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

[helaeon]

The angular momentum mode works almost opposite to the velocity conservation version. (If you warp out to Jool with velocity mode you have way too much velocity, the angular momentum mode you have far too little. As Jool has nearly twice the orbital momentum that Kerbin does)
Velocity mode as you climb out of a gravity well you get a ton of free potential energy. Angular momentum mode you do not.
The hyperbolic orbit calculations in the angular momentum mode however, make it so it's easier to use the mass of the target world to capture without using your reaction drives very much if you know what you're doing. In practice, yes you can keep warping to the planet and match velocity with it around Kerbol, works a bit better in my experience in the angular momentum mode.

[Angstinator]

I suppose warping down to Moho and taking what by now must amount to nearly twenty post-periaptic jumps to somewhat elliptify the trajectory is normal, then?

[helaeon]

Depending on the direction of your travel vector, yes, sometimes more. Especially somewhere like Moho with very little mass. Sometimes it is a good idea to change the direction of your travel vector to match that of the planet you are travelling to (tangent to it's orbital path at its current position).
Version of the drive you are using changes the procedure, but generally you want to make it so you are at apoapsis or periapsis then as you turn to fall towards (or away) from the parent body warp away when your direction is what you want. That can massively reduce the amount of correction needed at arrival.

[Kershu5]

Say RoverDude do you still intend to add a 3.75 and 5m drive?

[RoverDude]

Eventually, yes

[Kershu5]

Cool.  One other inquiry- is it possible to disable the warp bubble's color thing where it flickers and ripples a lot?  When I tried Sophia's IXS thing it had a similar warp bubble but it ran, well, smoothly,  I hate to say it but your warp bubble murders my frame rate..  I like it, I just don't know what else I can do to make it smoother.

[helaeon]

A few pages back Sophia explained what was done to make it run better. That warp drive is based off of this one so it should make this one run better too. It involves changing some things in the DLL. I was hoping that Sophia would push along those changes. It's another efficiency thing involving Unity like when I started using Krakensbane instead of SetPostion to move the ship.

If I can find that solution I'll log a GitHub issue outlining what Sophia said to do so it's in an easy to find place. *done*

Edited December 13, 2015 by helaeon
Noting that did find solution and logged git hub issue

[Kershu5]

ooh.  I didn't realize that, thanks Helaeon.  Is it possible for us to make those changes ourselves or copy something out of Sophia's WarpShip or do we just have to wait for it?  If I'm told what to change and where I can do it, but otherwise digging through code I end up just looking like a chimp without any hands.

[helaeon]

I'm pretty sure Sophia would be fine with someone helping bring the changes over. I didn't know anything about programming in C or the inner workings of KSP when I started working on this, so, it's a good exercise if you want to take a stab. If you get something that works make the pull request. RoverDude is really cool about pull requests.
Otherwise, you can wait and at some point I'm sure it'll get worked in. If RoverDude doesn't do it, or Sophia, or someone else that wants to make it happen, I will once I have time but I have no idea when that might be.

[peteletroll]

I converted the mbm textures to dds, and added a reduced size version for lower memory usage. They work fine for me. Here they are, if anybody (including RoverDude  ) wants to try them: https://www.dropbox.com/s/08iz75jlff30r70/WarpDrive-dds.zip?dl=0

[RoverDude]

A good bet would also be to send a pull request with the DDS files to the DEVELOP branch

[peteletroll]

Too lazy to make a github account 

[goldenpsp]

3 minutes ago, peteletroll said:

Too lazy to make a github account 

If you are gonna be lazy at least be consistent.  In the time it took to make this post you could have been halfway done with a github account.

[gmiddlemass]

Managed to make a small warp capable space plane (SSTW) with the small version. It gets to low Kebin orbit with the Rapiers and then, very slowly over a few orbits, climbs out sufficiently far for the warp drive to activate.

Thank you for the mod.

 

Edit: Sorry, picture doesn't seem to be working. Not got used to the new forum yet! 

Direct link Picture

Edited December 23, 2015 by gmiddlemass

[RoverDude]

Very cool

[RoverDude]

0.3.2 is up!

This fixes that pesky lag issue

You can nab it on GitHub (link on the USI Catalog page)

[NotAgain]

So, if I use this drive, it will annihilate anything outside the warp bubble?

It would make the ultimate debris-clearer, but can I turn it from a doomsday device to a viable method of travel, as I want to refuel it's sub-light engines at my high-orbit refuelling station, which I want to keep.

Thanks for a great mod.

[RoverDude]

You are very welcome

[Mitchz95]

Is this compatible with 1.0.4?

[goldenpsp]

6 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

Is this compatible with 1.0.4?

Let us know! 

[Mitchz95]

52 minutes ago, goldenpsp said:

Let us know! 

I'll post back when I have some time to test it out.

[Mitchz95]

So I experimented with this in 1.0.4. It seems to work, but the warp field doesn't seem to be destructive like you warned in the OP. I took Bill on an EVA mid-warp and he passed through the bubble without a scratch. Even stranger, he was translated with me as I warped along even though he was outside of the bubble. Peculiar.

Also, it would be really great if we could use standard timewarp while, um, warping. An FTL ship isn't much good if you have to wait 90+ real-time days just to get to Proxima Centauri.

[RoverDude]

Which specific planet are you having a problem getting to?  And yeah I pulled out some of the destruction

[Mitchz95]

17 minutes ago, RoverDude said:

Which specific planet are you having a problem getting to?  And yeah I pulled out some of the destruction

I was just testing out its capabilities. I'm hoping to use it for interstellar missions once I upgrade to RSS and 1.1.

How far away do I have to get from stations and the like to make sure they won't get dragged along with me?

Edited February 5, 2016 by Mitchz95

[helaeon]

15 minutes ago, Mitchz95 said:

So I experimented with this in 1.0.4. It seems to work, but the warp field doesn't seem to be destructive like you warned in the OP. I took Bill on an EVA mid-warp and he passed through the bubble without a scratch. Even stranger, he was translated with me as I warped along even though he was outside of the bubble. Peculiar.

Also, it would be really great if we could use standard timewarp while, um, warping. An FTL ship isn't much good if you have to wait 90+ real-time days just to get to Proxima Centauri.

Going to other stars, yeah, it's far far too slow. The way I think to make that work properly would be to do like Elite does and do some (GM)/(r^2) calculations on your current position and the smaller that number gets the higher your allowed warp factor. This would help some of the issues of flying through an SOI way too quickly as well.
I think the change in the code to alter that top warp factor would be pretty easy. But this is the sort of thing that would require a lot of testing to make sure really bad things don't happen when you hit incredible warp factors and that there aren't bad interactions with those mods that add those extra star systems. I also have no idea how they handle SOI handoffs so the conservation of energy (both modes) might be affected in odd ways.