Why are KSP planets undersized in comparision to our solar system

[kiwiak]

I'm sure that was explained already, but i cant find it.

[ultimatevirus]

Mainly to make it easier to achieve orbits and do things like interplanetary travel. If the planets where the same scale it would take at least something like 10x more power to reach orbit then it is now making the learning curve even steeper then it already is.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

If you want a 1 to 1 scale universe - clicky

[Wallace]

In low Earth orbit, it takes about 2 hours to go round once, in low Kerbin orbit it's about 20 minutes.

If all the planets and moons were Earth scale, it would take ages to get anywhere, even at high warp, plus it would take ages to get through atmospheres when we can't warp.

[Sirrobert]

It makes the game play better

[Scarecrow88]

Because it's a game and not a scale simulation.

[ultimatevirus]

Imagine the processing power that would take!, better upgrade my pc

[arq]

It doesn't make launching easier so much as faster. The fuel tanks and rockets have terrible stats compared to IRL to put some of the challenge back.

It makes launches 3-4 minutes instead of 10 and orbits 30 mins instead of 90. It reduces the orbital times of all bodies in the system, meaning that transfer windows are more frequent and less time warp is necessary to get from place to place (the solar system is BIG). Lower time warp makes handing intercepts and other orbital events more accurate.

Also, if Kerbin has 1/10 the radius of Earth, it has 1/100 the surface area. This means that the surface can be more detailed with lower memory requirements, polygon counts, etc.

There is a rescaled Kerbin mod, but I haven't messed with it. Overall, I agree with Squad's decision to scale stuff down for the sake of enjoyability.

[EtherDragon]

As everyone said, it makes this game easier to play and learn, while still being able to apply real-world physics.

If you want a space-flight game with real world size and complexity, go check out Orbiter Space Flight Simulator which is free and has tons of free plug-ins - including the Apollo ships, modeled accurately right down to the computer system.

[eurybaric]

I think it also has to do with floating point calculations with big numbers. I.e. if i recall correctly, the bigger the numbers involved , the larger the margin of error.

[AlamoVampire]

I would say, some combination of all of the responses above mine honestly.

[codepants]

Kerbals are undersized compared to us. They evolved to be an appropriate size for their planet, just like we did. And the game is set in the Kerbalverse, not the Earthverse.

[martinws]

Kerbals are undersized compared to us. They evolved to be an appropriate size for their planet, just like we did. And the game is set in the Kerbalverse, not the Earthverse.

How tall are the Kerbals?

[DrMonte]

I think the first, main and the only true reason to make Kerbal Universe small was just to save Computer calculation power. Maybe one day in version 2.0 we will witness "BigBang" and Universe will rescale to real values.

[Starwhip]

2 reasons.

1: Processing power. Planets of that size would take up MASSIVE amounts of memory, possibly crashing the game or even your computer.

2: Time. It takes 8 minutes to get to orbit in reality. The game is set up so it only takes about 1:30.

[KerbMav]

Even if I had a computer - and I guess I have, but KSP is 32bit and single-threaded - that could handle a scaled ... how does Orbiter handle it anyway?

No matter even then I prefer the space-time scaled down to playable levels.

[Kasuha]

I think it also has to do with floating point calculations with big numbers. I.e. if i recall correctly, the bigger the numbers involved , the larger the margin of error.

Most of it was caused by the fact that PhysX uses single precision floats and the game initially used them optimistically everywhere. Double precision floats are sufficient for solar system size purposes, you get submilimeter precision with them even behind Neptune orbit.

Assuming you use stable arithmetics, that is. Making calculations so errors don't pile up is not easy and problems of that type can be seen in the game even now.

[Smidge204]

How tall are the Kerbals?

Based on their size compared to rocket components, a tad under 1 meter.

It's actually a bit of a mystery how they actually fit into the Mk 1 command capsule... their helmet is larger than the hatch.

=Smidge=

[700NitroXpress]

In all honesty, I think it boils down to time constraints and gameplay reasons. Computer processing power doesn't really factor into scale because scale in space is relative. I'm not sure what game engine Squad is using, but this looks similar to Unity. Unity doesn't support Hyperthreading on processors so things like water and large terrain can run very slow. I think that this is a custom engine that was inspired by Unity or perhaps Unity pro. My PC is a beast and it's hard to get anything better without thousands of dollars invested into it because I'm a game designer and 3D artist. Scaling things down improves on time for travel, texture size, engine performance, poly count, and animation. When you add up all of the things necessary to run a game, this game wouldn't be able to run on any computer using a single processor core for all of the calculations. As far as programming goes, an engine like this isn't anywhere near as effective as something like Unreal Engine 4 or even Unreal Engine 3, but again I think that this is some sort or Unity clone engine.

[Black_Tomcat]

The only computer processing power that is needed in addition to make a bigger solar system is for the graphics card to load bigger textures.

If you look at the Kerbin-Earth rescale you will see that Kerbin's resolution is quite a bit lower because of that.

[700NitroXpress]

The only computer processing power that is needed in addition to make a bigger solar system is for the graphics card to load bigger textures.

If you look at the Kerbin-Earth rescale you will see that Kerbin's resolution is quite a bit lower because of that.

Not really, you can load any sized texture you want for a planet up to 4k and over. Kerban with a texture resolution of 1024 x 1024 is the same as an Earth texture of 1024 x 1024. And since there is only one planet loaded into a scene at one time aside from the sun and background galaxy, you could have an extremely large texture resolution for the planet because you're only projecting the texture and normal map to a standard resolution sphere.

[DrMonte]

Any other argument leads to processing power.

1. Time warp. - You can easily add one more x1M or x10 physics warp if your computer could handle this.

2. Precision in calculation - floating point calculations, big number libraries, double floating points. There are number of possible solutions if your computer would handle this.

From my experience - it's physics that holds the game not the graphics. From the other hand graphics can be easily lowered, physics is fixed.

Note that the game is not aiming for supercomputer. It must work on average PC.