What KSP has taught me to be annoyed at

[RizzoTheRat]

Is the shuttle/Soyuz/ISS pressure really that high? Most commercial airliners run at about 11psi, equivalent to about 6000-8000 feet.

ETA: Interesting, shuttle cabin pressure was kept at 14.7 psi but they dropped the airlock to 10.2 when pre-breathing oxygen prior to EVA http://www.colorado.edu/ASEN/asen3036/EVAOverview.pdf

Edited October 7, 2014 by RizzoTheRat

[Geher]

The movie interstellar has also many mistakes. (WARNING! THE FOLLOWING MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS)

A few examples:

- When they want to fly from an earth orbit to Saturn they face the spaceship away from earth and then activate the engines. That's really unefficient.

- They first fly to Mars for doing a swing-by manouver. Then they arrive at Saturn after only 2 years (you wouldn't even get to Saturn after only 2 years if you would do a direct Homann-transfer to it.)

- When they arrive at Saturn they are in a stable orbit. Why don't they need to slow down?

- Gravitation isn't infinite fast. It's travelling at the speed of light.

- The ship is too small. It should have biiiiiiiiig fuel tanks attached to it.

- A planet with gravitation 130% relative to earth doesn't bend spacetime enough so that 1 hour on it's surface equals 27 years in orbit. More like 1 hour equals 1 hour and 0,001 milliseconds.

But at least you couldn't hear anything in space.

[cantab]

It has a few minor issues, but all round it does things very well.

- When they want to fly from an earth orbit to Saturn they face the spaceship away from earth and then activate the engines. That's really unefficient.

Trick of the camera positioning perhaps?

- They first fly to Mars for doing a swing-by manouver. Then they arrive at Saturn after only 2 years (you wouldn't even get to Saturn after only 2 years if you would do a direct Homann-transfer to it.)

Yeah, they must have been really beaning it. Which means a Mars flyby might not have done much, but every little helps and all that.

- When they arrive at Saturn they are in a stable orbit. Why don't they need to slow down?

Assume they did and the film just didn't show it.

- Gravitation isn't infinite fast. It's travelling at the speed of light.

Circumvented by the higher-dimension stuff.

- The ship is too small. It should have biiiiiiiiig fuel tanks attached to it.

Yeah, this one is something of a plot hole. The best explanation I can come up with is it has super-efficient engines, but they still wanted to get it in LEO with all its fuel and the big inefficient rocket was the lifter they had to do that.

- A planet with gravitation 130% relative to earth doesn't bend spacetime enough so that 1 hour on it's surface equals 27 years in orbit. More like 1 hour equals 1 hour and 0,001 milliseconds.

Gargantua, the black hole that the planet orbits about as close as it can. This is one of the cooler things in the film, made even more awesome when you know that the appearance isn't an artist's idea but a physical simulation - that truly is, to the best of our knowledge, what a rotating black hole with an accretion disc would look like from the right camera angle. (And is revolutionary CGI work, demanding the coding of a general relativistic raytracer). I'm not sure if the movie hasn't exaggerated the amount of time dilation, but considering the wider effort put in in this area I suspect it's actually correct.

[Gargamel]

If you really want to get annoyed at Trek, consider this:

The Trek universe has FTL spaceships and astronomical sensors good enough to examine things in close detail from light years away. However, a standard plot setup is for the Enterprise to arrive at a scene moments after some disaster happened and to be puzzled as to what caused it.

Why don't they just back up a couple of light minutes and look?

Welp..... there goes any interest I had in Star trek.

[LethalDose]

Crappy early-access communication between the devs and the community and heavy-handed forum moderation.

[Voyager55]

Just about every scifi has been ruined for me xD Why do space ships fly like planes? Why to spacecraft burn prograde to land on a planet? It's dreadful.

[Geschosskopf]

Yes I know, just a movie. Before playing KSP I would have never have known this basic principle. All I can say is thank you KSP for making me a smarter person (although getting me mad at the occasional movie )

Rocket science isn't alll that hard in KSP, especially when you have a GUI (aka the map view) that allows eyeballing everything if you've got a basic understanding of the underlying princiiples. The hard part is finding a worthwhile use for rockets beyond sending a couple of Kerbals somewhere to plant a flag and bring back a handful of gravel.

[Sweetcreek]

Spoiler alert alerts you of spoilers.

What really caught me in interstellar was towards the end, when Cooper does his recovery of the other vessel and an ascention burn to get out of the decaying orbit, but overburns -so hard- that he flies clean out of the orbit and into Gargantua. That's a pretty awful throttle management.

[KerikBalm]

Gargantua, the black hole that the planet orbits about as close as it can. This is one of the cooler things in the film, made even more awesome when you know that the appearance isn't an artist's idea but a physical simulation - that truly is, to the best of our knowledge, what a rotating black hole with an accretion disc would look like from the right camera angle. (And is revolutionary CGI work, demanding the coding of a general relativistic raytracer). I'm not sure if the movie hasn't exaggerated the amount of time dilation, but considering the wider effort put in in this area I suspect it's actually correct.

I seem to recall someone did the calculations for what the orbital velocity would be for a world at the roche limit... and the time dialation wasn't so bad.

In order to get that much time dialation, the orbit would have to be so close that the planet would be torn apart by the gravity gradient.

Additionally, with tidal waves that large, the planet would be tidally locked very very fast, one side always facing the black hole.

And of course, there is the deadly radiation...

[AengorKerbow]

Apollo 13. If you find yourself getting annoyed with movies like Gravity can I recommend you watch Apollo 13 - even if you've already seen it, it's worth watching again after playing KSP a lot. Great film, very accurate, wonderful to watch with the knowledge learned from KSP

Back in college I went to a talk given by Ken Mattingly (the one that got bumped off the mission because he was exposed to measles). It was right around the time Apollo 13 came out. He said when they first screened the finished movie for him he went up to Ron Howard and said that the movie was great, but there was one thing which was inaccurate. Luckily there was still time to rectify it. He had never owned a gold Corvette. If you remember, there was a scene with him parking his gold Corvette and watching the launch wistfully. He didn't say if they ever ended up giving him a gold corvette

[AengorKerbow]

If you really want to get annoyed at Trek, consider this:

The Trek universe has FTL spaceships and astronomical sensors good enough to examine things in close detail from light years away. However, a standard plot setup is for the Enterprise to arrive at a scene moments after some disaster happened and to be puzzled as to what caused it.

Why don't they just back up a couple of light minutes and look?

There's a scifi series by Ryk Brown that used this capability as a literary device to do a flashback. It was a very inventive way to do a lengthy and important flashback.

[Starwhip]

Spoiler alert alerts you of spoilers.

GASH DURN IT, put that thing in a [noparse])

[/noparse] tag! (I almost looked at it!

[strigon]

I know it's old, but on topic; this:

If they can go FTL, they also have an engine that has light years of deltaV and the shields/hull to compensate for whatever atmospheric entry profile they want.

they also have an engine that has light years of deltaV

light years of deltaV

[Guest]

When my little brother watched Escape from Planet Earth there was a evil spaceship, that flew to earth with multiple light speed. When the pilot was knocked out by the good ones, they turned the ship around and directly flew back! I know its a film for little children, but that really annoyed me.

[John FX]

In order to get that much time dialation, the orbit would have to be so close that the planet would be torn apart by the gravity gradient.

Additionally, with tidal waves that large, the planet would be tidally locked very very fast, one side always facing the black hole.

And of course, there is the deadly radiation...

These are some of the things I wanted to post about. I already knew there would be time dilation from the fact that this is a hollywood film and the guys daughter is a young girl and the film seems uninspired.

The planet would be molten from the gravity compression if you were that close as well IMHO

AFAIK the issue is life on the planet is dying from lack of phosphorous.

There is loads and loads at the bottom of the ocean locked up in minerals. No need to go on a really long space mission, just send down an unmanned mining sub.

EDIT :

I know it's old, but on topic; this:

The current proposed designs for FTL flight call for a warp field around the ship which would allow the ship to surf on a wave of spacetime, not actually moving at all and not using any Dv.

All you need is a power source for the warp field and the ship does not move yet ends up with a different frame of reference.

Dv is for sublight travel. They don`t seem to have enough of that anyway though.

Edited November 12, 2014 by John FX

[cantab]

The issue in interstellar was plant disease, or "blight". Which presumably cannot be effectively treated. The whole blight producing nitrogen thing seems really iffy though. I don't think they got a decent biologist to advise them like they got a decent physicist.

[Stargate525]

The issue in interstellar was plant disease, or "blight". Which presumably cannot be effectively treated. The whole blight producing nitrogen thing seems really iffy though. I don't think they got a decent biologist to advise them like they got a decent physicist.

not producing, BREATHING.

What possible chemical process could a carbon-based lifeform undergo using nitrogen that even resembles breathing?!

[Vallius]

This is more of an issue with Sci-Fi space in general than something I specifically learned in kerbal.

We agree that there is no real up or down in space.

For people to walk through ships, there has to be some kind of artificial gravity technology, and it would have use the orientation of the ship as its frame of reference. In most shows, this same technology presumably cancels out crushing forces due to superluminal acceleration.

So why would a 'tipping' vessel in space cause the people inside to crash around like they're on a capsizing boat?

[Aragosnat]

This is more of an issue with Sci-Fi space in general than something I specifically learned in kerbal.

We agree that there is no real up or down in space.

For people to walk through ships, there has to be some kind of artificial gravity technology, and it would have use the orientation of the ship as its frame of reference. In most shows, this same technology presumably cancels out crushing forces due to superluminal acceleration.

So why would a 'tipping' vessel in space cause the people inside to crash around like they're on a capsizing boat?

Best guess would be. The initial sudden vector change was to much for the artificial gravity generators to handle and that it is not able to calabrate quickly back that causes such violent reation to the people on board. Causing higher and lower levels then the crew is expecting at random intervels. Which could also be explained by random power fluctuations to the artificial gravity generators.

[helaeon]

The issue in interstellar was plant disease, or "blight". Which presumably cannot be effectively treated. The whole blight producing nitrogen thing seems really iffy though. I don't think they got a decent biologist to advise them like they got a decent physicist.

Biochemistry degree here:

N2 has a triple bond and few organisms possess a metabolism that can break it effectively. Nitrogen is needed to make amide bonds. So every amino acid needs a nitrogen that's been liberated from that triple bond. Nitrogen is also needed to make nucleotides. It's a very very biologically necessary material and its very plentiful, but life can't use most of it. If the blight organism had an enzyme that could make its own ammonia, nitrate, etc from N2 in the air efficiently it would be a big deal and could have a huge survival bonus. Likely we would want to study this organism and turn it to our own purposes to make fertilizer cheaply. Fungi and bacteria do this for us in the soil and fertilizes plants but slowly and at a huge energy cost usually requiring "free" sugars from the plant, as the plant cannot do this themselves. What they can't do we add through fertilizers.

If the blight organism crowded those fungi and bacteria out out or killed them and kept the liberated nitrogen for themselves and didn't pass it on or in a form that the plants could use that would be a huge, huge problem. You would see crop failures of many species because of it. Yes, we could still use fertilizers though. Ammonium Nitrate in particular. But, if the blight organism used up all of that or otherwise made it un-available for plants as well again huge problem.

The organisms in Interstellar probably wouldn't be using the nitrogen to fuel themselves, such as through respiration, but build as they'd be putting a ton of energy in to breaking that bond. This wouldn't be the piece of their metabolism that caused the blight, it would be something else maybe related to the fact they could make biologically useful nitrogen compounds on their own. Possibly creating some sort of novel anti-fungal. antibiotic, or herbicide using that part of their metabolism.

So that isn't really that absurd as some life on Earth already has a metabolism that can take atmospheric nitrogen and use it, and it's essential for life but it's done in a symbiotic way rather than a parasitic or cancerous(?) way.

Edit to add: it's generally a bad idea to wall off things life can do with chemistry. Once you think something is impossible you find some organism that can do just that.

Edited November 22, 2014 by helaeon

[Wallace]

The physics problems in interstellar were pretty small compared to the other dumbness, they're sending them prepared to start a colony, but they only send 1 woman? Wut?

[SpaceXray]

The physics problems in interstellar were pretty small compared to the other dumbness, they're sending them prepared to start a colony, but they only send 1 woman? Wut?

Apparently you didn't pay attention.

They took thousands of gametes, 10 of them they would incubate, then those grown humans would continue birth through surrogacy. Doesn't matter who manages the process. Brand would never have to impregnate herself even.

[AcidSludge]

"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes / And other science facts / Then repeat to yourself 'It's just a show, / I should really just relax.'".

So - what KSP has taught me to be annoyed at? Absolutely nothing. I rarely mix up movies meant to entertain someone with documentaries. Same with books.

Now excuse me, I'll have to dock my infiniglider-ssto-rocket-thingie at my space station around Kerbol.

[notanedit]: Hey, I can hear the engines in space. Ragequit.

[Coga19000]

You have no idea how glad I am I saw Elysium before I started playing KSP, and threfore was able to obliviously take in all of its unrealistic epicness and enjoy my 14 Euros. Had I seen it now, I would rage quit out of the theater.

[Kruleworld]

It has taught me SOOOOOO much in the way of, well, rocket science.

don't tell the kids it's educational, but make sure they play it.

Wow, I play A TON of EA games and KSP is by far the BEST one out of all of them.

ksp isn't an EA game.

actually considering the difference between EA and Squad, i'm rather disappointed how bad EA's games are. i can't believe they still want me to buy another Need For Speed game after they've burned me so many times before.

edit: i didn't realise this thread was 15 pages long