PB666

It may be 'a free parameter of the theory' but it is not free of the interactions that give rise too gravity, if you know precisely how many moles of something is in a given space, say a carbon-12 diamond, then you know just about everything, then you should be able to predict the gravitational attraction between two carbon-12-diamonds to the relative accuracy of knowing how many molecules of C-12 exist in each diamond. You are going to have to give this argument up, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as long as gravity cannot be defined precisely (and there are ongoing arguments in the literature about what is causing variation in very cold effects), then there is not perfect understanding of how it works.

Hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell as well as a propellant. Liquified Natural Gas is not just methane, the gas needs to be distilled first to remove the contaminants. It will generally come by pipe which means you need two facilities on site. 1. methane refinery 2. LNG plant.

Don't destroy the launchpad, Don't destroy the VAB, Don't pull the mask off the ole long ranger and you don't mess around with Jeb, dup do de da dup do de du dah (or kill him). Lets see, any other rules: No warp engines or unproven science. --No LfOx engines over 500 --No ION engines over VASMIR (ISP = 5000) --I'de have a rule about Nukes, but I don't use them in career mode. --Since I play hard only in career and no science mode the reverts and quickloads are out, but I back up the game folder every day just in case the 0.90 Kracken strikes.

Hmmmm, I name them in three ways 1st I click on that little text window at the top of the VAB or Right click on the icon in the Navigation window in the section with the Name or I right click on a command and control unit and hit the change name button.

Moment of Force = Mass(moment) * acceleration. This is useful if you have one of the stretchy-man kerbal rocket that can't fly strait.

Im not going to knock unmanned space flight, I want more of it also, I am amazed at the Voyager missions, they are still producing cutting edge science. We need really great roboticized telescopes with the ability for them to repair themselves in space (with the occasional supply mission). While Kepler is still going wouldn't it be great if we could repair it and recharge it with liquid Helium. But I really would like to see a manned observatory with a large capacity to do cutting edge science on the space station. But if you look at what human accomplished 40 years ago (with 40 year old technology) in 1 moon mission. It all revolves around bringing samples back! So this is why I started this thread, why would you send humans to a place you already have samples, or to a place where you could not bring samples back. If they want to make a Polar lunar landing and do polar science, I have no problem with that, and if they want to practice a future Mars landing, I have no problem in combining the missions. But if your mission is not about the science, you really don't belong in space, because it is simply a waste of dV to go there and not gather preparatory information. Look at Hayabusa 1, it suffered ghastly luck, just the worst possible fate, and yet it made its way back to Earth. The reason it could do that is because the gravity of asteroids is very forgiving. If that luck happened on Mars, not only would you have stranded (or killed, the fate is the same) the astronaut, you would have stranded your sample. Lets talk about sending humans to places where they can easily bring samples back, and when we have the skill to perform a moon landing like success on Mars, we will be ready. The gravity of Phobos is also very forgiving and a great place to wet ones whistle. Im sure when we finally get geologist/astronauts on Mars, we are going to be able to bag lots and lots of really useful geology, the number of samples will prolly exceed the weight of astronauts, but we have to be able to get them back to Earth. It looks like a great place to do science also much better than the moon, but we have to be able to get back. Suicide missions offer no scientific benefit (Unless you are going to land a 30 ton geology lab complete with a mass accelerator/isotope detector, a wet chemistry lab, electron microscope, etc. (i'de like to see Mars power up a TEM), of course isolation for TEM, and since they are wasting all the dV*Mass give it a jack and some wheels, and a complimentary backhoe for digging graves of all the geologist that land and use it. But then again if you can send 30 tons of lab you can also send food and water on one of those bouncy bally and feed and water that astronaut until he either dies of natural causes or can be returned to earth.

This is long so if you are TL:DR type go to the next post or thread:D I guess if I was trying to over simplify the problem, lets say we are going to study Jupiters orbit, and then we placed all the objects in the solar system inside jupiters orbit, the closer the objects were to the sun, the easier it is to solve the orbital problem (except for the tidal issues, which might actually get worse, lol). When they are in the sun its a two body problem. By the same token, if we move all the masses in the solar system to the periphery of Sun's sphere of influence, the problem is also now very easy. Jupiter goes flying forward until it approaches some mass. Assuming that we start with a 'good' position and velocity, what we really want to know is what the acceleration (or some cozy function thereof) is going to be over the next time interval of simulation. I think I left something out of the computation on the other page, the calculations for the interaction vectors for each interaction are not as simple as an accumulation (explained at the end of the post). Lets give every object a P (im going to use matrix but not matrix math) Lets say object zero at any moment can be defined as 0Ot = {0M, 0Pt, 0Vt, 0At, 0Et} Mass, Position, Velocity, Acceleration, Elliptical (moment). This sounds easy but it really is not. Lets say 0O is the central body of the system a massive star. The elliptical will remain an elliptical until we apply A*t, then both the PV&E will change. is the central body 0Pt=0 = {0X0,0Y00Z0} 0Vt=0 = {0XV0,0YV00ZV0} 0Et=0 = {0Pe0,0I0, 0a0, and the various Theta (arguments)} These three mean that first you have to define a reference system, which most logically means it has to be the systems center, which is going to be different from 0P0. This also means that 0V <> 0. This means you need to calculate the systems mass,easy and the center of gravity. Since Y will be perpendicular to the plane one needs to decide on a plane (either a massive satellite or the weighted plane between all satellites). So in the Solar system who do we have to include to be accurate. 1. Jupiter-yep (and its satellites)-yep [hmm maybe we need a separate processor to integrate these] Let suppose they were all in a line this would be the point in the suns 'orbit' that its center would be a maximum distance from the systems center its apoapsis. 2. Saturn-Yep (and its satellites)-yep 3. Neptune-Yep 4. Uranus-Yep 5. Venus-Yep 6. Earth-Yep 7. Mars-Yep So the question then becomes, how many more masses need to be added before the system center stops moving. This not the hypothetical, its how much more mass needs to be added before your floating point digit is no longer relevant. For example the asteroid belt objects mass are sort of balanced, in addition also objects that are roughly pluto's that are so numerous that, in essense pluto's imbalancing effect is negligable. The other non-functional limitation is that because of the limitations in our understanding of mass and gravity in our solar system, the suns mass is only accurate to the 4th decimal place. For the sake of argument lets extend it to the fifth. It may be true that this is because we don't know G past that many places, but as we move further from the sun or earth, these calculations become less certain. Since we are placing all our planets in a line we can use the semi-major axis (a) as distance to iX, 0 and the center will be 0O. Jupiter moves suns orbit some 743,000 km (this is an example so don't fault me if these calculations are not perfect, the problem I worked on was a star undergoing accretion in its planetary disk) To do this right you need to accumulate the total weight of each system (I didn't). I don't think it matters were you place the satellites around the planets. So if we do this we see that each of the 4 largest planets listed move the system center away from the sun on the magnitude 8 scale. Adding Earth drops the outward motion down to magnitude 5. Mars magnitude 4. Mercury 3. We can see here that the distance between relative distance added by mars between the system center and neptune is now below relative error of mass determination for Neptune or the Sun. We can sweep that under the rug for a moment because we can argue that mu is precise even if G and iM is not. Even there, mu for bodies is based on alot of assumptions and so if we carry this more than 2 to 3 more magnitudes we really are having a Don Quixote moment. If we look at the attractive affect of Pluto on the sun, its 1/107 that of jupiters, it about 1/1000th the error in Jupiters mass determination. Yeah sure mu can extend this, but only two digits or so. [TABLE=width: 360] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD=colspan: 2][/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]Center-O distance[/TD] [TD]A-effect [/TD] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]Max Dev (m)[/TD] [TD]on sun[/TD] [TD]dDev/O (m)[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Jupiter[/TD] [TD=align: right]742621394 [/TD] [TD=align: right]2.09E-07[/TD] [TD=align: center] 742621394 [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Saturn[/TD] [TD=align: right]1151676894[/TD] [TD=align: right]1.85E-08[/TD] [TD=align: right]409055500[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Neptune[/TD] [TD=align: right]1383038072[/TD] [TD=align: right]3.38E-10[/TD] [TD=align: right]231361179[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Uranus[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508129542[/TD] [TD=align: right]7.03E-10[/TD] [TD=align: right]125091470[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Earth[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508573705[/TD] [TD=align: right]1.78E-08[/TD] [TD=align: right]444163[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Venus[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508834535[/TD] [TD=align: right]2.77E-08[/TD] [TD=align: right]260830[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Mars[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508907523[/TD] [TD=align: right]8.24E-10[/TD] [TD=align: right]72988[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Mercury[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508916876[/TD] [TD=align: right]6.57E-09[/TD] [TD=align: right]9353[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Pluto[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508955363[/TD] [TD=align: right]2.52E-14[/TD] [TD=align: right]38487[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Ceres[/TD] [TD=align: right]1508955559[/TD] [TD=align: right]3.67E-13[/TD] [TD=align: right]195[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] We can see from this that Ceres is not going to significantly alter the position of the sun in any way that we can measure. Its mass effect on the suns acceleration is at the border line of our knowledge of the sun's or Jupiters Mu the primary determinants where the Sun is being pulled and how far its center is from the system center. So the issue is whether one should waste processor time on anything smaller than pluto when calculating the orbits of distal objects. So now we have a system center. We can then get the position information for the Sun, but now we need to assign velocity vectors, yikes, which we do not have. We can assign acceleration but until we run our simulation for a time we wont have an dynamic equilibrium representation of velocity. If we take our sun at apogee of its orbit we could use the elliptical equation to derive a velocity but the effects of inner planets is likely only to muddle the argument, you would need to focus on the big four. The velocity vector however is idealized, there are inclination vectors that also need to be considered (Imagine me handwavign vigorously- substitute some intense calculations). We therefore need to know what the Suns orbital motion was like the last time it reached Apogee as a good starting point. It is assumed that the motion of the Sun defines the XZ plane thus Y is perpindicular to the line that bisects the velocity vector at P creating a plane that Y is perpindicular X and Z can be assigned relative to the periapsis of Jupiter. From this map we can select N=10 or so objects to detemine the next value A objects That being done you can move on. 0A0 = G * Sumi = 1 to N Mi * (iP0 - 0P0)2 That is the initial acceleration vector, if time is large enough and A is also large enough, you will need to go back and calculate 0d1 and detemine the change in acceleration and calculate the average acceleration vector at over dt. This is why is best to keep the number of effectors low. Because you are going to have to do the same calculation on all objects in the system, but each object will have different effectors depending on is position in space (e.g. Pluto does no have to worry about say ceres when its on the other side of the Sun, but it does have to worry about the Sun and Jupiter everywhere). I did underestimate the processing power needed, because as you can seen the critical calculation A is not a simple accumulation, as acceleration increases, there will be a need to increase the number of passes (improvements on A) . The ideal computer needs interaction subprocessors (multiple) to assess each dimension and parse distance into X,Y,Z, it then needs to square the values and send it to the interaction processor which then accumulates the values and takes the square root and (assuming that the other iP1 (i>0) do not change significantly from tempiP1), acceleration would be recalculated also at 0Pt=1u (dP = V0u + 1/2au2) and then some formula approximating acceleration between 0 and t = u would be applied. Then there is one final caveot, the t * a metric will be a good allocator of clock-cycle resources except when two objects approach each other (ruling out gravitational waves some collision might send to each other). As this occurs you may have to go into the process with a much more refined unit of time. Because error>meter changes of orbit (e.g. Pe) could have profound changes if the two objects approach, because neither object can be treated like point sources anymore. In the event that two object distances are below the maximum added altitude of terrain one runs into uncertainty outcomes about the result, more calculable interactions would be a atmospheric interaction. Unless you are also following the rotation of the planet and its wobble in its system you have Shrodinger's cat. I would also consider you lucky, my simulation never got this far, I estimated I would need a million processors running a year to get a nice collision. If you have alot (billions) of objects you simply cannot calculate all the close calls, you have to use probabilistics. I

You did a pretty good job anyway. Science is not knowledge, but a process of discovery that relies heavily on and sometimes stumbles over past knowledge. To facilitate the process it is better not to lead the discovery with facts that maybe overstated cases. Gravities future: 1. Do gravitons exist? 2. How many variants of Higgs and how do they affect gravity? 3. If we knew exactly how gravities force is constituted we could calculate the constant to comparable Planck's precision (and in doing so also calculate the mass-energy equivalent for nearby celestial objects to very precise levels).

Not necessarily, you can launch and as you launch earlier payloads can assemble, then launch humans and join up. The only exceptions would be if you used liquified fuels. low orbit decay rates are pretty predictable. The other thing is if you can collaborate with another struggling space program, you can join payloads in space.

From first hand experience Euler equation will fail. In an N-body problem that is sufficiently complex you need to know the acceleration vectors at the beginning and end of a time step. Since the trajectory is not a simple ellipse, and therefore since accelerations are subject to complex changes with position, the integral of acceleration or velocity cannot be simplified to a simple equation. Rephrasing what you said, the core problem with computers can be simplified to the very abstract, its not in the size of the numeric processors, the problem lies in that for a computer, time is also digital, it runs on clock cycles (square waves). By definition it will always be looking at the problem from a stepping of time. This is compounded by the fact that producing results is not intuitive to a computer, and typically processes in nature that are happening in parallel must be serially processed in a computer. it requires brute fore processing and complexity compounds the problem astronomically. Solving the N-body problem is quite simple if one has a computer made of a core processor, assumes that no masses interact outside the system, and that masses cannot collide. Each mass has its own processor, and each body-body interaction has its own processor. At the level of 3ghz you can calculate the interactions, feed then to the body 'processor' with sums the accelerations and produces new Position and Velocity vectors, which the feeds them to the core processors that then updates. The number of needed processors in best equipped N-body computer can be estimatated as 1 + number of bodies + Σi=2toN (i-1) with the time constraint being the amount of time it takes to accumulate all the vectors for each body. So therefore the minimum time with multiple bodies mean accumulation time * (number of bodies -1). As you can see as the number of bodies increase, the length of time between time intervals also has to increase. So in trying to create an accretion problem on my PC, the amount of local space 'looks' (simple for solving the local space problem) becomes smaller if one shrinks the time. It therefore places more mass in the point-mass GM part of the equation. There have been other attempts to solve the problem, however, from what I have read they solved the problem by sweeping the computation problem by making assumptions about what happens in local space, and following the interactions of local spaces (sort of like kerbals SOI). I don't know if this helps the OP or not, I would simply make the following simpler point If only SOI is producing gravity then you can use elliptical/orbital equations and the solution should not vary at the origin (assign it Pe). I would not try to solve every N-body problem, It is not necessary to solve earths orbit given pluto's orbit. So what you could do with say earth is to spin it around the sun for say 20 orbits and see which 10 or 20 bodies produce the most accelerations. The same would be true fore the entire system. From the equation I give above you can estimate how fast you want to update, because the amount of time to process a N-body problem/2 body problem is going to roughly be that number/2. E.g. a 20 body problem would be 210/2 = 105, therefore if were looking at your system every second, you would then want to look every 105 seconds and at some point you would find that there is a tradeoff (compromise the result for the most accelerative body) and therefore a need to reduce the number of bodies examined in each accumulation.

Crowd sourcing, Just till everyone you need money to make a gigantic beach-ball, they will fall for it, paint it pretty colors and tell everyone they need a telescope to see it.

The simpler answer would be "42".

+ half the radia of the M1 and M2, if the apoaspis is not quoted as a radius. In KSP the are both missing Kerbins radius.

OR for underground areas, better for underground since you can go larger and the side of the cavern will keep the fabric from overstretching.

An ion drive is essentially a mass driver, I think the goal of a good ion drive is to get the ejection velocities in the 3000 to 100,000 m/s range. One other thing, here you are wanting to a have an exo-Earth/Moon space program and you are mparting reaction force on micrometeor or larger particles to accelerate your asteroid, so the next calculation is what happens if we throw a few hundred billion meteors into earths orbit around the sun, does that eventually increase catastophic risk for future space flight?

A circular orbit could exist in deep intergalactic space for a small object orbiting close to a very massive but energetically inactive object. What is your level of precision, the higher the level of precision, the less likely it is to exist. A truely parabolic cannot exist on a galactic scale, there are simply too many massive perturbations. - - - Updated - - - Shhhhhhh, KSK will go all ragey on you.

I look at asteroids from the point of view of what materials they would provide. The ideal asteroid is one that is a chimera of both rocky and icy materials. The rocky asteroids for the exact reason that you give, but there is a large future value for any inter-terrestrial space program. The problem is that, in earth orbits, ice sublimates and in distant orbit there is not enough solar to exact any industries. There is a Trojan asteroid (the leading variant) sharing earths orbit around the sun right now, but it has been stated that reaching this would actually take more energy. Its orbit is very unstable, in the future they predict it will station behind the sun and then wander somewhere else. I think the reason for this is that to reach it you would have to run solar retrograde (expensive) or 2 cheaper but taking 20 months, and then expend energy to stop the craft once if got back in earths orbital plane at the same theta as the trojan. For human exploitation we need a craft that can survive at least 2 years without a resupply has alot more dV. Of course if they can get something like the Cannae drive running they can use the sun energy to push back against w2r and push forward to its station, which might speed things up. I don't hold out hope that it can produce that much thrust no matter how much power you can supply to it. If the drive actually does what they say it does, I believe it has a rapid local space saturation that would be useful for only the smallest loads. If you could get a large scale drive on-line and if you could get a flight path to the F1 or F2 (sun exposed is better for energetic reasons) then that would be the best of all targets. Other conventional-flight path options include a VASIMR drive or nuclear drive that takes advantage of volatiles liberated from asteroids. The VASMIR however uses argon, which is abundant on some of the outer planet moons, its non-reactive so only incidentally trapped in asteroids. The Isotope for the nuclear rocket would have to come from earth but the accelerant could be mined from 'roids. The operating temperature would tolerate a wider variety of elements, including boron, sulfur, lithium (although this is prolly too valuable to use as a propellant), beryllium, carbon monoxide, chlorine, etc. The nice thing about an asteroid based nuclear drive is that it would take full advantage of the nuclear potential, versus convential drive where the unspent portion of the fuel is essentially wasted after the propellant is expended. The other good thing about a nuclear drive dedicated to pushing an asteroid is that you can keep the nuclear fuel packaged in graphite until you get to the destination and then unpack it into the engine. This greatly reduces the in-atmospheric transportation risks. The preliminary science for Asteroids would require a much better space telescopes capable of far better resolution of the surface, the target should be chosen based on best mineralogy and convenience of orbit relative to earth.

And for good reason also, if one looks at the Soyuz missions many failed because the astronaut could not dock a space craft and they ran low on fuel. It got so bad that the Soviets instituted a policy that every docking mission had to have had an experienced cosmonaut that had been on a previous docking mission. Take a look at the photograph of the MIR Station. Note this picture was taken by the Space Shuttle Atlantis . . . . . Its no wonder that private organization did not want to foot the bill to keep it going. Parts of the station were operating at 3 times their designed life, the coolant systems were leaking gas and there was not design to repair or replace the bad parts. That was their main power supply module before they had to isolate it. Needless to say the Soviets could have spent more money on flight training and docking training as well as docking simulators in the 70's and 80's On the bright side, don't feel so bad when you knock those Gigantor solar panels off.

The thread is about alternative destinations, I replied to Grenwalds nonsense in the thread he created.

That gave me such a good laugh . . . . . . . . I take it you've had your lemon juice this morning. Heaven forbid we git a little wild on a topic discussing a physical impossibility.

So lets get into the payload carrier statistics and scrape away some of the false and blatantly misleading information that has been presented here. Space Shuttle (STS) 1. 135 manned missions with two pressure hull loses 1.48% 2. Approximately 820 individuals carried to or from space (counting the maximum either on launch or return), with 14 losses 1.7% 3. Failed missions 2, not counting minor failures Here are the Soyuz statistics 1. 26 unmanned and 128 manned missions 2-fatal failures and a dozen or so unqualified failures (including 2 pressure hull loses where crew survived) - I counted 5 failures in the unmanned missions, so I have to break the two down to be fair. (I have generously included Russian era missions into this also 2. Unmanned missions 28 - 4 failures 3.5% (given the cryptic description there may have been others, or fewer) 3. Manned missions 128 - 198 people carried 4 fatal or would have been fatal without emergency mission termination. 3.125% 4. Personnel carried 333 - 4 fatalities 1.1% Fisher exact test was performed on the results R1C1 4 R1C2 328 R2C1 14 R2C2 809 p = 0.373 there is ____no____ significant difference between crew loss rate of Soyuz and shuttle at alpha = 0.05 p = 0.081 there is a marginal (0.05 < alpha < 0.10) difference between the hull loss rate of soyuz versus shuttle. If we asked the question whether the shuttles hull loss rate was greater or equal there would be a test failure, indicating more study need to be done on hull loss rate of Soyuz. (because the Soyuz hull loss rate is higher) If we exclude the unmanned Soyuz missions there is no significant difference between the hull loss rate either by single or 2 tailed testing. So we can throw out these notions that the Soviet/Russian people carriers are safer or more reliable and focus on the relative economy.

So Im finding a problem in trying to extract position information from the program, I suppose some have managed to work around this. When a ship is away from the planet, the universe mores relative to the ship, the origin can be meters away from the ship, so Im guessing the scene origin is then working backwards to determine the relative positions and motions from the planets and ship. Obviously there is a game clock somewhere positioning the planets (feeding information where the planets should be at time x) as ships move in an out of SOIs, the game is inspecting the game clock, then determining where the satellites are going to be with respect to the CB of the SOI. Ad hoc calculations are going to be less useful unless one can get a frame of reference. For example I placed ship in perfect 100km orbit with miniscule inclination (0 but calculated that it was +/- 8 meters deviancy from the equitorial plane).After applying F12 'show debug pane' I then froze the game at precisely Longditude 0, however the velocity vectors were not as expected, and they did not follow the angle to prograde (235.6) either. So apparently there is a masked coordinate system that determines the velocity vectors. The Y velocity coincided close to the expected values for Y based on inclination, but the VX and VZ coordinates appear to follow V2 = VX2 + VZ2 but not sure what the orientation of the X and Z dimensions are. The other problem was in trying to extract the information my computer had a memory free up because there was an overrun, and I had to shut down everything and reboot. I can manage the debug info, all I need is a reference position. If I find something different from the above I will edit this post. I think Kerbal needs a 'force' coordinate debug button that works with the last velocity and in [escape] freeze presents X, Y and Z coordinates or the rotational equivilants.

Elliptical Equations using any 3 dimensional spatial coordinates If an ellipse is composed of a center © and two focal points (F1, F2)) Then C = X0 Y0 Z0 (the center of the elliptical area) F1 = X1 Y1 Z1 (the systems center of mass) F2 = X2 Y2 Z2 (an imaginary point in space that lies along the line CF1 at an equal distance from C on the opposing side) EX = XEx YEx ZEx (a point along the ellipse or orbit) f = ((X1 - X0)2 + (Y1 - Y0)2 + (Z1- Z0)2)1/2 2a = ((X1 - XEx)2 + (Y1 - YEx)2 + (Z1- ZEx)2)1/2 + ((X2 - XEx)2 + (Y2 - YEx)2 + (Z2- ZEx)2)1/2 2a is coincidentally the Major-axis a = 2a/2 = semi-major axis a2 = b2 + f2 b2 = (1-f2/a2)1/2 e = f/a l = b2/a2 = semi-latis rectum. It is possible to reassign the coordinates to two dimensional geometry bases on (-a,0) (a,0) and (0,-, (0,+ since the line CF1, CF2 can be projected to -a and +a and since ((X1 - XEx)2 + (Y1 - YEx)2 + (Z1- ZEx)2)1/2 = ((X2 - XEx)2 + (Y2 - YEx)2 + (Z2- ZEx)2)1/2 at reassigned points (0,-, (0,+ This will simplify the determination of spatial position by converting the points back when arithmatic is complete. [Appended, it is necessary to have at least one more point other then Pe and Ap to derive a converter to the planar coordinate system since there are a circle of points of r = b from the center that can satisfy the above equity. In order find which 2 points lie in the plane of the ellipse the semi-latis rectum intercept might be convenient. The problem will arise in trying to convert the coordinates back into the original coordinate system]. If you are using a program like mechJeb the program gives an angle-to-prograde (AtP), therefore the periapsis also has an angle to prograde, the coordinates at positions rotated +/- 90o relative the AtPPe or AtPApo will reflect the elliptical semi-latis rectum intercepts. This assumes that the physics engine does not change they way is determines SOI in the future, because it assumes that the F1 = central bodies center. These slr intercept coordinates can be related to the planar slr coordinates system to derive a conversion equation. If central body is massive and satellite is not then 2f = Ap-Pe therefore e = (Ap-Pe)/Axismajor Axismajor = Ap + Pe + rcentral body (only if Ap and Pe are measured in altitude and not radius from CB otherwise Ap + Pe) if a is known and the period is also known then it is possible to determine GM with great precision but not G or system mass GM = 4pi2a3 / Tp2 Now wouldn't we rather have a computer program that handles these?

It is possible if there is Bosian mass at one of the F , and the object at C is half composed of negative energy. lol, lets start this discussion again. Then the orbit would only have one periapsis and one apoapsis. IOW if it is possible for a warp field to exist, it is also possible for this orbit to exist. Also you can rotate the plane of a circular orbit by 80' and look at it from an angle, it may not be possible, but it would sure look possible.

Yeah that smoke being kicked up was from the radiant heat at the nozzle. The local areas was probably sprayed with water before launch to prevent dust kickup. I don't think it was dust, some of the steam dissipated as it rose up.