lowest solar orbit

[kahlzun]

hey gang, new challenge here:

get a rocket in a circular orbit around The Sun (Kol) as low as you can get.

This gets increasingly difficult at lower orbits due to insane high dV required..

[MaxBrains]

I was thinking of doing this, but then I did some math and figured out that it's actually impossible to attain a really low orbit around the sun.

Mathematically speaking, there is an absolute theoretical minimum circular orbit that is possible. We could arrive at this answer, first, by calculating the highest possible dV that any spacecraft in KSP can ever attain. Because all fuel tanks carry 9 times as much fuel as their own dry mass, and the highest possible Isp using the nuclear engine is 800s, the limit as you keep adding more and more fuel tanks ad infinitum using the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation is 800 × 9.81 × ln(9), or 17243.8m/s. You could set this dV equal to the dV required to make a transfer to the lowest possible orbit and solve it, but that's some hard math and I haven't been able to do it yet.

[Night_Miner]

.....

Huh?

[Dilin]

The closest you can get to the sun is 4000 meters, so the real challenge is getting there and not any closer than 4000m

[AncientAstronaut]

I believe Kosmo-not found that he could orbit under 2 kilometers before blowing up at 1km.