Hello, it's Scott Manley here with a Kerbal example of just how big distances in space are.
I built this tiny little capsule as basic as a
mainsail engine it has the smallest crew cabin on top of it and
Well, that's it. There's not any fuel in it
I'm of course using the infinite fuel cheat to make this thing take off at some ridiculous acceleration and Thompeny Kerman looks like he's having
some problem dealing with it I think. Regardless look we are heading up through the atmosphere. We're getting shock heating
We're getting aerodynamic effects and well within you know 30 seconds
We're ready out of the atmosphere already up into space under a minute, right?
this is going like a bat out of hell, but the reason I'm doing this is because I want to make another discussion about
traveling long distances, now some people have asked will there be other
solar systems in Kerbal Space Program and will you be able to travel to them
So I just want to say we talked about what it would take to travel to other solar systems
Using Kerbal technology even if you can cheat. Here is my rocket it is accelerating at about
25 G's and when time acceleration is set up to a factor of four that's almost a kilometer per second of acceleration
per real world seconds
Now if we were to do this to travel to another star, how far would we have to travel?
Let's just take you know our local solar neighborhood the nearest stars are about four light-years away
I mean, that's the nearest one and we are actually particularly
sparsely populated part of the Galaxy, it's quite common to find stars much closer together than that, but let's use 12
Sorry, 4 light-years as the reference distance, right?
So I'm looking at my speed here
My orbital speed is just past 70 kilometers per second there are 72
If I take that at 72 kilometers per second it would take a very very very very
Very very very very long time to get there
but we have time acceleration, time acceleration of course will let us make time pass at
100 000 times normal speed and that means if you're traveling at 3 kilometers per second and you do a
100 000 time acceleration that means that you're actually traveling at essentially light speed.
Albeit the game doesn't think you're traveling at that, but that's what it's like, so if you want to travel 4 light-years
in a year at
100,000 times time acceleration you would need to travel 12 kilometers per second
Now
You see that our speed is about to reach a hundred and twenty kilometers per second that means
If we add time acceleration at maximum we could get there in one tenth of a year, so that's just over a month now
I would have to leave the game running if I cut the power and let this accelerate and let this just fly off now and
One Hundred and Thirty once this gets to
144 kilometers per second of course that will be one month, a mere 30 days of time acceleration
And I know you guys have gone all the way out to Eeloo have experienced how slow time acceleration can feel. There we go
144 kilometers per second 30 days of
continuous time acceleration to reach another world after three or four minutes of in-game time
Of course we have infinite fuel
And we can keep on accelerating like this as long as we can, it took us about 10 minutes of acceleration to reach
one month duration that means if we continue to accelerate for another 10 minutes or 20 minutes of game time
then we'll only have to time accelerate for two weeks, and that means 40 minutes will get us down to one week and
If we wait for an hour, you know an hour and 20 that will mean that it'll only take us half a week
But you see that the getting things shorter and shorter we're eventually gonna hit into some regime about
one to two days of
continuous game play to actually travel a four lightyear distance
And that's not including of course the time that it would take to decelerate
Now
You can optimize the spacecraft just a little you can of course put the pilot just in a seat with no
protection around them although at these accelerations is not uncommon for the pilot to actually fall out when you try to increase your physical time
acceleration to four times normal speed
But you know, traveling at interstellar distances at near interstellar speeds of course you
then encounter other hazards all those hydrogen atoms and stuff that are floating around. They suddenly become
ionizing radiation that will give you cancer
even the tiny grains of sand, if those hits you they are highly energetic
They will demolish your entire spacecraft and to be honest the difference between sitting there in a spacesuit and sitting in that lander can
probably not that much difference because they will hit you like a ton of explosives.
of course my point is that to appreciate the huge distances that exist in this universe
Obviously Kerbal space program makes things a little smaller
And you know we could certainly shrink these things down a whole lot to unphysically small distances
And I wouldn't have a problem with that or if we were to add other star systems
you could have some other mechanism to get between them
You could in fact develop some hypothetical warp drive or something which wouldn't exist in the real world
I personally like the concept of having to hunt around the solar system for
monoliths and easter eggs
And use those to build a stargate which will let you go to other star systems, add a mini game in there!
Now the other question you might have is how fast could you do it without using this cheat system
And it is actually possible to get up to speeds in excess of about
60 kilometers per second if you do things right and if you use all your fuel correctly by exploiting
Bi-elliptic transfer and then doing a fly pass to the sun
And then dumping all your fuel there you can easily get up to north of *inaudible*
You know into that realm let's say, so you could cut the flight time
Certainly down to a few months if you are lucky, if you were really dedicated, but take a really really long time
so let's not be doing that let's hope that if new systems are added the developers come up with some new and
Fascinating way for us to reach the stars, but until then I'm Scott Manley fly safe