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Burn definition for vessels without attitude control

Open ezsnackeur opened this issue 9 months ago • 2 comments

A common use case would be planning a correction burn on a unguided and spin stabilized probe that just performed a TLI burn, since the only parameter that you can tune is the timing of your burn, but that makes the manouver move around the navball.

ezsnackeur avatar Mar 07 '25 01:03 ezsnackeur

It is a sensible idea to provide something to help with planning burns for vessels without attitude control (for which the burn definition lives in a two-dimensional space, with, e.g., timing and duration as a chart, rather the usual four-dimensional space).

This has nothing to do with a vessel-centred frame (we have one already, the target frame), and the idea that using such a frame as the manœuvre frame would help betrays a profound misunderstanding of what the manœuvre frame is. In a reference frame centred on your vessel, your vessel does not move, so the Frenet frame of its free-falling trajectory is singular: it would simply be ill-defined to use such a frame as the manœuvre frame.

eggrobin avatar Mar 07 '25 02:03 eggrobin

An alternative could be to have another checkbox i guess?

ezsnackeur avatar Mar 07 '25 02:03 ezsnackeur