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Add Better Xenon thrusters


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13 hours ago, tater said:

Better to add continuous thrust trajectories, and make them as weak as they should be.

While I agree this would be nice, even with low thrust trajectories ion engines still have limits, too low thrust and you're making a zillion orbits of the Sun while you get anywhere. So there would still be the situation where taking good advantage of ions requires spamming them, unless a larger ion engine is provided

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That's how ions work. Many spiraling orbits. If you care about time, they're the wrong choice.

Anyone using them on crew vehicles is exploiting them, IMHO.

People can play how they like, but knowing how they are "faked" into KSP precludes using them outside of how they should be used if you wish to suspend disbelief.

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Up to a point. Dawn made just over 1 1/2 orbits of the Sun before reaching Vesta, while Vesta to Ceres took a little over half an orbit. So it's slower than a Hohmann but not ridiculous. And based on this diagram it looks like it could have pesudo-Hohmanned it to Mars with the right phasing.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dawn_trajectory_as_of_September_2009.png

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Dawn's mass is about 1/2 the heaviest Mercury capsule. Crewed craft flying the same mission profile would be vastly more massive. Astoundingly more massive if we make the mission over 9 years :wink: .

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7 minutes ago, cantab said:

... which is why you need a bigger ion engine ...

... or more a ability to Trust and hold Rotation on an unfokused vehicle ingame?...

Edited by Urses
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Which would still be nonsense in ksp as it stands if the goal is anything like the real trade offs with ion engines vs higher thrust engines.

As it stands, the only trade off is that long burns are a pain in the posterior, and it has zero effect on mission duration.

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5 hours ago, Urses said:

... or more a ability to Trust and hold Rotation on an unfokused vehicle ingame?...

Yeah, but then the more ships you have, the more laggy it is going to be, cause it's doing separate calculations for every ship at the same time. Different thrusts, different everything... I could never play with that. 

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I would like to see some sort of on-rails ion engine burn system, where it just changes your rail using patched conics, consumes fuel/electric charge and does everything using some sort of simplifications for efficiency. Not sure how realistic it would be to program in though. 

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If Children of a Dead Earth's module edit has taught me anything about ion drives, it's about their OPness.

They are terribly efficient, both in term of exhaust velocity (on Earth: Isp) and energy usage. The downside is their power consumption.

Actually, there are MPD thrusters (magnetoplasmodynamic thrusters) that have relatively high thrust, but you won't like it when I say that they are also very power-hungry. As thrust goes up, both exhaust velocity and power consumption also went up, and if you're not careful, you might ended up with gigawatts of power consumption, or worse. (In that game, however, people made gigawatt nuclear reactors, so they're not that big of a problem. It's the glowing 2400K radiators that's the problem :D)

Edited by Hypercosmic
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