recommend me some new planets

[KerikBalm]

13 hours ago, String Witch said:

Great stuff @KerikBalm! Rald really livens up Kerbin's SOI, and I love the 'terraformed Mars' look. I do think it's a bit close though, like it's invading Kerbin's personal space or something and only a century away from colliding; seeing it occupying Minmus' orbit, with Minmus as a subsatellite, would be awesome. I'm gonna try to do this in the configs for myself at least.

Well, the version I'm playing with has it co-orbital with kerbin at pseudo L4. I made it a moon in response to someone's request from another thread - I forget which thread now. A note: its SMA is 3,463,334.05.  The SMA of Ike is 3,200,000. Its just under 10% of Kerbins mass, compared to Ike which is about 5% of Duna's mass. This distance is rather close to Kerbin, but it seemed in line with Kerbal universe scaling for duna and ike and where Mun is much much closer than the real life earth-moon analogue.

My reason for putting it at this very specific distance is that I wanted it to be tidally locked to kerbin, and since its rather massive, Kerbin should be tidally locked to it. I did not want to alter the length of a kerbin-day because that could make things annoying with the day-night cycle not matching the clock. So I set its orbit so that its orbital period is be nearly exactly 1 kerbin-day. Also I figured the closer in it was, the less likely it was to destabilize the moons.

When its that close... one does start to wonder about roche limits though... or if Rald should start to be elongated and significantly deviated from a spherical shape.

Making Minmus a sub-satellite is an interesting idea though. Still, in my game, I'm keeping it at pseudo-L4 where it basically doesn't interfere with anything. Since it has almost the same orbit as kerbin (exact same orbital period), there are no launch windows... one can go to/from it any time equally well. The transfers I use take 5/6ths of a year to reach rald, and 7/6th of a year to return (because I either have an orbital period larger or smaller than kerbin/ralds to advance or fall bal 1/6th or a kerbin/rald orbit at a time to move)

I like the L4 position as it can serve as a trainer for plotting interplanetary trajectories, but people don't have to wait for launch windows.

 

Modify it as you wish. I should also give a lot of credit to the RSS guys, as this is a modified version of the RSS mars - I think I just took the color, height, and normal maps from them... but that stuff is itself directly derived from public NASA data. The height and normal maps are completely unchanged, but obviously the color maps is highly modified, and the .cfg is very different as well.

Edited August 21, 2016 by KerikBalm

[Bloojay]

Kerbol Origins Is my personal favorite, it adds some of the lost planets that Squad promised but never got around too  but we have this and its quite great  My favorite addition is Potatus:

Just for its amazing Concept of course.