Harnessing the Kraken: Eeloo in 11 hours!

[Comrade Jenkens]

On this thread I want ppl to post about their Kraken encounters and most importantly what causes them I'd like to know the pieces and interactions that do this and the effects its had on your ships.

The reason for this is I want to find out how to trigger these physics breakdowns and hopefully to harness them in some kind of productive way. Yes I am talking about stock warp drives!!! I the past I've had glitches which have caused my ships to accelerate to past the speed of light yet I have no idea how to trigger this.

My final goal from this reaearch is to create a device that can transport a ship from Kerbin to Eeloo in a single in game day.

Current Craft:

Warp test 6

Old Craft:

Warp Test 3

Warp Test 4

Warp Test 5

Update 3

Further research has yielded a greatly improved device with the following advances:

The size was halved yet again and the part count reduced to 12.

Power has been increased and in space acceleration has gone up to 25G.

The craft is much more controllable, with loops and spins now possible.

Lifting of up to 40 tons has been shown.

Update 2

With continued testing I have managed both anti gravity and a craft capable of accelerating at 8g. While the acceleration test proved uncontrollable, the anti gravity has turned out a remarkable success and the pilot can even kind of choose a direction. Uncontrolled torque is still the main issue but I think that this can be solved with further work.

I still don't have a clue about the exact mechanism behind this so if anyone has any theories that would help a lot.

Update 1

I have now managed to construct a craft capable of accelerating at 4g indefinitely! Though this is still a longshot from a warp drive it proves that infinite acceleration is possible and with further development this could be improved upon. The craft I built successfully travelled from a 100km circular orbit to kerbin escape.

Accuracy is still impossible but it will accelerate roughly where the ship is pointing. Also the landing legs used to initiate the glitch are breaking off making repeated uses difficult.

Lifting an orange tank

Kerbin escape in 30mins

Edited February 7, 2014 by Comrade Jenkens

[ManaaniWanderer]

Careful, for if you prod the Kraken, the Kraken might just stab you back.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Careful, for if you prod the Kraken, the Kraken might just stab you back.

I'm counting on it

[Mr.Rocket]

I've found that the H*** Kraken strikes randomly. I've had it happen on multiple occasions. I go on EVA, and the whole screen goes black, and the altitude meter goes to 111111, then 222222, and continues to spin randomly. I think it stops sometimes on 666666 which gives it the name. So basically EVA can prod the kraken. And not just in space, i've had this happen at KSC also

[katateochi]

All I can think of now is a Kraken in a giant hamster wheel being used to power a spacecraft!!

I think a careful study of Danny's videos might give you some ideas of reliable exploits. I'm afraid most of my encounters with the Kraken have been catastrophic and left few survivors.

[Prince of Rockets]

I've found the Kraken will occasionally appear when "Reverting to Launch" from strange places. Sometimes it's even reproduceable until I restart the client.

[CalculusWarrior]

Occasionally when switching ships on low-gravity worlds (it happened to me on Minmus), your craft will suddenly explode violently. I'm unsure if they've fixed that bug, as it has been several versions since that happened to me.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

Very interesting thought... if you weld a small craft (chute, capsule, fuel tank, engine) into a single part, then bait the kraken by placing it in a huge ring structure or something, you might be able to get that free warp travel....

[NASAFanboy]

Right now, I currently use the power of the Kraken in my weapons, which are designed to fly at super-high speeds at close promixties to an target, with tons of low-weight decorations on them to increase lag, and 4X timewarp/turning SAS on and off. This is very effective, and can inflict damage on the scale of entire planets, managing to once destroy 1/3rd of the satellites orbiting Kerbin plus obliterating an massive orbital dockyard, to destroying surface bases with in-atmosphere flying.

The Kraken fights for me. Which is why my friends nologner play PvP in KMP with me, citing things like "You win everytime"

[Deadpangod3]

Right now, I currently use the power of the Kraken in my weapons, which are designed to fly at super-high speeds at close promixties to an target, with tons of low-weight decorations on them to increase lag, and 4X timewarp/turning SAS on and off. This is very effective, and can inflict damage on the scale of entire planets, managing to once destroy 1/3rd of the satellites orbiting Kerbin plus obliterating an massive orbital dockyard, to destroying surface bases with in-atmosphere flying.

The Kraken fights for me. Which is why my friends nologner play PvP in KMP with me, citing things like "You win everytime"

(/o.o)/ (\o.o)\ (/o.o)/ (\o.o)\

*hopes Danny comes along*

[Geschosskopf]

I can very reliably summon the Hell Kraken by taking advantage of the very 1st Year 1 window for Eve. When the ship is on the way home, it will get eaten between 60-75% of the time with only about 1 week to go before entering Kerbin's SOI. And very occansionally, this ship will get eaten on the way out to Eve before passing Mun's orbit.

I suspect there's a very bad pot hole in space just inside of Kerbin's orbit at the clock position where the ship always comes home from Eve at this point in the game. But the thing is, it always picks the one ship out of a large flotilla that has the Kerbal in it. All the probes always pass through safely, so it can't be a flaw in the fabric of space. But OTOH, it can't really be a problem with the crewed ship, either, because this ship invariably is only a slightly modified version of what I've been sending to Mun and Minmus, and even Duna, with no problems, all through the game up to this point. Strange.

[RocketPilot573]

Attach a few Cubic Octagonal Struts to a docking port, and then dock it to an enemy ship....

[CaptainArchmage]

Occasionally when switching ships on low-gravity worlds (it happened to me on Minmus), your craft will suddenly explode violently. I'm unsure if they've fixed that bug, as it has been several versions since that happened to me.

There was an issue shown in one of Scott Manley's recent Interstellar Quest videos, where the cubic octagonal struts have a physics bug, and this can possibly rip the ship apart. He had some mods running which caused maximum g-forces to be exceeded.

There was another bug in which a spacecraft would suddenly be duplicated in the same location, so when physics starts up you get a huge explosion. I think this was also documented in Interstellar Quest.

In orbit around the Mun, spacecraft get hit by phantom forces. I experienced this one recently when I looked at the BABYLON: Derelict challenge. There is a spacecraft in orbit around the Mun that starts out pointing North, but it starts to roll around once the physics starts.

I had one situation where the game did not load from save properly. I associated this one with trying to repeatedly load games in quick succession, though it may be something else.

[Tw1]

The other day, I was casually exploring the bottom of the ocean.

Courtesy of a 50 ton weight I made KAS grabible, when I fell through the ground.

After some time, I decided to drop the weight, and let the Kerbal float back home. I stayed with the weight, leaving the game on 4x physics warp.

Leaving the game to work on an assignment, when I came back I found the weight billions of kilometers away from the solar system. And traveling very fast.

The solar system was practically invisible in map veiw. When I returned to the space center view, all the space center buildings were on top of one another.

Also, everything in LKO was gone. Lucky I didn't have anything that important there.

So, if you want a kraken powered, warp speed trip, here's what you can do.

1 Sink a part to the bottom of the ocean.

2 Wiggle around a lot.

3 Wait as you sink.

4 Woosh.

[WhiteWeasel]

Crashing at time warp in command seats breaks the law of conservation of energy. Make a rover, crash into a SC bulding at 20 m/s at 4x time warp and watch your kerbals break the sound barrier twice over.

[Pds314]

Known ways to circumvent the conservation of energy/momentum via physics bugs collectively known as the Kraken:

Air is sometimes hypercritically bouncy at high speed: Bouncing into it really hard will cause difficult-to-predict behavior, even in FAR. I used infinite fuel cheat to accelerate a ship to 5,000,000 m/s (1.67% the speed of light) (within a few hundred m/s +/-) and then ran it into The lower atmosphere of Jool. Sometimes it was successully stopped, other times it lost most of its momentum and fell to 70 km/s, still other times it bounced back hard, once at over 60,000,000 m/s.

It should be noted that the ship consistently lost any attachment of significant mass. All 40 R 48-7S rockets, and four I-beam used as landing legs were lost. However, the 40 cubic octagonal struts used to attach the propulsion systems consistently survived the half a billion Gee re-entry, as did the lander can that was the primary component. Maximum Known speed: 60,000 km/s. (0.2 C) but completely uncontrollable and largely random. May require giant nuclear rocket years to reach speeds required to possibly cause bounce.

Infiniglide: mysterious phantom forces that allow escape-velocity speeds to be attained by a ship with lots of control surfaces being used. Also doubles as a means of allowing a ship to hover in certain directions as if swimming in Jell-o. Maximum known speed: 6 km/s controllably, 12 km/s by vehicles that essentially explode upon activation. Doesn't work normally in FAR (although a similar bug still effects specific control-surface parts like the B9-heavy wings in a slightly less severe and less controllable manner).

Fuel-transfer Stairstepping: moving fuel across a ship does not cause an equal and opposite force to move the ship back. It is therefore possible to slowly build momentum or a raise an orbit (including to, and well past escape velocity) by spinning and transferring fuel. Works fairly slowly even in highly specialized ships. Maximum Speed: unlimited, but cannot accelerate fast.

Kerbal-on-Ladder Bug: Kerbals on ladders behave oddly. Moving Kerbals on ladders can push the object the ladder is attached to around at high acceleration but in a somewhat chaotic way. One of the more controlled attempts is

. Maximum speed: fast, but dangerous to try to reach. E.G. The FTL Egg gets to a few percent the speed of light sometimes before throwing the Kerbal off at unrecoverable speeds.

Nvidia PhysX Bugs: Unity's PhysX is not perfect in terms of book-keeping for energy or momentum. In some cases, objects clipping inside eachother that aren't attached can jiggle around and accelerate to high velocities. Maximum speed: If you include parts buried in the ground, speeds used to reach multiples of the speed of light. This doesn't happen anymore and it is unknown if ANY useful output can be gained from the sort of device.

Apoapsis/periapsis wobble: design a ship that spins the originating part at high speeds, Time-accelerate when you would gain momentum from doing whatever it says. This can also be used to lower your orbit, and on someworlds, even deorbit. Maximum speed: Limitless, with proper timing, may average several G of acceleration. No orbit needed to attain more speed, just spin up your ship, wait until you are allegedly moving faster, time accelerate for a fraction of a second and back down. Doesn't work in atmosphere.

Water bounce bug: occasionally, an object falling into water may bounce back significantly higher than it fell from after penetrating the surface intact. There is little to no use for this in warp drive power.

[A Fat Pokemon]

Behold, Kraken powered flight!

As posted above, Kerbals on ladders have some nice effects. As they are holding onto a ladder, and are clipping into a part, say a strut as they're light objects.. It pushes the strut away, but 'pulls' the ladder with it. I've done this with 3 parts, a small ladder, octagonal strut, and the smallest strut piece.. Though I suspect you could do it in two as well..

The egg tends to push in one specific direction for a pretty random period of time, if the Kerbal is not moving around. Putting an Egg into orbit and using a probe core to rotate let me somewhat choose my trajectory, though as I said, the thing has a mind of its own and decides to start accelerating in some other direction.. I did once make a variation that could actually be controlled rather reliably, and had very few 'direction swaps' but unfortunately I have no idea where that craft is..

Edited February 4, 2014 by A Fat Pokemon

[arq]

Do NOT taunt the magic boulder!

[Comrade Jenkens]

One thing I've found is clipping landing gear into things can summon the kraken. I'm hoping this can be used somehow.

[andrew123]

I can very reliably summon the Hell Kraken by taking advantage of the very 1st Year 1 window for Eve. When the ship is on the way home, it will get eaten between 60-75% of the time with only about 1 week to go before entering Kerbin's SOI. And very occansionally, this ship will get eaten on the way out to Eve before passing Mun's orbit.

I suspect there's a very bad pot hole in space just inside of Kerbin's orbit at the clock position where the ship always comes home from Eve at this point in the game. But the thing is, it always picks the one ship out of a large flotilla that has the Kerbal in it. All the probes always pass through safely, so it can't be a flaw in the fabric of space. But OTOH, it can't really be a problem with the crewed ship, either, because this ship invariably is only a slightly modified version of what I've been sending to Mun and Minmus, and even Duna, with no problems, all through the game up to this point. Strange.

Warp Daemons? This can only mean Hearsay... Exterminatus, the emperor's hammer, has been summoned to cleanse this system with ionic fire by the Order Malleus. Back on topic, I tried to harness the power of the kraken in a slipspace drive, but it ate the ship and left behind only atomized particles. I guess underpowered slipspace transistions are dangerous. (I wish I had pictures, but I cleared my screenshots folder and deleted the subassembly to prevent further warp corruption.)

[SSSPutnik]

I just triggered Kraken by using KAS to plugin to my own ship, then removed base plug connector from ship, then connected it again.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Progress!

I've started playing around with the ftl egg and have stripped it down to its most basic components. As someone described before the kerbal pushes the ladder away while at the same time being pulled along with it. The speed and direction just depend on where the kerbal has glitched to.

The down side to this is both the lack of control and poor handler safety, though it sure does get the krakens notice!

However I believe that this effect could be replicated with a docking port or perhaps even landing legs in a much more controlled manner. Such a device if attached to a ship could provide rapid acceleration in a known direction.

Of course the problem also remains of slowing down...

[magnemoe]

My last kraken was in 0.22 after an successfully Eve landing I went to Gilly, landed successfully. Kerbal enter pod to store data after taking surface sample. Exit again and then releasing the ladder the screen goes black. Exit to command center and back lander is in pieces and with close to zero orbital speed relatively to Eve, one kerbal MIA.

No derbies on Gilly, of the four side tanks, with battery,leg and solar is not far from pod. I managed to aerobrake into some Eve orbit so kerbal can be picked up by motership.

[The Fleet Master]

Arcadia denies any involvement in a so called "Warp Drive" but if we could get it working without breaking the game and computers that'd be nice

[Comrade Jenkens]

I'm reliably summoning the gyro kraken with docking ports now. I think having two in parallel may be able to cancel the twisting motion.