How to move your LAN

[DreidenKisada]

I saw a bit on braid orbits. While I understand what they're doing and how it's doing it, I don't understand how to actually move my LAN. Can someone please help?

Edited June 3, 2013 by DreidenKisada

[tavert]

You change LAN most effectively by burning normal while at high latitudes, ideally at one of the poles if your inclination is 90 degrees.

[Akane]

There isn't a way to change it in KSP as Kerbin is a perfectly round object with a perfectly round gravity well. In real life, you could be patient and wait for equatorial bulge to cause nodal precession, but in KSP the only ways to affect LAN is either:

- timing your launch into your inclination

- launching into equatorial and burning normal, or

- waiting for your AN/DN relative to the equator and burn normal to equatorial, and then burning out of equatorial into the desired inclination at the desired LAN

[DreidenKisada]

Thanks! Is LAN based on Kerbal's longitude system? I thought it was referenced outside of the planet.

[Akane]

LAN can be ecliptic [sun's rotation] or equatorial [parent body's rotation]. In KSP, they're the same, thankfully. There's a lot of headache in figuring how to launch to a different planet whose inclination is different, but it's only worse when your launch plane is not with the ecliptic. In KSP, you can reasonably, with timing, launch, go east, keep burning, and land on the moon no problem, or with some minor course corrections any other body. This is because your space center is on the equator so you'll launch into equatorial, and because the ecliptic equals the equator, right into the ecliptic. But Kennedy, Baikonur, Tanegashima, etc? Good luck. There's a reason why launch windows are so narrow, after all. The alignment has to be perfect just to enter a trajectory you can clean up with mid-flight course correction.

Edited June 3, 2013 by Akane

[DreidenKisada]

Excelent, that all makes sense now. You're the best.