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Air breathing ion engines


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One issue there is that it doesn't really fit an in-game niche.

The real-world air-breathing ion thruster works at a transition zone between "really high atmosphere" and "really low space", where there's enough drag over days/weeks to cause a deorbit without propulsion. It's not powerful enough to go anywhere, it's just there for station-keeping.

In KSP, there's a hard boundary between space and not-space. Maintaining a stable orbit is as simple as reaching a periapsis of 70001 meters. There's also the fact that in the not-space zone, rails timewarp is prohibited, so you can't get a useable orbit there without painful amounts of 4x physical timewarp.

There's no real station-keeping in-game, which is this engine's sole niche (and even then, it's a niche-of-a-niche only applicable in a narrow transition zone where there's enough atmosphere to run the engine without being so much that the ion drive can't counteract atmospheric resistance).

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2 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

One issue there is that it doesn't really fit an in-game niche.

The real-world air-breathing ion thruster works at a transition zone between "really high atmosphere" and "really low space", where there's enough drag over days/weeks to cause a deorbit without propulsion. It's not powerful enough to go anywhere, it's just there for station-keeping.

In KSP, there's a hard boundary between space and not-space. Maintaining a stable orbit is as simple as reaching a periapsis of 70001 meters. There's also the fact that in the not-space zone, rails timewarp is prohibited, so you can't get a useable orbit there without painful amounts of 4x physical timewarp.

There's no real station-keeping in-game, which is this engine's sole niche (and even then, it's a niche-of-a-niche only applicable in a narrow transition zone where there's enough atmosphere to run the engine without being so much that the ion drive can't counteract atmospheric resistance).

So there could be in game niche if atmosphere was more real. 

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39 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

yeah, but then stable orbits near planets  wouldn't be in the game.

We know the game will have thrust on rails so with station keeping thrust we could have stable orbits much lower till fuel runs out.  

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1 minute ago, mattinoz said:

We know the game will have thrust on rails so with station keeping thrust we could have stable orbits much lower till fuel runs out.  

It will have thrust on rails, but not necessarily in atmosphere, where I doubt it will work.

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