, does this mean the specific interstellar engines will be massively overpowered for traveling in the system? Now, in trying to preserve the impression the player is given of lightyears, we've massively changed how they perceive these new engine concepts vs regular liquid fuel.

What I don't remember exactly what was said in the interview. But I believe it was something to the effect of "we want to give people an impression of how big the distances are". 

And I think even at 1/10 scale, that impression will still be made, even moreso that the kerbin system itself is at a smaller scale. I think even in those videos they talk about, look how far apart the planets are, zoom out and look how far the next star is.

Ultimately, the distance is so large, the difference between 1 and 1/10 won't have a meaningful impact on what you see other than the times to travel. Why go to the effort of handling all the other issues, spending the extra computing resources, and balancing how engines perform for interstellar vs interplanetary, when if the game gives any distance outside the system in lightyears, no one is going to notice if they are kerbal sized ones or real sized ones.

[The Aziz]

2 hours ago, SolarAdmiral said:

It's a game. Some things will need to be changed to service gameplay. The choice of what to keep the same and what to change should be a choice of what services the gameplay.

So they could've changed the gravitational constant to make things easier. But they didn't. They did, however, buffed an ion engine tenfold, compared to real world equivalent, for better gameplay.

2 hours ago, SolarAdmiral said:

So does it make good gameplay sense to have players wait fifty or one hundred years in game

They make it less, they make the whole interstellar thing trivial. So, yeah. It's supposed to be big, it's supposed to be long.

2 hours ago, SolarAdmiral said:

Does it make sense for them to abandon all their local ships and colonies and stations for fifty to one hundred years to warp their ship to the next star. Or run fifty to one hundred years of missions at home waiting for it to arrive.

By the time the player goes interstellar, they should have all delivery routes automated, probably building in the background another interstellar vessel that will be aimed at another star. So, yeah.

2 hours ago, SolarAdmiral said:

Or does it make sense to make the player scroll out 10 times further from a system just to show more and more empty space before the next star becomes visible on the map.

Player should be able to visualize how big a lightyear is. Not ⅒ of it, not half of it. Player should be scrolling out, seeing Kerbol only as a dot, finally reaching 1LY marker with jaw on the floor, and scrolling even further, to go all HOLY EXCREMENT as they reach the first star at 4LY. So, yeah.

42 minutes ago, SolarAdmiral said:

If they use real scale ly, does this mean the specific interstellar engines will be massively overpowered for traveling in the system?

They will be regardless of scale. Dunno where I posted it, here or elsewhere, but it doesn't matter if you need to travel 2300m/s or 10000m/s to orbit a home planet, for an interstellar engine both of these will be a tiny fraction of speed they're capable of reaching. But I bet they wouldn't be worth using internally, the cost of materials and time to produce it all will make them useless compared to chemical/nuclear rockets.

[SolarAdmiral]

They didn't change the gravity constant, but by reducing the size of the planet they did make getting to orbit a lot easier. Even with the nerfed rocket equipment, its much easier to get to orbit than it should be. SSTOs are easy to build for Kerbin, large rockets don't need sustainer stages, moon landings are easy to do with one stage for landing and takeoff, ext. Earth takes 7.5 km/s DV, kerbin is 3.4 km/s. However, I'd argue the main goal wasn't to make it easier. They just wanted to cut down the amount of time it took to get to orbit. 

55 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Player should be able to visualize how big a lightyear is. Not ⅒ of it, not half of it. Player should be scrolling out, seeing Kerbol only as a dot, finally reaching 1LY marker with jaw on the floor, and scrolling even further, to go all HOLY EXCREMENT as they reach the first star at 4LY. So, yeah.

I mean, the kerbal system is about 1 AU, so like about 1/60000th of a lightyear.  Whether the distance between systems is 0.4 ly or 4 ly, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The orbit of Jool will become a single pixel on the screen before you can see 1/100th of a ly. As I said, the game could 'lie' to you, use tiny kerbal sized lightyears, and it would be almost impossible to tell.

55 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

They make it less, they make the whole interstellar thing trivial. So, yeah. It's supposed to be big, it's supposed to be long.

Keep in mind, the kerbal year is like a third of an earth year. So when I say cutting the distance by 1/10, the "time" the game tells you, would only be cut by 3.

Without reducing the size, a trip that would take 50 years in earth years, KSP would call it 150 years, since they used kerbal length years in game.

There's already a lot of fuzzy units and math going on, simply due to the changes KSP 1 already made.

Edited January 3, 2023 by SolarAdmiral

[t_v]

10 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Player should be able to visualize how big a lightyear is. Not ⅒ of it, not half of it. Player should be scrolling out, seeing Kerbol only as a dot, finally reaching 1LY marker with jaw on the floor, and scrolling even further, to go all HOLY EXCREMENT as they reach the first star at 4LY. So, yeah.

If you had a ruler that appeared on the screen and displayed the numbers so that people could see how comparatively small the Kerbol system is, then yeah. As it is, zooming out would give you the visual of 40 ly rather than 4, because there's no reference to stop people from assuming that the Kerbol system is 'standard size,' resulting in a gross overestimate of what a lightyear actually is compared to our solar system. If you really want a visual reference of how big a light year is, you are better off using the scaling system that the rest of the game uses so that things have proper proportions. 

I don't want light years to be 1/10th the size, or 1/4th the size, or even the size that they are in real life. I just want the size of light year that makes the most sense for gameplay. The point I was trying to make above is that no matter what distance you use to represent a light year, there are going to be problems with it.

If you want a visually accurate depiction of the scale of a light year, you should keep its proportion to the rest of the game the same i.e. 1/10th. But that also creates a cascade of things to reconcile in the units and constants (the time it takes wouldn't actually change much, as "shorter" trips under full baristochrone trajectories take similar amounts of time). Most importantly, the actual value for a light year measured in meters is going to be wrong, which is bad for anyone who looks it up on the wiki and is woefully misled by distances that are an order of magnitude off. 

This applies to any value that you assign a light year. If it isn't 1 ly, that means it isn't numerically accurate and people will probably want some sort of reason for that within the lore of the game. The 1/4th ly measurement probably works well for this, but then again, it isn't accurate and will throw people off when trying to convert from lightyears to meters. 1 ly is the only numerically accurate answer but it misrepresents the size of a light year by being too large for the rest of the game. So you have to decide what criteria you want to fill when scaling light years. And I choose the gameplay of it. 

30 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

They make it less, they make the whole interstellar thing trivial. So, yeah. It's supposed to be big, it's supposed to be long.

Longer distances do result in longer transits, but not in the same way as you might think. The interesting thing about a baristochrone trajectory is that the time to cross any distance increases with the square root of that distance, ignoring relativity and other effects. So crossing a distance in real light years is only 3 times as long as doing the same in deci light years. Between 30 and 100 years, the gameplay implications are pretty similar. However, the real consideration here is delta-V. If you want to take advantage of the square-root law, you have to be in a full baristochrone trajectory - no coasting phase. With smaller light years this is much easier as you have to burn for less time along the journey, while there is more challenge in getting enough dV to make a "quick" journey in large light years. Somewhere from 0 ly to ∞ ly is the right amount of challenge for KSP 2, and that is where I'd like light years to be scaled at. The educational purpose  is never going to be fulfilled because they will always be off either visually or numerically, so in the end, the gameplay challenge is what matters. 

[obney kerman]

Holy moho, this got out of hand. Metric-versus-imperial aside, I just want to be able to convert between my ship's speed (as a percentage of C) and my travel time without having to constantly change from Earth years (that are completely useless in the context of the game) to Kerbal years. And sure, you can make the argument that I might as well have Kerbals use a whole new system of measurement, but there's a thing called suspension of disbelief. Having such an obvious connection to the nonexistent planet Earth in a game about little green men kind of breaks it, but meters and kilograms don't. That's because one is based specifically on a measurement of time unique to a single planet (please, nobody use the argument that 365.25 days is completely arbitrary again, because no, it's not), and the others aren't (or at least, not obviously.)

[Pthigrivi]

On 1/1/2023 at 10:22 PM, SolarAdmiral said:

Also, for every other unit than time, revising/removing historical flavor in favor of metric was a very good idea. As a Canadian Civil Engineer who does work for a US company both in Canada and the US, the one thing all the US projects have in common, is constant revisions and error corrections due to mistakes made adding measurements in feet, inches, and fractions. I've seen thousands of man hours wasted on correcting errors and finding out where mistakes were made. There's never a project without at least once dozens of engineers in an online call all adding up measurements to find out who made the mistake. The Canadian projects just use millimeters and never run into the issue.

We can return to the subject but damn as a person who grew up on imperial and then worked a few projects in Europe metric felt like a ton of bricks coming off my shoulders. Imperial units are actual insanity. 
 

For real though I made fun of this thread but “days” and “years” in the game are in Kerbal units since .23. Maybe there’s something to this… Even parsecs are based on AU which is earth-based. Maybe Petameteres? Those would be the same for both. But no one actually uses that so its kind of meaningless. 
 

I suppose solar might be right, if we are being as consistent as possible you would scale down the distance 1/10 and measure it in kerbal light years. I would even display it on screen in “Kly” so players understood there was a difference. That would put a consistently scaled Proxima Centauri analog “1.46 Kly” away.
 

 

Edited January 3, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[whatsEJstandfor]

23 hours ago, darthgently said:

The parsec makes a bit more sense at those distances.  

But then do we base the Kerbal parsec on our own AU or on the distance between Kerbin and Kerbol?