OhioBob

Okay, I think I have all my silly mistakes fixed. The tables should be correct now. If anybody finds a discrepancy, please let me know.

You may have to hit refresh because I just revised the atmosphere properties. (edit) Also just found an error in a couple of the SOI calculations. In the process of fixing it now. (edit 2) Some how I managed to get Tarsiss' semimajor axis wrong. Fixing it too.

For those who find this stuff interesting and useful, below are tables of properties for the celestial bodies in this system. Note that all planetary satellites are tidally locked to their primaries; therefore, their sidereal orbital periods and rotation periods are equal. Note that Ciro's atmosphere is currently not implemented due to it producing an artifact when viewed in the Tracking Station. The properties listed above are what Ciro's atmosphere would be if we could get it working properly. The properties listed in the game are those of the stock Sun. To compare the properties of the scaled down KSP bodies to real life celestial bodies, multiply the given distances and radii by 10, masses and gravitational parameters by 100, densities by 0.1, orbital periods and escape velocities by √10, solar luminosity by 100, atmosphere heights and scale heights by 1.25 (though atmospheres really don't have a defined edge), and to convert 6-hour days to 24-hours days multiply by 0.25.

Both of those situations are intended. The atmospheres were developed using real life gas laws, so the end result are atmospheres that resemble what they would be in real life. In the case of Tellumo you have to remember that gases are compressible. When you have a planet with a high surface gravity, it's going draw that gas in and compress it into a small volume. Therefore we end up with a high surface pressure but a very shallow atmosphere. Just the opposite happens when we have a low gravity planet, the atmosphere will expand and take up more volume. This is one of the areas where the original KSP developers got it wrong. They gave Eve a deep 90 km atmosphere and Duna a shallow 50 km atmosphere. In real life it would be the other way around even though Eve's atmosphere is much more massive than Duna's. Real life can be counter intuitive sometimes. In the case of Gauss (and all the gas giants) the surface pressure is only about 1g. But more importantly, the gas has a very low molar mass. The gas giants have hydrogen-helium atmospheres while Gael and Tellumo have nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres. At the same temperature, a unit mass of hydrogen will occupy 14 times more volume than unit mass of nitrogen. For this reason gas giants have very deep atmospheres.

I've had that problem too, with the little grey square. Sometimes KER works and sometimes it doesn't, though I've never been able to identify a root cause.

I have a couple of observations and suggestions regarding the new package: (1) I have two installs of GPP - the first is a clean install with nothing but GPP, and the second includes all the recommended mods. Everything looks great in the one with all the mods, but in the other the sun looks terrible. I traced this down to sunLensFlareColor = 0, 0, 0, 1 in Ciro.cfg. This setting is apparently necessary to allow Scatterer's sunflare effects to take precedence. But without scatterer installed, this really messes up the appearance of the sun. All that can be seen is the disc of the sun, so from a distance it looks like nothing but a tiny dot. I realize the need to have sunLensFlareColor = 0, 0, 0, 1, but perhaps in the ReadMe there should be instructions stating that if scatter is not installed then, for best results, Ciro.cfg should be edited so that sunLensFlareColor = 1, 0.92, 0.85, 1. (2) I think I goofed with the atmosphere of Hadrian. I wanted to give one of the outer moons a thick Titan-like atmosphere, so I selected Hadrian without considering its temperature. Hadrian has a black body temperature of 56 K, which is below the freezing point of nitrogen (63 K). I think this would cause its atmosphere to freeze out, leaving it with only a very thin atmosphere, not the thick atmosphere that I gave it. I think that Augustus is probably a better candidate to have a thick Titan-like atmosphere. (Tarsiss is also a candidate, but there is already a thick atmosphere in that system with Catullus.) I'd like to switch some of the atmospheres around. Although I'll have to rework the atmospheres from scratch, essentially I'd like to move Hadrian's atmosphere to Augustus, Augustus' to Tarsiss, and Tarsiss' to Hadrain. I also think that Augustus has the right temperature range that with a thicker atmosphere it could possibly support liquid methane lakes on its surface (I'll know more about that after I've recomputed its atmosphere). @Galileo, with your OK I'll start reworking the atmospheres.

The only two bodies that jumped out as being really tough nuts to crack are Tellumo and Catullus. Tellumo may be darn near impossible to get off of unless you can land on a mountain top. My Eve Optimized Engines might help, but even those aren't designed for 10 atmospheres of pressure. Tellumo's 1.9 g surface gravity is really difficult too, but in some measure that actually helps. Because of the high gravity, the atmosphere has a really small scale height, which means the atmospheric pressure drops very rapidly with increasing altitude (i.e. the atmosphere is compressed into a really shallow envelope only 40 km deep). By the time we reach an altitude of 4900 meters, the pressure has already dropped to just 2 atm. And we only need to get above 40 km to establish an orbit. So by selecting the right landing site, Tellumo may not be as impossible to get off of as it may first appear. The problem with Catullus is in many ways just the opposite of Tellumo. It has a surface pressure of 5 atm, but a surface gravity of only 0.9 g. At first observation that doesn't look all that bad, after all, we can get off Eve having the same pressure and nearly twice the gravity. The problem with Catullus is that it has a very large scale height, meaning its atmosphere thins out very slowly as we ascend (mainly because it has a low molecular weight hydrogen-helium atmosphere). We have to climb all the way to 38 km before the pressure drops to one atmosphere; and overall the depth of the atmosphere is 280 km. This creates a challenge unlike anything in the stock game. It will probably take a very long and slow ascent, staying below terminal velocity for much of the way. Designing the right launcher to do this could be interesting.

The smallest body in this pack has a radius of 80 km, so there's nothing as small as Gilly. In fact, Gilly, Pol, Minmus, and Bop are all smaller than this pack's smallest body. (edit) We changed one of the moons to 60 km, so that is now the smallest body.

There is definitely something messed up there. I would have liked to have seen that descent with the Aero GUI screen open to see what was happening. It could be something as simple as a typo in the pressure curve.

It's just the opposite of that. Although Kerbin as no vernal equinox, the Kerbal celestial coordinate system does have a direction that defines zero degrees longitude. Kerbin's longitude of ascending node and argument of periapsis are both assigned values of zero. This means that Kerbin's ascending node and periapsis (even though it really doesn't have either) and the origin of celestial coordinate system all point in the same direction. Kerbin's starting mean anomaly is 3.14000010490417 radians (not pi), which means its starting longitude is 179.908753681645 degrees. That is the longitude from the center of the Sun looking outward toward Kerbin. Looking from Kerbin, the Sun is located at approximately 0 degrees at the start of the game.

Here's the method I use...

I remember all the Apollo flights. I was eleven when Apollo 11 landed. Reading about the upcoming Apollo 7 launch in school is what got me hooked on space. I'm a little too young to remember much about Gemini, though I do remember watching one of the launches on TV. My earliest space memory was hearing my father talk about Ed White's walk in space (1965).

Yes, I can do that. First, however, I'm working on some stock settings (i.e. non-scatterer) to get the skies and atmospheres looking good. Galileo has done all the scatterer settings has and everything looking great, but if scatterer is not installed, the skies all default back to Kerbin-blue. I'm trying to fix that so that if somebody doesn't want to use scatterer, they can still get some decent, if not great, alien-looking skies.

Nice view from Tarsiss of Catullus and Gauss. And Tarsiss' shadow transits Catullus.

@The White Guardian, I'm working on a planet mod and I'm trying get the sky/atmosphere to look correct. There are several settings that I really don't what they do. I've got a general understanding of it but, when I try adjusting the numbers, I just can't see exactly what they do. The items I'm having trouble with are listed below, can you provide an explanation? The waveLength setting clearly sets the color of the sky, so what does lightColor do? Atmosphere { lightColor = AtmosphereFromGround { innerRadius = outerRadius = waveLength = } } ScaledVersion { fadeStart = fadeEnd = }

Nero-rise from orbit around Hadrian. And landed...

The Gauss system From orbit: (left-right) Catullus, Tarsiss, Loki, Gauss. Landed on Catullus: (top-bottom) Tarsiss, Gauss, Loki

Otho peeking over the horizon of Augustus.

Atmosphere Update... I've done some preliminary work on the atmospheres and I'd like to provide a report on the current status. The following was originally composed as a personal communication between @Galileo and I, so some knowledge about the layout of the solar system and the properties of the celestial bodies is assumed. Readers here will be at a disadvantage by not knowing this, but you should still find it interesting. I've set up my atmosphere spreadsheets but I still haven't made all the decisions needed to work up the models. There are a couple places where I'm at a crossroads and unsure which direction to take. I'd like to hear your overall impressions of the plan, but I'm particularly interested in hearing your opinions on the direction we should take with some of these. Rather than making a decision based on what is most scientifically viable, it might be best to make the decisions based on providing the most diversity in terms of game play challenges. So far I've identified the bodies most likely to have atmospheres. I've also computed their effective temperatures, which is the black body temperature taking into account albedo but excluding warming due to greenhouse effect. A body with a thick atmosphere and abundant greenhouse gases could be much warmer than its effective temperature (e.g. Venus). Much of what I need to compute an atmosphere comes from the body's physical characteristics, which I already have based on the work completed to date. The two things that are still undecided are (1) the atmospheric pressure at the surface, and (2) the average molecular weight of the gases. I don't need to know the atmosphere's composition per se, but it's the composition that determines the molecular weight. Niven (effective temperature 304 K) - I'm thinking of giving Niven a Duna-like atmosphere. It's bigger than Duna and should, therefore, retain a thicker atmosphere, but it's also closer to the Sun where the more intense solar wind should strip some of the atmosphere away. I also don't think Niven is big enough to have the thick atmosphere needed to produce a Venus-like run away greenhouse effect. I envision Niven as a hot world with a predominately carbon dioxide atmosphere and a surface pressure of about 0.1 atmosphere (a little greater than Duna), though I could go a little higher if we want to make parachutes more effective. Gael (250 K) - There's not much debate here, Gael's atmosphere is effectively an exact duplicate of Kerbin's (which is based on Earth's atmosphere). I'll probably use the Kerbin model I developed for my Realistic Atmospheres mod, with perhaps a little tweaking. Tellumo (201 K) - I'm not sure what to do here because I have no real-life examples to look to for guidance (there are no super Earths in our solar system). Given Tellumo's size, the atmosphere will undoubtedly be massive. The planet's effective temperature is low, but I think I can give it enough of a greenhouse effect to at least warm up the lower latitudes to above freezing temperatures. In the cfg file I noticed that you have "oxygen = true". Is that your intent? If so, then obviously oxygen is present. Clearly there will also be a large amount of nitrogen. I think the carbon cycle on Tellumo would have removed most of the carbon dioxide; however, given the planet's enormous size, I suspect that volcanism pumps out enough CO2 that it's still a significant constituent. Tellumo is also big enough to retain light gases, though I really don't want it's atmosphere to contain large amounts of hydrogen and helium (we have Catullus for that). But it might have lighter gases like methane, ammonia, and neon. Overall, I suspect that the average molecular weight will be close to that of Earth's atmosphere. I'm thinking of giving Tellumo a surface pressure of at least 10 atmospheres (I just can't see how it would be anything less, and perhaps much more). I've also given Tellumo a surface gravity of 1.9 g, so I think that landing on Tellumo is likely a one-way trip. Gratian (146 K) - This planet started out a bit bigger than Gael but I sized it down to a bit smaller to bring its moon closer. I've given it the density of a rocky planet, rather than an icy planet as would be expected farther from the Sun. I'm undecided as to what kind of atmosphere to give it. I think the constituents would be nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but I don't know the proportions. I think that most of the outer moons/planets will have predominately nitrogen atmospheres, but those are icy bodies. Being a large rocky planet, I think that volcanism would have pumped out quite a bit of CO2 and, without oceans, I don't think there would be a mechanism to remove it. Without the CO2, I think a surface pressure of about 0.5 atmospheres is reasonable. However, I could see it possibly having a much thicker atmosphere of perhaps 2 atm with 75% CO2. The thinner atmosphere would be similar to Laythe, while the thicker atmosphere would be somewhere between Kerbin and Eve. Otho (107 K), Gauss (74K), and Nero (53 K) - The atmospheres of gas giants is pretty straightforward. There's really nothing here to discuss, I'll just do my normal thing. Augustus (112 K) - This is the farthest body from the Sun to which I gave a mostly rocky density (similar to Io and Europa). I have some of the same problems here as I do with Gratian. Is the atmosphere mostly nitrogen, or is there a lot of carbon dioxide and other heavy gases from volcanism? In either case, Augustus is not especially big so I think it's atmosphere will be thin. I'm thinking about 0.05 atmosphere (a little lower than Duna). Catullus (77 K) - The size and temperature at Catullus means that it should be able to retain lightweight gases like hydrogen and helium. I also made it an icy body, so if any volcanism exists, it will be cryovolcanism (i.e. no heavyweight gases like CO2). I see it having an atmosphere with a composition much like a gas giant. I'm sure it will be a very deep atmosphere, so it might make for some interesting clouds formations floating high above the surface. Although Catullus has a very large radius, its low density resulted in me giving it a surface gravity of only 0.9 g (about 1/2 that of Tellumo). I really have no idea what the surface atmospheric pressure should be, but I'm leaning toward 5 atm (1/2 Tellumo). This pressure and gravity should make getting off the surface of Catullus feasible, but its very deep atmosphere (probably hundreds of kilometers) will make for a very different and unique challenge. Tarsiss (76 K) and Hadrian (47 K) - I'm sure that nitrogen with be the primary constituent of all the remaining atmospheres, so atmospheric composition is no longer an issue the rest of the way. The moons Tarsiss and Hadrian are almost twins it terms of size and temperatures. I'm thinking we can go one of two ways. First, I think we could have an atmosphere that's just dense enough to produce some entry effects (i.e. faint plasma trail) but too thin for parachutes to work. The other possibility is give one of these a Titan-like atmosphere. If we were to turn one of these into Titan, I vote for Hadrian (since Tarsiss is already right next to a moon with a thick atmosphere). Hox (45 K) and Leto (36 K) - Again we have two near twins. I think that both of these planets will have atmospheres, but very thin (e.g. Triton and Pluto). The atmospheres I give them will probably be very minimal in terms of the effects they produce on a spacecraft, but it might be neat to tinker with the visual effects to give the planets a faint airglow (kind of like this image).

(strikethough by me) It would just be the Ciro System.

He's using reversed engineered alien technology.

Yes it is. The biggest concern passing through the VAB are the high-energy protons in the inner belt. By the time you're 1 Earth-radii out, you'll be past the danger zone. Beyond that there is just electrons, but those don't carry enough energy to penetrate the hull. The electrons will produce secondary x-rays (bremsstrahlung), but any dose from those will be small because the x-rays are low energy.

You don't have to go the full blown RO (Realism Overhaul) route to make RSS playable. There's a mod (just a single file really) called ROMini.cfg that factors all the stock parts (as well as any part mods that you have installed) to give them realistic dimensions, masses, mass ratios, etc. For instance, the propellant mass fraction of fuel tanks is greatly improved over the 8/9 ratio used in stock. This allows you to get the higher delta-v needed to play RSS while using stock parts. There's also another mod called SMURFF that does something similar, though I haven't used it. If you want to try out RSS, I'd recommend that you first try it with ROMini or SMURFF before you heavily mod your installation with all the RO stuff. That will give you a chance to figure if you like it or not before moving on to the next step.

It will take me at least a few days to do my part, so don't expect an quick turn around. If I were just throwing together an atmospheric model based on somebody else's given parameters, it would go pretty quick. But deciding what I want to do here will require some study and contemplation. Plus if we change anything, I have to redo the atmosphere (they are dependent on the physical characteristics of the planet). You can give me the cfgs without the biomes, right? I'd like to get started with my part without having to wait on the biomes.

So we get a bonus planet, cool! The way I now count it, we have: Icarus > Thalia > Niven > Gael > Tellumo > Gratian > Otho > Gauss > Nero > ? > ? Sound right?