Orbital Bliss Challenge

Wondering if anyone has ever completed an entire orbit with Auto-assist off? Are there steps to insure a complete orbit or multitude of orbits with no flight assist? If not, who will be the first to complete? :yum:

Don’t think I got all the way around, but it’s not too hard. You just have to align your heading with the orbital marker while ensuring your relative velocity to the planets centre stays at zero. You know the orbit is stable when the relative velocity doesn’t change. However there is air resistance that will slow you down causing you to fall towards the planet (your relative velocity to the planet will increase slowly at first but it will speed up), so the further away from the planet you are the more orbits you can complete without having to correct the orbit, but also the further you are, the longer it will take to complete an orbit (the further you go from the planet, not only does orbital speed decrease, but the distance to travel around the planet increases greatly).

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a time-lapse might be nice

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Additionally, by switching off power as you turn you may even be able to keep the same view.

Now that atmospheric drag is quite low, it would be the perfect time to take such a timelapse even from low orbits.

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Not sure but I think if you turn off auto flight assist you can turn anyway you like without turning power off. But as yet I still haven’t managed to achieve a perfect orbit that would last an entire rotation…:disappointed:

With flight assist off you will still maintain a static orientation. By turning power off while changing orientation you will maintain that movement so that you can compensate for the curvature of the planet. It’d be very tricky to get the pan just right for an entire orbit.

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Thanks guys, didn’t know that. I will power it down from now on. :grin: