25

The game is great alone, but if we install a mod called Real Solar System and another called Realism Overhaul, the force of gravity, engine power atmospheric heights and everything happens to real flyers, then: under these conditions you can simulate a mission there is? What do you think, what other simulators do you recommend?

Anton Hengst
  • 10,687
  • 40
  • 78
Valentino Zaffrani
  • 1,633
  • 1
  • 6
  • 19
  • I think answering this may require knowledge of how the program handles certain calculations, conversions, truncations, and so on. – BMF Feb 29 '20 at 22:02
  • 21
    This question is meaningless without specifying what a "suitable simulator" is. – user2705196 Mar 01 '20 at 16:12
  • 6
    Relevant XKCD – qazwsx Mar 01 '20 at 17:15
  • Satellite tool kit. It is (AFAIK) the industry standard for mission planning and analysis – user6916458 Mar 01 '20 at 19:40
  • 10
    I'd say that KSP is a suitable simulator without any mods. Then, I might not have the same definition of a suitable simulator as you do. – Antzi Mar 02 '20 at 05:21
  • 2
    why did you accept the generic "what is a simulator?" answer and not the one which specifically answers the question you asked? – Aaron F Mar 02 '20 at 09:48
  • 3
    @AaronF using the new timeline feature and some mouse hovering it can be seen that the currently accepted answer was accepted on 2020-02-29 at 22:30z, but the other answer was not even posted until more than 22 hours later at 03-01 21:04z. So the question “Why did you X instead of Y” has a trivial and not so interesting answer. Instead, just a reminder that a quick acceptance of an answer can sometimes discourage others from posting answers, and it’s best to wait at least a few days to give some time for answers to accumulate might be a more helpful comment. – uhoh Mar 02 '20 at 10:45
  • 1
    @uhoh aha! I didn't know you can now see when an answer was accepted! – Aaron F Mar 02 '20 at 11:01
  • @AaronF ya it's pretty cool! SE trusts us to know stuff ;-) – uhoh Mar 02 '20 at 11:07
  • @qazwsx Other relevant XKCD – user253751 Mar 02 '20 at 14:47
  • 2
    Suitable for what purpose? For learning a bit about orbital mechanics - sure. For planning a real space mission? Forget about it. – J... Mar 02 '20 at 14:50
  • 1
    Does Realism Overhaul include Ferram Aerospace Research? Without it, the aerodynamics model is fairly unrealistic. – Skyler Mar 02 '20 at 14:56
  • 1
    Microsoft Excel can act as a suitable simulator with the right formulas, can't it? If the effort to jury-rig an existing tool into the one you want is not substantially less than that required to make or buy one, why bother? – Emilio M Bumachar Mar 02 '20 at 19:12
  • 1
    I guess the underlying question is "tool or toy?". Could be reformulated as "Is this software accurate/realistic enough to allow you to be cocky or even condescending with real aerospacers?" ;) – rackandboneman Mar 02 '20 at 23:09
  • 1
    @Skyler Yes, FAR is an RO dependency. – Anton Hengst Mar 03 '20 at 23:21

3 Answers3

58

I helped (somewhat) to develop the RSS/RO/RP-1 mod suite (which, respectively, are and do: Real Solar System, which gives you the Sol system, appropriately sized and massed; Realism Overhaul, which gives you historical engines with historical masses, thrust, specific impulse, and rated burn times; and Realistic Progression One, which requires star trackers/radio beacons for vehicle control & provides a career progression & tech tree roughly approximating the historical development of space-related hardware).

The mods that I consider critical for making KSP "simulation worthy" are:

  • Real Solar System. You can't even start to be realistic if you're flying between fictional planets.
  • Realism Overhaul. Otherwise, you have ridiculous mass fractions and crazy engines which lead to schemes like the famous (but completely unrealistic) "asparagus staging". FAR and RealFuels are required for RO to work.
  • FAR (Farram Aerospace Research). FAR overwrites the stock aerodynamics model with one that properly simulates supersonic and hypersonic flow phenomena & drag characteristics.
  • RealFuels. Otherwise, you have "oxidizer" and "liquid fuel" instead of LOX and LH2. Models boiloff of cryogenic propellant and feed issues caused by ullage under negative acceleration.
  • Principia. This is by far the single most important mod to take KSP from "game" to "simulation". Principia applies a high-speed, very accurate n-body gravitation model to KSP. You can accurately simulate the ISEE-3 mission in KSP. Essential if you hope to do anything resembling real spaceflight. Also models the "lumpiness" of real planetary bodies.

Honorable mentions:

  • Kerbalism with ROKerbalism configuration (the best stab at realistic life support requirements yet)
  • RealAntennas (highly simplified yet still the most realistic antenna model so far)
  • MechJeb & kOS (real spacecraft are nearly fully automated)

What these can't do (a partial list):

  • RealFuels doesn't properly model mass distribution within propellant-filled tanks nor the effects of bulkhead positioning.
  • RealFuels models tank mass solely as a function of tank volume, not tank area. Ends up being a pretty decent model for most tank shapes (I did a project testing this model against historical data for an upcoming tank materials overhaul) because while skinnier tanks might have the same surface as a wider tank, it carries less propellant mass so doesn't need as much mass to meet structural demands.
  • In general, there is no modeling of the vibrational demands of spaceflight more finely than the component (part) level. This is a limitation of the base KSP engine & its modular approach to vehicle design.
  • FAR cannot model shockwave compression lift (no droop wing Valkyrie for you!).
  • FAR always models the atmosphere as a perfect gas even at high hypersonic speeds.
  • Principia cannot model the force of solar radiation or atmospheric drag at altitudes above 140 km.
  • Principia cannot model conservation of angular momentum and hence the Джанибеков effect. But this is about to change! egg, the brilliant mathematician behind Principia, has announced as of a few days ago that he has solved this equation & is incorporating it into an upcoming Principia release.

Further reading:

Anton Hengst
  • 10,687
  • 40
  • 78
  • 9
    +1 for noting how essential Principia is for the stated purpose. Without it you're still stuck with patched conics. No Lagrangian points, no gravitational disturbances, no Halo orbits, all you have is model that is very user-friendly, helpful in learning the basics, but quite significantly simplified. – SF. Mar 01 '20 at 22:39
  • 4
    +1 for an authoritative and well-sourced answer! You might be interested in adding answers to Will Kerbal Space Program 2 have Lagrange points, halo orbits, and other 3-body goodies? (which really needs a better answer than my placeholder) and possibly Are patched conics (and by induction, KSP) “useless” for simulating ion propulsion? – uhoh Mar 02 '20 at 00:48
  • 7
    I think you can safely transliterate the Dzhanibekov effect - it's awkward and atypical to switch to foreign script when writing loanwords in English, mostly because we shouldn't expect typical English speakers to be able to read Cyrillic script. – J... Mar 02 '20 at 15:07
  • Did egg make said announcement on one of the IRC channels, on the forums, on the GitHub, or elsewhere? It's exciting to see preservation of angular momentum finally being incorporated; IIRC it's been in the works for quite a while. – awksp Mar 02 '20 at 16:21
  • Game has several point without the kind-of perfect gravitational model that Principia gives. RP-1 is awesome, ridiculously harder than stock KSP - that has plenty of challenges itself. However, citing this as a game vs simulation mod - it's correct. – Szundi Sep 14 '20 at 07:01
  • I don't understand your criticism of asparagus staging--Falcon Heavy was originally planned to use asparagus staging. They found the fuel transfer too big a headache, it wasn't an issue with the fuel or engines. – Loren Pechtel Feb 14 '21 at 02:49
  • @LorenPechtel Precisely the point. The pumps required to move fuel between tanks at useful speeds are both heavy & expensive compared to base KSP's implementation of cross-tank fuel transfer, and RP-1 adjusts values to model this [more] appropriately. – Anton Hengst Feb 14 '21 at 08:25
  • 1
    @AntonHengst I've wondered if pumps are even needed--what would happen if you put a "payload" on the side boosters--fuel tanks. They simply gravity drain into the main booster. – Loren Pechtel Feb 14 '21 at 17:54
  • I've seen one or two studies suggesting such an arrangement might be worthwhile, seems to only be the case with a massive central hydrolox core & long-burning high-thrust boosters. – Anton Hengst Feb 14 '21 at 19:53
40

For all simulators, the core question is: What is it trying to simulate?

Real world space travel has many different motivations, like for instance:

  • Science
  • Military interests
  • Money
  • Prestige

Ultimately, it's the goal that shapes what missions end up looking like. A game-like simulator will have trouble quantifying many of the underlying motivations. Can a computer program easily estimate scientific value of space activity? Geopolitics? What stuff costs and what you can get a budget for? (people often fail spectacularly predicting all of those, even in real life).

With those general considerations out of the way, the game is indeed a physics simulator, simulating:

  • orbital flight
  • atmospheric flight
  • rocket engine operation.

As you have noted, the base game takes quite some liberties with all of those.

If we assume that your proposed mods take care of oddly sized planets and orbits, the orbital part isn't very far off. Kerbal Space Program uses 2-body patched conics to approximate orbits, which is what we care about in most "practical" space-flight anyway. But it still misses out on some n-body effects, like Lagrangian points.

Aerodynamics is a completely different beast, mostly because it's inherently much more complex than orbital mechanics. While the base game's atmospheric model and re-entry heating could certainly be modified to be more realistic, the experience is ultimately not going to hold up to most serious simulations and actual missions.

Rocket engine operation is a mixed bag. While I'm assuming that your mods can take into account the myriad of different propellant combinations, the game fundamentally has to leave out what makes stuff work. Where's the engine development, testing, quality control, assembly, equipment failure, etc.? If all the program does is applying the acceleration vector an engine produces, those same calculations could be done on the back of an envelope. A very very minor part of what managing space hardware actually entails.

Ultimately, we come back to the same question: What are you trying to achieve? Simulators fundamentally select some specific part of reality, and abstracts everything else away. This is often exactly what we desire.

Are you trying to get a feeling of how much hardware is required to get from A to B? KSP can probably help you. Are you deciding the architecture of the next generation orbital launchers? KSP will probably not give you very meaningful results.

The list goes on, and only you knows what parts of reality you want to deal with.

SE - stop firing the good guys
  • 43,384
  • 3
  • 143
  • 244
  • 12
    Just as a sidenote: There's a mod for KSP called Realism Overhaul/Realistic Progression 1. This makes the game a lot more realistic=harder. They makers of the mod tried to mimic realistic rocket engineering as well as possible. So if you're interested in a more realistic insight into rocket flight it's maybe worth checking out. https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0/wiki – CKA Mar 01 '20 at 18:58
  • Without engines with ridiculous ISPs, the way I build SSTOs is out of the question. That's somewhat meaningful. – Mazura Mar 01 '20 at 21:09
  • 1
    I'd also like to note that if the "Physics" simulation is meant by OP; KSP's physics engine is known to be unstable so In that case it would not at all be suitable for simulation. – Stefan Teunissen Mar 02 '20 at 11:24
  • "KSP's physics engine is known to be unstable" Are you talking about the Kraken? I thought they fixed that in a patch. – nick012000 Mar 02 '20 at 12:00
  • 3
    @nick012000, no, it's more fundamental than that. The physics integrator in KSP is not symplectic -- it fails to conserve either energy or linear momentum. There's an easy way to see this in action: put something into a circular orbit around Kerbin with an altitude of 70,050 meters above sea level and let the game run for a few hours. If the integrator were stable, you'd be able to watch it indefinitely; in practice, the orbit will elongate and the spacecraft will re-enter after two or three orbits. – Mark Mar 03 '20 at 00:54
  • 2
    To Science, Military interests, Money and Prestige can "Fun" and "Inspiration" be added? – uhoh Mar 03 '20 at 02:59
  • @Mark a symplectic won't necessarily conserve energy, and a non-symplectic integrator might. I used to think that there were hard and fast simple rules like that, but then I asked What does “symplectic” mean in reference to numerical integrators, and does SciPy's odeint use them? – uhoh Mar 03 '20 at 03:02
  • @nick012000 Try cheating a satellite into orbit--and note where it ends up. Everything accumulates floating point roundoff errors--your focused object is at 0,0,0 so the problems are minor, more distant objects won't be quite where you left them--hence there are mods to lift grounded objects into the sky and gently drop them back down when you focus them. Otherwise roundoff can throw them violently or even blow them up. – Loren Pechtel Feb 14 '21 at 03:01
1

Having tried for years to use KSP as a simulator for developing trajectory optimization algorithms in MechJeb, I'd say there are some severe issues with considering KSP something that e.g. NASA would ever want. Fundamentally KSP is a game and the game physics is based on being a "noodle rocket" or "ragdoll rocket" simulator. That is both its fundamental strength as a game (all the crazy stuff you can build) and its weakness.

The game engine itself is also geared towards game players. The staging engine is not what you'd want in a real simulator, there exists no concept of "booster stage" and "core stage" just a list of actions that gets plowed through. And there exist subtle one-tick bugs on staging where stages disappear and reappear in the engine. The way that game players can rearrange the staging of the rocket during ascent is also absolutely crazy -- NASA doesn't ever fiddle with the staging on the way to orbit, and guidance algorithms shouldn't ever have to deal with the configuration of the vehicle fundamentally changing like that on the way to orbit.

The internals of the game are also somewhat crazy. The way that the "world" is centered on the rocket and travels with it rather than being body-centric, along with the rotation of the world axis that happens around the rocket during atmospheric flight, along with the use of left handed coordinate systems makes everything a lot more difficult (but is really required by the physics engine). And while it may seem like you should be able to do left-handed physics just as easily it changes things like covariant vectors (e.g. "north" vectors become [0, -1, 0] in xzy space) and KSP still uses right-hand screw Keplerian euler angles and I burned around 3 days on a perifocal coordinate change thinking I had xzy problems when I just needed negative signs on all the Keplerian angles.

Of course if you made it a fully realistic and boring rocket simulator then it wouldn't be as attractive as a computer game to the mass of people (e.g. rearranging your staging on the way to orbit was an early feature which was added to the game around KSP 0.21 or something like that because as a game it needed to be more forgiving).

So, if you phrased the question like "would NASA ever build a simulator that looked like highly modded KSP?" the answer is "absolutely not". KSP is built around the PhysX game engine in Unity and around the needs of gamers first and the ragdoll physics is a prime selling point. NASA can assume that everyone using its simulators has a PhD and they intuitively understand that failure to "check yo staging" (Scott Manley) will result in a totally unforgiving failure to go to space.

lamont
  • 993
  • 6
  • 17