Kerbal Space Program - Savefile Editing & Orbital Parameters Tutorial (Fixed)
Why Arqade Stack Exchange recommends it
Gaming Stack Exchange (Arqade) answerers point people to it when explaining how to hand-edit KSP save files to set exact or stable orbits such as geosynchronous ones.
Recommended by 4 people across 3 different months, 2013 to 2021.
What it is
A 2012 Kerbal Space Program tutorial by Scott Manley showing how to edit the game's save file to set orbital parameters directly. He uses it to explain terms like semi-major axis, eccentricity and inclination and to show the effect of changing them. The video was re-uploaded to fix flickering.
What people said
Recommends koko · 2013-08 · Arqade Stack Exchange · on “Kerbin Stationary Orbit”
Even a 0,1 m/s difference in speed makes a difference over the years. The only way to ensure that they stay in their position is to fiddle with their orbits in the save game file. Note that this only works as long the satellites remain in their on rails-simulation , so you can't directly control them by using the control center. Otherwise they will always drift. You might find these links helpful, there are lots of tutorials how to do this: Scott Manley's video tutorial [this video] Orbits in KSP wiki [LINK]
Recommends MBraedley · 2014-01 · Arqade Stack Exchange · on “A way to practice certain stages?”
There are a few things that you can do to reduce the cost of screwing up. The first thing to do is to quicksave often (defaults to F5 , load the last quicksave by holding F9 ). This means that you can get your ship into Kerbal orbit (quicksave), do your transfer burn (quicksave), do your Munar injection burn (quicksave), and then your deorbit burn (quicksave) without worrying about having to redo the entire mission. If you want to practice landing, then just try to land, and then load the last quicksave, which should be just after your deorbit burn. Note that there is only a single quicksave available per save, and if you load it, and it's too old, you're basically stuck with it, unless you
Recommends Mołot · 2014-01 · Arqade Stack Exchange · on “Editing Kerbal Space Program save files for KSO”
The part most interesting for you is: lat = -0.0708559885838229 lon = -97.2394889192516 alt = 2917405.7211654 To have a stable geosynchronous orbit, you need to set latitude to 0, so you are over equator. To obtain longitude, simply launch another craft, and keep it in KSC. Read lon from it's save. Proper altitude can be read from Kerbin entry at wiki [LINK] . Currently it's 2,868.75 km - you are a bit too high, so update accordingly. Now to the orbit part, you want: ECC = 0 for exactly round orbit. Also, to avoid confusing your game, you need to set average of periapsis and apoapsis to your new-current altitude. However, when we take into account Kerbin radius, it gets 3 468.75 km, due to K
Recommends Mołot · 2014-01 · Arqade Stack Exchange · on “Editing Kerbal Space Program save files for KSO”
It was all explained here: [this video] - can't acces youtube now, so I'll leave it to you to watch and listen and write an answer here ;) But as @Frank say, a little bit of propulsion is good. Or a docking port so you can attach a tugboat. Last but not least MechJeb [LINK] is great for cheat-less precision.
Recommends Trish · 2021-02 · Arqade Stack Exchange · on “Vessels escaping host bodies over time”
That is most likely stemming from floating-point precision [LINK] . Whenever you load a vessel, the path gets loaded with the maximum precision from the file. However, the path data it handles on an active vessel is in a different coordinate system. When saving the vessel to inactive or swapping to time-warp, those coordinates get converted again, and somewhere at the end one of the decimals can get truncated. The more often a vessel is loaded, the more the error accumulates - and it happens at least once for each vessel. The tiny error created when unfocusing the craft already can throw off the path enormously over the course of decades. This error was much worse before they rewrote much of