What would happen if you put a ship on the borderline of SOI?

[Kobymaru]

On 9.12.2015 04:46:23, EditorRUS said:

So let's imagine we have a really long ship and somehow put it at exactly 84 159 286 m obit (hyperedit, anyone?) so that one part of the vessel would lie inside Kerbin's SOI and another inside Kerbol's SOI. What would happen here? My assumption is that these two parts would start to experience different gravititional pull and basically the vessel would get phantom thrust until the entire ship is in only one SOI.

Nothing will happen, you will be either inside or outside the SOI. Unfortunately the SOI system is a bit buggy, and the actual SOI size is very fuzzy.

KSP can think that you are "outside" if you are not, and it can think that you are "inside" when you are outside. This has happened to me many times, where I  put a satellite "just outside" the SOI (with very high precision), and after a few high timewarps with another ship, the satellite had an encounter and got ejected.

So in short, you will simply go out of the SOI sooner then expected, then back in, then back out, then ... until at some point you stay on one side of it.

Edited December 10, 2015 by Kobymaru