What do these options do?

[zarakon]

In the main Settings -> General tab:

"Orbital Drift Compensation"

"Ease in Gravity"

 

Just updated to 1.2, and I don't recall seeing these before.  What do they do?  I can't find anything in the release notes

[Superfluous J]

The first is a fix for orbits drifting while you were in control of the active vessel. They used to slowly decrease over time which is bad, and the weirdness made docking very difficult as well. It's only a toggle because the problem was so weird, they weren't sure if the fix would end up worse than the original issue. It's not, and you should leave that on.

The second is so that you don't go from 0g to a full 1g in a single frame when you load a ship. I don't know if it's just for the launch pad or counts ships landed on other planets. In the past, that sort of thing could destroy a ship. It's a toggle because in rare cases, easing in gravity can be worse for a ship than snapping it on. I've never encountered one of these cases so can't give any details, but I've heard others say it.