How big is the ksp map or "kerbol system"?

[awsomejwags]

I think it would be huge. I mean you can walk across entire planets! And orbit the sun. So how big is the ksp map?

[CosmicX1]

I think it might be theoretically infinite, however in practice over very long distances the maths breaks down. I'm just guessing though, I could be wrong.

[Tex]

If you take Eeloo's apoapse and double it, you find that the Kerbol System has a diameter of aproximately 227099426400m. This is just the planetary boundary, and if we assume that the structure of the Kerbol System has stuff like a hidden Kuiper Belt-type thing or a heliosheath, then it might go on for a loooooong ways after that. But that's what I came up with!

Of course, bear in mind that there is no other visitable star system (yet) so the system would, technically, be infinite.

[Pecan]

Not sure what happened here: post deleted.

Edited June 1, 2014 by Pecan

[cantab]

For planetary surface area, it's bigger than the USA and Canada combined. It's far larger than many games with a reputation for big maps, but in turn dwarfed by Minecraft which has a map the size of several Earths.

In case anyone's interested, here's how the planets compare in surface area.

Kerbol and Jool excluded, considers all area including water along with land.

[Pecan]

If you are talking about the stored-data size it's probably much smaller than you'd think. Most terrain is generated mathematically as its needed from key data rather than the whole thing being saved pixel-by-pixel. For the system itself there's no 'map' as such, just the figures for the planets' and moons' orbits - from that the computer can work out where they are at any time.

ETA: The classic 'Elite' reputedly has 100-billion planets and moons (in many different star-systems, of course) which would have been an impossible number of anything to store on the computers of the time when it was launched. 100 Gigabytes would be possible now, but still very, very impractical ^^.

[awsomejwags]

Thanks for the chart!

[RenevB]

There's two ways to interpret the question, both sort of answered, but I'd like to expand a bit on both.

I plugged the numbers into wolframalpha once and, I believe, the total surface area of rocky planets and moons in the game was 1.4 times Russia. You may think Gilly is small, but its area is still just over half of Rhode Island (or if you're British about a tenth of Wales).

Eeloo's semi-major axis is 90 million km, its apoapsis 114 million km, Earth's semi-major axis is 150 million km (all rounded to the million), so the whole Kerbin system would be contained within Earths orbit, but even that is a whole lot of space.

[EvilotionCR2]

Infinite. You cannot stop proggressing deeper into space. Math will break down at around 300 million km (around that). But you will continue going.