User talk:OhioBob

Scale heights

Hi there, I'm wondering if you've made a mistake in changing the "scale height" in Duna/Param, Laythe/Param, and Jool/Param. This has had the consequence of producing what I believe to be highly invalid atmospheric heights in Template:Infobox/Body, used on all of the celestial body pages, and a table on Science. The formula used there is "ln(1e-6) * -scale_height". Is your change erroneous, or is the formula used to calculate the atmospheric height incorrect? I'm tempted to quickly revert your changes, but hoping you'll spot this message quickly and get a chance to look at it yourself, in case there's good reason for the change. It's not a radius vs. diameter error, is it, or something like that? --Murph (talk) 07:13, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Ok, so I've thought a little more on this. Since you didn't give any edit summary, it's impossible for me to know why you changed the numbers for scale height. It seems to me that the number which is most important to average players of the game is the atmosphere height, and that most probably won't care about the scale height. In that regard, the old numbers look like they are more "correct" than the new ones. I don't know about Jool and Laythe, but Duna's atmosphere always started around 41–42km, which matches the old numbers. Accordingly, I'm going to revert your 3 changes to the scale heights, under the assumption that there's some sort of error with them, and that the old numbers are better for now.

If the problem is actually with the way the wiki's infobox is calculating the atmospheric height, I'd be quite happy to help with any changes needed to the wiki's templates and scripting.

Here are the numbers for ease of reference, with atmosphere height calculated using the "ln(1e-6) * -scale" formula. Old is before your change. New is what you changed it to.

Body	Game Tracking Station	Old		New
		Scale	Atmosphere	Scale	Atmosphere
Duna	50,000m	3000	41 447m	6000	82 893m
Jool	200,000m	10000	138 155m	30000	414 465m
Laythe	50,000m	4000	55 262m	8000	110 524m

--Murph (talk) 08:56, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Note that Squad might have change these values but unfortunately I don't know how to access them without starting KSP and manually doing the tests (I don't trust the infobox ingame as the numbers are at least rounded or worse (aka manually added so that they can get out of sync)). Anyway if someone has the capability of testing it I guess three data points are interesting: The pressure at the surface, the pressure inside the atmosphere for a given altitude and the border at which space starts. From the first two we should be able to determine the scale height and from the latter we could verify that it's currently still a relative border (the border is not at X atm but at X*surface pressure). — xZise [talk] 22:14, 16 May 2015 (UTC)