The Part I want more than anything

[Hoshino]

I put forward the idea of The Accelerator, available in 1.25m, 2.5m, and radial varieties.

When supplied with copious amounts of ElectricCharge, The Accelerator produces a magnetic field.

With tweakables, The Accelerator's strength (and ECharge consumption) as well as an activation delay (activation time after action group is activated) may be set.

The potential applications of such a part should be immediately apparent, but for entertainment, here's a list off the top of my head:

Garbage Collection/Salvage/Tug Ships - need to recover something that doesn't have a docking port on it? A small array of accelerators may hold it snugly in place. WARNING: Activating attraction while too far from desired capture target may result in higher rendezvous velocities than intended.

Artificial gravity on ships - Ever just wanted to keep those pesky EVAs from floating away, or wanted your kerbals to be able to stand firmly upon the deck of your space galleon? A longitudinal array of Accelerators may be for you! WARNING: Structural integrity may be compromised by unpredictable field interactions.

Railguns - Who hasn't wanted to build a giant Railgun in LKO to fling your ships into interplanetary space? Or build an array on the surface and see if you can achieve LKO with one.

Green Energy - Never felt like you needed to lift an orange tanks' worth of batteries into LKO? You will now. Ever wish you had something to power with your completely overdone lotus-esque solar array? We've got just the thing for you..

Articulating spacecraft - For the truly insane, it may be possible to build a jointed spacecraft, and articulate it with the activation/deactivation of said accelerators.

Space Wrestling - Build a melee ship and attempt to punch your friends' (or more properly, attract them into your fist), grapple in a low-orbit cartwheel (reversible polarity as a tweakable action group toggle would make this more interesting)

"Catchers" - For lack of a better word, reverse-railguns that decelerate objects that fly through them.

There you have it. This is the one part I would most like to see added to KSP.

Thoughts? Comments? Add your own possible uses for such a part to the thread below!

[toric5]

yesss! although i think this would be better in the suggestions forum. i like it because its not a pre made solution, like other railgun ideas out there, but in fact a simple part that could be used to make a whole hose of contraptions. although ti should be small and radially attachable, in order to work with your ideas. that way we can attach it to girders and other stuff instead of having to use copious amours of radial attachment points.

[vexx32]

Moved to Suggestions and Development Discussion.

Not entirely a new suggestion, but one that could definitely be discussed again.

[CodatheSpaceFox]

This one is definitely unique, but in thought of something like a railgun, isn't a magnetic field as attractable as it is attractive to magnetic objects?

[vexx32]

Not sure what you mean... magnetic fields have two poles, after all.

[Hoshino]

The basic "railgun" architecture would be two parallel rails each lined with the Accelerator part (note that this is not how actual railguns work). The projectile would need to be between the rails, at which time the firing sequence would be initiated as an accelerating cascade of accelerator pair activations(regulated by the tweakable activation delay) that impart hopefully gratuitous speed to our projectile.

Other more sustained applications could include *very* unorthodox spacecraft arrangements, such as having components/modules that orbited a core that was running a constant accelerator. Basically you could start playing with N-body ship/station designs, as I envision this module following the inverse-square law with regard to its attractive force.

If it were implemented with an actual electromagnetism model, that would let it do more interesting things (Somebody would build a simple hard drive in orbit, I'd bet) but it'd probably be too complicated and would reach into too many other systems.

So, The Accelerator would more closely be related to artificial gravity, as it's not a magnetic dipole.

[404james]

The basic "railgun" architecture would be two parallel rails each lined with the Accelerator part (note that this is not how actual railguns work). The projectile would need to be between the rails, at which time the firing sequence would be initiated as an accelerating cascade of accelerator pair activations(regulated by the tweakable activation delay) that impart hopefully gratuitous speed to our projectile.

Other more sustained applications could include *very* unorthodox spacecraft arrangements, such as having components/modules that orbited a core that was running a constant accelerator. Basically you could start playing with N-body ship/station designs, as I envision this module following the inverse-square law with regard to its attractive force.

If it were implemented with an actual electromagnetism model, that would let it do more interesting things (Somebody would build a simple hard drive in orbit, I'd bet) but it'd probably be too complicated and would reach into too many other systems.

So, The Accelerator would more closely be related to artificial gravity, as it's not a magnetic dipole.

Maybe not magnetism then. perhaps it could just be some sort of gravioli generator. Odds are it would be quite heavy, expensive, and power consuming, not to mention the late placement on the tech tree, but the uses are, as has been mentioned, endless.