Latest revision as of 07:52, 21 May 2016

Several missions in this campaign require targeting specific orbital inclinations. Is it possible to see exactly what inclination a vessel is at? Hitting a specific inclination, to two decimal places no less, seems pretty tricky, especially without SAS.

Less specifically, the terminology used definitely ramps up in this campaign (polar orbits, sun synchronous orbits, Molniya orbits, sidereal time). The missions for polar and sun synchronous orbits describe them pretty well, but Molniya orbit and "1/2 sidereal day" are less clear. ~tacocritic (sign talk pages)

Without a telemetry addon (ie, mechjeb, engineer, etc) there is no in-game readout of inclination. This can be gotten around in orbit of Kerbin however, since the Mun has exactly 0° inclination you can just target that and see your relative (in this case, also absolute) inclination. That challenge is requesting a 'classic' Russian orbit (Molniya), and could be redefined more simply (define periapsis, apoapsis, and inclination). Its not too hard to hit 1 decimal place in inclination if you are light on the throttle/ use RCS, but 2 decimals isn't even shown. A note along the lines of "feel free to round these numbers to whatever you feel comfortable completing" would be reasonable. SGCam (talk) 07:34, 11 August 2014 (CDT)

I was reading up on sun-synchronous orbits on Wikipedia to figure out what altitude I needed for the SpySat mission, and I found out the parameters are entirely based on the oblateness of the planet, and that it's not possible for planets that are too spherical (Kerbin is spherical). For Earth, you'd need an altitude that gives you a 1:7 to 1:16 synchronous orbit, and its inclination is a function of how oblate the planet is. I think the best bet would be to use the examples for Earth. The 1:7 synchronous orbit would be the easiest, but to get within 10 degrees of your target after one day, you'd need to be within 2.5 km of the desired altitude, or less than 1% error. This seems a bit much for a player who hasn't tried a moon landing yet.

tl;dr The current article is wrong, it would be impossible in real life, the correct way would be too difficult, and it's kind of silly anyway to make a spy satellite look like a camera so I propose we get rid of this mission. --Electrollama (talk) 16:09, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Campaign Formatting

I believe this page should be the standard formatting template for the all the Campaign mission pages. If you'd like to help with formatting, apply this page's layout to the other campaigns. This is a surprising amount of work, so any help is greatly appreciated. If you'd like to make changes to the standard format, please discuss here. --Electrollama (talk) 07:52, 21 May 2016 (UTC)