Differences in interplanetary transfer windows between 1.12 Stock Maneuver Creator vs Alaram Clock

[ttikkoo]

I'm a bit confused, why is the interplanetary transfer window alarm created by the Alarm Clock 100 days apart from the Maneuver Creator maneuver?  I could understand differences of a couple of days but 100 days seems excessive. Am I misunderstanding something here?

[DVQuill]

I did some testing on my end, and also compared against the modded version of TWP/KAC and got similar results. 

I posted my findings here in the modded discussions section: 

 

I don't have an answer to your question unfortunately, but definitely noticed some differences as well.

 

Edited June 26, 2021 by DVQuill

[Streetwind]

The alarm clock app gives you the time of the start of the transfer window. Not sure how the size of the window is defined, but it's a period of multiple days. The best possible second to launch will be different than the time the alarm gives you, because the alarm only tells you when the window starts, and the best possible time is somewhere in that window.

In practical application, for all bodies other than Moho it doesn't really matter if you're a day or two off of 'perfect'. You'll still get an encounter just fine.

The transfer app, meanwhile, searches for the mathematically perfect solution to create a maneuver node. This means that it often decides to give you a node for a transfer window far into the future, because that future transfer would be mathematically better than the best the current window has to give you.

This obviously doesn't help if you want a transfer for this window. This has already been raised as feedback during prerelease testing and acknowledged; but sometimes, a week or two before release is just not enough time to research and implement a fix and then run it through the entire proper test-QA-release process. The tool will likely be improved in a future patch. Probably. I'm not a dev, I'm just a volunteer

[ttikkoo]

5 hours ago, Streetwind said:

The alarm clock app gives you the time of the start of the transfer window. Not sure how the size of the window is defined, but it's a period of multiple days. The best possible second to launch will be different than the time the alarm gives you, because the alarm only tells you when the window starts, and the best possible time is somewhere in that window.

In practical application, for all bodies other than Moho it doesn't really matter if you're a day or two off of 'perfect'. You'll still get an encounter just fine.

The transfer app, meanwhile, searches for the mathematically perfect solution to create a maneuver node. This means that it often decides to give you a node for a transfer window far into the future, because that future transfer would be mathematically better than the best the current window has to give you.

This obviously doesn't help if you want a transfer for this window. This has already been raised as feedback during prerelease testing and acknowledged; but sometimes, a week or two before release is just not enough time to research and implement a fix and then run it through the entire proper test-QA-release process. The tool will likely be improved in a future patch. Probably. I'm not a dev, I'm just a volunteer

Ah that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I do hope there are a few more updates to the tool, a bit more choice in the maneuver creator would be useful. Thanks for the clarification

[ttikkoo]

Honestly, I have given up trying to understand the stock tools. My current game has KAC, transfer window planner, MechJeb, stock alarm clock and stock maneuver tool all installed and I just use whichever gives me the result I'm looking for in a particular situation. It's easier than trying to figure out exactly how each tool is coming up with it's corresponding results.

[surge]

The native alarm clock is completely broken in many ways. It is entirely useless.

The Kerbal Alarm Clock addon is an appropriate workaround.

(This message was not subsidised by the legal owners of KAC, it's subsiduaries and/or affiliate companies)