Getting to Proxima Centurai

[DeathMetalViking666]

Before trying this challenge, will someone confirm for me if the game will even go this high...

Take a trip to Proxima Centurai! For those of you who don\'t know, Proxima Centurai is the nearest star to Earth, around 40 Petameters away (that\'s 40,000,000,000,000,000 meters).

None stock parts are allowed, obviously. I doubt anyone could do it (or have the attention span) to get that high with stock parts.

[EmperorJon]

None stock parts are allowed, obviously. I doubt anyone could do it (or have the attention span) to get that high with stock parts.

Escape velocity?

It\'s all down to your attention span.

[Jarnis]

The game engine will break far before that.

Not something it was designed for.

[Causeless]

The game engine will break far before that.

Not something it was designed for.

Not entirely true. The game used floating origin, which means the ship never goes far away enough form the origin to break things. I\'m not sure if any fail-safe is in place for the planet\'s distance.

[Spiz102]

Surely we would be aiming for Proxima Kerbali which would be only about 9% of the distance between Earth and Proxima what with the scaling factor applied to our rather puny 1m rockets and the planet itself.

[Millitron]

Well, gravity ceases working well before the game crashes. Eventually, once you\'re out far enough, (it was 800Mm I believe back before the moon update), Kerbin\'s gravitational pull gets lost in the rounding errors inherent in floating point math. Presumably, the sun\'s gravity would work farther out, but it still stops well before the required 4 lightyears. We don\'t know exactly how high you can go before the game crashes.

Not that that\'s necessarily bad. Just reach solar escape velocity, and crank up timewarp as high as it will go, and wait a day or two.

[adamapple]

I got up to 1066 Giga meters took about 4 hours and my departure speed was 14 kms a second I think

I came back after watching a movie and the screen had gone black which is a shame dunno why but the game was working well up to that point with the usual 10 000 X time dilation effects ie ship buckling like crazy etc keep in mind that this is only 1.0*10^12 metres away while 1 light year is roughly 1.0 *10^15 metres so i\'m not even close to one lightyear here.

BTW teh sun is jsut barely visible in the pic, it is a small pale dot suspended in a ring of light. Reminds me of Carl Sagan\'s pale blue dot.

'From this distant vantage point, Kerbin might not seem of any particular interest. But for the kerbals, it\'s the only home they know. Look again at that dot. That\'s here, that\'s the VAB, that\'s us. On is every crazed engineer, every rocket technician and every pyromaniac that has ever lived, lived there – on a mote of dust orbiting a humdrum star, suspended in a sunbeam.

[Motorsheep]

It\'s 'Proxima Centauri', not 'Centurai'.

c keep in mind that this is only 1.0*10^12 metres away while 1 light year is roughly 1.0 *10^15 metres so i\'m not even close to one lightyear here.

So....4000 hours for one lightyear? That\'s about half a year. Shit. We need faster timewarp.

[Mirage]

wait, are there other stars in KSP? (I mean stars, not pctures for the background)

Another planet would come first I thought...

[JupiterII]

wait, are there other stars in KSP? (I mean stars, not pctures for the background)

Another planet would come first I thought...

No, but they might add them in a long, long time.

[JupiterII]

None stock parts are allowed, obviously. I doubt anyone could do it (or have the attention span) to get that high with stock parts.

Why would they be not allowed?

[Millitron]

I got up to 1066 Giga meters took about 4 hours and my departure speed was 14 kms a second I think

I came back after watching a movie and the screen had gone black which is a shame dunno why but the game was working well up to that point with the usual 10 000 X time dilation effects ie ship buckling like crazy etc keep in mind that this is only 1.0*10^12 metres away while 1 light year is roughly 1.0 *10^15 metres so i\'m not even close to one lightyear here.

BTW teh sun is jsut barely visible in the pic, it is a small pale dot suspended in a ring of light. Reminds me of Carl Sagan\'s pale blue dot.

'From this distant vantage point, Kerbin might not seem of any particular interest. But for the kerbals, it\'s the only home they know. Look again at that dot. That\'s here, that\'s the VAB, that\'s us. On is every crazed engineer, every rocket technician and every pyromaniac that has ever lived, lived there – on a mote of dust orbiting a humdrum star, suspended in a sunbeam.

Well, the stars and such are on a spherical image map surrounding the solar system. I bet it all went black because you\'re now outside that sphere.

[Chief at War]

Well I currently 2250G\'s away from earth and traveling at 5352.1 m/s. Thing im going to end it and try to get something in the sky much faster then this.

[0rbit]

I got to 5268G by going very close to the sun and in the PE of that trajectory I accelerated using all my fuel. Speed maxed out at about 56 km/s. After 1607 days of travel time I was still doing 38 km/s.

It should not be hard to reach much higher speeds and much greater distances.

[ahipple]

I\'m in transit as we speak. This screenshot was taken at 3045Tm but we\'re still counting upward...

[Motorsheep]

73 thousand kilometers per second?

[Plymouth]

Getting there is possible, but we\'ll need like 1 000 000x warp, cause it\'s gonna take forever.

[ahipple]

Aaaaand made it. A little over 40,000 Terameters or in the range of four and a quarter light years. It only took... about seventeen and a half years. The looks on their faces must then be of sheer boredom...

[Ydoow]

O_O

Your speed is insane

[Millitron]

Aaaaand made it. A little over 40,000 Terameters or in the range of four and a quarter light years. It only took... about seventeen and a half years. The looks on their faces must then be of sheer boredom...

Can you pan the camera around for us? Or show the map view?

Also, LOL at your G meter and your velocity reading.

[ahipple]

Can you pan the camera around for us? Or show the map view?

Also, LOL at your G meter and your velocity reading.

Ahh, I apologize but I did close the window after recording that. It was taxing my poor little laptop to the max and I\'d left it open for quite a while. However, achieving that velocity is pretty simple with a little rocketry, and perhaps a modified part or two. I used the Intrepid II rocket from the Spacecraft Exchange forum.

It all happened when a friend, unfamiliar with the game, asked if I could 'set the controls for the heart of the sun' (being a Pink Floyd fan). Naturally I tried.

You just have to launch yourself through the sun on an *extremely* eccentric orbit. As the sun has no real modeling of surface or temperature or anything at the moment you can delve deep into the core and launch yourself around what is basically a point-source of gravity at the very center. The first time I tried it I came out at half the speed of light. On this attempt I didn\'t get quite it quite as fast.

I can post some pictures to detail it if you\'d like but essentially all you have to do is get into a solar orbit and then do a retrograde burn to turn the orbit into the center of the sun. In my experience the game tends to crash if you aim directly at the center but it doesn\'t take much to get where you want to go. On this attempt I got into an orbit with an apoapsis of about 17Mm from the Sun and burned from an orbital velocity of ~7000 m/s down to about 0.1m/s and then simply let the ship fall in.

I don\'t know the math all that well. It may be that simply by slingshotting I was able to achieve the velocity. It may be a glitch of the game engine. At any rate, that\'s how I achieved the velocity.

I\'ve not gotten any faster than about half the speed of light. I wonder, if anybody else would care to try, if we can hit warp speed...?

[trbinsc]

I\'ll try it in a modified Intrepid III. It\'s a version of the Intrepid II designed to get a full soteria in escape velocity.

[Motorsheep]

Hmmm...new challenge? 'How close can you get to light speed?'

[Aliv3]

Current altitude:1,014,438,966,801meters Current Apoapsis: 59,084,498,250,144,300 Current time : 5265 days in

[trbinsc]

I had to stop mine here. I got to here by diving straight into Kerbol. Ripped my ship apart though.