Does Kerbol ever disappear if you get far enough away?

[99TheCreator]

Right now I have a probe on an escape trajectory out of kerbol, I know the SOI is infinite but i did notice kerbol gets smaller and smaller as I get farther away. Is it possible that if I leave my game on time acceleration for some ridiculous amount of time I would eventually get far enough away where I couldnt see it? Or is there an edge to the kerbal universe that will stop me?

[Spartwo]

Kerbol will eventually stop getting smaller around twice eeloos furthest point at that point solar panels will become useless.(Or the change has such little effect that I don't notice)Once you escape well...http://i.imgur.com/6ESb25y.png?1

So yes and no.

Edited August 19, 2013 by Spartwo

[ledogen]

If you move away from Kerbol at escape velocity, your speed will remain constant and eventually the game will crash, because the amount of RAM necessary to keep your craft's location would be immense. That being said, it is not unheard of for people's crafts to combust, and a look at the flight report will say they've been devoured by the space Kraken.

[Bacterius]

If you move away from Kerbol at escape velocity, your speed will remain constant and eventually the game will crash, because the amount of RAM necessary to keep your craft's location would be immense. That being said, it is not unheard of for people's crafts to combust, and a look at the flight report will say they've been devoured by the space Kraken.

Not so much the RAM usage (it's not using arbitrary precision arithmetic, and even if it did, at a constant speed you would be hard-pressed to go far enough out for memory to become a problem) but as the numbers involved get larger floating-point inaccuracies would start creeping in, eventually tearing your craft apart. I like to think of it as tidal forces from dark matter around the Kerbol system destroying unsuspecting spaceships...

[Spyritdragon]

So what happens if the 'craft' is just a single probe core you let fly through space which has long since run out of power? I don't think you can have a similar problem anymore then, can you?

[Boex]

So what happens if the 'craft' is just a single probe core you let fly through space which has long since run out of power? I don't think you can have a similar problem any more then, can you?

I'm no expert, but I think that just using one part would reduce the time it took your system to crash, just like increasing the RAM. If you convert a persistence.sfs file to a persistence.txt you will see that the "coordinates" of your vessel are kept to many decimal points. We all know that even a slight change in moment could hugely change the periapsis of an encounter in 60 days time. The "coordinates" have to be as exact, but optimised as possible.

Kerbol will eventually stop getting smaller around twice eeloos furthest point at that point solar panels will become useless.(Or the change has such little effect that I don't notice)Once you escape well...http://i.imgur.com/6ESb25y.png?1

So yes and no.

It's actually impossible to escape the Sun (Boring...), purely because there is no Sphere of Influence outside it (yet). The Sun's SOI is infinite.

What actually happened in that picture is what ledogen said - "the game will crash because of the amount of RAM necessary to keep your craft's coordinates."

Edited August 19, 2013 by Boex

[SRV Ron]

Actually, it would be the result of overflow in the floating point calculation for distance that would cause that crash. Sort of like exceeding +- 32,767 on old integer based games. That could be fixed in the future by the program trapping that error before it happens, or by deleting the probe after it exceeds a threshold distance with a message that your probe have left the Kerbal system and is now lost.