Ion Drives

[davidpsummers]

You need some way to allow you to leave ion drives running and/or warp with them. Maybe with a simple shut-off timer for those who don't have Kerbal Alarm Clock.

I suspect that this may run into some issues for physical vs. non-physical warp. It would be worth it to do some short cut on this, because otherwise they are too limited to be of any real potential. Maybe they just calculate a new orbit when you switch back to them without worry about the details.

[dewin]

Honestly, having run into this problem myself even with some LV-N powered craft, I think that there needs to be some sort of way to handle extremely long burns better myself. Something's wrong if I have to go back and add engines to a craft simply because I don't want to wait 5 real minutes for a burn (at 4x physwarp)

Maybe adding higher levels of physwarp that are only enabled outside of atmosphere is an option. Spacecraft with very low TWR don't tend to be experiencing drastic forces during their burns anyways.

I almost wonder if a sort of pseudo-time-dilation could fix this... which I'll post as it's own suggestion because it's a bit more complicated and affects way more than just Ion Drives.

[Sky_walker]

Alt + . doesn't work?

(it's the force-time-warp command, sorry, never used Ions, so I can't tell if it works or not)

[dryer_lint]

Alt + . doesn't work?

(it's the force-time-warp command, sorry, never used Ions, so I can't tell if it works or not)

It does work, but even with 4x warp, it still takes forever.

[davidpsummers]

Alt + . doesn't work?

(it's the force-time-warp command, sorry, never used Ions, so I can't tell if it works or not)

It only gives you up to 4x. (In my test "sundiver" mission, the burn was 3 hours.) And the indicator was going yellow and red, so I wasn't sure how badly the computer was keeping up. (Though, like I said, a modest error would have been acceptable if I had known that was all I was getting, though even so the warp wouldn't be high enough).

[davidpsummers]

As I read my initial note, it wasn't clear that switching away from them, in addition to higher warp, is desirable. Though, in the end, when you switch away you will want to warp other missions, so how to handle warp is still the issue? Again, my suggestion is just do a special short cut in the calculations for the ion drive that lets this happen.

[Strikerklm96]

There are relatively simple mathematics that they could implement to fast forward 10 minutes, while the thrust is on, and find the new position and velocity. And as long as the projected positions never fell within an atmosphere, or too close to other bodies, and didn't change SOI, there shouldn't be any problems. So you could do this shortcut, and it would either ask you how long you wanted it to run, or tell you it couldn't for some reason, like an atmosphere or projected SOI change. Then, it would either jump to do the new time, or it could fast forward to that new time.

Edited July 19, 2014 by Strikerklm96