Limits

Limits

What Real Worlds 0.2 does not do yet.

• No tilted worlds. KSP spins every world about one axis; here Earth's. So every world turns about Earth's pole and orbits are laid out against Earth's equator: Earth's seasons are right, but Mars, Saturn and Uranus do not lean their own way (Uranus does not roll on its side).
• Launch sites. Making History's sites stand at real ones, but as the game's own buildings, not the real pads; the island airfield is taken out (nothing like it stands near Cape Canaveral). Kourou, Mahia, Vandenberg and Plesetsk must be found first, as their Kerbin sites must (a craft has to go there). Vandenberg's pad stood at the map's shoreline: it stands on a terrace raised 15 m, which shows from high up as a round headland. Making History's missions that start at its sites were written for Kerbin.
• The Moon's month, not its node. Each moon goes round in its real period, so it stands where it is in the sky on any date; but the game cannot turn an orbit, and the Moon's node (18.6 years round) and nearest point (8.85 years) stay as they were at J2000: its height above or below the Sun's path and its distance drift from the real ones over the years (its phase does not).
• Earth's fine detail. Under its 4.9 km height map Earth's ground is smooth slopes; the other measured worlds have a light noise below their maps' pixels, but on Earth the game's noise would raise its low coasts out of the sea.
• Drawn, not mapped: the bands of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (no global map of their cloud tops is published), Venus's cloud tops and its ground's colour, Titan's haze, Saturn's rings (from their measured radii and opacities).
• Made-up relief on the worlds no spacecraft has measured all over (the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Ceres, Triton, Pluto and Charon, Phobos and Deimos): noise at each world's real range of heights, with the real maps' colours.
• Skies are likenesses: Scatterer cannot model Venus's cloud deck or Titan's layered haze; their colours were set by eye against photographs.
• Unseen ground. Where no spacecraft looked (Triton's north, Pluto's and Charon's south, smaller gaps elsewhere), the map is a plain cap of the world's mean colour, softened into what was seen.
• From high over land, a lilac veil. From 30 to 150 km up, Earth's land is seen through a lilac-white haze. It is Scatterer's light scattered over the ground, drawn at the exposure set for Kerbin's small sky (taken out of the game, Scatterer took all of it with it). From far off it is mended (the exposure falls to a third from 60 to 300 km: from 15,000 km the seas are deep blue and the land its own colours); lower down it is not: starting that fall lower left the haze as it was and put a magenta band on the horizon. (The terrain's own fade toward Kerbin's sky ramp, part of it, was mended before: the land keeps its colours to 119 km and is put away at 120 km.)
• The sea is told from the heights: Earth's far picture marks as sea every place whose ground lies 30 m and more below the sea's level, and its shore between. Dry land below the sea's level (Death Valley, the Qattara Depression) is taken for sea and glints; a lake counts only where the map's lake bed lies below the sea's level (the Caspian).
• City lights want Environmental Visual Enhancements; without it Earth's night side is dark. They are 2016's, a pixel some 5 km across; close up the streets' grain is BoulderCo's (EVE's config pack), and plain without it. They show from orbit, above 120 km, where the far picture is drawn; below that, on a climb or a re-entry by night, the ground's own drawing has none yet (EVE's lights for the terrain did not show over Paris from 100 km). They are dimmer than photographs from orbit show cities: EVE's own colouring caps them.
• Titan from space is a red-orange ball, redder than the butterscotch Cassini saw. Its sky is set for the ground, where Huygens landed: orange all over, deepest away from the sun, as Huygens saw it (with Earth's strength of the nitrogen's own scattering it ran from green to orange). Its ground there is nearly black in the dim light.
• Venus's sky from the ground is yellow-ochre, golden toward the sun (it was an even grey), and the ground dark: the light under 92 bar and the deck is dim. Scatterer has no cloud deck, so the blue taken out low down tints Venus from space too: pale beige-cream, duller than the bright pale yellow Venus is.
• Natural Weather (0.5.0 and later) gives each real world its own weather: Venus its deck alone, Titan little cloud, Mars thin high cloud (Configs/Weather.cfg). With an older Natural Weather each has the weather of the stock world whose place it takes. Its clouds over Earth from orbit are the fields of its 0.4.0.
• Rockets. Low Earth orbit takes about 9.4 km/s; the stock parts were made for Kerbin. Real Worlds changes no part.
• Windows and Linux have not been run. On Windows, KSPTextureLoader uploads textures its own (working) way, so Real Worlds' fix for the Mac does nothing there.