interplanetary travel calculator

[maxboost]

What about including an interplanetary travel calculator in the tracking station so as to be able to plan such travels, without any external help? Personally I am using a web site to plan my interplanetary travels and I  think it would be great to do this directly in the game, from the Kerbal Space Center.

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah I actually think this would be a huge help. We're given all these great tools to check COM and COL  and drag to make planes work but then when we have to go to other planets we're kind of left hanging in the dark. There are a few ways to do this. It could be as simple as making a simple in-game estimator in which you could select start and target location and it would let you set an alarm for the next launch window and tell you how much dV and time it will take to get there. There could also be a more rigorous tool in which you set preplanned maneuvers and could scroll forward in time to find the best window manually. They each have their advantages. A basic drop-down estimator would be much simpler to use and program, but wouldn't be as good at letting players know about trade-offs between shorter mission times vs optimum dV. The visual orbit-based pre-planner would give players a more intuitive sense of what's happening and might be more educational, but might leave us where we are now, spending silly amounts time fiddling with nodes and time warp without giving us a clear idea of what we're looking for or whether we are close to an optimized solution. 

[pandaman]

@maxboost  Firstly,  hi and welcome to the forums.

Yes I agree, there are quite a few design and planning aids that are currently only available as mods that many of us think should be stock.

I think that Squad will get around to including such things at some point, but apart from the fact that there are probably more urgent things to deal with at the moment, I think they also want to take the time to 'get them right' and blend them into the game more seamlessly than can be done with mods.

[todofwar]

7 hours ago, pandaman said:

@maxboost  Firstly,  hi and welcome to the forums.

Yes I agree, there are quite a few design and planning aids that are currently only available as mods that many of us think should be stock.

I think that Squad will get around to including such things at some point, but apart from the fact that there are probably more urgent things to deal with at the moment, I think they also want to take the time to 'get them right' and blend them into the game more seamlessly than can be done with mods.

I would disagree on this one. The base game makes it far too difficult to get between planets right now. I would say this and mechjeb  (just the stats readouts) are probably the two things I would want to see stock asap. 

[THX1138]

I support this. I'd like a thing to tell me when my next window to any planet (don't care which) is.

[The Aziz]

Of course it would be nice to see it in stock, but Transfer Window Planner  for the rescue. It fits in game UI so good you would quickly forget it's a mod.

[Wjolcz]

@5thHorseman had a good idea of interplanetary manouver nodes. You would place such node somewhere on Kerbin's (or other body you want to trasnfer from) orbit and tweak it however you'd like.

KAC would also be a nice addition to let us inform about things.

[Red Iron Crown]

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

@5thHorseman had a good idea of interplanetary manouver nodes. You would place such node somewhere on Kerbin's (or other body you want to trasnfer from) orbit and tweak it however you'd like.

That method, while effective and clever, is rather tedious and non-obvious.

"So I just make a node and move it around?"
"No, you make a node to eject from Kerbin, then put a node on the resultant trajectory and move it around until you find a cheap window."
"So then I just execute the nodes?"
"No, you warp until the planet is near the final node, then delete them and make a new node in LKO."

It works, but it's a bit clumsy and what I'd characterize as a workaround to the lack of any real planning tool for IP stuff.

Stock definitely needs something in this regard, whether a porkchop plotter, KAC-like display of the windows, or even just shading orbit lines to show efficient windows when another planet is targeted. Anything to give some indication of when it's cheap to go interplanetary.