aelred717

That's what I suspected was the case. Does that mean there's no way to get the orbital velocity of a body then? As an example: If I have a ship orbiting Kerbin and I want Duna's current orbital velocity, it would be DUNA:VELOCITY - SUN:VELOCITY. This works because both are relative to Kerbin's velocity. However, because SUN has no velocity parameter, I need a different method... The only approach I can come up with, would be to abuse the fact that Kerbin's orbital speed is constant. Using Kerbin's position and orbital speed I can get an orbital velocity vector relative to the Sun, which (assuming the ship is orbiting Kerbin) can be inversed to give the Sun's velocity relative to Kerbin, which can then finally give Duna's real orbital velocity. This is completely mad for what should be such as a simple problem.

Loving playing with this mod - it's resulted in me learning more about orbital mechanics than the rest of KSP combined! I wonder if anyone can help me figure out how to do something that should be really easy: getting the current orbital velocity vector of a body. thebody:velocity doesn't give me the right answer (based on the numbers in the KSP wiki). If I subtract the parent body's velocity I get the correct answer, but I can't do this for heliocentric orbits because the Sun doesn't have a velocity vector, which seems like a bug. Has anyone got a solution for this?