Interstellar Google Drive
Janis Shaeffer
Originally written by @RealGecko, it was last updated for KSP 1.3.1. After a request, I've adopted and updated the mod for KSP 1.8 & 1.9. Original thread is here: -ksp-131-interstellar-warp-drive-standalone-betoooo-2017-10-10/
for some reason ships sometime don't slow down when disabling warpdrive, and the camera effect also seems to stay after jump most of the time. i'm playing on 1.10, is this a 1.10 bug or does this happen on other versions ?
so you say that is is incompatible with warpplugin? and since show what happened to the normal warp drive that interstellar extended mod used to include? and how to i get this warp drive (interstellar) since i prefer it over usi one because i love more complexity
So I just recently downloaded KSP Interstellar and I wanted to use the warp drive. Problem is I don't quite know how to use it. From what I can tell, it requires an insane amount of electricity, although for some reason you need antimatter and exotic matter? Also I can't even get the ship enough power. My electricity to mass ratio is always not good enough. It always says the ship has too much mass in order to run with this amount of electricity. How do you guys power your Alcubierre drives?
Fast than light speed is only possible by folding space itself. Space in front of the vessel needs to be shrunken while space behind it the vessel is extracted. To shrink and expand space, you need to generate negative mass which can be achieved by exciting exotic matter. KSPI warp drive can generate exotic matter and use it to create a warp field. The amount of power required to create a stable warp fields depends on the speed and power of the warp coils.
The speed of light itself requires the least amount energy. Traveling faster or slower requires more power. However speed is influenced by a large degree by the curvature of space, in other words, gravity. It means that the higher the gravity pull of any heavily body, the lower the maximum speed possible for a finite amount of power requirement. This effectively means that when a vessel is in a low Kerbin orbit, where the pull of gravity is significant, the maximum warp speed is very low. And since traveling slower than the speed of light requires more power, it means that it will be hard or impossible to generate enough power. To get around it, you need to bring your vessel further away from the gravity source or install more warp drive power.
Warp Power is achieved by any of the 3 warpdrives in KSP, The Light Warp Engine, the Foldable Warp Engine and the Heavy Warp Engine. The amount of warp power is directly dependent on the mass of the warp drive. Warp drives also stack linear, which means it will not matter if you use 24 ton of light warp drives or a single large warp drive.
What is important to understand that the KSP Interstellar Extended- Alcubierre Drive power requirement depends on avialbe warp drive power (warpdrive mass) nearby gravity wells and set speed relative to lightspeed (lower and higher speed are more difficult). The minumum amount of power requirment can be achieved by beeing in a high orbit, with a large warp drive power to mass ratio. This also means that trying to get to warp with a large vessel but little warp drive power in a low orbit is going to require a very large amount of power.
So here i was, happy as always playing in my Spore save with the Betterspore 1.5.1 mod and i bought interstellar drive 6 for 5.000.000 Sporebucks, all of a sudden i notice im starting to have the BAD_DATA bug because of the mod, so i had to remove it and the game got back to normal (im italian and the BAD_DATA bug is when the namegenerator for planets, dice, and everything won't work.), i got the game back to normal with no mods, the game was working fine and all, but when i return to my save, i notice i can't move to any solar system, it's like i had no interstellar drive anymore to go anywhere.. I can not move anymore, i can't even buy the 5/fifth one again since it's not in the shop anymore.. Is there a cheat code or a mod to help me with this? It would be a shame to throw this save away.. If anyone would help it would be appreciated! Thanks for reading.
The Interstellar Drive is effectively a second engine (in addition to the basic engine that spaceships utilize) that is only engaged when traveling between stars. The speed of the engine slowly increases as the ship travels to an incredibly fast speed: hundreds of times faster than the speed of light. For example, light takes 4.2 years to travel from Earth's nearest star, other than the sun, to Earth itself. The Interstellar Drive allows ships to travel there in roughly one second. Providing a ship had infinite Energy, a ship could use the drive to travel from the end of one of the galaxy's arms to the center in roughly 2 minutes. The drive cannot be used to simply travel through space: its high speed means that this would be hazardous as collisions with other space bodies would be high. The drive can only be used to 'jump' between stars. If a destination cannot be directly plotted, then the ship will use the drive to jump between several stars in order to reach a destination. All races, when progressing into the space stage, acquire the knowledge of how to construct the Interstellar Drive through alien knowledge. The power of their initial drives, however, is low, and frequent jumps must be plotted in order to traverse the galaxy. The early drive is also inefficient on energy/fuel, and therefore is much more costly. It is unknown how the drive travels faster than light.
Im trying to get the Alcubierre drive to work but when I activate it the bubble appears but the only thing that happens is the entire ship explodes after a minute or so and the game gets laggy. I have no throttle control, cant right click any part and really cant do anything except revert flight until the ship explodes. Anyone have any ideas on whats wrong? (Yes the ship is well within the bubble)
The approach to achieve this was to use the momentum and energy of a plasma stream flowing past the ship and using that energy to transfer momentum to an onboard propellant to drive the ship. That plasma stream would be the solar wind inside the solar system (or another star system), and an ionized interstellar medium once beyond the heliosphere.
Box 1 shows that net momentum (and force) can be attained when the energy of the drag medium and propellant thrust are equal. However this simple momentum exchange would not be feasible as a drive as the ejection mass would have to be greater than the intercepted medium resulting in very high mass ratios. In contrast, the Q-Drive, achieves a net thrust with a propellant mass flow far less than the medium passing by the craft, resulting in a low mass ratio yet high performance in terms of velocity increase.
Box 4 provides some illustrative values for the size of the mag sails in the solar system for the Q-Drive and the expected performance for a 1 tonne craft. While the magnetic sail radii are large, they are achievable and allow for relatively high acceleration. As explained in [4], the plasma magnet sails increase in size as the medium density decreases, maintaining the forces on the sail. Once in interstellar space, the ISM is yet more rarefied and the sails have to commensurately expand.
Figure 6 shows my attempt to illustrate a conceptual Q-Drive powered spacecraft for interstellar flight. The propellant is at the front to act as a particle shield in the ISM. There is a science platform and communication module behind this propellant shield. Behind stretches a many kilometers long spine that has a plasma magnet at either end to harvest the energy in the ISM and to accelerate the propellant. Waste heat is handled by the radiator along this spine.
In summary, the Q-Drive offers an interesting path to high velocity missions both intra-system and interstellar, with much larger payloads than the Breakthrough Starshot missions, but with anticipated engineering challenges comparable with other exotic drives such as antimatter engines. The elegance of the Q-Drive is the capability of drawing the propulsion energy from the medium, so that the propellant can be common inert material such as water or hydrogen.
So in reviewing the comments I came to the conclusion they what this method amounts to is sucking the interstellar medium of its energy and dumping it into propellent; is that the essence of this whole thing?
The toy model is simply to explain the overall concept as an analogy. It is like the wind turbine boats that can sail upwind. The suggested drive uses the Plasma Magnet technology to extract power from the medium as it streams past and to use that power to eject propellant. The math then clothes the physics.
I would argue that the detail of where the propellant tank is located is very minor compared to the challenges of making this drive work. It is the concept that is intriguing as it allows for a craft to accelerate without requiring onboard power, a problem for electric engines like VASIMR and even the possible increases in the thrust of next-generation ion drives.
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