Eriksonn

So if I understand correctly: If you want to have something that matches minmus you need to do a weighted sum of those spheres until the blue and red areas match with the more/less dense areas on minmus. And for an approximation you can treat more elevated areas as more massive ie more blue on the sphere.(so the minmus flats would be more red and the hills more blue). Is this correct?

It would be interesting to have some sort of geopotential for some of the stock bodies. Maybe assume constant density and use the altitude at each point? I think it would have an effect on very lumpy bodies like minmus or gilly. Is that a possibillity?

Why did it loose dv by upgrading ksp, did some engine stats change? I have not heard that anywhere.

In my carrer i went to duna with a "Apollo style" lander that separates from the main ship, lands, gets science and then docks again. I also realized that my landing legs was put on the external tanks that was ment to decouple, and i wanted to land on ike too. Fortunely i had enough dv to save the tanks and the legs so i could land on Ike. And i might not have had enough to land and get off Ike without them… The Ike landing was a bonus part that i did not think of when starting the mission but since i hade some extra fuel and was in need of all the science i could get my hands on i did that too. Ballistic capture around Ike with ~22 dv from duna orbit. ~20(+-10) dv from elliptic duna orbit to ike capture(didnt need to circuralize at duna capture. Lander had enough anyway), ~2 extra to avoid crashing and minor stabilizing(to avoid flying away again). These types of orbits are really sensitive so a 0.1 dv push at the start could mean the difference between a somewhat nice ike orbit and escaping duna completely... Nice scenery over here

It is quite a compact lander design, i like it. Here are some tips: I recommend putting the heatshield between the tank and the cargo bay and adding a decoupler to ease the load on the parachutes.(Meaning you can have less parachutes and save on weight.) It does not look like your landing legs touch the ground very much, you can extend them in the vab to see if they reach far enough before you have even launched. If you have problem with dv you can use an engine with higher isp like the poodle, it gives you 14% more dv and weighs half as much as 4 thuds.(You might need larger landing legs when using the poodle)

Today i took a bunch of Tourists to the Mun and Minmus. I only had the medium landing legs so the mun landing was a bit shaky but otherwise a pretty successful mission considering i dont do tourist missions very often...

I usually dont make many spaceplanes but every once in a while i make a mk2 plane for taking kerbals to/from a space station or something similar. Once I made a tiny ssto that could get to minmus and back. I was really proud of that one.

I made a small paint diagram to show the correct manuever:

I started a new career world today, main reason is becauce when i use principia max timewarp gets quite choppy. And with opm (more than) max warp is needed alot and i am impatient so i rearranged the planets a little so that they are closer in. Sarnus was moved to roughly the orbit that Dres was on before(but with less eccentricity and inclination). Urlum was moved to between Sarnus and Duna, in 5:3 resonance with sarnus(I tested it in my gravity simulator and it works great). Dres was put between Polta and Wal. Neidon was put in a distant Jool orbit(Fun times ahead) Plock was put in the same orbit as Eeloo is in stock. I have not come very far in the carrer itself but i sent Bob together with an Okto probe to minmus and back and a small relay in kerbin orbit but that is it for now.

I recently made an orbital refuel outpost over minmus with an isru to get fuel from. Also launched a miner to mine ore from minmus, refuel at minmus station and then fly with some more ore to a larger station in lko. I had 2 problems with this mission: Firstly i did not realize that the small isru unit had only 20% effectivity compared to the large one so the full ore load of the miner was not even enough to replenish what was needed to land and take off from minmus. So i had a net loss of fuel... The second fail was that the miner itself had too little dv to get to kerbin station. With a few munar gravity assists i got there by using the rcs in the end(i ran out of liquidfuel). So now i have a miner with a nerv engine instead of a terrier.(Even looks slightly cooler due to the new shiny golden hull panels)

Yes, the Kerbin/Mun barycenter only makes sense outside the orbit of the mun. If you are inside kerbin and mun are pulling in different directions most of the time so their gravity doesnt add in a way that would make a barycenter a valid approximation any longer. (In fact a "true" barycenter only makes sense "infinitly" far away compared to the kerbin-mun distance)

I also have principia and even if the angle of the camera makes it hard to see the exact path i am quite sure that it is cauced by the fact that the center of the reference frame is Kerbin but Kerbin is wobbeling around a little due to the Mun, and that wobble is displayed in the trajectory. So it is not your craft that is wobbeling, it is simply the object that you have selected to be the origin of the reference frame:Kerbin. It is most visible at the edge of kerbins soi when your speed is very low(and hence the wobble is relativly large). An enhanced version is by switching to the muns frame whine out there, it will be a bunch of loops due to the mun but the overall path of the trajectory is still there and that is what kerbin is also doing but on a smaller scale. This is also the same process that cauces minmus orbit to wobble around when on high warp as ksp tries to model the orbit after kerbin but kerbin keeps moving so it looks wonky. And if you look closely you will see that the period of the wobble follows the orbit of the mun.

I am having lag issues with my slightly modified opm+principia world. I think it depends on objects getting too close to each other as that have cauced issues in the past (when using opm without changes ovok gets closer to sarnus and its orbit gets super twitchy when at periapsis and starts lagging). I think something similar is happening becauce the planets have moved into slightly different orbits. When starting a new world 100k warp is as smooth as no warp but in the old world even 10k warp is jittery. Is there some debug setting that allows me to see what planet or moon is causing the slowdown? Or is it the amount of active vessels(19)? Edit: I updated to 1.5.1 and it got a little better, not as good as the new game but still better.

This looks interesting, and i might try it someday. Not right now since i dont know when I will have time. I might send a tiny ore miner probe to the minmus station so it can refuel. Is there a screenshot anywhere of the current state of that station? Also, how am i supposed to dock with only 5 parts+docking port? Since it is ment to go from the station to the ground and back again it needs rcs on itself.(Unless there exist a small tug of some sort but that one also needs 5+ parts for rcs...) I also realized that a ore miner needs at least 6 parts(drill,solar,ore tank,fuel tank,probe,engine), hmm... Does that mean that I am screwed?

I managed to capture an eclipse of Gilly. Not sure if it is rare, but due to the inclined orbit i think so...

Ah, well then. I guess i will have to do a boring regular orbit closer to duna then. The problem with this contract in particular is that it says: maintain orbit over this Point. but that Point is directly under ike, so i cant really do anything...

I seem to have a problem getting to Ike's L5 Point for some reason. It seems much more unstable than mun's L5 Point(I already have a stable relay sat there). I know minmus Lagrange Points are a bit weird due to the proximity to the mun and (maybe) the edge of kerbins soi, but ike has no stable Points as far as i can see. the reason is that a contract wants me to be in a stationary duna orbit, so i thought it would be nice to have it in ikes L5 Point as it is in the correct orbit. Why?

I never kill kerbals obvously. I actually like to launch sattelites and probes instead of crewed missions on almost everything further than duna.(this also means less science in the mid-game so more intresting flight paths will be needed) I use the principia mod and i love to make really complex gravity assists to save every dv of fuel as i can, even if my craft has 5 times more than needed. I like ion Engines, and planning the burns with limited solar Power and unreliable Connection near sarnus is challengeing. I have a very strict "no space debris" policy. I always plan my stages so that they wont run out in the middle of a long transfer burn. I usually have the option on so that ksc is the only sattelite Point on kerbin. This creates interesting problems since almost all my ships are probes so i need alot of relays. I like to place relays in the L4 and L5 mun points as then they can always reach ksc. I also use OPM to give a Little more variation to where i can go. Sarnus moons were a bit wonky with n-body gravity so i had to move them about a little, that was also quite intreresting. At one point Tekto was kicked out into interplanetary space, that was fun.

The most important thing for me is to enable the setting that shows closest approach at all times, this will make it easy to see where tylo is and where you want it when you arrive. And if it is wrong you mess with prograde/radial until the closest approach markers come closer to eachother.

This was from when i used GPO a while ago, dont use it anymore but i still use principia. If you use GPO yourself you might notice that Olei is further out then usual, this is becauce it messed up the mun when being so close in.

Nothing too exiting apart from redoing the orbits of Sarnus moons so that they would not go crazy becauce of principia, and also alot of timewarp. First ovok became unstable becauce of Eeloo, so i moved Eeloo out a bit but the slate messed up Eeloo so i had to move it out aswell. It ended with Slate kicking out Tekto into interplanetary space but now Everything seems alright except that hale and ovok get very high inclinations after about 10 years for some strange reason. Now i can start my new carrer mode without principia yelling at me that ovok is weird.(I cant max timewarp in my carrer game now becauce of that. And that is essensial for opm...) But nothing really apart from that.

I dont know if it was crazy, but it sure was hard. A long time ago i made my first interplanetary ssto, and it was going for laythe… Everything went quite well until i was about to exit laythes soi. I cant remember exactly but i think i had about 600 dv i laythe orbit or something like that, way to Little at least. So i had to gravity assist like crazy to get home. I think it became Laythe->Vall->Tylo->kerbin->eve->eve-kerbin. and when i entered kerbins atmosphere i had 15 dv left. It was 3 full orbits between the last eve encounter and kerbin. It was very tight.

I dont think that moons are possible in this simulation due to 1.The planets are very big compared to their own soi, 2. They are too close to the sun, 3.The timesteps are too large.(ie. the moon "teleports" past the planet before being able to orbit). I also think that it wont work becauce of the order in when stuff happens. When most larger planets form it is in the time when there is lots of chaos everywhere, and so not good time for moons. And in the end when things are stable there are no more tiny asteroids left to be captured anyway. I managed to get a moon to orbit a planet by spawning them manually, but it was a very narrow range of values that could support it. Sidenote: i dont actually know the masses of the larger planets in the end of my simulations, so i might have chosen lower mass on my planet that what is possible. All objects in the cloud are spawned randomly, but you can manually add new planets if you want to. If no velocity is given they are put on circular orbits.

I did Another run and found something intresting. It ended up similar to the previous one but with a small object in a very inclined orbit but the same radius as the big outer planet. It is rare for those inclined ones to survive for very long. It is in a horseshoe orbit with the big one. That basically means that it is in a slightly different orbit and alternates between inside and outside compared to the big one. The inner 2 planets are in a 5/3 resonance with each other.(5 blue orbits in the same time as 3 cyan orbits) This makes them stable and dont get messed up by the other planets.

The code is not that long and all the intresting stuff is at the top, so finding the values you want to change should not be that difficult. I have variables for the amount of asteroids, their average mass and the size of the cloud and a bunch more stuff you can play around with. I can link the code and you also need processing to run and edit it. (Code liked in original post) you dont have to wait that long, becauce once the amount goes below 100 the amount you can warp increases very fast. when there is ~10 things left i get the warp to over 10k without problems at all. (~400 years per second) I just used newtons gravity formula to calculate the forces between the bodies and then moved them according to those forces. And made them collide if they touched each other. Nothing too complex going on here. The asteroids also dont pull on things to make the fps a bit better at the start.