Warp Drives - sswelm/KSP-Interstellar-Extended GitHub Wiki

Faster 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 ( wikipedia ) 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 limited 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. 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.

in low kerbin orbit

Warp drive in low kerbin orbit

further away

Warp drive at average distance

much further away

Warp drive far away from Kerbin

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.