Something in low Ike orbit

[WyDavies]

I was taking off from Ike and had gotten into a 20km equatorial orbit. As I was admiring the scenary something shot under my little ship at very high speed. At first I thought it was dropped stage, but my lander doesn't have any detactable bits and it had left the mothership in Duna orbit.

I have no idea what it was. I checked my ship to see if anything had fallen off, but it was all intact. Plus this object was moving at considerable speed relative to my ship. Way too fast for me to work out what it was. It was targetable, but it came and went so fast I didn't have a chance to do anything.

Waited for a while, but I didn't see it again.

Is this a glitch or maybe some Easter Egg I know nothing about?

[turkwinif]

That may have been the magic boulder, an easter egg that disappeared after 0.18. It was in a polar 12km orbit, but it was never targetable as you described. Would you kindly go back into that save and see in the Tracking Station if that was a piece of debris? Search "magic boulder" in Google if you really want to learn even more about this easter egg.

[Kasuha]

Try to go to map view, switch to Ike, check if there isn't any object orbiting it. If you see nothing, try enabling display of debris (using icons in a bar that appears if you move the mouse near center of top edge of the screen) and check again.

[Bissotwo]

Spooky. Could it have been a part from an earlier craft?

[cantab]

I had some debris mysteriously appear from my asteroid ship when it was orbiting Ike. It wasn't moving fast though, just drifting, a few parts that matched some on my ship but nothing was missing from said ship.

Maybe a similar bug but put a lot more speed on the thing?

[M4ck]

A pretty important question is which way was it moving relative to your craft. Prograde, retrograde, perpendicular? Or maybe vertically?

[AlexanderB]

Can you post the save game? We'll wind the clock back and see?

[GoSlash27]

Whatever you do, don't taunt it!

-Slashy

[cantab]

Can you post the save game? We'll wind the clock back and see?

Is there a reverse time mod? Or would you just edit the savefile?

[Boomerang]

The magic boulder lives!

[The Jedi Master]

I will be watching this closely. Magic Boulder FTW!

[AlexanderB]

Just edit the save file, it says "universetime" or something somewhere, you can just wind that back and it'll clock back all the orbits accordingly, so it should just match up if you didn't execute any burns after seeing this fly-by.. really neat.

[bsalis]

Can you post the save game? We'll wind the clock back and see?

Agree - please do this!

[Endersmens]

Wait, what was the reason for removing magic boulder in the first place?

[Kasuha]

Wait, what was the reason for removing magic boulder in the first place?

AFAIK it was causing the game to crash.

[Endersmens]

Hmmm. Could they not clean it up so it doesn't? (I'm not demanding or anything, I'm just curious)

[Ikaneko]

The resurrection!!!!! HE LIVES!!!

[Kasuha]

I believe it was hacked into the code in a way that was completely different from e.g. the way how asteroids are implemented. By that time, there were planets flying on rails and having their SOIs, and ships controllable by players. This was somewhere in between, it was on rails but did not have a SOI.

[Endersmens]

I believe it was hacked into the code in a way that was completely different from e.g. the way how asteroids are implemented. By that time, there were planets flying on rails and having their SOIs, and ships controllable by players. This was somewhere in between, it was on rails but did not have a SOI.

Makes sense. But what i'm saying is now that we have Asteroids, could it not be remade? It could have the minute gravity similar to the asteroids and such, and it seems to me that it could be made to be invisible in map mode by tinkering with the "unknown object" code.

[RocketPilot573]

Makes sense. But what i'm saying is now that we have Asteroids, could it not be remade? It could have the minute gravity similar to the asteroids and such, and it seems to me that it could be made to be invisible in map mode by tinkering with the "unknown object" code.

I have no idea what your talking about, asteroids have no gravity last I checked, and they are treated just like a ship/part.

[Endersmens]

I have no idea what your talking about, asteroids have no gravity last I checked, and they are treated just like a ship/part.

Hmm. I thought they did have some form of gravity. thought i read that somewhere. And I know, the boulder could be treated like a ship/part too. That's what i meant. and i thought maybe it could be invisible in map mode, like the way debris is invisible. Something like that. Am I just going crazy here?

[cantab]

Maxmaps said in the Squadcast earlier that the Magic Boulder is not still in KSP, and mentioned its origin having something to do with the ground scatter system.

Of course it's easy to make your own with an asteroid and some lights.

[GreeningGalaxy]

Hmm. I thought they did have some form of gravity. thought i read that somewhere.

AFAIK, Unity does not support N-body gravitation, meaning that as long as you're in the SOI of something (like Kerbin or the sun), it's the only gravitational force that can act on you- thus why KSP has no realistic Lagrange points. Since the asteroids have no SOIs, I don't think they can have gravity based on KSP's current model. Also, as the asteroids are much less dense than real-life ones in addition to being small, I don't think even a class-E would have enough gravity to be noticed.

I could be wrong about gravity absolutely requiring SOIs though- thinking in terms of what I know from making realistic(ish) gravity in Scratch, N-body stuff shouldn't be too hard for 2 dimensions, so I don't imagine three would be any harder than essentially adding another axis. Of course, it might be less an issue of code and more an issue of the majority of KSP players not owning a supercomputer.

[WyDavies]

Try to go to map view, switch to Ike, check if there isn't any object orbiting it. If you see nothing, try enabling display of debris (using icons in a bar that appears if you move the mouse near center of top edge of the screen) and check again.

Sorry about the very late reply. Incredibly I managed to forget I posted this.

I checked the map view and there was nothing. I hung around in that orbit for ages and nothing reappeared again. It may have been some weird glitch as I had a hell of a lot of debris floating around Kerbin and maybe the KSP engine said "Take some of your junk back!" and hurled a bit of it at me.

[Aethon]

WhyDavies. You may not know the significance of your post. "You've got a bunch of guys down here about to turn blue". Could you post your save game like has been requested?