Ship Shape - Round or Square?
Shouldn't that be a cube, going from X/Y/Z dimensions?
The sphere has the best volume to surface ratio iirc.
Are you sure? A quick look at Coriolis told me an Anaconda can pitch >125°/s and that observatory is about 100m in front of the rotational axis. A radius of 100m with 20 RPM is 44.72G if I'm correct?
And that's with constant speed, the insane acceleration at the start is even worse I assume.
edit: Fake news, I was looking at roll. The correct pitch value lowers the RPM to about 9 and G force to about 9 as well.
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You seen Star Wars, right? Look at Star Destroyer - why is it V-shaped? It's so it can bring the most cannon to bear from front and both sides. The ship shape reflects the ship's purpose. In the fictional physics framework, of course.
Any value >100°/s (and possibly even >80°/s) for any ship pretty certainly refers to Roll, not Pitch. An Anaconda barely reaches 30° Pitch even with G5 DD according to Coriolis.
That was tonghue-in-cheek. But which coriolis do you get your numbers from? If I set up a minimum conda with 7A G5DD, I get a pitch of 56°/s (boost, 4 pips). Yaw is less, and roll doesn't care.
That's 0.155 rounds/s - ok, not a significant difference in terms of g's. Perhaps that's the reasdonn why we can't fly the conda from the forward deck.
Oops, thanks for pointing that out. That was indeed roll instead of pitch. With the correct pitch value of about 50°/s I get about 9G which I guess won't even make you faint in your high tech Remlok suit as long as you're strapped in. Assuming my calculations are correct.
Oh, now I remember what I wanted to say about realistic spaceship shapes. If the things are designed to travel through real space at higher velocities - thus risking getting hit by micrometeorites or space-junk, and/or are supposed to endure getting shot at with kinetic weapons, they will probably feature strong wedge-shaped frontal armour, probably augmented with spaced armour, like most present-day MBTs do.
OR they might have a huge ice cube clamped to the front, that serves both as impact armour and propellant reserve.
ED ships do not move through real-space at higher speeds than a jet plane, but kinetic weapons are a thing.
OR they might have a huge ice cube clamped to the front, that serves both as impact armour and propellant reserve.
ED ships do not move through real-space at higher speeds than a jet plane, but kinetic weapons are a thing.
I seen Goofyness unfathomable. Players come up with the weirdest stuff when they find out about glitchy physics. Like self-powering rotorblades. I think "Spin-to-Win" originated from KSP?
After all these years, still the 12th most popular screenshot ever on the Steam KSP gallery.
Thruth be said tho', that would have been impossible to do as I did back at the time, before atmospheric friction became an actual thing in the game...I shot this up in a single piece!
The cockpit cat will have a hard time if left to roam freely.
Guess we soon will have the adapted versions of the joke with "What's the Red mushy stuff..."
And here I thought that the round vs square debate was confined to only the Jeep community.
I would think a sleek flat-shaped ship would be best for combat and damage reduction.
- Depending on angle of approach the sleek ship would be harder to detect with certain sensors. Harder to target, harder to hit.
- When traveling forward a sleek design would have reduced impact. Glancing blows instead of direct impacts. For shields too.
- When entering the mail slot of a big station a sleek design can bounce of the walls and slide in, a chunky cube would get stuck.
And prior to (the) Mercury (program) we hadn't any real experience at all. We flew transport planes in parabolic courses that might give as much as 30 seconds of almost-zero-g, and that was all we knew. I will not soon forget some of our early low-g experiments. Some genius wanted to know how a cat oriented: visual cues, or a gravity sensor? The obvious way to find out was to take a cat up in an airplane, fly the plane in a parabolic orbit, and observe the cat during the short period of zero-g.
It made sense. Maybe. It didn't make enough that anyone would authorize a large airplane for the experiment, so a camera was mounted in a small fighter (perhaps a T-bird; I forget), and the cat was carried along in the pilot's lap. A movie was made of the whole run.
The film, I fear, doesn't tell us how a cat orients. It shows the pilot frantically trying to tear the cat off his arm, and the cat just as violently resisting. Eventually the cat was broken free and let go in mid-air, where it seemed magically (teleportation? or not really zero gravity in the plane? no one knows) to move, rapidly, straight back to the pilot, claws outstretched. This time there was no tearing it loose at all. The only thing I learned from the film is that cats (or this one anyway) don't like zero gravity, and think human beings are the obvious point of stability to cling to...
(Jerry Pournelle, 1979)
Absolutely, as others have already shown - and, what's more, you can do it with varying degrees of realism.
Everything in KSP gets constructed in either an "aeroplane factory" or in the "rocket factory", and then you move the finished item to either a runway or a launch-pad.
When you're building silly stuff the simplest way is to build it in one of the factories, put it on the runway/pad and... erm... probably witness a spectacular explosion when you try to launch it.
Alternatively, you can build "modules", store them and then attach them to other, pre-existing ships.
So, for example, you can build a generic "heavy lifter" ship, store it and then design various parts of your project, fit them to the heavy lift ship and launch them into orbit.
Once in orbit you can attempt to assemble the modules into the completed star destroyer/borg cube/whatever.
If that all sounds too complicated, KSP also has a comprehensive "cheat console", which allows you to build anything, plonk it on the runway/launchpad and then switch off gravity, enable infinite fuel and put it into orbit easily.
Is this using mods? Both the planet and space looks way better than I expected from KSP. Of course the Borg cube also looks amazing!
