Speed of Light Possibility?

[willwolvescry]

I watched Scott Manley's video of the possibility of speed of in Kerbal Space Program but I was thinking about this. The design he used could accelerate at 153 m/s² and that design didn't seem to me to be the best design. So what I did was focus on weight and thrust to come up with the best design. Now I didn't test the "good citizen" method but rather the cheating method (the one being demonstrated in the video). Doing so I decided I would need to use the lightest computer command moduel, the best SAS moduel that is about the same size of the command part, smallest fuel tank, and the most powerful rocket engine. This is the design here. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=154440031 Now keep in mind this is all stock no mods to it and only using the infinite fuel cheat. Now on to the testing and math portion.

Test and math portion:

Now there is two possibilities here. One being we will do the hard way being we stay with Kerbin's atmosphere and close to the surface. The other is we do it all in space. We are also assuming that all values in the Kerbin system is similar or equal to those in real life. So we will start with the path in atmosphere. After some testing it was found that the spacecraft's average acceleration was 243.2 m/s² and the drag made it lose about 4.9 m/s² of acceleration. Now drag will come into play later. The good news is the rocket was able to fly perfectly straight which means all forces are on one axis (the y to be exact) so we don't need to do anything to the acceleration so we can skip straight to figuring out how long it will take to get to the speed of light. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. Using basic physics the equation we would use is t=V/a so lets plug in those numbers. 299,792,458 m/s / 243.2 m/s² = 1,232,699.3s which after doing some conversions we find that it would take 14 days 6 hours 28 minutes and 48 seconds to reach the speed of light. I don't know about you but I wouldn't want to wait that long nor do this within atmosphere.

In space we don't have to deal with gravity, friction, constant threat of running into something, or poor engine performance. So lets go back to that original number we started out with 243.2 m/s². We know that gravity and friction in atmosphere are both exact opposites of our forward acceleration so we simply need to combine the two values and add it to our forward acceleration. Kerbin's gravity is 9.82 m/s² and friction was 4.9 m/s² we would get 14.72 m/s²(I'm not doing sig figs because I'm looking for exact values) so adding that to the forward acceleration would give us 257.9 m/s². Once again we do as we did before t=V/a. 299,792,458 m/s / 257.9 m/s² = 1,162,436.8 s and with the help of conversions we get a total of 13 days 10 hours 53 minutes 54 seconds to reach the speed of light. That is only a 5.70% increase from within atmosphere.

The results:

Using nothing but stock and the infinite fuel cheat you can reach the speed of light using this design in 13 days 10 hours 53 minutes 54 seconds at best. Now there maybe a better design but this is the one I found best. I want you guys to test this and see if using only stock if we can possibly reduce that number.

All of the above was done through the Phemoral Space Program (PSP) results may vary. For further evidence please private message me and I will do the best I can. Thank you!

[Themohawkninja]

In space we don't have to deal with gravity, friction, constant threat of running into something, or poor engine performance.

Actually, in real life there is the possibility of getting close enough to a celestial body that gravity comes into play, the interstellar medium creates some friction (and therefore drag), micrometeroids, and the interstellar medium can cause damage to a craft, and some engines have poor performance anywhere.

Aside from that, luckily since the mass of an object in KSP isn't affected by velocity, this is perfectly possible as you state.

[SuperFastJellyfish]

I did this before the forum crash. I let it run for a few days at x4 warp to get there. The small solid booster without fuel has the highest TWR in the game. I could have left off one RTG, but I couldn't get it to attach to the top of the probe core correctly so I just put two on radially.

Here's a few screenshots:

Just before the speed of light:

Just after the speed of light:

Edited June 21, 2013 by SuperFastJellyfish

[willwolvescry]

Interesting. Didn't think of using the small booster. I tried to small separation booster but that's it.

[Nibb31]

Not much point if you're using infinite fuel.

[Loocas]

Without infinite fuel it would be impossible to achieve light speed in KSP. The craft would have to be *massive* (I guess that of the size of a small moon) to hold such a ridiculous amount of fuel.