[1.12.x] Alcubierre Warp Drive (Stand-alone)

[RoverDude]

There's a pretty detailed explanation a few pages back in the thread. And when dealing with an Alcubierre drive, there's no such thing as a simple english writing

[TheReaper]

"Velocity" mode maintains your linear momentum direction and magnitude. So if you leave Kerbin you'll have an orbital velocity around Kerbol of ~8 km/s, if you warp out to Jool, you'll still be going 8 km/s so will be going 4 km/s too fast and probably be on an escape trajectory out of the solar system. That's your best case scenario if Kerbin and Jool are aligned on the same side of Kerbol.

"Angular Momentum" mode maintains the magnitude of orbital angular momentum (orbit.h) and your direction of travel. Your orbital velocity adjusts down as you climb out of a gravity well, and adjusts up as you warp towards the parent body. Same scenario: This time you will have too little velocity when you get to Jool. It actually ends up being like a Hohmann transfer where you pay for it all at the end. This mode you get no free potential energy like you do in the linear momentum mode.

In a way the drives are opposites. You can see if you take the exact same warp ship on the same trip but set in the other mode.

[Removed by the moderation team]

Edited July 21, 2015 by sal_vager

[Whirligig Girl]

Whatever happened to that supposed 5m Warp Drive for that Freight Transport System mod? Would be useful for, you know, transporting freight. Even without the rest of the system.

[RoverDude]

Still on the drawing board

[TonyC]

[Removed by the moderation team]

sounds serious.

I really like this mod. I've been using it to transit in Kopernicus based mini galaxies packs. Very interesting mod, nifty part and a great potential. Thanks again RoverDude !

[RoverDude]

Glad you dig it

[Lukavachan]

Hmm can anybody tell how i can use the 2 drives correctly? always when i try to activate it it deactivate itself after 0.5 seconds. I use big Solar panel for it but i don't get it working <.<

[AlonzoTG]

Okay, I've been flying a few missions with the "2.5m" ring. Why is the warp drive tied to the integrated conventional xenon thrusters? I have found that the amount of xenon on board determines the range -> I'm carrying 3 tons of xenon =P. I'm flying to a planetary system around the star Nemesis, it takes 2.5 jumps to get out there... Kinda annoying, especially because I can't just turn it on and walk away because I have to manually shut it down before running out of my E.M.

I've been trying to deploy an orbital scanner. My first one didn't work because my comms dish was interfering with my scanning dish... This time I added a qbic octagonal strut under the comms dish so I thought that would fix it, but it still didn't work even though there were no clearance issues when I checked it in the editor. =\

More seriously though, there is a major issue with the colliders for your ring models here and in FTT. Just implementing the collider as a disk seems like a quick fix but it breaks aerodynamics, especially under FAR, it also creates some very odd situations where you can surface-attach parts to hard vacuum and can't send an EVA on a shourt-cut through the ring to get to the other end of the ship to do go investigate issues such as the one mentioned above.

[Tarheel1999]

Hmm can anybody tell how i can use the 2 drives correctly? always when i try to activate it it deactivate itself after 0.5 seconds. I use big Solar panel for it but i don't get it working <.<

You are probably to close to the planet. You have to be a certain distance (varies based on planet size) away for warp drive to operate.

[RoverDude]

Yep, very likely you're too close. Try it from orbit.

[almagnus1]

Any chance you'd make a drive unit that's designed for the FTT starlifter series of parts?

[Tarheel1999]

Any chance you'd make a drive unit that's designed for the FTT starlifter series of parts?

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100798-1-0-2-Alcubierre-Warp-Drive-%28Stand-alone%29-v0-2-1-2015-05-15?p=2096397&viewfull=1#post2096397

[volcanicshrimp]

What'd the difference between the conservation modes?

[Lukavachan]

You are probably to close to the planet. You have to be a certain distance (varies based on planet size) away for warp drive to operate.

Ok i tried it same thing happen again. But this time my kerbal and modules was all killed. no explosion but all was gone in my stage bar

[volcanicshrimp]

Mk 2 and mk 3 versions would be really useful for spaceplanes (If I could build one which could get to orbit!)

[Kershu5]

What happens if I use /two/ rings at once? Does that affect the size of the Warp Bubble at all? I mean like if I'm designing an IXS-style ship and it has two "rings", and both are active- will Bad Things happen, will nothing happen, or will I get a larger bubble?

[RoverDude]

What happens if I use /two/ rings at once? Does that affect the size of the Warp Bubble at all? I mean like if I'm designing an IXS-style ship and it has two "rings", and both are active- will Bad Things happen, will nothing happen, or will I get a larger bubble?

Bad things.

[Kershu5]

Good to know before I risked drawing the Kraken's wrath, then! I can only hope it plays well with Sophia's updated IXS WarpShip stuff in such case.

[Gaalidas]

More than likely the edges of each bubble will still rip apart the craft parts that they intersect with.

[Kershu5]

My fear was actually more along the lines that the overlapping warp bubbles would cause Physics Itself to break down and start twisting the ship and then a violent game crash.

Now that I know NOT to do that, though, it all seems to work just peachy! The only thing I need to do now is figure out how to fiddle with the settings a bit so the warp bubble doesn't generate so much framerate loss.

[helaeon]

Now that I know NOT to do that, though, it all seems to work just peachy! The only thing I need to do now is figure out how to fiddle with the settings a bit so the warp bubble doesn't generate so much framerate loss.

That... might be tricky. Fiddling with settings probably won't do it. Every couple of frames the game gets a new set of orbital variables to calculate from and pretty much re-does everything about your ship as far as it's orbit and velocity go. It's part of the deal with translating through space this way regardless of which energy conservation mode you use. The velocity conservation mode is a lot simpler and is way easier on the CPU however. My great hope is we will get multi-threaded physics with 1.1 and the issues of re-calculating the orbit of all of the individual parts that make up a ship will be a much smaller problem.

Serino and I went to quite a bit of effort to try and reduce the CPU overhead while not causing too much lossiness in the calculations. What you have is about as good as it gets unfortunately.

Maybe if there were some way to load the whole ship into the warp bubble and weld the whole thing to a single part, then re-constitute the multipart ship from temporary file or something when it drops out of warp... that's about the only way I can think of.

[Sophia]

Every frame, PlayWarpAnimation calls GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("Icon_Hidden") and then iterates over the results. This function is apparently "notoriously inefficient" so calling it every frame to get a result that could (and probably should) be generated once and then cached seems like a pretty quick fix to save some CPU cycles.

I've made this change in WarpShip, but haven't gotten around to submitting it as a pull request for this one yet, sorry about that. But I thought I'd at least mention it.

[Third_OfFive]

I absolutely love this mod. If Faster-Than-Light travel is ever added into KSP, this should be it.

[Haze-Zero]

Is it intentionally designed for the warp-drive to immediately overheat upon touching an atmosphere? I attempted to aerobrake with it, I didn't feel it was a particularly deep aerobrake but my entire ship blew up the moment it entered atmo. I reloaded and reattempted to aerobrake but each time it immediately overheated and blew up.

[RoverDude]

Insufficient specificity, but given it's shape, etc. I expect there's a spectacular amount of drag. So pretty much stock thermal mechanics doing their thing.