Orbital mechanics presentation at work (I’m doing it!)

[Warzouz]

I work in a bank as a tax expert on stokes market for retail customers. I’m very far from my initial course (electronic engineer who worked quite a long time in software development). I still develop software as a hobby.

I’m some kind of strange fellow at work, always figuring how to use basic tools to automate repetitive tasks for back-office. I did stuff myself that even IT developers didn’t grasp (got a promotion for that )
 
Playing KSP for more than a year has let me learn a great deal about orbital mechanics and rocket design. This knowledge is usually counter-intuitive for most people (including me), that’s why it’s fun.

So this morning I took a leap of faith and offered my boss to do a quick introduction in orbital mechanic to the team.

Here is what I plan to do :

Spoiler

 

1- Gravity and weight in few questions

• Why the earth orbits around the sun ?
• Why the apple fall and not the moon ?
• Do astronauts fly or float in space ?
• With as (very) sturdy ladder, could we climb into the ISS ?

2- Ellipses and hyperboles

• Newton’s canon
• Speed altitude, periaps, apoaps, acceleration and bearing change
• Prograde, normal et radial, how to change orbit ?
• Accelerate to slow down and slow down to increase speed
• Speed and escape velocity
• Effet Oberth and where to burn

3- About rockets

• What’s a rocket ?
• Action / reaction and engine efficiency
• Launching a rocket (gravity turn and orbital insertion)
• TWR, dV, ISP  dry mass, wet mass, payload : Rocket equation (the only one I’ll show)
• ISP engine examples.
• Solar system dV map
• If Saturn V had only one stage ? (bring the excel sheet !)
• 1/10 of the speed of light ? “unlightly” ! (crash the excel sheet, yeah!)

4. Interplanetary transfer

• Flight plan : flyby or orbital capture (transfer time)
• Hohmann  and transfer windows
• Alexmoon simulation (for dV cost illustration)
• Gracity assist and aerobraking
• Patch conics and N-body
• Moon base, space elevator (if I’ve time)

 

I target 1 hour, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it in less than 2hours. This WE, I’ll gather some illustration from the net and build a document (probably a powerpoint).

Insight appreciated

Edited April 12, 2016 by Warzouz

[Rocket In My Pocket]

I'm confused, how would learning orbital mechanics help a bunch of bankers?

Or is this just a sort of "after hours/just for fun" thing?

Either way, best of luck! My advice is to keep the main body of your presentation short and sweet, then invite questions after.

[Kertech]

My advice is lots of pictures and as few numbers as possible! Even statisticians switch off when a presentation becomes to numbery!

[hypervelocity]

red your case mate and feel I'm in a similar spot - how did you make your teammates interested in orbital mechanics and space-related stuff???? I work at a huge multinational financial company and would love to incorporate KSP into my workday (tho I don't see that happening jajajajaj)

Edited February 11, 2016 by hypervelocity

[Foxster]

Take it from someone who has done a LOT of presentations around the world: Don't talk at people for an hour! 

People have an attention span of <20 minutes. Doesn't matter how much longer you talk at them, they won't take in more than 20 minutes worth and will just reward you with yawns after that. 

You also want about 6 or 8 slides max, without a wall of text on them. Just a picture is best and you then talk about it. 

Even better would be to skip the presentation completely and come up with some group exercise where they explore orbital mechanics themselves. 

My personal learning adage is: Tell me and I'll listen. Show me and I'll understand. Involve me and I'll remember. 

[Moesly_Armlis]

23 minutes ago, Foxster said:

Even better would be to skip the presentation completely and come up with some group exercise where they explore orbital mechanics themselves. 

So was the beginning of the great banking crash of 2016;  bankers everywhere playing KSP and would not stop until they achieved low Kerbin orbit and a Mun landing.

[nobodyhasthis2]

I can tell you as a professional speaker the above advice from @Foxsteris absolutely spot on. All I can add is to keep it very light and aim to just spark curiosity rather that go into the details on anything. Hook them and human nature will do the rest. Try stick to this winning structure. 

Aim (What is the point of this in less that 10 words, in marketing circles this called the tag line)  

Contents (A very brief mention of subjects coming with absolutely no details given).  

Subject 1

Subject 2

Subject 3

Contents (A very brief reminder of subjects covered with absolutely no details given).

Wrap up

Another thing you want to think is about is answering the biggest question and audience will have. "What is in for me?"

Your skills and knowledge will appear to be totally irrelevant unless they are useful to others. It is a case of beauty in the eye of the beholder. Despite your best efforts the ability for comprehension is held by the audience.

In the hope of trying to help you come up with an answer here. For the banking industry. I would suggest mentioning the programing of PID loops used SAS systems. The reason is the exactly same software can be using in banking systems to follow marketing trends. Your bank wants to offer commercially viable deals on loans and mortgages. The data on which those deals get made should be influenced by a feedback loop from the external market. Including this not only automates repetitive tasks for back-office. It also significantly reduces the financial risks to the bank. That way it goes from lessons about rockets to lessons learned that could help the bank stay on target. We go from an interesting subject to an immediately relevant one for banking staff. 

 

     

[Majorjim!]

Just remember to explain gravity correctly. That the apple or anything else for that matter in a gravity well does not 'fall'. It is more accurate to say the earth moves 'up' to meet the apple.

 Good luck with this! And good luck working in banking..

[pandaman]

Ah ha gravity!  So that's where the money went! 

[AbacusWizard]

Awesome!

 

I teach physics myself and I might be using KSP to demonstrate principles of orbital mechanics to some students in an optional series of workshops this summer.

[Deddly]

15 hours ago, Majorjim said:

It is more accurate to say the earth moves 'up' to meet the apple.

I have to question the wisdom of explaining it like that, Majorjim. Surely that would completely confuse most people? From your description, I see in my head the apple hanging still in space and the earth being sucked up to it. Isn't it more correct to say that the apple and earth both move towards each other because all mass has gravity, but of course the earth moves only a tiny amount?

[Warzouz]

12 hours ago, pandaman said:

Ah ha gravity!  So that's where the money went! 

That more about greed but the "physic" seems to be the same

21 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I'm confused, how would learning orbital mechanics help a bunch of bankers?

Or is this just a sort of "after hours/just for fun" thing?

Yes, that's about fun. I already did a basic communication security introduction (spoke about hash, cyphering, private/public keys, certificate...). But orbital mechanic will surely have no use at work.

20 hours ago, Kertech said:

My advice is lots of pictures and as few numbers as possible! Even statisticians switch off when a presentation becomes to numbery!

Yes, I don't intend to show too much numbers. I'll probably end with this Wednesday's video : it has a lot of features that can be commented (staging, payload weight, interplanetary navigation, gravity assist and aero capture/reentry. The only formula I'll display is the rocket equation, to let them understand why rockets uses multi-staging.

17 hours ago, Foxster said:

Take it from someone who has done a LOT of presentations around the world: Don't talk at people for an hour! 

...

Even better would be to skip the presentation completely and come up with some group exercise where they explore orbital mechanics themselves. 

My personal learning adage is: Tell me and I'll listen. Show me and I'll understand. Involve me and I'll remember. 

I also do a lot of presentation and explanation in my work. I know how to manage attention for a quite long time, that's not an issue for me. Exercise are a good way to do it indeed. But for that presentation, I can't really le them calculate Saturn V dV. I'll rely on candid questions and pictures (even video but I don't have much time)

I think I'll end doing 1h presentation by filtering the content then offer for a secondary presentation later.

 

[Majorjim!]

3 hours ago, Deddly said:

I have to question the wisdom of explaining it like that, Majorjim. Surely that would completely confuse most people? From your description, I see in my head the apple hanging still in space and the earth being sucked up to it. Isn't it more correct to say that the apple and earth both move towards each other because all mass has gravity, but of course the earth moves only a tiny amount?

If they are confused that is good! It means they are visualising it correctly for the first time. There are no forces acting on the apple as gravity is not a force, this is important. Someone I know asked me recently if gravity and magnetism are the same thing..

[Warzouz]

32 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

If they are confused that is good! It means they are visualising it correctly for the first time. There are no forces acting on the apple as gravity is not a force, this is important. Someone I know asked me recently if gravity and magnetism are the same thing..

I'll not explaining anything about relativity. Basic orbital mechanic don't need relativity. I'll stick with Kepler and Newton.

[Snark]

On 2/11/2016 at 2:21 AM, Warzouz said:

So this morning I took a leap of faith and offered my boss to do a quick introduction in orbital mechanic to the team.

Excellent, way to go!  Kudos on being willing to stick your neck out. 

Having done a fair amount of speaking (and taught school for a couple of years, back in the dim mists of ancient time), I can add a hearty +1 to @Foxster's and @nobodyhasthis2's excellent advice about keeping it simple, involving the audience, and paying a lot of attention to how the material is structured and organized.  How you present it is at least as important as the material itself.  Once you've lost them, you've lost them.

And make sure you approach it with a sense of humor.  A well-placed visual joke or two (e.g. a good KSP screenshot that makes people laugh-- preferably with a gleeful Jeb/Val or a terrified Bill/Bob) can really help push the emotional "reset button" when you get into a more technical area where their attention may start to wander.

23 hours ago, MoeslyArmlis said:

So was the beginning of the great banking crash of 2016;  bankers everywhere playing KSP and would not stop until they achieved low Kerbin orbit and a Mun landing.

...although, given what the banking industry has done to the world economy in the last several years, maybe it would have been better if they had all been playing KSP instead...

21 hours ago, Majorjim said:

Just remember to explain gravity correctly. That the apple or anything else for that matter in a gravity well does not 'fall'. It is more accurate to say the earth moves 'up' to meet the apple.

Gotta beg to differ on this one.  Just call it a force and move on.  Doing anything else and trying to explain the nature of space-time and its curvature will be a pointless distraction that will do nothing but annoy your audience, and you'll lose them in short order.

You're covering a difficult topic that a lot of folks find boring, incomprehensible, or both.  So you've got your work cut out for you.  The only way to make a presentation work in such circumstances (or, indeed, any circumstances!), is to decide up front what is the point of my talk, and what goal am I trying to accomplish?  Note that I said "point", singular, and "goal", singular.  Not "points" or "goals".

Doing an effective presentation is hard.  Even if you're totally on the ball, it's a big challenge to get even just one point across.  As soon as you try to do multiple unrelated points, you're diluting the message and you're practically guaranteed to lose the audience.  It's far better to get one point across well, than to try for two or more points and fail at all of them.

You can give a talk about orbital mechanics and the practical details of spaceflight.

Or you can give a talk about gravitational physics, Newtonian mechanics, and the contrast with Einsteinian relativity.

You can't do both.  As far as the audience is concerned, those are completely different things, and one is almost totally irrelevant to the other.  If you wanted to give one talk about the former, and it goes well and they're interested and want more, and then you give a separate talk about the latter, then great!  But don't try to fit both of them into one talk.

1 hour ago, Majorjim said:

If they are confused that is good! It means they are visualising it correctly for the first time. There are no forces acting on the apple as gravity is not a force, this is important. Someone I know asked me recently if gravity and magnetism are the same thing..

No.  If they are confused, then that's bad, because it means they're not visualizing anything. It means you've failed as a presenter.  It means they will immediately turn off their eyes, ears, and brains and start regretting they let you talk them into attending this presentation.

Confusion might be a good thing if this was a physics class at university and these are all people who want to learn physics and are highly motivated to do so and regard confusion as a challenge, and you know you'll have them for another dozen lessons and can circle back later to address the confusion.  But this isn't that situation.  It's a bunch of laypeople who will get highly annoyed at confusion.  As far as they're concerned (and that's all that matters!), if they're confused you're wasting their time, and they'll immediately stop listening.

And talking about "visualizing it correctly" is completely beside the point.  It's irrelevant, it's basically just an attempt to show off "how smart I am about something you don't understand".  Gravity-is-a-force is a fantastically accurate approximation.  It was good enough for Newton, who was no dummy, and remained good enough for three centuries after that.  The whole relativistic-curvature-of-spacetime thing is pretty much completely irrelevant, not just to daily experience, but to practical spaceflight as well.  The engineers and scientists at NASA spend a lot more time in Newtonian calculations than Einsteinian ones.  If you were giving a talk about astrophysics, and black holes, and accurately calculating minute perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, it would be a different matter.  But that would be a completely different talk.

And maybe it would make a great completely-different talk.    If your talk goes well and they want more, maybe you could do another one that does go into relativity, the nature of space-time, etc.  That would be great!  But don't, really don't try to address it in talk #1.  Just call gravity a force and move on.  Orbital mechanics are hard enough for folks to wrap their heads around without dragging Einstein into it.

Just my two cents, speaking as a physics major, former schoolteacher, and experienced public speaker.  But I can see that this advice isn't really necessary , because:

34 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

I'll not explaining anything about relativity. Basic orbital mechanic don't need relativity. I'll stick with Kepler and Newton.

This!

...Anyway, @Warzouz, from your posts here it sounds like you're on the right track.  Congratulations on being motivated to do this, good luck with the presentation, and let us know how it went!

 

Edited February 12, 2016 by Snark

[Warzouz]

I found that video which is quite short and show a lot of interesting things.

Thx Hazardish

 

 

[AbacusWizard]

At the most fundamental level gravity may be a result of spacey timey bendy whatsis, but whatever it is, it provides an acceleration to objects with mass, and for all practical purposes, that means it's a force.

[rumpledskinstilt]

I signed up to KSP forums to endorse this OP. Excellent work sir - commendable endeavours.

[legoclone09]

Yeah, go over the basics only. Like what gravity is, orbital velocity, and a few simple concepts.

[Xavven]

10 hours ago, AbacusWizard said:

At the most fundamental level gravity may be a result of spacey timey bendy whatsis, but whatever it is, it provides an acceleration to objects with mass, and for all practical purposes, that means it's a force.

Hey, @AbacusWizard. You are referring to gravity in the sense of Classical Mechanics, whereas @Majorjim is referring to gravity in the sense of General Relativity. So you're both right depending on how you're using the term "force", since it means different things in classical mechanics vs relativity.

TBH, though, I would recommend not delving into theory of gravitation in a 1 hour presentation about KSP. It will probably confuse the audience and detract from other aspects of the presentation.

We might refer to it as "the force of gravity" or even "acceleration due to gravity,"  gravity is a tricky one. Why are you weightless as you fall, even though you appear to be gaining speed. How can you gain speed without a force accelerating you? Well, I'll let this video explain.

 

[Warzouz]

I did a 3min teaser this morning at the end of a team meeting. It seems many are interested or at least amused

Now I've to create the powerpoint. But I'm quite reassured, while doing my teaser, I found tons of resources on the net, I won't have to draw anything myself.

 

For example : Gravity turn explained in one image

 

[JoeNapalm]

7 hours ago, Warzouz said:

For example : Gravity turn explained in one image

 

 

You know, that is a lot clearer than my example:

 

If you just look at like the third...(or is the fourth?)...booster on the right...

-Jn-

Edited February 18, 2016 by JoeNapalm
For the lulz

[Wolfos31]

I laughed a lot harder at that image than I should have while browsing the forums at work... 

[AbacusWizard]

Hey, as long as one piece of the debris makes it to orbit, we'll call it a success.

[Warzouz]

Something I may use to illustrate dV and TWR : what would be the dV to Low "earth" orbit if

1. Earth was double sized (mass x8)
2. Earth was 25% larger (mass x2)

What would be the compared TWR (in earth-like value, not local body value - which should be > 1) to lift off ?