Exoplanet ideas:

[Dr. Kerbal]

16 hours ago, siklidkid said:

alright, first person to reply with a name idea gets to name this one, cause i have got no ideas

A very thick clouded and dark skied planet that is really hard to land on, which causes the land below to have a dark grey tint. The atmosphere is not yet breathable, but minor terraforming might be able to change that.

This planet also has a high chance of rain, hurricanes, and tornadoes.

Afa

[Catto]

4 hours ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

Afa

Perfect

[PlutoISaPlanet]

23 hours ago, siklidkid said:

alright, first person to reply with a name idea gets to name this one, cause i have got no ideas

A very thick clouded and dark skied planet that is really hard to land on, which causes the land below to have a dark grey tint. The atmosphere is not yet breathable, but minor terraforming might be able to change that.

This planet also has a high chance of rain, hurricanes, and tornadoes.

Grisibis

[Dr. Kerbal]

7 hours ago, siklidkid said:

Perfect

It means hurricane in Samoan,

[Synonym Toast Crunch]

A tidally locked planet in the habitable zone. The side facing away from its sun is frozen and the side facing its sun is scalding hot, but between these two is a habitable ring of perpetual twilight.

A planet with a very eccentric orbit that brings it into the habitable zone twice during its orbit. For half the year it's too cold and the other half it's too hot. May not be possible for devs to implement changing biomes in game depending on how the game is already set up without doing significant reworking, so I don't have huge hopes for this one.

A planet with a very fast rotation. Day/night cycles are measured under an hour, so you gotta plan your missions carefully or you might find yourself suddenly without solar power.

[Catto]

15 hours ago, Dr. Kerbal said:

It means hurricane in Samoan,

Oh, thats quite  smart.

[ffx]

14 hours ago, Synonym Toast Crunch said:

A planet with a very fast rotation. Day/night cycles are measured under an hour, so you gotta plan your missions carefully or you might find yourself suddenly without solar power.

Basicly Mesbin, pretty uniqe

14 hours ago, Synonym Toast Crunch said:

A tidally locked planet in the habitable zone. The side facing away from its sun is frozen and the side facing its sun is scalding hot, but between these two is a habitable ring of perpetual twilight.

Too generic, will be boring fast
 

 

[PlutoISaPlanet]

We need a planet with a spanish inspired name. Masomenos would be a great name!

[Kerb24]

I have a idea: Kennu. A boring grey rock covered with boulders, and is about the size of Gilly, orbiting another star. (No one said these ideas had to be interesting)

[sturmhauke]

On 7/13/2021 at 8:19 PM, Pthigrivi said:

Twill: This is a moon locked in the L2 lagrange point of a hot jupiter, permanently in its shadow (yes I know there is no n-body, it just has an orbital period that matches the planets orbit around its star.)

That won't work in a patched conic model without a hack specifically for the body at the simulated L2 point. First off, that point is unstable, and no object would stay there for long without station keeping abilities. Secondly, since L2 is further away from the central body, its orbital period is necessarily longer. In an n-body model, the secondary body pulls the L2 object along, speeding up its orbital period, but in a patched conic model all the major celestial bodies are on rails. Only small bodies like asteroids, comets, and spacecraft are calculated dynamically. Without an L2 hack, any such body would be out of sync with the secondary, sometimes trailing behind and sometimes leading.

 

[Pthigrivi]

13 hours ago, sturmhauke said:

That won't work in a patched conic model without a hack specifically for the body at the simulated L2 point. First off, that point is unstable, and no object would stay there for long without station keeping abilities. Secondly, since L2 is further away from the central body, its orbital period is necessarily longer. In an n-body model, the secondary body pulls the L2 object along, speeding up its orbital period, but in a patched conic model all the major celestial bodies are on rails. Only small bodies like asteroids, comets, and spacecraft are calculated dynamically. Without an L2 hack, any such body would be out of sync with the secondary, sometimes trailing behind and sometimes leading.

 

Interesting. Cant you just put it on rails to follow the L2 point?

[sturmhauke]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Interesting. Cant you just put it on rails to follow the L2 point?

That's where the L2 hack would have to come in. "On rails" (or more properly, a Kepler orbit) means that the simulation only considers the primary body (the star in this case) and the orbiting body. Since the L2 point is strictly further away from the primary compared to the secondary (the planet), the simulated L2 object necessarily has a longer orbital period and a lower velocity. This is a consequence of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

The difference in orbit is small, so the drift would happen gradually, but it would still happen. The L2 hack would have to alter the equations, effectively increasing the L2 body's velocity while keeping it on the same orbit, where normally this would boost it into a higher orbit. This would also mess with anything (such as a player spacecraft) attempting to orbit the L2 point.

[Pthigrivi]

9 minutes ago, sturmhauke said:

That's where the L2 hack would have to come in. "On rails" (or more properly, a Kepler orbit) means that the simulation only considers the primary body (the star in this case) and the orbiting body. Since the L2 point is strictly further away from the primary compared to the secondary (the planet), the simulated L2 object necessarily has a longer orbital period and a lower velocity. This is a consequence of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

The difference in orbit is small, so the drift would happen gradually, but it would still happen. The L2 hack would have to alter the equations, effectively increasing the L2 body's velocity while keeping it on the same orbit, where normally this would boost it into a higher orbit. This would also mess with anything (such as a player spacecraft) attempting to orbit the L2 point.

Goootcha. That makes sense. Id been thinking about whether non-nbody lagrange simulation/ approximations were possible for other things like satellites. 

[sturmhauke]

17 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Goootcha. That makes sense. Id been thinking about whether non-nbody lagrange simulation/ approximations were possible for other things like satellites. 

If the orbit is close to circular, L4 and L5 are probably the easiest to fake. L3 is unstable but at least has the same orbit around the central body. Objects at those points are not properly described by Kepler's laws though, so if you fake it by assuming an invisible point mass for objects to orbit the results won't be very realistic. Might be good enough for trojan asteroids or something.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/754/what-is-a-lagrange-point/

[Mitchz95]

On 9/22/2021 at 8:06 PM, sturmhauke said:

That won't work in a patched conic model without a hack specifically for the body at the simulated L2 point. First off, that point is unstable, and no object would stay there for long without station keeping abilities. Secondly, since L2 is further away from the central body, its orbital period is necessarily longer. In an n-body model, the secondary body pulls the L2 object along, speeding up its orbital period, but in a patched conic model all the major celestial bodies are on rails. Only small bodies like asteroids, comets, and spacecraft are calculated dynamically. Without an L2 hack, any such body would be out of sync with the secondary, sometimes trailing behind and sometimes leading.

 

Couldn't they just make it a moon of the gas giant and match its orbital period around the planet to the planet's period around its sun? And maybe make the gas giant low-mass and low-density to justify the L2 point being so close.

Edited October 4, 2021 by Mitchz95

[sturmhauke]

10 hours ago, Mitchz95 said:

Couldn't they just make it a moon of the gas giant and match its orbital period around the planet to the planet's period around its sun? And maybe make the gas giant low-mass and low-density to justify the L2 point being so close.

Again, not without a hack of some sort. Orbital periods are not explicitly set by the devs, they are calculated by using the Kepler equations and related formulae.

Take Jool for instance. Let's say you want a moon at L2. Because Jool is much less massive than Kerbol, L1 and L2 are about the same distance from Jool and we can use the simpler formula (see links below). That distance is 2.967 x 10⁹ m. The problem is that Jool's SOI is only 2.456 x 10⁹ m in radius, placing both points outside it. That means that there cannot be any orbit around Jool at that distance using the patched conic model.

Ignoring the SOI problem for a moment, you still need to reduce Jool's mass as you suggested in order for a moon to orbit once per Jool orbit. "Mini-Jool" works out to about 33% of the mass, with an SOI about 64% of the radius, when compared to regular Jool. Mini-Jool's L1 and L2 are also closer, at about 69% of the distance. That makes such an orbit even more out of reach.

links:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence_(astrodynamics)

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Jool

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbol

Edited October 5, 2021 by sturmhauke

[Maria Sirona]

7 hours ago, sturmhauke said:

not without a hack of some sort

And why won't they do a hack?

[sturmhauke]

6 hours ago, Maria Sirona said:

And why won't they do a hack?

They might. But when you add in a hack to do something that your model doesn't normally support, you increase the potential for weird and hard to fix bugs. Plus, the simulated, hacky Lagrange points won't act like real ones anyway. You need an n-body model for that.

[pandaman]

On 9/19/2021 at 1:38 AM, siklidkid said:

alright, first person to reply with a name idea gets to name this one, cause i have got no ideas

A very thick clouded and dark skied planet that is really hard to land on, which causes the land below to have a dark grey tint. The atmosphere is not yet breathable, but minor terraforming might be able to change that.

This planet also has a high chance of rain, hurricanes, and tornadoes.

Sounds like an English summer .  

So call it Summa.

Edited October 15, 2021 by pandaman

[Klapaucius]

An anomaly.  A super-dense planet with 1/10 the diameter of Gilly and twice the gravity of Eve.    Scientists have been arguing for years about how this is possible. Despite it's small size, it's atmosphere extends up to 100,000 meters.  Almost a gas giant, but not quite.

[TheKrakenHerder]

I feel like necroposting today, how about naming it “Vanto”

[sturmhauke]

This thread isn't old enough for it to be necroposting. Please try again a year from now. 

[Kerb24]

A small planet, about the size of Duna, with a grey rocky surface, also having large ice caps and no atmosphere. Haven't thought of a name yet though. First person to reply with a name gets to name this.

[sturmhauke]

Dunan't

[TheKrakenHerder]

Bizarro-Duna