Please add missing Keplerian Elements to bodies in system view

[Dewin]

I've often seen an interesting combination of planets and wondered if it would ever be close to the right time to try to get an interesting screenshot -- most recently in a system I found featuring trinary gas giants. Having played Kerbal Space Program before, I know a bit about the six orbital elements needed to model a body's object

The system map will show four of them:

• Eccentricity (1.0 is a perfectly circular orbit, with the orbit becoming more elliptical as it reaches 0.0)
• Semi-major Axis (The "long radius" of the orbit)
• Inclination (Angle relative to a reference plane)
• Argument of Periapsis (Orientation of periapsis as related to Longitude of Ascending Node)

We'e missing two:

• Mean anomaly at epoch (The body's location within its orbit as of a fixed reference time)
• Longitude of Ascending Node

Additionally, there isn't a way to get orbital parameters for the barycenter of a binary system.

Being able to take a E system into a model and figure out things like... when planets and moons would be in some sort of alignment.. might be neat.

 

[Mitore]

I don't think they even simulate every aspect of orbits because it would probably be too complex?
Don't start with Kerbal, i play Kerbal and flight mechanics in Kerbal are a biiiiit different. I wish we had deltaV fuel indicator instead of reactor type that can't even tell how long till fuel runs out.

Imagine if we had even fuel consumption there, it would be quite complex to worry about everything. Current hydrogen fuel - energy, xenon - ion propellant? Or maybe some other exotic stuff? ED have some sort of ion thrusters but they have to use some type of fuel right? Or are they those theoretical something that does not require fuel?

 

[Janichsan]

I don't think they even simulate every aspect of orbits because it would probably be too complex?

They do, because the mentioned missing orbital elements are crucial to display the orbits as they currently are displayed in the game. They don't fully simulate gravity (i.e. you can't do slingshot manoeuvres), if you meant that.

 

[Mitore]

They do, because the mentioned missing orbital elements are crucial to display the orbits as they currently are displayed in the game. They don't fully simulate gravity (i.e. you can't do slingshot manoeuvres), if you meant that.

I mean planets in orbits are sometimes in random positions no?

 

[Dewin]

I'm fairly certain they aren't randomized and are just as procedural as everything else. With all 6 parameters, the exact position of everything can be calculated using nothing more than the current time. (When using Keplerian orbital mechanics, fully simulating n-body physics isn't feasible). And planets do actually move (I found one that was moving faster than minimum supercruise speed), though when you enter orbital flight you lock to the planet's reference frame.

Given the efforts already taken with realistic simulation (see: actual star data, Voyager probes, etc.), I can't imagine that these are left out and randomly generated. Besides, if they were, leaving and re-entering a system would change planetary locations and the random state would need to be synced across all players in a system regardless of instance.