Why "Kerbal Time"?

[tstehler1]

Alright, I finally understand everything now. But you would think they could at least make a year be exactly 426 days... Then I get less OCD breakdowns when the sunrise/sunset time is off

[FenrirWolf]

Eh, we don't get a real 365-day year on our planet either. Some slippage is only natural but there ought to be some way to account for the spare change as it accumulates.

[DMagic]

I dont see how that works when Moho and other planets have a completely different orbital cycle. Even though kerbin will be in the exact same position moho will have moved relative to kerbin.

It's not about lining up a launch window to rendezvous with Moho, it's about launching at the ascending/descending node between Kerbin orbit and Moho orbit. If you do this right you can launch into a high inclination (20^o or so), burn retrograde with respect to the sun, and come out of Kerbin orbit within a degree or so of Moho's inclination. The actual rendezvous is easier to setup later, more like an orbital rendezvous for docking, but you save the hassle of having to make a huge inclination change while in orbit. I'm not sure what the actual delta-v savings of launching like this are, but I've done it many times, and I think it's the simplest way to get to Moho. Of course it doesn't really matter so much for other planets, but it's still useful.

[Guest]

To launch to Moho, Dres and Eeloo many people like to launch when you're at AN/DN

Ah, well, with a little math you can do the same with Earth time, but whatever floats your boat I guess.

[FenrirWolf]

It's not about lining up a launch window to rendezvous with Moho, it's about launching at the ascending/descending node between Kerbin orbit and Moho orbit. If you do this right you can launch into a high inclination (20^o or so), burn retrograde with respect to the sun, and come out of Kerbin orbit within a degree or so of Moho's inclination. The actual rendezvous is easier to setup later, more like an orbital rendezvous for docking, but you save the hassle of having to make a huge inclination change while in orbit. I'm not sure what the actual delta-v savings of launching like this are, but I've done it many times, and I think it's the simplest way to get to Moho. Of course it doesn't really matter so much for other planets, but it's still useful.

I can see this working well. One thing I noticed on my recent (and first) mission to Dres is that since Dres' orbit is so slow compared to Kerbin, the planet will have gone a fair distance around its orbit by the time you transfer down to it, and perhaps will have made more than one lap around the Sun if you take a sufficiently slow route. This makes it so that, given the same departure time from Dres, small variations in your phase angle and speed of departure can make the difference between reaching Kerbin's orbit right on target, or finding that it's on the wrong end of the Sun by the time you get there.

I haven't tried going to Moho in a long time but I'll bet the same principle applies. Wait until Kerbin is in phase with the AN or DN then mess with your node until you generate an encounter. It should be doable without an overly large expenditure of delta-v compared to waiting for the textbook phase angle.

[katateochi]

Does any one know if the different time settings have an effect on the calculations for life support mods (TAC in particular).

[Guest]

Does any one know if the different time settings have an effect on the calculations for life support mods (TAC in particular).

Should be none because you'd operate on the UT (seconds from game start), not the human-readable time.

[katateochi]

Should be none because you'd operate on the UT (seconds from game start), not the human-readable time.

excellent, that's what I was hoping. Thanks regex!

[Godot]

I can confirm that ... the standard 80 day LS module should give you 320 Kerbal days of supplies

[Epthelyn]

Does any one know if the different time settings have an effect on the calculations for life support mods (TAC in particular).

Just confirming that this is the case.

The most notable example I have currently running is KER; all the displays are in 'Earth' time but the game is running in Kerbal time. Since I've got used to how long it takes for a year to pass at warp and suchlike it's nice to have the 'real time' display available, but for general gameplay it's kinda fun to know how many times Kerbin has orbited the Sun since the start of your savefile

The only minor inconvenience is that I often forget that 1d 2h 32m actually means 8h 32m. Thankfully Kerbal Alarm Clock prevents me from skipping past nodes