How to got more than one Star System to work....

[tntristan12]

Has any brought up the suggestion that you could make Kerbol a binary or more star system? You wouldn't have to deal with the light year distances and have the star just orbiting each other with there own sets of planets. Although I would love to see a small Kerbal galaxy with a black hole at the centre you could go visit.

I'd love to see something like the Firefly star system.

Edited August 29, 2014 by tntristan12

[Dooz]

Well if they do Slay the Physics Errors and such.

They can have a Galactic center(blackhole) then Instead of The sun being the center point for all the galactic center would instead of the sun, then put all the stars and kerbol Orbiting the galactic center.

It could work.

And then maybe some microwave engine for probes.

And mabye some rocket motor with 1000 ISP

Edited August 29, 2014 by Dooz

[Kasuha]

I don't like the idea of other star systems in KSP very much. There are plenty of things that can be added to the game within the current system - more planets, more moons, asteroids, comets, kupier belt, scattered disc, "random" visitors from interstellar space, eventually even a brown dwarf companion to the Sun on very distant trajectory and with its own planets. Any interstellar travel would require unrealistic means of transport such as teleportation or FTL drive. Not that these can't be added but it's not about orbital mechanics anymore and they need to be set up in a way so they can only be used for interstellar travel, not within single system - or they'd render any other technology obsolete.

[Capt Snuggler]

Any interstellar travel would require unrealistic means of transport such as teleportation or FTL drive. Not that these can't be added but it's not about orbital mechanics anymore and they need to be set up in a way so they can only be used for interstellar travel, not within single system - or they'd render any other technology obsolete.

exactly! and also. what would you do when you get there? land, plant flag, log temperature data, don't transmit data because distance is too great.

I think unlocking some amazing propulsion and life support tech, then building and launching and interstellar ship makes a good end game mission. but as for arriving at the destination, forget it.

you assemble parts, launch them, assemble a huge ship in orbit, move to safe distance, launch on interstellar trajectory (or engage gravity drive or what ever), credits roll, game continues.

[chaos_forge]

exactly! and also. what would you do when you get there? land, plant flag, log temperature data, don't transmit data because distance is too great.

This. Before the devs add more star systems, we need planets to be more interesting.

That said, there are ways to include other star systems without needing to add warp drives. First of all, if you have Kerbol be part of a binary star system, you can have the other star be relatively close, say 10 or 20 Jool orbits away from Kerbol. Certainly not close, but not far enough to require a warp drive. Second, you can have STL interstellar drives that don't make interplanetary travel too easy. For example: consider we have an Orion drive that adds 10km/s delta-v per pulse. If we instead have it randomly add between 8 and 12 km/s to our velocity, then if we use it to get to a planet, we'd still have around 1 km/s to kill with conventional engines. However, when going to another star, this would be a small price to pay. Combined with the fact that an Orion drive would probably be heavy, unwieldy, and expensive, this is enough to make an interstellar STL drive not be OP.

[Dooz]

Any interstellar travel would require unrealistic means of transport such as teleportation or FTL drive.

Not entirely true, you can slingshot off Jool to get on a interstellar trajectory and if done correctly Encounter The Star Using

Engines we have now.

We will need Higher time warp.

[TrooperCooper]

Yeah... higher time warp and a cryo-sleep chamber for the Kerbals... or a multi-generation setup.

[thereaverofdarkness]

This. Before the devs add more star systems, we need planets to be more interesting.

That said, there are ways to include other star systems without needing to add warp drives. First of all, if you have Kerbol be part of a binary star system, you can have the other star be relatively close, say 10 or 20 Jool orbits away from Kerbol. Certainly not close, but not far enough to require a warp drive.

Don't have to make it a binary star system (though that would be cool). Our sun's stellar neighborhood is not particularly dense. Life-bearing worlds could easily lie in a cluster a hundred times as dense or more. So if we take the 1/10th sizing of the Kerbal universe and make the Kerbal stellar neighborhood a further 100x denser, we could have the nearest star system be 1000x closer to "Kerbol" than Alpha Centauri is to Sol.

Alpha Centauri A is 4.367 light years, or ~276,200 AU. So the nearest star in KSP could be ~275 AU away, or 3025x the distance from Kerbin to its sun. (1 Kerbin AU is 0.090909 Earth AU)

At around 3000 "Kerbin AUs" you could get there with conventional engines in KSP and well within Kerbal lifetimes. If you slingshot yourself into an escape trajectory going fast enough to average 20,000m/s for the trip (not too hard to do with LV-Ns), you could travel the 40 billion or so km in 2 billion seconds, or 65 Earth years. At 100,000x time warp, it'll take you about 5 hours, 45 minutes. It's quite doable, but still leaves a LOT of room for higher dV values from more advanced technology or larger multi-stage rockets.

Perhaps a rather elaborate (and initially tremendous) rocket built using highly advanced antimatter-powered fusion engines with an iSP of over 100,000 and built in 5 or 6 stages, with a payload fraction under 0.01% could accelerate to 1,000,000m/s and then decelerate upon reaching the star. Then the trip would take only about 1 year and 98 days. That's a little over 5 minutes on 100,000x time warp. With a ship like that, you might decide to go to a more distant star, or youmight just not go as fast as you're able to but instead save dV for a return trip. And this can be done with technology that has been demonstrated to work.

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Speaking of the idea of making the "Kerbol" system a binary (or trinary)...

Lets use a 1/10th scale version of the Alpha Centauri trinary system as an example. Alpha Centauri A is the "center", as it is the most massive of the three stars-though Alpha Centauri B is nearly the same mass and they orbit a common barycenter. Their orbits are eccentric and they vary between about 10 and 40 AU apart. Alpha Centauri C (Proxima Centauri) is about 13,000 AU from the barycenter.

If we wanted to give "Kerbol" a companion star close, but not so close as to light up the night, it could be ~130 Kerbin AU from the sun. It could appear as the brightest star in the night sky, and be variable and flash at times-as most small stars are variables. This would give a nice stepping stone for intrepid interstellar travelers to get an early grasp of the kind of distances they are dealing with, and to become more acquainted with the idea that packing extra dV is important because you can't just raise the time warp speed high enough to do it faster.

Edited August 30, 2014 by thereaverofdarkness