Asteroid Belt

[[insert_name_here]]

This has probably been suggested before, but an asteroid belt seems like a good idea. I'm not very experienced with KSP but I've heard that there's a bunch of asteroids near a certain planet (Dres?). But a proper belt of asteroids would be amazing IMO. Why? Well, it's a reliable place to get asteroids from. It would add a certain amount of extra danger to travelling to distant planets because travelling through the asteroid belt would put you in danger of your spacecraft being destroyed. Does anyone else think this is  a good idea?

[Dman979]

IRL, the asteroid belt is not as congested as it would appear in popular culture. Instead of this:

******************

you have something closer to this:

                                                                                                                                   *

*

*

and even that's a bit too close. The chances of you hitting an asteroid are extremely low. Space is big.

I think the way that asteroids are handled in the game now is pretty good.

Edited September 4, 2017 by Dman979
Included more content.

[RatchetinSpace]

This is not of concern in real life, and I don't think it should be in KSP either.

You might be imagining something like, this:

After all, that's what movies (and unfortunately a lot of science books) make asteroid fields look like.

In reality, asteroids are literally hundreds of Kilometers apart, the chances of a spacecraft running into one is quite small.

But the picture above is doubly misleading. It makes the asteroid belt appear as a distinct region where each asteroid is evenly-ish sized and evenly-ish spaced apart, but the reality is far more complex.

This picture from Wikimedia shows how mass is concentrated in the asteroid belt. As you can see, Ceres, the dwarf planet visited by the Dawn Spacecraft is a single asteroid making up 40% of the mass in the belt. The next two largest, Vesta and Pallas make up about 5-10% each, and the rest are much smaller. So the asteroid belt is really a few large asteroids and then a lot of tiny ones. That is why Dres is where it is, it is kind of the KSP equivalent of Ceres.

As this excellent image also demonstrates, the asteroid belt is not very cleanly defined, but is very chaotic, only roughly positioned between Mars and Jupiter. It doesn't have a clearly defined edge and position as many people have been lead to believe.

Now I'm not shooting down the idea of an asteroid belt of some kind. I think the devs could borrow some of the code from the Near-Kerbin-Asteroids and apply it to the Dres solar orbit. Every now and again, a mystery object could appear there for you to track between Duna and Jool, then the player could choose to fly out there and check it out, but asteroids shouldn't be a threat to spacecraft IMO.

[Xemina]

I do agree, It would make the tracking station map look better, also, I feel the need for a Kuiper Belt, another gas giant, and, a comet. This could be a pack the developers make, so you can install it, for free, to get a better Kerbol System, with clouds etc. 

[natsirt721]

In the off chance that this suggestion is ever implemented, can we also get more diverse locations for asteroids? AFAIK the only two places they currently spawn are near Kerbin and around Dres. Some additional locations might include:

• The aforementioned 'full' belt near Dres
• Trojan point asteroids co-orbiting near Jool and Kerbin
• A scattering of moonlets (prograde and retrograde) around Jool
• A sparse Kuiper-belt-esque region beyond Eeloo 
• Bodies on highly elliptical orbits (comets) 

Famous last words, but it seems like it would be fairly easy to add many of these as possible locations for asteroid spawns.

[Jas0n]

On 9/4/2017 at 0:04 AM, [insert_name_here] said:

It would add a certain amount of extra danger to travelling to distant planets because travelling through the asteroid belt would put you in danger of your spacecraft being destroyed.

This wouldn't even be true because you'll just time warp through it in a second, unless you deliberately drop out of time warp and decide to play chicken with asteroids.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Jas0n

[natsirt721]

@Jas0n I believe you've misquoted there...

 

[Jas0n]

12 hours ago, natsirt721 said:

@Jas0n I believe you've misquoted there...

 

What do you mean? I meant to address the fact that the asteroids wouldn't pose any danger to spacecraft because time warp.

 

Edit: I'm sorry. @OHara clarified what you meant. 

Although I'm confused how the quote was even attributed to you because you've never typed it? 

Edited September 7, 2017 by Jas0n

[KerikBalm]

Well, KSP does dynamically generate asteroids. If you use the IR camera originally from the official asteroid day mod, and have it between Duna and Dres, then Dres crossing asteroids will spawn, and you'll soon have an asteroid belt concentrated about where you want it.

On 9/4/2017 at 10:12 AM, RatchetinSpace said:

In reality, asteroids are literally hundreds of Kilometers apart, the chances of a spacecraft running into one is quite small.

But the picture above is doubly misleading. It makes the asteroid belt appear as a distinct region where each asteroid is evenly-ish sized and evenly-ish spaced apart, but the reality is far more complex.

This picture from Wikimedia shows how mass is concentrated in the asteroid belt. As you can see, Ceres, the dwarf planet visited by the Dawn Spacecraft is a single asteroid making up 40% of the mass in the belt. The next two largest, Vesta and Pallas make up about 5-10% each, and the rest are much smaller. So the asteroid belt is really a few large asteroids and then a lot of tiny ones. That is why Dres is where it is, it is kind of the KSP equivalent of Ceres.

As this excellent image also demonstrates, the asteroid belt is not very cleanly defined, but is very chaotic, only roughly positioned between Mars and Jupiter. It doesn't have a clearly defined edge and position as many people have been lead to believe.

Now I'm not shooting down the idea of an asteroid belt of some kind. I think the devs could borrow some of the code from the Near-Kerbin-Asteroids and apply it to the Dres solar orbit. Every now and again, a mystery object could appear there for you to track between Duna and Jool, then the player could choose to fly out there and check it out, but asteroids shouldn't be a threat to spacecraft IMO.

A few things:

#1 "literally hundreds of kilometers apart is a massive understatement.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26712/what-is-the-average-distance-between-objects-in-our-asteroid-belt

Quote

Wikipedia estimates about 1.5 million asteroids in the main asteroid belt that are larger than 1 km (about 0.6 miles). With the total volume of 13 trillion trillion cubic miles given above, that would about 8 million trillion cubic miles per asteroid. Taking the cube root of this gives a typical separation of 2 million miles, or about 8 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Now sure, asteroids the size of marbles and sand grains will be closer, but its still really really really sparse. Note that you wouldn't be able to see a 1km rock as far a way as the moon, much less 8x father away than the moon.

#2 " As you can see, Ceres, the dwarf planet visited by the Dawn Spacecraft is a single asteroid making up 40% of the mass in the belt. The next two largest, Vesta and Pallas make up about 5-10% each"

Look at the pie chart again, you can clearly see that this is wrong. Ceres is not 40% of the asteroid belt - its 31%. If you're going to round it to the nearest 10%, call it 30%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exceptional_asteroids#Most_massive

To get over 50% of the mass of the belt, you need the 4 or 5 biggest ones: 1 Ceres (31%) + 4 Vesta (8.6%) + 2 Pallas (6.7%) [sub total: 46.3%] + 10 Hygiea (2.9) [sub total  49.2] + 31 Euphrosyne (1.9) -> for a total of 51.1%... more or less (due to differences in mass estimates for the whole belt and each body)

Still, Ceres is by far the largest asteroid, and the next 10 largest asteroids combined would still be far smaller than it.

#3) "the devs could borrow some of the code from the Near-Kerbin-Asteroids and apply it to the Dres solar orbit." As I mentioned above, deploying the IR camera between duna and dres will allow you to start tracking Dres crossers. This is basically already implemented.

 

Because the big 3 constitute nearly half the mass of the belt (~46.3%), and dres is a Ceres analogue, I modded in Vesta and Pallas analogues, with eccentricities and inclinations based on their real life analogues and the relation between Dres and its real life analogue.

I named them Vot (Vesta analogue), and Pact (Pallas analogue). Pact is the one in the center of the screen, and I'm also mousing over Vot to highlight it.

Duna is obscured because its a moon of mars based planet... although their relative masses make them more of a binary planet (something like a 1:3 mass ratio). Also I added a small body to the pseudo-L4 point of Kerbin, to represent the hypothetical "Theia" that formed but got destabilized when it grew to >10% Earth's mass, and impacted the Earth and caused the Moon's formation...Anyway, that's the system that I play with (compatible with the OPM mod). It does have an asteroid belt of sorts, even if its just 3 asteroids, it still "simulates" nearly half the mass of the asteroid belt. Note that Dres is proportionately far too large and massive to be a proper Ceres analogue... so when I moved up to a 3x rescaled system, I didn't scale up Dres/Vot/Pact, and decreased their surface gravities (to more or less "real" values) to make them roughly proportional in mass to the real asteroids.

Edited September 10, 2017 by KerikBalm

[NSEP]

Real asteroids are millions, maybe even billions of kilometers apart. Also, the inclination of these asteroids might pose as a bit of a problem, and just the tinyness, the farawayness and the nosphereofinfluenceness of these asteroids make it hard to rendezvous, not saying its impossible just hard. Anyways, i would rather just get a free one at Dres.

[KerikBalm]

Definitely not billions.... Jupiter's SMA is less than 1 billion kilometers. Currently, Jupiter is about 560 million kilometers away from Earth.

Space is big... our solar system is big... but its not *that* big

See my previous post, the estimates are on the order of a couple million kilometers of separation for asteroids  >1km

[RatchetinSpace]

@KerikBalm Do you feel good now?

[invision]

you could cheat and alt f12 to every asteroid and place probe core on it, then place it in the suns orbit between whatever planets you want.

i placed an asteroid belt right at kerblin with about 25 of them. my pc begged for mercy every time  i went to space and it  started loading and calculating them all LOL