Apollo Optical Alignment Telescope For Calculating Phase Angles?

[blorgon]

So I was watching this awesome video just now, and wondered if the same system could be used to calculate phase angles between your parent body and your target body.

This is the next step I want to take in KSP—learning to calculate phase angles by hand, since I've done it enough times using a computer (I'm more of a "lots of math and notebook paper" type of KSP player). I think this could be a pretty cool way to do so.

Anyway, so I'm wondering if it'd be possible to use this measuring system, where the center of the sight is the body whose SOI you're in and you're in a top-down view of the Kerbolar system.

I think it'd be a neat tool to actually build, either physically, or in software. Software would be particularly awesome—just a basic window that accesses the planetary positions from the game time, and has the user rotate the spiral marker. Then it'd crunch the numbers. It's obviously not practical when things like KER exist, but I'd rather learn to do this stuff.

[blorgon]

After doing some more reading, it seems as though I may have slightly misunderstood phase angles. I guess I was just caught up in the elegance of the solution, and wanted to see to what else it might apply. I'm obviously no expert, but it still seems to me like this could be a viable method, but it looks like it would need to be heliocentric, not geocentric as I'd originally suggested.

[Stone Blue]

Saw that posted on Reddit, din'cha?...

[blorgon]

17 minutes ago, Stone Blue said:

Saw that posted on Reddit, din'cha?...

Haha. Facebook first, actually. Weird, huh?

EDIT: holy crap, it's all over Reddit.

Edited June 9, 2016 by blorgon

[Stone Blue]

Really??... I saw it mentioned in a reply to one post with the phase angle image on KSP reddit...

But anyway, yeah, I was thinking the same, it would be nice if there were a way to incorporate the whole periscope and spiral thing in an IVA prop...

[blorgon]

1 hour ago, Stone Blue said:

Really??... I saw it mentioned in a reply to one post with the phase angle image on KSP reddit...

But anyway, yeah, I was thinking the same, it would be nice if there were a way to incorporate the whole periscope and spiral thing in an IVA prop...

That would be awesome. I could see that being in an @alexustas IVA.

[Stone Blue]

56 minutes ago, blorgon said:

That would be awesome. I could see that being in an @alexustas IVA.

Exactly!.. My first thought was it would be awesome in the ALCOR pod.