Brachistochrone Transfer Feature
Dedalous opened this issue · 5 comments
It would be nice to see an implementation of the Brachistochrone transfer profile(burn to the midpoint, flip, and decelerate) for those of us not willing to wait for a low energy transfer window, or who have excess Delta-V on their ridiculous interplanetary craft.
This would probably require time warp while under acceleration to be practical, which isn't possible yet... Right?
It would be an awesome feature though :)
The only way I could see it requiring acceleration under warp, would be if you had a torch ship, something capable of roughly 1g acceleration for days on end. Otherwise, you accelerate directly at the target(roughly. Accounting for its orbit and time to intercept) until you leave kerbin soi. Coast, just like the current hohmann transfer profile, flip, then decelerate. It's essentially just a higher energy Hofmann, with the option to burn 100% of the time if you have the delta v, and without needing to wait for a transfer window. NASA uses them sometimes when the cost is justified. Cause you can't always wait for a least fuel intercept.
Maybe as a partial implementation, we could have a high energy transfer option to schedule a burn of X∆V for target intercept. For example, let's say we could get there for 700∆V, but our boost stage has 3000∆V, we could burn all of it and intercept with less transit time. Obviously we'd need to be mindful of what it'd take to slow down when we get there, but leave that on us, considering we already have the tools to manage that.
👍 for allowing transfer at higher ∆v. I like @Aquilux's idea of allowing a 'maximum ∆v spend' option.
Most likely need support from another mod which added support for continuous thrust while under warp. The math required though is going to be a bit above the average KSP modder. That mod is really going to need to solve this problem in order to implement continuous thrust on rails. I know how to do that, but I wouldn't but it into MechJeb, I'd have that other mod solve this problem. I think I'm therefore going to close this issue.
I do need to think about how to cleanup all the code I'm writing for #1061 and make it accessible so that other modders could use it, or so that I could write a constant-thrust mod.