Celestial Bodies and SOI

[drakesdoom]

1. Is it possible to add Celestial Bodies and/or an SOI with a mod?

2. Has anyone done this before?

3. Can the above be in impossible orbits? i.e. an orbital velocity higher or lower than what would be required to maintain that orbit.

4. Does an SOI have to be a sphere?

[ummwut]

1. If the game itself can add them in when it generates the planetarium, so can we.

2. To my knowledge, someone managed to move the Mun closer to Kerbin, but thats it.

3. Outside of the main body's SOI? Doubtful. Then it would be orbiting the sun instead. That's just how orbits work.

4. Yes. There's no other way for gravity to behave. If we made the SOI a cube, patched conics would be too chaotic.

[drakesdoom]

What if I wanted to add a body orbiting kerbin in a stable orbit but have it move through that orbit faster or slower than it would naturally. Almost as if it was under thrust, but still be on rails?

[tstehler1]

Would it be possible to create an entirely new star, and/or an entirely new solar system? O.o

[EndlessWaves]

1 & 2: Yes, you can simply clone a planet in one line of code to fulfill those criteria. Changing the surface of a planet is a more complicated proposition but likely to be possible once someone gets the time to experiment with the PQSMod system.

3: Hyperedit, which can alter planetary orbits, requires orbital parameters so I would suspect speed drops out at the end and can't be set (which would make sense, as you only have a constant speed if you're in a perfectly circular orbit).

4. I can't see any provision for changing the shape, it's specified as a single scalar and there's no enums attached to CelestialBody offering shape options.