question about scale

[konokono]

Just a quick question. I've heard a few times that planets in KSP are scaled down in size. What's the reason for this? And is everything scaled down accordingly like thrust and weight? Gravitational constant? What would be the difficulty in scaling to earth?

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

Weight hasn't been scaled down, planets are 1:10 real life sizes and TWR of engines has been nerfed by a factor of 5

The difficulty is the shear size, Jool is slightly smaller then earth, easy to render because it's mainly flat, a comples planet like kerbin, with varying terrain would become flat and gradual, no sharp mountains or steep Munar crators. Boring and laggy

[El wonso]

I belive that there are 2 reasons for this:

1. Kraken (early game versions)

2. Difficulty. You need much more dV to get to LEO than LKO.

There is a mod that rescales KSP solar system to real life one.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55145-0-22-WIP-Alpha-Real-Solar-System-v5-1-HOTFIX

[maltesh]

In the time before time, when there was no map screen, and no time acceleration, when the only world was the single, non-rotating planet of Kerbin, the most basic way to tell whether or not you'd made it into orbit without using third-party tools or performing mathematical calculations on the UI information was to wait to see if your periapse was above the atmosphere.

A low Kerbin Orbit is completable in about 30-35 minutes, requiring a velocity of about 2.25km/s.

A low Earth Orbit would be completed in about 90 minutes, and require an orbital velocity of about 7km/s.

For the players of those ancient versions, the former was somewhat more forgiving.

There is currently a mod in development that increases Kerbin's radius and mass appropriately to put it at Earth Size.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55145-0-22-WIP-Alpha-Real-Solar-System-%28Kerbin-Earth-rescale-etc%29-v2-1

Scott Manley did a video on it, which can be found here.

[Brotoro]

Diminutive planets are cute!

[Sirrobert]

Gameplay mostly. It's easier with everything smaller, more forgiving

[Eric S]

Gameplay mostly. It's easier with everything smaller, more forgiving

Gameplay yes, but not just because it's easier (because that's just a matter of balancing TWR and ISP of engines), but because it takes less time. As was pointed out above, LEO orbital period is about three times as long as LKO, and the transfer time of a Hohmann transfer orbit to the Mun is probably going to be at least three times faster than a Hohmann transfer to the Mun. That's not too bad, timewarp fixes that, but then there's the fact that there's time you can't timewarp through that gets magnified if you don't downscale the universe. Launch burns take longer, transfer burns take longer, etc.

[Kasuha]

The only disadvantage of small Kerbin is that it makes low orbit docking at arbitrary angles tougher because ships "rotate" faster than they would with big Kerbin. Apart of that it makes things easier and faster and the planet is big enough as is.

[Tank Buddy]

Kerbin has the same surface gravity as Earth. You may find this interesting:http://imgur.com/user/InAPedoVanDownByTheRiver/favorites/ckadxCa

[konokono]

Kerbin has the same surface gravity as Earth. You may find this interesting:http://imgur.com/user/InAPedoVanDownByTheRiver/favorites/ckadxCa

That's a cool little web page, thanks!

And thanks to all the above posters, I think I understand now, both the gameplay reasons and about the scaling of terrain