Lagrangian point

[Gunhed]

hi, short question.

Was anyone ever at one of the Lagrangian points?

Cheers

[Ascensiam]

Unfortunately as of now, due to the one-SOI at a time, Lagrange points can only be reached, not utilized.

I myself haven\'t been to any of them, due to the location of them still being unknown to me.

[dogon11]

We need to figure out in-game L-points only because that we would have more numbers to look at.

[sal_vager]

Sorry guys, but KSP does not have Lagrange points, system it uses does not allow for them.

Also, they aren\'t the perfectly stable points everyone thinks they are, you would sill need stationkeeping, check out the wikipedia page on them.

There are no plans to add Lagrange points, any benefit of having them is far outweighed by the effort to include them, and as soon as people saw they couldn\'t really leave a satellite there, there would be epic moaning and complaints that the Lagrange points were buggy.

[Gunhed]

Sorry guys, but KSP does not have Lagrange points, system it uses does not allow for them.

Also, they aren\'t the perfectly stable points everyone thinks they are, you would sill need stationkeeping, check out the wikipedia page on them.

There are no plans to add Lagrange points, any benefit of having them is far outweighed by the effort to include them, and as soon as people saw they couldn\'t really leave a satellite there, there would be epic moaning and complaints that the Lagrange points were buggy.

Hey thanks for your fast response. At least I don\'t have to ponder the question, on how to reach them.

[SubOrbitalGuy]

You can orbit something as close as possible to, but not inside, the SOI of Mun or Minmus on the same orbit (height above kerbin) so you get a static position in relation to Mun or Minmus. I think of these points as equivalent to a lagrangian point.

At least it\'s some special place (4 of them) to put something

[BlackBicycle]

It is still a darn shame L points aren\'t modeled. Back in the 80s I had a programmable calculator program that allowed for earth-moon flight and included an L point in between. I managed to do a gentle half-8 around it to get to the moon, upon which I had to enter another program to model my near-moon maneuvers and landing. Those programs were in an assembler-like language and were both about 100 commands long. So there.

[RangerDanger75]

That is one hell of a calculator! Unfortunately, bumping things up to an n-body system would be loads more complicated for PhysX and the Unity engine. Not to mention how much it would complicate the code.

[Endeavour]

Other than the L points I don\'t think that n-body has any advantages over what we have now, and it is more complicated.

[aquilux]

So we can\'t have actual L-points, but maybe there could be a simpler way to simulate them. Possibly a texture and collision free 'Child' object with it\'s own SoI that is stationary in relation to an object\'s orbit. Like this you could also remove the need for station keeping by giving them a small amount of mass at the center, therefor simplifying the game a bit for those who\'d complain.

[LongbowEOD]

So I was thinking about Lagrangian points, and it occurred to me that we can already fake 3 of them with a fair degree of accuracy, and we could probably fake the other 2, for certain systems, with a (minor/major?) tweak to a bit of the game code.

Here\'s what I\'m thinking: We can already fake the L3, L4, and L5 Lagrangian points of any 2-body system (Kerbin-Mun, Kerbin-Minmus, or Kerbol-Kerbin) in the game. Put your satellite at +180, +60, or -60 phase degrees, on the orbit of your smaller body. Easy. L3 wouldn\'t be slightly outside the orbit like it should, but it\'d be very close. Added bonus: these orbits are completely stable in the 2-body problem -> no station keeping!

Now for the L1 and L2 points. It requires tweaking the game code a bit. This tweak would only work with tidally locked satellites, like Kerbin-Mun and MAYBE Kerbin-Minmus. Tidally locked satellites still rotate relative to the background of stars, and that means, absent a larger body nearby, you could put an artificial satellite in a synchronous orbit around them.

Do you see where I\'m going? Synchronous orbit = spacecraft doesn\'t move relative to the surface. Tidally locked = parent planet doesn\'t move relative to the surface. Put a spacecraft in a synchronous orbit of the Mun, right at the surface point where Kerbin is ALSO directly overhead. From the Mun\'s view, the spacecraft and Kerbin are right in a line that never changes. Just like L1. Same deal on the other side of the Mun for L2.

But there\'s a problem: according to the wiki the Mun\'s theoretical synchronous orbit is outside its SoI. So the tweak would be to extend the SoI to allow Mun synchronous orbits. The same tweak may or may not work with Minmus. It\'s less massive and rotates slower, so it\'s SoI may have to be MUCH larger for the tweak to work.

[illectro]

Sorry guys, but KSP does not have Lagrange points, system it uses does not allow for them.

Also, they aren\'t the perfectly stable points everyone thinks they are, you would sill need stationkeeping, check out the wikipedia page on them.

L4 & L5 are stable in the Kerbin system - for the l4 & L5 point to be stable the ratio of mass between the two bodies has to be greater than 24.96:1 - and the ratio of Kerbin - Mun satisfies this.

However, long term perturbations from minmus may disrupt this, I need to do some real maths....