globe encompassing station

[PsykoticCreations]

Not sure if it's been answered, I did try to use google to find the answer and found nothing. I was wandering if, in the game right now, it is possible to dock enough parts together to completely circle the globe as one huge station or will the game not allow that? I'm talking if there was no lag issues at all could it be done?

[RocketPilot573]

NO, just no... There are tons of reasons why this can not be done. For instance, the game only loads parts up to 2.5 Km away.

[Syhrus]

My answer to this is: Go ahead and try. You'll have your answer after about 20 launches when you realise the enormity of the task.

That and physics of the game don't allow it.

Although, I would like to see an attempt at this and see what actually happens....... PROJECT TIME!

[Captain Sierra]

Even if it could be accomplished, it would not work. Orbit works by moving around the planet so fast that the fall due to gravity is matched by the planetary curve so you basically fall around the planet. Think about it like a weight on a string. As you spin the string, the weight is held at constant distance in relation to your hand. That is like gravity. If you have a ring around a planet, gravity will be acting on all sides at once and no amount of orbital velocity would keep you in orbit.

Though . . . it could be argued that the gravitational forces acting on one side of the planet balance that on the other and since the CoM would then be in the center of Kerbin, it could be held there by gravitational suspension.

Note: You probably wouldnt be able to build pieces bigger than quarters at a time before final assembly or the aforementioned problem of falling into the planet occurs. It would need to be at least 800KM radius (600km radius of kerbin + 200km altitude).

Of course, the came will not load physics on objects over 2.5km. This can be increased with the lasor mod (or any of it's standalones) up to 99000 if memory serves but that still wont be enough and bad things happen when your craft is out of physics range of itself (such has been learned from guys doing experiments with KAS XD).

[Tiron]

Even if it could be accomplished, it would not work. Orbit works by moving around the planet so fast that the fall due to gravity is matched by the planetary curve so you basically fall around the planet. Think about it like a weight on a string. As you spin the string, the weight is held at constant distance in relation to your hand. That is like gravity. If you have a ring around a planet, gravity will be acting on all sides at once and no amount of orbital velocity would keep you in orbit.

Though . . . it could be argued that the gravitational forces acting on one side of the planet balance that on the other and since the CoM would then be in the center of Kerbin, it could be held there by gravitational suspension.

Note: You probably wouldnt be able to build pieces bigger than quarters at a time before final assembly or the aforementioned problem of falling into the planet occurs. It would need to be at least 800KM radius (600km radius of kerbin + 200km altitude).

Of course, the came will not load physics on objects over 2.5km. This can be increased with the lasor mod (or any of it's standalones) up to 99000 if memory serves but that still wont be enough and bad things happen when your craft is out of physics range of itself (such has been learned from guys doing experiments with KAS XD).

Except... KAS has an Undocked Mode... DUN DUN DUN

[Bacterius]

Even if it could be accomplished, it would not work. Orbit works by moving around the planet so fast that the fall due to gravity is matched by the planetary curve so you basically fall around the planet. Think about it like a weight on a string. As you spin the string, the weight is held at constant distance in relation to your hand. That is like gravity. If you have a ring around a planet, gravity will be acting on all sides at once and no amount of orbital velocity would keep you in orbit.

Though . . . it could be argued that the gravitational forces acting on one side of the planet balance that on the other and since the CoM would then be in the center of Kerbin, it could be held there by gravitational suspension.

Note: You probably wouldnt be able to build pieces bigger than quarters at a time before final assembly or the aforementioned problem of falling into the planet occurs. It would need to be at least 800KM radius (600km radius of kerbin + 200km altitude).

Yes. It's an unstable equilibrium. It would work - if the ring was strong enough and in a high enough orbit - if it were in a perfectly circular orbit where the net gravitational force would be zero, however as soon as the orbit becomes even slightly elliptical, the periapsis (being closer) is pulled in slightly more than the apoapsis (being further away), bringing the periapsis in closer and thus pushing the apoapsis further away, eventually resulting in the ring colliding with the planet and causing immense damage to the atmosphere. I really can't see what kind of propulsion engine could do any meaningful orbital correction for a structure of that scale, so it doesn't seem feasible physically (I mean, ignoring all the other engineering problems). Interestingly, the opposite (a repulsive force on a surrounding ring) is stable, which I believe is used in some applications of electromagnetism.

That said, it could work and achieve pretty much the same function if you instead had a lot of disconnected mini-stations all orbiting close together at the same altitude behind one another. You could freely move from one to the next with a tiny burn/retroburn (like jetpack, or even jumping if they are close enough) and only minor orbital corrections to account for momentum transfer. Actually, that would kind of work in KSP, though you'd be constantly loading parts of the station and it would be very fragile. But.. it would work on some level. (I assume you would edit the parts into orbit automatically, doing it by hand would be near impossible to get accurate enough and very time-consuming).

Edited August 22, 2013 by Bacterius

[Crater]

To answer your original question about how many... if you used station-parts that were 100m long, which is huuuuuge in KSP terms, you would need in the region of fifty thousand launches.

But, as has been said, the game engine has a maximum single-vessel size of about 2300m by default, so the physics engine would fail on the 24th.

Also, ring-stations are gravitationally unstable. The maths isn't too hard, but essentially if you integrate around the surface of a ring (or sphere), the gravitational attraction from inside it sums to zero, which means that they cannot orbit anything that is inside them, and if there is any drift at all, it will continue. For more on this, read the Ringworld series by Larry Niven, they're great books.

[maccollo]

But, as has been said, the game engine has a maximum single-vessel size of about 2300m by default, so the physics engine would fail on the 24th.

Well it is possible to change that value. So what if it was changed to something massive to allow this, and this contraption was built out of modded parts that were 20 km long?

How many of these could be joined until the thing just fell apart, if the physics don't simply break down when the craft is loaded?

[Sirine]

You might want to try it from a smaller scale. Just go to the "tiny" moon like Ike. And start your "big" project there.

[Spyritdragon]

All lag issues and loading distances aside, I don't really get how this 'can' be physically impossible. I mean, i can orbit a beam. If i use MechJeb (and probably on my own given some time) i can put that beam in a perfect 100-by-100km orbit. Now i can orbit a second beam, and maneuver it very close to the other beam, also in a perfect 100-by-100 orbit. I can keep going like this untill i've eventually encompassed the planet with orbiting beams in perfect 100-by-100 orbits. Why would this structure fall apart once i dock all these orbiting pieces together, when all im really doing is applying clamps?

[Crater]

As has been said above, the structure is fundamentally not stable. As for what would cause it to collapse... in ksp it would die of floating point maths precision errors, and in the real world it would suffer from n-body interactions that made it drift into its primary. We are not saying that it would suddenly collapse as you got to a certain length, just that you would be building a house of cards.

[Stargate525]

This has been postulated, and IS possible. It's called a Dyson Ring. It would require stationkeeping, like anything else, but that could be solved by anchoring it to space elvators at even intervals.

[chefsbrian]

I'm surprised nobody pointed this out, but even IF you could get a ring into orbit and the physics engine didn't choke up and die, the whole thing would die if you tab away or time accelerate. Rotational is lost when things go on rails (How the nose of your orbiters will not stay level with the horizon) and depending on how KSP calculates its center of mass and motion, the entire thing would likely tear itself apart at the seams when it attempts to resume its position, because if the pieces lost the rotational force keeping the ring shaped like, well, a ring, the best result would be that one of the ends pops open, the worst result being each piece attempts to start back up and collides with its neighbor, dropping most of the ring, if not all into the planet, and possibly shooting out a small segment or fragments into deep space, depending on how the whole thing was simulated. (not to mention the MASSIVE floating errors that would provide a massive feast to the kraken)

[LexDavis]

if ALL things went right and by some wizard magic this was made. what would happen if you rolled?

[chefsbrian]

Well, assuming that all sections of the ring had reaction wheels, it would depend on how KSP decided to handle rolling, whether it gunned all wheels up to full force, or if the ones on the pivot axis watched how much force they pushed.

Either way, the likely reaction would be the ring bowing, and if that didn't snap it in half the difference in orbit speed and direction (and possibly altitude, depends how far you got it to bow) with the bent pieces would rapidly disintegrate the whole assembly.

[stringyquark]

Orbits just don't like to stay in perfect circles. As soon as it's not perfect different sections would start moving at different speeds. World's largest trash compactor. That whole same area covered in the same time science stuff, but I'm sure struts can fix it.

[karolus10]

Even if this would be possible to be done in game (no game and hardware limitations), I doubt that any player would be able to carry out thousands identical missions, without destroying his personal life or dying in the process...

I think it's perfectly doable to put couple thousands copies of same craft in regular intervals, by editing persistence file, but it still would be daunting task if done manually.

You can't see anything above 2500 meters, but you could had neat "ring" made from craft markers.

Edited August 26, 2013 by karolus10

[Spyritdragon]

Not to mention the enormity of the Kessler effect one could cause with this

[Umlüx]

planets and moons are way too big.

but what about the magic boulder? .... i smell a challenge somewhere!

[Kimberly]

The Magic Boulder doesn't have a sphere of influence, so I don't think that would really count. No different from making a ring around a ship.

[M4ck]

Even if everything mentioned here was somehow overridden, the station would have a center of mass inside the planet, and therefore below atmosphere pressure of 0.1(or whatever the line is...) and be neither landed, nor splashed down. Basically like something just launched. You could neither save with it nor switch vessels to anything farther than several km away from the center of mass(using the square brackets). Also, the camera would go crazy.

[M4ck]

Correction to he previous post: if your question was "can you have SOMETHING encompassing Kerbin", then the answer is... Well, yes, you can. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you the toroidal fuel tanks(each attached to a small probe core(central part) + MJ). The scientific method of research relied mostly on a variation of the pure-blood-Jeb motto: "Moar zeros!".

This one, with a resize factor of 2k

This, 20k

The next one, 200k

And the last one, following the trend, 2M

I DO know that is probably not what you had in mind, but hey! It actually works! By the way, this was done with no crash damage and unbreakable joints. Without that, the 2k one in a vessel made of clamp>core>toroid gets obliterated at launch, sending the probe core at the "sonic boom" effect speed, by the way.

[shand]

"Moar zeros!".

This one, with a resize factor of 2k

This, 20k

The next one, 200k

And the last one, following the trend, 2M

You read XKCD What If?

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and saying you didn't just zoom the camera in for them... Can you get it actually around the planet? rather then at 250km like a halo?

[M4ck]

Well, I do read it from time to time, but this was not supposed to be related to any strip at all. As for trying to get it to "fall" around the planet: I'll see if this single part (not with the probe core in the middle) will do that. It should probably work fine, as the COM does not have any collision and any "real" polygon of the part will not touch the ground.

[Tw1]

Other times, it has been said that having a center of mass inside a planet will cause the game to destroy your ship.