thin atmospheres - any plans for adding some?

[thereaverofdarkness]

I've previously discussed making Duna and Eve atmospheres much more different from Kerbin and more like Mars and Venus, but I've been told that atmospheres thicker than Eve's cause weird glitches, and thinner than Duna's are too difficult to use for aerobraking if you're an amateur astronaut. That's all well and good, but we know that thinner atmospheres are well-simulated in KSP, and they are common throughout the real-life solar system. Perhaps Duna could remain as it is, but it would be nice for some of the other bodies to have trace atmospheres, just to spice up the game a bit. It could be neat for, say, Tylo to have an atmosphere like 0.1% as thick as Kerbin's. It won't slow you much on a vertical descent, but if you make a few low passes it could make landing slightly easier. Also, it might just give the horizon a cool glow.

Thoughts?

Edited August 15, 2014 by thereaverofdarkness

[dryer_lint]

Agreed, I would like to see Tylo have a thin atmosphere. I want to see that sinister grey glow on the horizon

[chaos_forge]

Moho used to have a thin super-heated atmosphere, it might be cool to see it back . . .

[astropapi1]

Moho used to have a thin super-heated atmosphere, it might be cool to see it back . . .

Ugh, tell me about it.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Moho used to have a thin super-heated atmosphere, it might be cool to see it back . . .

That sounds really cool! Any idea why they took it out?

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It'd be neat if Tylo's atmosphere were oxygen (similar to Ganymede) so that if you got a plane going fast enough, it could gather enough air from intakes to turn its engines on. Wouldn't be practical, but that never stopped anyone.

[Random Tank]

To be fair Eve and Duna's atmosphere's are quite different to Kerbin's, Eve is 5x thicker, Duna is 5x thinner; it makes a massive difference... And that's not mentioning Jool! Jool's Atmo is incredibly thick at 15 atm, I just wish there was more reason to actually go to Jool itself...

I do agree though, some more atmospheres would be great, I'd love Moho's back, it would make it more interesting; You've already got a few planets that are easy aerobrakers, and Moho you usually can't... This would just mean if you wanted to aerobrake, watch out for the ground! Something like Kopernicus would be cool too (It's a planet with Mars' terrain, Duna's size and Gravity, and Laythe's atmo; great fun to fly on, and ridiculously easy to land on!)

[tntristan12]

That sounds really cool! Any idea why they took it out?

My guess would be physical realism. A planet that close to its host star (i.e. Mercury) would probably have had its atmosphere stripped by solar winds. I would like to see more planets with atmospheres. Perhaps even just one moon (Titan analogue anyone?)

[thereaverofdarkness]

I heard a rumor that there was eventually going to be a moon with a fairly thick atmosphere, but with so low a scale height and so high mountains that some would actually stick completely out of the atmosphere. I hope that gets made at some point. It would be awesome to make vacuum landings on the mountains, then cannonball-parachute down into the valleys. You could save fuel getting back up the mountainside with a crawler-hopper that rolls up as high as it can, then rockets the rest of the way up. If you're really adept, you could make small rocket jumps to breach gaps in navigable terrain, and perhaps make it up into the upper atmosphere or even to the mountaintop without burning much fuel.

I thought it would be neat to have a very large planet with a thin atmosphere but with a large scale height, so it would take a while to get past it. That would give you more time to use it for slowing on entry, though could make takeoff significantly more expensive. 10kpa should be plenty. Large planets at all would be nice, since currently Eve is the biggest one you can land on, and it's barely bigger than Kerbin.