Why planets are so small?

[Alex Boshko]

Hi guys!

First of all, I want to express my utter excitement about this game. It's really a masterpiece, and I spent dozen hours playing with my rockets and have no regret about it It's really amazing.

But one question still bother me a lot. The game actually has a great arcade / simulator ratio, keeping realizm exactly on a level that enjoyable to play with, and still adhere to main physics and general rocket sciense laws. BUT...

Guys, why all plantes are ten times smaller then their analogs? That's the only thing so far that dissapoints me a lot. It's a real glitch on a way to feel yourself a real astronaut. Just look on fotos of real ISS orbiting earth on 400 km height. The earth looks HUGE and magnificent... And in KSP on the same orbit it looks much less fascinating: just a small ball, even smaller than a real moon.

So is there any hope to have in future real-sized palents? Or is it just some hardware / architecture / float numbers precision limit of the game that never will be solved? Maybe some plugins can mend this stuff? That's would be really great

Thanks, Alex.

[skykooler]

The planets are small to make the game more playable. On Earth, it takes a good 15 minutes to fly into orbit, which would quickly get tedious. The smaller size of Kerbin allows for a better gameplay experience.

[Robbii6]

The game would be way to hard if they were realistically big so they were made smaller so it was easier and more fun

[Boex]

Also it allows the textures to be 10x higher quality with the same GPU usage, I guess...

[Sof]

Orbit lower

[Sapphire]

Not actually ten times smaller. Kerbin, I believe, is 1/3 the size of Earth. If you want to put a station in something the size of Earth, I'd advise going to Jool, which is as big as Earth.

[stupid_chris]

Not actually ten times smaller. Kerbin, I believe, is 1/3 the size of Earth. If you want to put a station in something the size of Earth, I'd advise going to Jool, which is as big as Earth.

Kerbin has a radius of 600km opposing to the Earth that has a radius of 6378km. That's pretty much one tenth. Precisely, objects in the game are scaled to 1:10.6 IIRC.

[Sir Nahme]

They shrunk in the wash

[Maddmatts]

Floating point precision errors are a major part of the reason. When you have something measuring meters in a space measuring in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers, it's hard for a computer to keep precise track of where everything is using a limited number of digits for coordinates.

[softweir]

The player has to ride with every launch, whether he controls the rocket/spaceplane or uses MechJeb or other autopilot. If each and every launch took 15 minutes then the game would become a lot more frustrating, and I suspect the planned Career Mode would grind to a halt! KSP needs to have the shorter launch times, and the only simulator-friendly way is to have smaller planets.

Incidentally, many shots of the ISS are taken from some distance using telephoto lenses, which is a photography practice which tends to exaggerate the size of background objects - in this case, the Earth. Earth looks less impressive in photos taken from the ISS using wider-angle lenses.

[stupid_chris]

Floating point precision errors are a major part of the reason. When you have something measuring meters in a space measuring in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers, it's hard for a computer to keep precise track of where everything is using a limited number of digits for coordinates.

True, but it's very mostly because of the size of texture it would require and because of the much longer time everything would take and how much bigger the rockets should be.

[jbaltus123]

play minecraft! must buy or hack! its not a space game but its 7000x bigger than earth its like neptune!

[Skyrunner27]

play minecraft! must buy or hack! its not a space game but its 7000x bigger than earth its like neptune!

What does this have to do with the size of planets?

[Kabloosh]

play minecraft! must buy or hack! its not a space game but its 7000x bigger than earth its like neptune!

Or check out space engine. That simulator allows you to explore the known universe. Can't build rockets and launch them into space though. But if you want the next best thing than going to a high end planetarium or going into space yourself space engine is absolutely epic.

[Khrissetti]

Or Orbiter.

KSP makes no apologies that it's about being a fun game first and an accurate simulator a distant second.

it's the same reason why sports games like FIFA tend to have their games squashed into 10-20 minutes unless you specifically ask for a full-length game - for most people it's more fun to have a number of quick-fire games than sitting through a tedious 0-0 kickabout for two hours. The only racing game I can think of offhand which has realistic race lengths is the endurance races in Gran Turismo and maybe some settings on the F1 racing games.

[Arran]

The only racing game I can think of offhand which has realistic race lengths is the endurance races in Gran Turismo and maybe some settings on the F1 racing games.

Try iRacing, it had full 45/60 mins races online in a pretty realistic sim. alot of people just cant race fully focussed this long and start too crash the cars after 20/25 mins due fatigue since those races are fairly brutal due realistic handling of the cars.

Only top drivers could keep high time pase up for that amount of time..

On populair demand even the 45/60 min races of the Radical C Challenge now have been lowered again too just 25/35mins what was for me a serious turnoff and turned those racing more into quick sprints.

[Jon Tash]

I hope one day there will be a mod to change the radius of planets and make atmospheres ticker/thinner to be more realistic. Don't care if my pc melt down because of it, I just want to see, you know, for science... and stuff.

[PDCWolf]

Back in the day there was no timewarp, so Harv decided to make the planets smaller as to remove "LE TEDIUM XD". Later on timewarp got added but the "TEDIUM, MAKE EASIER PLS" growth more and that's basically why we have 600km planets.

[Vanamonde]

The KSP planets are smaller than ours, but they're not small. Minmus alone has about the same surface area as Denmark. You could spend weeks just exploring it. The only thing scaling up the KSP planets would do is force you to spend more idle time in warp while travelling between them. And that is why they were made this size in the first place.

[AncientAstronaut]

For everyone saying, " it takes 15 minutes to get into orbit."

It actually takes a lot less depending on the vehicle. It took like 5 minutes for the Atlas to put the Mercury in orbit.

[Lazro]

It's partly because it would take longer (longer than it does now, at least) to get into orbit, partly because of issues with processing all that terrain, partly because modelling entire planets that size would take a heck of a long time, and of course, partly just for of the heck of it.

[Sir Nahme]

The kerbals are too short to live on a big boy planet

[Alex Boshko]

Incidentally, many shots of the ISS are taken from some distance using telephoto lenses, which is a photography practice which tends to exaggerate the size of background objects - in this case, the Earth. Earth looks less impressive in photos taken from the ISS using wider-angle lenses.

Like here? Really. My fault, didn't thought about it first time.

partly because modelling entire planets that size would take a heck of a long time

Even planets with current size would take a heck of long time. So nobody model entire surface manually

But still, all reasons for small planets listed here except technical ones don't look very convincing to me. I don't think the flight-to-orbit would take much more time - I didn't make any calculation though - but still, the atmosphere sickness doesn't seem to be scaled in a rate, as planet does. And atmosphere is a main predicament on a way to space.

Still, even if that time is uncomfortably longer, there are ways to mitigate it. Like an option, why don't make two launching pads, on usual surface for hardcore simulation, and, for example, for casual players on some extremely high plateau or hill? I don't say that it is an ultimate solution, just something that first occurred to my mind. I'm sure with further brainstorm there could be a great deal of ways to solve issues like that

Also, there is a time wrap. If you get bored of full-time launching, you can easily speed up process. But here comes the real technical issue: time wrap doesn't work well with physical simulation, and, as far as I understand, there never will be a solution of that

[Motokid600]

Id rather have detailed smaller planets then low res big ones. Squads making a good effort to pretty up these planets and I like them alot. Once clouds are added ( and weather effects. Severe lightning on the dark side of Jool for instance. ) the orbital views will look spectacular. I just wish the atmospheres would be more fluid and dynamic. Right now its a sudden "wall" of atmosphere you hit. Id like a proper one that degraded orbits under 200km

[skykooler]

Still, even if that time is uncomfortably longer, there are ways to mitigate it. Like an option, why don't make two launching pads, on usual surface for hardcore simulation, and, for example, for casual players on some extremely high plateau or hill? I don't say that it is an ultimate solution, just something that first occurred to my mind. I'm sure with further brainstorm there could be a great deal of ways to solve issues like that

The main thing that makes getting to orbit on Earth take so long isn't going through the atmosphere, it's the high speeds that are needed to achieve orbit. Satellites in LEO orbit at over 8,000 m/s, which would take four times as long to reach as the 2,200 m/s needed to attain orbit on Kerbin. And you can't just accelerate faster, if you're going for realism (and you probably are if you want the planets realistically sized), because that would put more g-loads on your pilots. The space shuttle peaked at 8 g's; 2 g's is the maximum humans can withstand for a prolonged period of time, while fighter pilots and astronauts can briefly take up to 9 g's before blacking out. To fly this four times faster, you'd peak at 32 g's, which is not survivable.