met and lct in persistent.sfs VESSEL structure

[Drew Kerman]

I went searching around for this through Google (pointed at this site for results after a general web search) and pretty much all the results came up with met for Mission Elapsed Time and lct as ??? - although one person did correctly guess LaunCh Time. Regardless, none of the posts explained exactly how KSP uses these elements so I did some quick experiments to find out. Hopefully this'll come up for anyone else searching about these in the future.

lct (LaunCh Time) - this is the number of seconds that have elapsed in the game up to the launch of the mission. In other words it is equal to the UT parameter at the time of launch. So if you launch your mission on Day 2 at 12:30:06, the lct for the mission will be 131406.xxxxxxxx (the x's being the floating point precision, which you can ignore and just change the integer portion). The game uses this value to calculate the MET you see displayed in the Tracking Station.

met (Mission Elapsed Time) - this is the number of seconds the mission has been ongoing, and is only updated and used when you have actually loaded the craft in question. This is important to understand, as if you want to change the MET for your craft you should only edit the lct value for the vessel as the met value will then be updated when you next load the craft.

Note that changing the LaunCh Time will not affect the position of your craft's orbit, just your MET. However changing the UT value will.

Edited March 5, 2014 by Gaiiden

[sumghai]

I've been looking for this info for quite some time, in order to rebuild a really old savegame and tweak the launch dates to ones that make sense narrative-wise.

Thanks for posting this!

[MaximumThrust]

I totally understand this topic is old, but all the information still correct and relevant.

Changing the lct worked to change the mission time, but not changed the order the vessels are displayed in the Tracking Station. How could I do that?

Thanks.