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Comment by janzer | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever combined KSP with the coding instruction using either kOS[1] or kRPC[2]?

1. https://ksp-kos.github.io/KOS_DOC/ 2. https://krpc.github.io/krpc/

I relied on Mechjeb too much in my game, so I did a run using KRPC and built my own autopilot features with it. It was a lot of fun, and I would recommend it.

I thought it would be nice to have actual mission planning in game for things like complex maneuvers, orbital slingshots, Lagrange point orbits, and the like.

Then launch countdowns, maps, exact timed burns that you'd still have to do manually but you could seemingly do so much more.

Or maybe this kind of thing already exists with mods.

Mechjeb does a lot of automation for complex maneuvers like planetary transfers, ascent autopilot, target interception, etc.. You can even do a porkchop plot for interplanetary transfer. but lagrange points are not possible in KSP because of the Sphere of Influence Model. and orbital slingshots are not included, I assume because they require an intense bruteforce calculation.

Aha ok! Ambition reignited, it's not that it's trivial but it's very possible to simulate these things and there are plenty of valid shortcuts. The "BMW" astrodynamics books I learned a large chunk of it from was published in 1971. "Sphere of influence" is a lot more "things you have to do with pen and paper" than things you're forced to do with modern computers.

There’s a KSP mod called Principia which does some kind of n-body simulation in which Lagrange points do exist iirc.

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