relativity - near lightspeed physics

[Shalkka]

I saw that FTL is a already suggested thing. I was wondering on what is the stance on slower than light physics. I know that this potentially might be such a major basic orbit mechanism change that it migth not be a trivial thing to add. Will we ever have time dilation or lorentz contraction? Given that the game already does time acceleration there might be easy ways to nudge it to have flight clocks tick at a diffferent rate than world clock.

[RSwordsman]

I personally wouldn't want to muck with time dilation too much. I can see it making a difference for resource consumption, but other than that I like my universal time and it would get confusing fast to have each ship on relative mission clocks.

Lorentz contraction would be pretty awesome. Unfortunately while going at that speed there probably wouldn't be a lot to see, so it would be sort of silly to include.

Relativistic effects are so cool to think about. However I can't really see them playing a role in KSP. Maybe something relating to the warp drives would be a better idea, despite that they don't really let the observer see how fast they're going inside the warp bubble hehe.

[cicatrix]

I saw that FTL is a already suggested thing. I was wondering on what is the stance on slower than light physics. I know that this potentially might be such a major basic orbit mechanism change that it migth not be a trivial thing to add. Will we ever have time dilation or lorentz contraction? Given that the game already does time acceleration there might be easy ways to nudge it to have flight clocks tick at a diffferent rate than world clock.

I don't think this will ever be implemented, moreover, I don't think the game would remain playable and enjoyable after this. I don't see how time dilation can affect the gameplay aside from making the game too cumbersome, and what concerns lorentz contraction - well, what purpose would it serve?

You can install Remote Tech and try playing with signal delay... most people switch it off after 5 mins of playing.

[*Aqua*]

green line - delay due to gravity (general relativity theory)

red line - delay due to moving (special relativity theory)

blue - combined effect

Looking at that diagram... I don't care about relativistic effects. They can be neglected.

[Sirrobert]

Time dilation would add nothing but an extra thing to concider when planning, if it is even significant enough to give that. Not worth the time to try to code in

[technicalfool]

There may, possibly be ways of fudging relativistic effects. However, to do it properly would be rather complex. You'd need to shift planets back and forth along their rails correctly for one, and would probably need to store a history of movement to play backward and forward through for each and every object in the game.

This concept game right here does exactly what you're suggesting, in a simple first-person object-collecting format. Even then, there are several hard limitations with the current slower-light engine (for instance, ONLY the player object may move freely). You can read more about the OpenRelativity engine itself here.

Funnily enough, I've suggested doing something like this myself. But, the more you look at the problem, the harder you realise it will be to pull off without some mighty fudge factors.