How could you travel to other solar systems in KSP without unrealistic FTL?

[Dr. Kriger]

I half agree with Ghost13, I would love to see the current planets and moons become more advanced and developed with things like weather, cities (on Kerban), and more landscape variations. Seasons would be cool but I don't think we would be spending enough time on any one planet or moon to really enjoy the season changes. I would however love to see a new solar system added but it seems to be impossible to get to one. I mean I can personally break Kerbol's SOI with a pretty low tech space probe but it can take upwards of 200 years for said probe to reach its apoapsis. 200 years would be insane for anyone using life support mods or all of us if the devs ever add life support. Even without life support I would have a hard time believing that a bunch little green creatures would have a life span long enough to reach their destination let alone decided "hey lets go sit in an aluminum pod for 200+ years just to go see if we can land on that rock way out in the distance."

Edit: To top it all off, think of the massive amounts of resources needed to achieve the mission. The main launcher would need to be colossal just to get the Kerbals and everything they need into orbit. Some of you may be thinking "well we can just send lightweight unmanned probes out into the new system to conduct scientific research." The answer to that is "what's the point of adding a new solar system?" I don't know about you but simply sending probe after probe out into the vastness of space isn't my piece of cake. I would eventually want to send manned missions.

Getting back to what Ghost13 said

Even if there will be some star systems it would be virtually impossible to explore them properly with usual kerbal technology and if some new propulsion will be introduced that will allow such a dV budgets and speeds it will make any mission inside the system way too easy.

This is also true, the sheer power of any propulsion system added to the game to be able to achieve such a feat would break the whole point of the game. Sure in career mode such a technology would be massively expensive and most likely at the very end of the R&D tree; it would most likely destroy interplanetary travel in the system. Sure you could just "not use it" but after sending mission after mission to the farthest planets the hard way most people would probably throw it on their rockets just to save time.

Edited April 14, 2014 by Dr. Kriger

[Ghost13]

This is also true, the sheer power of any propulsion system added to the game to be able to achieve such a feat would break the whole point of the game. Sure in career mode such a technology would be massively expensive and most likely at the very end of the R&D tree; it would most likely destroy interplanetary travel in the system. Sure you could just "not use it" but after sending mission after mission to the farthest planets the hard way most people would probably throw it on their rockets just to save time.

Thats, basically, was my point against the new solar system as an integral of main game (both carrier and especially sandbox). However, I think it can be done as part of special mission where building an interstellar ship and exploring the other solar system is your main goal. So now we have Sandbox, Carrier why not to have an Interstellar Quest mode with all futuristic technology for interstellar travel?

Edited April 15, 2014 by Ghost13

[RedPine]

I can't believe you guys didn't jump on this idea first:

Prodedural Generated Star System.

1. Upon starting a new career / sandbox game, click the "randomize my planets"

2. From the tracking station, the orbits of only the close planets are known.

3. Use accelerometers, thermometers, and barometers (note: probes can use these) within the sphere of influence of known planets to add that information to the Kerbal Space Center database.

4. Complete enough science on known planets to discover "a mystery celestial body is affecting the orbit of this planet" to discover the orbits of more planets.

5. Repeat steps 3&4 until you discover your entire Kerbol System.

6. Once you get bored of your planets, start over with a new save at step 1.

[RedPine]

A while ago I saw a map (fan generated?) for the solar system in the Firefly TV show... the writers there insisted they didn't have FTL but travel between several habitable worlds was a matter of days or weeks, which gave a lot of the more science-literate folks pause.

The map postulated a quaternary star system with a large-ish (A-class?) primary and two smaller (K-class?) secondary stars nearby, each with worlds in their own habitable zones, plus a distant minor star (M-class?) with couple of large gas giants whose radiated heat created their own small habitable zones. It'd be esoteric but not completely ridiculous... and if you want travel between stars in KSP that doesn't need "magic" drives, it's as good a model as any.

-- Steve

Brilliant. It would be like having 3 extra Jool's, except the moons would have moons!

[Ghost13]

Prodedural Generated Star System...

These might not be that easy since every planet in the game right now is not procedurally generated. It is probably doable in one way or another (i.e. the planetary bank that the game will pick up the bodies), but I belive this approach might have some limitations as well as unexpected buggs (since it will be difficult to test every possible combination and generated landscape). Anyway we are talking about interstellar flights here not randomly generated kerbol system.

[chaos_forge]

Hello, I took part in one of the very first discussions where a BSG-like system was proposed, and I am still partial to the idea. If you want to get an idea of what the quaternary star system would look like, take a look at this. I think most of y'all have already hit on what the main advantages of such a setup would be (it would also be extremely cool IMO). The main problem with this setup is the whole barycenters deal, however a while ago there was this very detailed discussion in which several of us figured out how to go about implementing barycenters without breaking the game physics or implementing n-body.

Now as for what STL drive to use, I recently had the following idea: say you have an Orion drive with pulses that impart a HUGE amount of Dv per pulse. Say, around 10 km/s per pulse for a medium sized ship. However, we add one extra behavior: instead of applying exactly 10km/s every pulse, it randomly applies anywhere from 9-11 km/s of Dv. Thus, if you try to use the drive to get to Jool, you would still have to cancel out about 1 km/s of Dv using normal rockets while hauling around your super heavy Orion drive. If balanced right, this approach could make getting to Jool with the advanced drive take about the same amount of player time as getting there with other methods. So, even though the in-game time would be short, the player time, which is the true measure of balancing, would be the same, and the drive would be balanced. And when using the drive to get to other stars, an error of 1 km/s would be a small price to pay for the ~200 km/s of Dv the drive could provide you with.

Thoughts?

[-Velocity-]

Acculbierre drives are most likely impossible or impractical to build, and even if not, most likely, it is not possible to exceed the speed of light with them.

I'd simply rather see KSP implement a higher time warp (1,000,000X or 10,000,000X), implement some kind of limited, physics-less thrust/acceleration system, and add nuclear pulse propulsion and/or light sails.

I am still interested in the black-hole drive idea though. The idea was with enough focused gamma ray lasers, you might be able to increase the energy density of a tiny region of space high enough for it to form a black hole. You could then throw mass into the black hole, and it would convert a large fraction of it into energy. It's still incredibly challenging (not to mention that getting enough GAMMA RAY lasers together and tightly focused would be incredibly challenging, it might also be tough to keep the black hole from evaporating, or feed it matter quickly enough to keep it from evaporating), BUT to my knowledge, it seems a lot more practical and possible than warp drives.

Still, I'd rather see more traditional interstellar technologies for KSP that we know for a near fact would work. The KSP solar system is miniaturized in favor of gameplay; miniaturize the distance between stars, too. Instead of ~4 light-years to the nearest star, make it ~0.4 light-years. That will make things MUCH easier! 0.05c would get you to the nearest star in "just" 8 years. That's ~2500 seconds at 100,000X time compression, a little over 40 minutes. Not bad at all.

Edited April 15, 2014 by |Velocity|

[Nemrav]

But, when travellign light speed what happens when you say hit a single particle... You desintegrate....

And it would happen often if this thingy is correct (in principal it doesn't make sense but...)

[flipmcf]

Here are some ideas:

First off, my pet peive is when anyone says "Other Solar Systems" (or in this case, "Other Kerbol Systems") There is only one Solar (Kerbol) system - this one. All others have different names (Like Spican, or Vegan, or Alpha Centaurian). Start using the term "Other Star Systems" before some touchy Betelgeusian decides that we're all a bunch of self-centered Solans who think that anything not Solar is wrong and should be changed. Don't be that guy.

Or better yet, go to Paris and call it "Another New York" and see how well you are received.

</soapbox>

1) Reduce the speed-of-light in the Kerbal universe and introduce relativistic timeframes.

This way, from Kerbal's perspective, the craft accelerates and reaches the other star system in the 'expected' amount of time, but from the perspective of the Kerbanot, the trip takes much, much less time.

I think some of the multiplayer work done with synching times can be applied here.

2) "Null SOI" needs to be applied. However, I guess that all velocities that are in NULL SOI need to be derived from the closest STAR SYSTEM.

3) Hydrogen Scoops for fuel - Purely theoretical, but very plausable. The faster you go, the more interstellar hydrogen you collect. You can then ionize it and propel yourself with protons (much, much less thrust than Xenon, and takes much more electrical power to ionize). Or, you can create a chemical reaction with O2 and propel yourself with water.

[Tery215]

It would take ~10 years or much, much more without unrealistic FTL.

Hydrogen scoops (/ huge, hyper-efficient xenon-ion drives with much, much less thrust) are about right.

Free fuel when you're going interstellar, little to no use in a star system.

My biggest concern is that the players can't handle boring hydrogen burning. They need to be able to timewarp through < 0.5 gees of acceleration in space by engine.

[Torquemadus]

Check out two important books by Robert Zubrin: The Case For Mars, and Entering Space.

Buzz Aldrin heavily references "a guy called Zubrin" in his hugely underrated sci-fi novel Encounter With Tiber. In the novel, a group of aliens visit Earth in a star ship propelled by solar sails.

[_Augustus_]

Using the StarSystems mod and PlanetFactory CE, I made this star system among the many others I've made. It's the closest to Kerbol and meant to mimic Alpha Centauri. Enjoy!

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[tntristan12]

I was working on a special relativity mod before I got really busy and had to put that project on the backburner. I've still got the files though, if anybody is interested in contacting me about it. Perhaps I can put it in better hands!

[Whirligig Girl]

Extrasolar Gameplay is not in KSP's scope. An expansion pack would add other solar systems and it would be not as realistic.

[problemecium]

I agree with those recommending on-rails thrust. It shouldn't be a terribly tall order after all the patched conics business SQUAD (or equivalently we could say the modding community) has slogged through thus far - in fact I do believe a warpable engine plugin does exist somewhere... and of course 1 MILLION (Dr. Evil pose) times timewarp would be helpful - or even 10 million times if we want a more realistic scale.

I dunno about spending a large portion of the travel time accelerating though. Warpable engines would be great, and I'm in favor of them, but we don't exactly NEED them - we'll just have to put up with going there slowly and probably doing some gravity-assist sorcery after entering the system.

[Westi29]

Extrasolar Gameplay is not in KSP's scope. An expansion pack would add other solar systems and it would be not as realistic.

I've been playing with multiple solar systems for almost a month. It is awesome and adds so much more to the game.