[ABANDONED] Black Hole Jool

[Whirligig Girl]

This mod is abandoned. Go away.

Spoiler

Finally, the first edition of the BlackHole mod is released. It currently modifies Jool to remove it's atmosphere and make it's radius 0.001 meters. It's named after ShimmyTheJJ, who's KSP streams are as inescapably amazing as a black hole!

DOWNLOAD SHIMMY's SINGULARITY 0.1.1

YOU MUST REMOVE PREVIOUS VERSIONS! REMOVE RealSolarSystem and ShimmyHole before installing a new update!

Changelog:

 

0.1.1: Removed science resource, it was conflicting with the stock science config. Just don't do science for now, or your immersion will be broken!
0.1: The Shimmy System released! 

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Click here for some musings on the graphics of black holes and the possibility of Wormholes.

and Here for some frustrations of illustrations and thoughts on Flatlanders.

So, I just saw Interstellar. It is absolutely 100% the best sci-fi movie ever made in all of film history. Even more than 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is truly the most scientifically acurate depiction of a black hole EVER in a movie. In fact, the black hole depicted in the film discovered how black holes would really look. Physicists actually figured out what a black hole would TRULY look like. It's not Artistic Licence. It's what it would actually look like.

There may be spoilers in this because of the amount of comparisons to Interstellar.

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I found a HUGE science result. Black holes in KSP actaully have Event Horizons from which crafts can not escape. This event horizon is based totally on floating point error accumulating until you get pulled by a cube rule instead of a square rule. When there's no glitchy PQS terrain at all, then getting close enough will cause the errors to accumulate so much until you just get flung out.

Could a mod create time dilation? Universal Time would progress faster when a ship is closer to a gravity source, but the ship would appear to be going slower when it's close to gravity?

Planned Features

-Gravitational lensing and Black hole

-KittopiaTech Rings (Accretion Disk)

-Wormhole Tanuki (With mouths Dahud and Jayk)

-Not replacing Jool; perhaps by using Kopernicus?

-Time dilation?

-Automatic Game Crash when the ship passes the event horizon. (Because although it would be really cool to be able to show a proper universe-hole on the other side of the event horizon, that is just not possible in KSP to my knowledge. Click

to understand what I mean.

-Fix for lack of lighting in black hole SOI.

-Maybe fix the Navball? It's almost cool how it spazzes out like this.

 

Edited August 23, 2016 by GregroxMun

[Mekan1k]

So... What did the Kraken think?

[Whirligig Girl]

Here's the tragically failed config file I ended with. It's supposed to be a normal KSP scale MunHole config.

REALSOLARSYSTEM
{
    wrap = false
    spheresOnly = false
    compressNormals = true
//MunBlackHole mod for KSP 0.25. Ludicrously simple. It is just a resizing of the mun to make it really small.

    Mun 
    { 
        Radius = 0.01
        Mass = 9.7600236E+011
        rotationPeriod = 60
        Orbit 
        { 
            semiMajorAxis = 12000000
        }
        CelestialBodyScienceParams 
        { 
            flyingAltitudeThreshold = 100
            spaceAltitudeThreshold = 101
        } 
    } 

Basically, what seemed to happen was that the Mun had NO gravity at all and it would have a terrain that was still much bigger than the super-small size I tried to set it to.

Edited November 9, 2014 by GregroxMun

[Whirligig Girl]

http://gamelab.mit.edu/research/openrelativity/

I wonder if it would be possible to implement this as a mod for KSP?

Edited November 9, 2014 by GregroxMun

[Whirligig Girl]

I have a hunch that there's some hard-coded limit for how small a planet can get before the game slaps you in the face with it.

[electronicfox]

I guess you could trigger the rest of the game to timewarp depending on your proximity to the core of the black hole. You'd need to account for the fact that the black hole will need to move at the same speed as everything else in timewarp, while keeping your ship in orbit (not in timewarp). Not sure how you'd handle that.

[landeTLS]

"Black hole mun

Won't you come

And wash away the rain

Black hole mun

Won't you come

Won't you come":P

Sorry i couldnt help it..

[Whirligig Girl]

Huge discovery made about event horizons.

I found a HUGE science result. Black holes in KSP actaully have Event Horizons from which crafts can not escape. This event horizon is based totally on floating point error accumulating until you get pulled by a cube rule instead of a square rule.

[electronicfox]

I wanna see spaghetification. Kerbal noodles!

[Whirligig Girl]

I suppose that might be possible, but calling it easy would be like calling the sun small.

[beabop]

Cool! IMO, this would be an awesome addition to the Star Systems mod - they already have a black hole.

[Whirligig Girl]

First off, I've decided on a name for the black hole. The black hole has been relocated to Dres (now the Mun is fine), and has been named Shimmy, because his streams are so engaging that you get pulled in and can not escape! It also has the nickname "The Shimularity."

I had thought some about the gravitational lensing effect that the distortion of space around gravitational sources (In this case it would be very visible due to the immensely high gravitational pull of Shimmy)

From a small amount of searching I found that something called a "World Transformed Refraction" could produce the effect in a fixed location. Then I read here that THIS might work.

Finally, the simplest explanation came through:

I had planned on creating a distort material and applying it to a player facing particle.

And in response:

I'd just do this. The complicated solutions aren't worth the hassle. And nobody will know any different.

So then I started thinking about wormholes. Now, I've been thinking for wormholes for a long time, and seeing Interstellar helped me to truly figure out how wormholes really work in the spacetime-fabric analogy and even the flatland analogy.

Basically, the premise of the wormhole (if we ignore the gravital lensing for a moment) from a graphical standpoint is this. You take a point in one location and map the entire spherical view around it. Then you take the sphere and you view it from the outside. (Like how when you take an outside view of an interior space and the leading walls are invisible, like this.)

Apparently you could also do this with reflection mapping, and it would be more realistic. You take the reflection of the sky, then use a reflection mapped object at the planet.

This accounts for the appearance of most of the wormhole's visual area. Then near the edge of the wormhole, when the gravitational lensing is added, you get the intense distortions of the very edge of the hole.

So now I have an idea of how to make it look like a wormhole, how would you get KSP to do the teleportation? From thinking of the patched-conic-approximation and matching it topologically to the spacetime fabric illustration, I figured the following.

First you create two planets. Cosmologically speaking, they're the same object. From the game's standpoint they are two separate objects. If we're doing KSPTV streamers, then the names are obvious. Dahud and Jayk. Their diameter would be that of the throat of the wormhole that is being simulated. Then you make the surface's mesh that of the inside-out sphere. Worst case scenario you get a pseudo-realistic planet where the terrain is a map of the skybox. Then apply the graviational lensing shader.

Now comes the part where you have to implement the orbital mechanics of KSP into it. In many other games, you'd be using goofy small scale wormholes only a few meters across, and you just teleport from one center to another. Here, you have to do it differently.

Let's take a scenario of a ship falling towards Dahud. at the moment of impact, you teleport to the surface of Jayk on the exact opposite side of the globe. You also reverse the velocity you had falling towards Dahud and turn it into velocity moving away from Jayk. You'd then be under the normal influence of patched-conics gravity until you fall back down to the surface of Jayk. If you simply raise your periapsis above the surface of Jayk, you won't fall in again. Aside from the peculiar appearance of the wormhole, you might as well just be in the SOI of any other planet as far as manuverability goes.

Interestingly, you could get this stable perpetual figure-eight orbit.

So then let's say for the sake of argument that once a mod like this is created and published, we want a good lore and game experience for the object. Fear not! It needs a name to describe it singularly, so we'll call the cosmic object itself "Tanuki" and the SOIs of the respective mouths "Dahud" and "Jayk" respectively.

Dahud

Tanuki is a peculiar phenomenon in space called a wormhole. It is not a naturally occurring object, so it is quite a mystery. It was once thought to be two objects, Dahud and Jayk. Dahud is the closest one to Kerbin, and was discovered when Wilbury Kerman realized that heat should not be warping his telescope in the arctic. It is like a black hole in that it has infinite density. The closest thing to a "surface" it has is the throat. Think of it as a 3D hole in the patchwork of space. This "event horizon" is the place at which space around Dahud folds into Jayk. Dahud and Jayk were both renamed Tanuki, after the lead engineer who built the telescope and the detection system.

Mass=4.10023×10^22 kg

Diameter=592,023 meters (approx. the diameter of Kerbin)

Surface Gravity=3.12 g

Jayk

Tanuki is a peculiar phenomenon in space called a wormhole. It is not a naturally occurring object, so it is quite a mystery. It was once thought to be two objects, Dahud and Jayk. Jayk is the furthest side of the hole from Kerbin. It was discovered when echo signals from a radio transmission where picked up at a radio telescope. Once the location of the echo was discovered, the scientists were baffled. Full funding was devoted to figure out what the mysterious object was. At first it was thought to be another universe entirely, but then higher detailed observations permitted the realization that Dahud and Jayk were the same type of object. A directed transmission was sent to Dahud, and was picked up by a telescope pointed at Jayk. It was then realized that Dahud and Jayk were in fact the same object. Dahud and Jayk were both renamed Tanuki, after the lead engineer who built the telescope and the detection system.

Mass=4.10023×10^22 kg

Diameter=592,023 meters (approx. the diameter of Kerbin)

Surface Gravity=3.12 g

(The Mass & Diameter values were the result of some minor playtesting on Dres to find a high-density that would not cause major problems with the physics engine)

So the question that must be answered is: Is it possible? From a mechanics standpoint I don't see why not. HyperEdit is capable of teleporting spacecraft, and the visual bit is just a shader and is not strictly required. The only thing standing in the way of this idea becoming a reality is the limit of my coding skills. It would very much be an extremely interesting mod to be developed. If anyone would like to do most of the project for me while I crack the whip help me learn how to implement such a mod, or even just help with the coding side of things, PM me and we can get a discussion going.

[Yaivenov]

You have my attention.

[Whirligig Girl]

Good, because the latest version is released. Jool is now a singularity called Shimmy.

[Starwhip]

Ooohhhhh, this is what you wanted the skybox for....

Intriguing.

[Whirligig Girl]

Ooohhhhh, this is what you wanted the skybox for....

Intriguing.

Yep. This is it.

[Whirligig Girl]

It frustrates me that so often people screw up illustrations.

This is incorrect:

If you compressed Space into 2D to show gravity as the Third, then why is the Earth still 3D?

In reality, such an illustration would appear as a 3D version of this:

(Albiet with constant gravity replaced with inverse squared gravity.)

All objects on the "fabric of spacetime" are locked down to it. On a 3D version of this illustration, the surface is actually a 1D line wrapped around in a circle, and the interior of a planet is the 2D area wrapped around the... erm... well(?) shape. This makes sense if you expand space back into 3 dimensions. The surface of a planet is a 2D map wrapped around a sphere, and the interior is a 3 dimensional volume. Now take that back to the "Patchwork(Patched Conics!) of SpaceTime, where we remove one spatial dimension to visually replace it with the dimension of gravitation. It's just the Planetary Flatland, but the plane is stretched backwards wherever there's mass.

Oh, what's that? You don't know what the Planetary Flatland analogy is? Sorry. I forgot I invented it.

For the uneducated, Flatland is a 2D plane where creatures live, talk, etc. If you want to learn more about this philosophy and are in the mood to see a rather dramatic movie, watch

. (

)

When I first saw this movie, it got me thinking about 2 dimensions, 3 dimensions, and even 4 dimensions. But then I realized something was wrong with the way that Flatland was built. You can move around in 2 dimensions. But... that's what we do. I mean, yeah we can jump and fly in airplanes and stuff, but gravity holds us down to 2 dimensions of the ground. In a proper flatland, what I call the Planetary Flatland or Platland, the surface of the world is just a line which flatlanders can move forwards or backwards along. The planet still has 2D volume (Or, area, from a 3D view), but it's solid and impassable without a shovel or something. Platlanders can jump and move their arms up, they're not inherently restricted to 1D or anything, this is just a better way of imagining the flatland so that it approximates our universe. Sea creatures in Platland behave much like classic flatlanders, because bouyancy allows for the extra degree of freedom.

Then the final season of Futurama came out, and in a simpler, more Lowest-Common-Denominator kind of way,

. The line of the world is straight, it's not a circle.

Recently I realized that if you make the third dimension Gravity instead of our spatial dimension, you just have a planetary flatland that is pushed back and warped wherever there's mass. And by the way, strictly speaking you don't have to use gravity to create black holes. If you as a 3D creature can manipulate the 2D fabric of spacetime, you can just create a wormhole using the third spatial dimension. Although I suppose that would act like gravity as far as the platlanders are concerned. Holy crap I just realized that that means there'd be two dimensions of gravity.

[/rant]

EDIT: This is how I can get away with using a third dimension to the Platland that's not just our own physical space. ANY higher dimension of our 3D space will bring the dimension count to 4. That 4th dimension could be that of Time, or Gravity, or just another one of space. These dimensions are all at right angles to each other. You could even visualize a space where the three visual dimensions are what we see as "Time", "Gravity", then just a Spatial dimension that is unrelated to ours!

Let's just, for future reference, create a list of dimensions. Each dimension is perpendicular to all of the previous. They will relate to KSP, not the real world. You could relate these to the real world if you imagine a solar system like the Kerbolar System exists IRL.

X=The direction from the Sun to Kerbin at the start of the game. I only need to specify XYZ so that we have a frame of reference. Strictly speaking it could be in any direction.

Y=The direction going directly up out of the Pole of Kerbin.

Z=Combining with X, PlaneXZ is the plane of Kerbin's Equator/Eccliptic.

W=A fourth spatial dimension.

G=The Gravital dimension. (Note that warping spacetime in any direction will cause gravitational attraction, but space is automatically bent by mass in the G- direction)

D=Duration, the directions of time and antitime. (I'm not entirely sure if this relates to the game, because in KSP all positions are a function of time)

T=Tivargy. It's a hypothetical gravital dimension running along W as G runs along Z. So, if you replace Z with W, gravity comes from T instead of G. It's at right angles to Gravity.

N=Niotarud. It's Tivargy but with Duration instead of Gravity. If D runs along X, then N runs along W.

Edited November 11, 2014 by GregroxMun

[HerrGeneral]

Definitely needs an accretion disk. Also, does the radius correspond to the actual Schwarzchild radius of an object with Jool's mass?

[Whirligig Girl]

In-game the radius of Shimmy is 0.001 meters. I did some calculation.

According to the regular laws of physics, the swarzchild radius of Jool is 62 centimeters. But what is the kerbal speed of light? Well, the only mod that I know of which deals with the speed of light (and not for FTL travel, but for actual transmissions) is RemoteTech. And apparently the Speed of Light in RemoteTech is THE speed of light. This makes sense because from a game balance standpoint, you don't want hugely long delays.

Thus, my swarzchild radius of Jool is correct under Real world physics. Right? Well, if you're curious, the speed of light according to KSP Interstellar is 1/10 of our own speed of light. This is because we're talking about travel time, so game balance would have a lower lightspeed.

NovaSilisko has confirmed that Kerbals exist in a universe with higher gravity than our own. Luckily, the mass values are configured for our universe, so raising the gravitational constant would also warrant lowering the mass. This balances itself out, so we only have to worry about 1/10 speed of light.

Rs=(2(MG))/c^2

Rs=5.64E+14/ 29979246^2

And finally, unless I'm waaaaay worse than math than I previously thought, the swarzchild radius of Jool under KSP physics is... 63 centimeters. Hmm. That's the same as above within a rounding error. Let me think... oh, yes. It's 63 decimeters. Duh. It's 10 times more because the speed of light is 1/10 the size.

So, the value of the swarzchild radius of Jool under IRL physics is 0.63 meters and under 1/10 speed of light is 6.3 meters. The question is... Which one should I use? Note that until gravity lensing is implemented, there will not actually be any implementation of this event horizon. Right now it's the closest a game can come to a true singularity. 0.1 centimeter radius is pretty small!

Edited November 11, 2014 by GregroxMun

[Yaivenov]

63 centimeters is 0.63m, 63 decimeters is 6.3m.

P.S. Go with the 1/10c value, might as well stay consistent to the current game physics.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Yaivenov

[Whirligig Girl]

63 centimeters is 0.63m, 63 decimeters is 6.3m.

P.S. Go with the 1/10c value, might as well stay consistent to the current game physics.

Hmm. I guess I'm bad at math after all! Yay!

[NFUN]

I'm still afraid this project has something to do with Jebediah Kerman, a Hypetrain, a remote controlled rocket and a camera*.

*Sssh, don't ruin the Kerbals' dreams!

[Whirligig Girl]

Streaming this NOW on my channel!

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/2m0nq3/exploring_a_black_hole_in_ksp_streaming_now/

[Whirligig Girl]

I'm conducting an expedition to Shimmy as we speak.

It's going pretty well!

[Whirligig Girl]

Minor fix to remove the science config, which was conflicting with stock. You MUST remove the previous version! Remove RealSolarSystem and ShimmyHole folders from Gamedata.

Edited November 12, 2014 by GregroxMun