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Nivekk / KOS

Fully programmable autopilot mod for KSP.
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Add inclination as flight statistic? #37

Open tambo1 opened 11 years ago

tambo1 commented 11 years ago

Would be nice to have this as a flight statistic and, if possible, be able to bind it to target. I guess this might go with adding AN and DN as an orbital geometry value?

Dunbaratu commented 11 years ago

In principle if we could get the periapsis and apoapsis as 3-d coordinates instead of just as altitudes then the inclination could be derived fairly quickly from that.

Rauthskegg commented 10 years ago

Unless the major axis is perpendicular to the axis of inclination, you won't get any useful information about the orbital inclination from the positions of the apoapsis and periapsis. In the case that the major axis and axis of inclination are parallel, the inclination of the major axis will always be 0, regardless of what the orbital inclination is.

There are ways of calculating inclination using GEOPOSITION or LATITUDE and LONGITUDE, but they all require traveling through a significant fraction of an orbit (preferably near the ascending or descending nodes) and make it difficult and time consuming to make corrections.

I second the idea of making the inclination available in kOS, and would like to expand the idea to making it available for target orbits as well, to help with rendezvous.

Dunbaratu commented 10 years ago

Unstated in my claim that you could obtain it is the fact that you can already obtain your position relative to the origin (center of body) indirectly from from your UP vector -and your velocity vector is known as well.. Apiopsis plus Periopsis plus the information the mod already gives you would let you work it out if Apiopsis and Periopsis told you everything about them and not just their altitudes like they do now..

But at any rate, more data from the underlying system being exposed is better.