Talk:Kerbol System

I don't want to make any changes myself because I'm not very involved in this wiki. But I just wanted to point out that I believe the following statement in the first paragraph is somewhat inaccurate: "Because the sphere of influence of Kerbol is infinite it is impossible to escape the system."

First, I believe it is possible to reach an escape velocity from the Kerbol system: v = √[G M / r], where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of Kerbol and all planets/moons, and r is the starting distance from Kerbol system's center of mass (probably more or less equal to Kerbin's orbital distance). You can check me on this, but I think it's possible to reach this speed. That implies that it is possible to escape the system.

Second, I suppose it is a question of defining when you have LEFT the system... You can never escape the pull of Kerbol's gravity, but this has nothing to do with whether or not you can (or have) escaped it. The influence of gravity from ALL objects is infinite. The fact that you are under the gravitational influence of Kerbol is irrelevant. In the real world, we have a number of phenomena which give us means to define the boundary of the solar system. In KSP we don't... But after traveling to the edges of what the programming allows with an escape velocity I think qualifies as having left the system.

The "real" reason of course that you can't escape the Kerbol system is programming. You can only go so far before you reach program limits. But in any case, the sentence is misleading. Even if you disagree about how to define whether we can reach distance "outside" the Kerbol system and even if you can prove that an escape velocity is unreachable, it is not correct to state that one cannot escape it "because the sphere of influence of Kerbol is infinite." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jofwu (talk • contribs)

Interesting point. Now maybe you can escape Kerbol (when you reach escape velocity of Kerbol) but do you leave the Kerbol System then? Of course in real life everything gets gravitationally attracted to eachother. But there is still a real world sphere of influence which is afaik finite for all objects. Wikipedia only determine the SOI for planets and moons, but shouldn't this also work for the Sun in a larger context?

And I have to do calculations, but do you leave other planets/moons in KSP, as soon as you reach escape velocity? Or are you outside the SoI already when you are slower than escape velocity? Or you can't link SoI radius and escape velocity?

Also on another note, you can't enter another sphere of influence (of the Milky Way equivalent, or the nearby star) so you are always bound to Kerbol. Maybe only the word “escape” should be replaces as it is shouldn't be meant literally in terms of escape velocity but more like “leaving”.

Is shouldn't be a problem with the programming. You could define a finite SOI for Kerbol and as soon as you are outside, you don't get deaccelerated by it. — xZise [talk] 05:07, 11 September 2013 (CDT)

Radius or Diameter

At first... sorry for my bad english ;)

In the first Graphic under the Planets is the label of the diameter. But in the text of kerbal for example it says it has a equatorial radius of 600 km... then the diameter has to be 1200 km... or am i wrong?

i hope you understand what i am meaning ^^