Krafpy
Feature request: porkchop plot
Same as with TWP, it would be nice to be able to visualize a porkchop plot for the selected timeframe and be able to select transfer windows that are not optimal instead of having to check a lot of small time intervals one at a time
Hi! Porkchop plots are fast to compute for a direct transfer because we can immediately compute the optimal trajectory/delta-V given the departure and arrival dates/travel days.
For multiple gravity assists, computing the optimal trajectory for a given arrival and departure dates requires an optimization process to actually find a (possibly) good trajectory (that's what MGA planner does when you search for a trajectory).
To generate a plot with, e.g. 10 departure and 10 arrivals days, we would need to run the optimization process 100 times (once for each combination of arrival/departure dates). It takes ~10 seconds to search for a single trajectory on my laptop, so I don't think anyone would want to wait 100 times that long. Even if we did generate the plot, it would probably look a lot more chaotic than the plots of TWP, and very hard to read, even if we increase the resolution (making the plot generation even longer).
So I don't think it's a very feasible or relevant feature. Unless I misunderstood your question or you had another idea in mind, in that case let me know.
Le ven. 17 janv. 2025, 23:03, ezsnackeur @.***> a écrit :
Same as with TWP, it would be nice to be able to visualize a porkchop plot for the selected timeframe and be able to select transfer windows that are not optimal instead of having to check a lot of small time intervals one at a time
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I know its a computationally intense feature but i guess it could have a checkbox to toggle it before plotting and default to disabled. Even if plotting a porkchop takes a hour i'd rather let it compute as i do something else than having to manually input and compare multiple windows while babysitting the calculator, taking screenshot/notes of every single window and changing the time scope.
But if its too much work or you feel like it wouldn't add anything meaningful for the majority of users i won't complain either :3
I agree that a porkchop plot would be a pretty useful feature if it allows more precise finetuning. My main concern is readability and interpretability of the plot. In this post they explain:
People rarely generate and look at the pork chop plots in order to find good gravity assists. This is because they're relatively hard to read, and the scale will limit the precision the human eye can detect. Instead, mission designers set parameters of broad missions, and use trajectory finders. The most used one is undoubtedly NASA EMTG.
I couldn't find many online mentions of porkchop plots of trajectories with gravity assists. I did find a paper which drew the plots of individual transfers, but this wouldn't be as straightforward to use as a single plot for the entire trajectory. So I guess the only way to know is to give it a try!
I'll try to implement a porkchop plot generator that basically runs the full trajectory optimization for many combinations of arrival/departure dates, and see what it looks like. If it happens to output something useful, I'll definitely add it to the tool.
https://github.com/Zange10/KMAT this guy beat you to it, hopefully you didnt put too much effort in 😂