ummwut

I am familiar with calculus and differential equations, but I really don't know anything about physics. How does the game calculate the paths our ships take? I'd like to learn how, so I can supplement what the game shows me with other information.

How did you derive this?

@falafonos: The fall is from within the SOI, no worries there. But it is definitely on the order of hundreds of thousands of kilometers. @Warscribe: The total acceleration is some constant times (1/low altitude - 1/high altitude). I believe the constant is whatever the gravitational acceleration is at the center of the mass.

SunJumper, where did you get this formula? Is there a relevant wikipedia page?

The game is huge, there is no such thing as a "short fall". Thanks falofonos, I didn't think to consider a falling ship to be a falling projectile! Oh, but that assumes constant acceleration :/

I'll edit my first post to give details, but this is assuming no atmosphere, and heading straight down to the center of the body with no rotation happening. I need to go learn about physics.

I want to calculate the velocity of impact upon a surface of a body from some altitude, and an initial downwards velocity. Maybe also a time to impact, as well. Normally I wouldn't need to ask for help with something like this, but I don't know enough physics to get through this. I know the acceleration is changing with some change in distance, which can be integrated into a total acceleration over a distance, but from there I am stuck. This is assuming a heading of straight down, no atmosphere, and the body is not rotating underneath.

Read up on Unity documentation.

That could be interesting, as an extremely long-term form of propulsion!

Apparently a plugin that is sorely needed and is exactly what it says on the tin: When in the SOI of a body, will display waypoints corresponding to values entered into a prompt (Latitude and Longitude), which will probably be some crappy looking green lines or something until I figure out how to render more complex stuff onto the body surface. Also it won't be persistent across games until I figure out file IO stuff. Not sure yet if I should attach it to a partmodule or make it a partless plugin. Discuss and/or leave feedback.

A big damn Xenon tank? YES! YESSSSS!

Ignoring the fact that magnet shoes does not downward acceleration make, we do need some sort of non-buggy way to have artificial environments. Possibly to land ships in, more for walking around with kerbals. Because why not. Less complex textures and collision meshes? I do like the idea of hulking huge space station parts that don't lag me to death.

Ah! That makes sense.

Nice! We definitely do need more space station stuff in all different shapes and sizes. Speaking purely in hypotheticals, would a large spinning cylinder be able to keep things inside purely by centrifugal force, or would that bug out?

What is transform and what is this doing? I'm really not familiar with game programming or 3D calculations.

Raycast I understand; it's pretty straightforward. HFT and HFS both give a value of -1 above 20k meters, but below that, HeightFromTerrain gives what I assume is exactly what it says on the tin, in meters. For CelestialBody, what's SurfaceNVector? I assume it's a point tangent to the terrain pointing north, but does it assume the Body is a perfect sphere?

@Michael Kim: Can you go through the first PHP code box and tell me about what each item is and what it's doing? There's very little documentation on the Assembly-CSharp library. Also, HeightFromTerrain and HeightFromSurface do not work. Or if they do, their output is indecipherable to me.

Well... looks like I have a lot I need to learn! The update looks good!

@tetriswizard: I know. Relax. It wouldn't be hard to extend it to 4-D or 5-D or 5.2-D either. I didn't major in math for nothing @shand: I guess I'll have to crawl through the source for Engineer Redux to get answers, something I hope I didn't need to do, as I fully expected a simple solution. Oh well!

I'm looking for a way to determine the exact distance between me and a planet's collision mesh so I'm not taken by surprise when I crash into it. Distance to the ground itself, not the altitude reading.

Hey Cryo, how did you learn about blender? Most of the tutorial videos I've found just kinda tell you what to do and how, not why, or what other options could be. Also, there's practically no blender videos pointed towards KSP part modeling.

I've been playing with various bits of information available during flight, but nothing seems to give very conclusive or consistent results (or behavior; one seems to stick to the value of -1 after fluctuating wildly during launch). I have no idea how I should go about doing this.

I didn't say it sucked bad, but when it messes up, it's usually an unrecoverable situation. That said, I do understand what it does, but I still prefer doing things manually, except for finding Latitude and Longitude, which I've written my own plugin for doing so.

When you switch scenes, the parts are destroyed and rebuilt, and new code is called. If you can, try and figure out what is being called and when.

No? I guess I'll have to keep learning by trial&error I suppose. At the very least, I'm sure you can teach me about modeling, as I'd like to help out on that front as well.