Any way to see unexpected gravity assists coming?

[Mitchz95]

I was timewarping through the Jool system, all ready for my Laythe encounter, when suddenly Tylo grabbed my ship with no warning and flung it right into Jool's atmosphere. Since I have Deadly Re-Entry installed, all I could do was watch as my ship disintegrated in the green clouds (which admittedly was kind of awesome) and quickload.

Is there a way to stop those random encounters from happening, or at least see them coming in advance? I'm afraid to timewarp now.

[Frank_Black]

It is because the gravity range of Tylo is too large, and its mass is not small. Very easy to encounter, but troubles follow when you do not want to get into its way. One solution is to get your Jool orbit out of equater, and encounter Lathe from either polar.

[Frank_Black]

Oh if you open timewarp, ship always travels too quickly, hard to stop before encounter other unexpected planets.

[Yasmy]

Tylo is a jerk. Just assume Tylo will cause problems if you sneeze in its general neighborhood, or try to sneak past when it isn't looking.

I assume HarvesteR will continue to improve the conic patch solver. It's pretty good already, but this is one of its known weaknesses.

It is a fairly hard problem to predict the next N SOI changes every frame or physics update.

I'd love to see a modder take a crack at this problem. It's a great toy problem to play around with.

[Bearsh]

Tylo as all the others have said is a jerk, Best i could say is to try and go through with your burn or orbit when tylo isn't in capturing range, Not sure if thats possible. I don't know/remember how tylo orbits. If it's possible you could also try to get to your destination planet on the other side, Where you'll go pass laythe and jool and not tylo, Making it better so you can not have to worry about tylo. But that's the best i could do, I'm sure HarvesteR Will work on this, Until then that's all i can say. Maybe try to get into an orbit around tylo then from tylo go to your destination planet, Other than that i don't know, Hope i helped!

[FenrirWolf]

Sometimes you have to just accept Tylo's help whether you wanted it to begin with or not. While you're far out in Jool's SoI you have a good amount of time to try making a gravity assist out of the unwelcome encounter.

[Kasuha]

There's a bug in KSP trajectory evaluation code, causing it to not see SOI intersects under certain (unclear) conditions. At present the only workaround is to make quicksaves and store enough of them so you can return and change the trajectory if such thing happens.

I have a save where the ship is on collision course with Tylo and the game does not see that until the ship breaks into Tylo's SOI.

It does not depend on whether you timewarp or not.

[FREEFALL1984]

I had a similiar issue, I sent a landing probe and 2 mini landers into the jool system, hoping to land on laythe with my big probe and send the little probes to land on bop and pol, anyway I got my big probe onto Laythe and left my little probes in a reasonably stable eccentric orbit while I caught my next duna window, by the time my manned lander made it half way to duna my mini probes where on a kerbol escape trajectory, I didn't see exactly what happened, but it seems that tylo may of played a part.

[bsalis]

Happens all the time...

[RW-1]

"when suddenly Tylo grabbed my ship with no warning and flung it right into Jool's atmosphere."

Bad Tylo, Bad !

[Bearsh]

"when suddenly Tylo grabbed my ship with no warning and flung it right into Jool's atmosphere."

Bad Tylo, Bad !

Haha, That's going on my 2nd comment of the year award.

[Kasuha]

Actually the only way I know to avoid unexpected Tylo slingshot is to plan for an expected one.

Tylo slingshot is very good to slow down in Jool system, fix your inclination and prepare approach to whatever moon you plan to visit for almost zero dv.

[That guy who builds stuff]

Going of on a tangent a bit: It'd be nice to have something like this that calculates encounters. Since tylo's (or any bodies) position at a given time is constant in any save you can calculate what it's position will be solely off the global time+time to encounter the parent body.

Then it's just a matter of tweaking your entry so it's on the other side.