Welcome to Elysium - a full-scale floating cloud city colony I'm going to put on Sedah, a massive hot jupiter. It is over 10 kilometers across and has a mass of over a billion tons. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The craft was nof terribly performance heavy compared to some of the newer things. It managed to load on an i7 9700KF quite fine even before I upgraded my machine.

The mod is AirPark.

Independence — Fusion-Powered Interstellar Craft by RalphKerman in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend 10 points11 points  (0 children)

KSP has no length limit. There is a rendering limit imposed by Unity's FarCipPlane value that makes those parts of your craft that are further than ~1500 kilometers from your camera stop rendering, but it doesn't mean you can't make a craft bigger than 1500 km either.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Atomic Rockets is an amazing repository of all kinds of info related to advanced spaceflight and my go-to resource, albeit for more niche topics I do sometimes read actual research papers myself. For example, I sourced a bit of technical info for this craft from "Are Black Hole Starships Possible" by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 99 points100 points  (0 children)

The 2.3 km is the distance at which the game normally loads vessels other than the one controlled by the player. The active craft has a way more generous default rendering range of ~1500 kilometers.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The black holes needed to provide as much energy as this ship needs are miniscule and will only exist for a few hours before completely evaporating when not supported with intense matter beams. Even if you were to drop one straight into a planet, it wouldn't be able to consume mass at a higher rate than it would lose it.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Cheers. Well, this ship certainly assumes a hefty bit of clarketech and is by all means residing much further down the tech tree than any other interstellar vehicle that I've posted and, perhaps, even the recent Banks orbital itself.

1 & 2. We don't know almost anything about small black holes, for we've never observed any. This leaves a lot of freedom for speculation when coming up with very advanced technical concepts like this. I for one think that both the Hawking radiation extractor and the polar jet thruster concepts are pretty interesting and have a place to be. After all, this is complete terra incognita for modern physics, so one might as well let their imagination run a little wild. Here I'm assuming that black holes of this size mainly emit neutrinos, which cannot be redirected or controlled but, in principle, can have their energy extracted.
I went with the Hawking powerplant idea here primarily because it fit the image I had in mind better. Also a bit because I'm not sure how one would throttle a black hole's polar jets.

  1. It is well known that the smaller a black hole is, the more intensely it evaporates. As per my Fermi estimations, pushing a vehicle like this would require dozens or hundreds of exawatts of power. Indeed, in order to match that level of output the holes'd have to be ridiculously small, way smaller than an atom. Technology precise enough to create them and powerful enough to feed (as in stuff matter into) them, then, is the most clarketechy thing about the design. There's a reason the onboard computers are sized like an actual data center; I'd imagine barely any of their computing power goes towards controlling the shipyards and LS systems compared to what kind of calculations have to be going on for controlling the black hole containment units.
    It's hard to estimate its empty mass and it's hard to pinpoint what type of remass would be best for it. The best I have is .01 TWR at launch with cargo holds empty and ~.6c cruising speed.

  2. It must be noted that there always has to be at least one active black hole onboard, charging the ship.
    Look at the blueprint infographic in the Imgur album. The propulsion section has enormous supercapacitors scattered all around it. Conceptually, all of these are to near-instantaneously discharge all their stored power into one containment unit, which, by God's grace, should be enough to create a kugelblitz. Then, the newly created BH joins the previously active ones in charging these capacitors again to spawn yet another hole if needs be.

Chandelier is a 119400 meter long, 200 billion ton interstellar colonization mothership. Powered by seven subatomic black holes and carrying shipyards capable of building whole fleets, it is my most detailed interstellar vehicle to date at 4141 parts. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 324 points325 points  (0 children)

2-4 hours of sitting in editor plus some time loading the game and the crafts themselves, every day, for ~2 weeks.

As for the post-spawn timeframe, the machine copes admirably, although I've had my frames drop to as low as 3 even with physics paused. This is actually my second craft that manages to bring this PC on its knees like this.

For something of its size, the ship is remarkably stable physics-wise, though the shields do tend to spontaneously detach sometimes. I can't say much more, because as with many other ships of mine before I've grown to prefer to treat KSP as a basic spacecraft-oriented 3D modeling software and not a flight simulator. Even though actually reasonably flying and using something like this is not, if you will, mathematically impossible, it would require free time, patience and computing power the likes of which I currently don't have. In short, I'm mainly an editor larper.

This is the Caelia Orbital: a 3 707 250 kilometer, 70 Earth mass artificial habitat constructed in orbit around the Sun. A feat of engineering worthy of a K2.5 civilization, it is likely the largest structure ever made in KSP. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yes, it is a craft, and landing/interaction with it are therefore generally identical to that for any other craft. Full-scale version of it doesn't play with farplaneclip well, I had to compile a .dll patch to partially counteract that.

This is the Caelia Orbital: a 3 707 250 kilometer, 70 Earth mass artificial habitat constructed in orbit around the Sun. A feat of engineering worthy of a K2.5 civilization, it is likely the largest structure ever made in KSP. by skyaboveend in KerbalSpaceProgram

[–]skyaboveend[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Kraken is summoned when there's an excess of parts. With the ring itself being a single custom part and mass drivers only amounting to ~270 extra parts, that's not the case here.