yamanofudo

Seems that Principia already solved the time warping issue... Also, forgetting about the asteroids part, the force is always "on rails", shouldn't that help?

I know this question has been asked before, and that the usual reply is "you need N-body solvers for having Lagrange points, Principia does that". However, that's not necessarily true. Here's the argument: I'm assuming that the average player interested in Lagrange points etc cares about a better description of the gravitational field felt by spacecrafts and possibly of asteroids (in case you want to capture one and park it at e.g. L4 for mining). This can be used to simplify the problem. One can keep objects above a certain mass M* on patched conics (basically planets and moons) whose orbits will be known analytically at all times and solve for the other objects in the background field of such objects. Furthermore one can perform a gradient expansion (and possibly overall force magnitude expansion) for the relative forces among these objects. This way we neglects gravitational forces between spacecrafts (ok assumptions unless one builds really gigantic stations) and from far away asteroids. Assuming one has k of those objects and N-k planets/moons, the problem reduces most of the times in k 1-body equations in the field of N-k analytically known objects. In some cases (e.g. for spacecraft landing on asteroid), it will be 2-body "triangular" system (the spacecraft feels the asteroid gravity, but one neglects the feedback, which is again a 1+1-body system), or full 2-body for e.g. two nearby asteroids and only rarely one has to fall back on a N-body solver, basically when there are multiple asteroids sufficiently close to each other. I have not looked inside the Principia code and it could be that what is done there already (I doubt since there are patches for avoiding instabilities for the Joolian moons). Also I do not know if having such if statement on the mass is problematic with the way the code is structured. But if it is not the case it would be really nice to see something like that (together with the Principia plotting frames and a better flight plan UI) in KSP2 or in a mod. Anyways, here were my $0.02. (And of course if you keep asteroids not generating gravity then the problem is always a set of 1-body equations in an analytically known external field)