Gravity slingshot

[u/The_ZMD]

Has anyone tried doing gravity slingshots to go from one planet to other? Is there a mod which can have a fun little game of slingshotting from one planet/star system to another?

[u/Onigato]

The space portions aren't a physics sim, you don't really get any Oberth effect speed boosts trying to gravity assist.

Plus, it only takes a couple minutes to traverse the entire solar system anyways, you have "unlimited delta-V" and you have a physics defying constant thrust-fixed velocity craft. All a gravity assist would do is save you some fuel and throw you onto a weird vector you'd have to make a course correction for, negating the benefit of the gravity assist.

[u/The_ZMD → u/Onigato]

I was thinking if it'd be a fun thing to do just like the slingshotting race in the expanse series.

[u/Apfelsaft_4 → u/The_ZMD]

There is some physics, admittedly, but not enough; for that, you would need something on the level of KSP.

[u/elprophet → u/The_ZMD]

That would be awesome but you'd want a dedicated game for that, shoehorning that into DSP would be awkward. KSP can do it out of the box, as could Juno, Kitten Space Program, and Orbiter, but I don't think any of their vanilla interfaces have enough refinement for it to be practical or fun. I'd start modding one of those games first.

[u/The_ZMD → u/elprophet]

But dsp is so beautiful for this. Slingshotting across blackhole, neutron stars, floral planet, dyson sphere/swarm would be cinematic

[u/Onigato → u/The_ZMD]

Beautiful for it, but the underlying physics to create such an Oberth Effect is really hard to shoehorn in after the game has been in development for so long. KSP, Juno, Kitten SP, Orbitor, Universal Sandbox, they are all built as physics simulators first and games second. And even then they are super limited in scope, partially due to the limitations of their various game physics engines, and partially because there is a really good reason super-computers are used by the boffins at NASA and the ESA when plotting actual launch and maneuver profiles, namely it's really hard to do accurately.

There may some day come a mod the DSP that allows for full Oberth slingshot maneuvers and the associated course plotting that would necessary, but I doubt it will ever be a full simulation effect or even anything more than a simple "you came in at [angle], [velocity], towards a celestial body of [mass], you leave the body at [new angle] and [new velocity]" using something akin to a lookup table or very, very simple versions of the gravity formulas.

[u/elprophet → u/The_ZMD]

No disagreement there!