Search the Community

Surface Coordinates (Lat/Long) to Distance Calculator Have you ever wondered how far and long you would have to drive a rover to get from one place to another? Maybe you're planning a Science rover expedition, or maybe you want to place a base within driving distance of other bases or new Science biomes. Either way, here's a simple spreadsheet that calculates distance between two points on any planet/moon in KSP: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11ahybKKvft5v7hfzkBEnTdFKhT_f-YsI3ITXKMeZDUw/edit?usp=sharing Make a copy of the sheet and you'll be free to make your own calculations between any two points on a planet or moon in KSP. All landed crafts will show their coordinates if you hover over them in map view. Note: The spreadsheet doesn't account for hills or elevation on planets. Coordinates must be in decimal format, so 2* 25' 48" N 17* 22' 40" E would look like 2.2548 and 17.2240, while 2* 25' 48" S 17* 22' 40" W would look like -2.2548 and -17.2240. Enjoy!

Hi! Some friends and I are trying to fly to Minmus manual mode IVA without map view. We're therefore needing to plan out all our manoeuvres ahead of time. One that is giving us difficulty is the plane correction. We launch equatorial, but need to correct to a 6deg inclination to match Minmus. The burn itself is easy enough, but getting the timing right in order to be co-planar is problematic. We are using telemachus to give us telemetry (aka API access!) and so can see our various orbital parameters. We know that we need to burn at the ascending node - and we have the longitude of this relative to an arbitrary reference line. However, we're not sure how to see our vessel's own longtitude as measured from this same reference point. The longitude offered by the api/telemetry appears to be relative to the orbited body's prime meridian, which of course is rotating in inertial space. Looking at wikipedia, it seems that the way to do it is to take our argument of periapsis, and when our true anomaly is the negative of this, we make the plane change. We'd do this twice: once to correct launch errors (using the vessel LAN, INC->0), a second time to match minmus (using the minmus LAN, INC->6). Does that sound right? Is there any way to time a launch such that we can insert directly into a minmus plane (applying our inclination burn during launch)? Without an orbit, we'd not have a true anomaly or AoP, so we'd not know when we were at the LAN/when we were coplanar with minmus....