Am I missing something? Anyway to see the SOI?

[Buster Charlie]

Sometimes when I am trying to intercept a planet or moon I'm apparently missing the SOI by a tiny amount and I spend way you too much time tweaking maneuver nodes. 

Is there any way to visualize the soi and or position of a planet relative you my maneuver node so I can more easily intercept planets?

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

You can look on the wiki to find the SOI distance and check your closest approach. But I think that's the only real way to do it. That'd be an interesting mod... something to actually show SOIs as like colored spheres in the map view.

[KerbonautInTraining]

7 minutes ago, Buster Charlie said:

Sometimes when I am trying to intercept a planet or moon I'm apparently missing the SOI by a tiny amount and I spend way you too much time tweaking maneuver nodes. 

Is there any way to visualize the soi and or position of a planet relative you my maneuver node so I can more easily intercept planets?

I have an ill-informed question: Are you setting the planet as a target

If you are and can't see the close approach markers, try tweaking the normal/antinormal (triangle icons) on the maneuver node until your ascending or descending node are where your orbit intersects the target's orbit.

[Ignore this, I misread the OP]

Edited March 1, 2016 by KerbonautInTraining

[Buster Charlie]

1 minute ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

You can look on the wiki to find the SOI distance and check your closest approach. But I think that's the only real way to do it. That'd be an interesting mod... something to actually show SOIs as like colored spheres in the map view.

Okay, I was just making sure I wasn't missing something obvious. But I'd love a mod you show the soil visually as a toggle feature.

1 minute ago, KerbonautInTraining said:

I have a stupid ill-informed question: Are you setting the planet as a target?

If you are and can't see the close approach markers, try tweaking the normal/antinormal (triangle icons) on the maneuver node until your ascending or descending node are where your orbit intersects the target's orbit.

Yeah it's targeted, and yes I don't have huge issues with this, but some times I have very limited delta v for something  (poor planning) and it'd hard to get the very bare minimum SOI change. I think a visual indicator of how close I am to the soi might make it easier for me to know which direction I need to tweak

[Vim Razz]

51 minutes ago, Choctofliatrio2.0 said:

You can look on the wiki to find the SOI distance and check your closest approach.

The information is also available in-game by focusing on a body in map view and opening the info box on the right side of the screen.

[Archgeek]

9 hours ago, Vim Razz said:

The information is also available in-game by focusing on a body in map view and opening the info box on the right side of the screen.

Wait, the body info seriously has the sphere o' influence radius?!  That's leaning on the 4th wall a bit...and more importantly, how the heck did I not know this?!  Utterly nifty.

[Gargamel]

6 hours ago, Archgeek said:

Wait, the body info seriously has the sphere o' influence radius?!  That's leaning on the 4th wall a bit...and more importantly, how the heck did I not know this?!  Utterly nifty.

If you think about it, it's really not 4th wall material.  Some "basic" physics math would reveal the mass of the body, and therefore it's gravity.  You could then calculate the distance from the body before it's gravity has less effect than another body's gravity.  That'd be the SOI as kerbal's don't use n-body math.   Obviously we know the "SOI" for the planets of our system, or else the Apollo program would have been a crap shoot for landing and return. 

[KerikBalm]

This link is relevant to the non-4th wall breakingness of that info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere

[Thomassino]

Kopernicus has a tool to highlight SOIs, it is supposed to be a debug tool for overlapping SOIs but it can probably be used to solve your problem.

[John FX]

I`d really like a small mod that drew a circle around bodies showing their SOI. It would help with places like Gilly where the SOI can be reached with a particularly big jump.