encounters sometimes unstable

[lammatt]

sometimes i get and encounter that is very unstable

it flicker between yes and not at light speed

it happens last night when i flew to Minmus for a station building mission; the encounter was very low already (~10km) and the path alternates between a cyan (not encountering) and a cyan-orange-purple (encountering) at a very high frequency to a point i couldnt even read the values off the nodes to do any path correction

while most of the time the game gives me an SOI change as i wish when the ship got there; sometimes it didnt: usually its when i time warp

what is it that make my orbit projections flickers?

Edited July 26, 2013 by lammatt

[GoDores]

Floating-point errors. What I do is once I get my encounter, I go into time warp, which puts the ship on rails and locks in the encounter. If it's not where I want, I go out of warp, let it bounce around, and try locking in again. Repeat until you get the encounter you want, and then stay in warp until the SOI change (I usually back down to 5x warp for the shift to avoid blowing past my encounter).

The magnitude of the errors decreases as you get closer, so if you can't get the encounter you want, warp closer to the encounter and make adjustments there.

[Kimberly]

In my experience, warping doesn't always lock in your encounter--I've seen my encounter disappear while in warp, and I had to drop out of warp to make adjustments.

[painking]

It's the mind-warping power of maths at work, it's usually safe to err on the side of "it's an encounter". If not usually a small burn of a few m/s in the appropriate direction should get encounter.

[Tic-Tac]

Having the same issue, sometimes the encounter isn't even shown, I just have an elliptical trajectory, but once I get close the SOI changes...

[ComradeGoat]

Seen this a lot. If you're gonna be close enough anyway, just drop out of time warp and the game will figure it out and put you in the right SOI.

[Taki117]

Also, if you have an sub-optimal encounter you can just wait until the SoI change to make course adjustments to avoid losing your encounter.