#get fucked you absolute clownshit

[professional-fangirl2187]

source

[yokowan]

oh boy howdy does KSP function on some troll physics logic. no, like literally. docking ports have a slight magnetism to them to make alignment easier, but if you put two docking ports on the same vessel and point them at each other, it'll pull your vessel along with no external force.

it's fucking goofy

another fun bit is how KSP only loads structural physics (calculating joint strengths and stuff) within a radius of 2300m of the active vessel, measured from the root node, but it calculates collisions at much further distances. this means that you can build huge megastructures that should collapse under their own weight, but make them infinitely strong by just offsetting the root node away from the rest of the "vessel" by 2300m

my personal favorite category of exploits is drag occlusion - by using fairings, engine plates, and sneaky offsetting you can make craft that have literally zero air drag, and do goofy shit like orbit at an altitude of 500m with a craft that looks like a brick.

the only reason this works is because doing actual fluid dynamical simulations is pretty infeasible, so KSP cheats by calculating drag individually for each part, but considering some parts to be "occluded" so you don't get additional drag from stuff that's streamlined with the rest of the rocket or hidden inside cargo bays. this works reasonably well until you become aware of it and start optimizing for it.

tldr Kerbal is a clownshit game held together by popsicle sticks and chewing gum and you should absolutely play it

Kerbal Space Program was once afflicted by a bug the fans dubbed the "Deep Space Kraken", whereby if you travelled far enough from the origin of the game's coordinate system, floating point rounding errors would cause your spacecraft's components to become misaligned and/or clip into each other, resulting in the craft falling apart or exploding for no obvious reason.

The bug was later fixed by defining the active spacecraft itself as the origin of the game's coordinate system. In effect, the spacecraft no longer moves; instead, the spacecraft remains stationary and the entire universe moves around it. Owing to how relativity works, to the player this is indistinguishable from the spacecraft moving about within a fixed coordinate system, and it ensures that the body of the craft and its components will always be modelled with maximal precision.

While elegant, this solution introduced a new problem: it was now possible, by doing certain stupid tricks with relativistic velocities, to introduce floating point rounding errors to everything except the active spacecraft. In extreme cases, this could result in the destruction of the entire observable universe.

Some might call this one of those situations where the solution proves to be worse than the problem. I call it a perfect expression of what Kerbal Space Program is truly about.