AdvancedFlightComputer

Extra maneuver planning tools for Kitten Space Agency.

Features

Maneuver Quick-Tools

New plan types in the stock Transfer Planner dropdown:

• Set Periapsis / Set Apoapsis - single burn at the opposite apse to raise or lower one apse to a target altitude.
• Match Inclination - plane-change burn at AN or DN to align with a target orbit's plane.
• Set Inclination - plane-change burn at AN or DN to set an absolute inclination angle. Reference plane selectable: Ecliptic or Equatorial.

Flyby Targeting

The stock planner aims every transfer at the target body's center, so a well-timed Hohmann arrives as an impact and the flyby has to be set up afterwards as a separate correction. Tick Target flyby periapsis in the Transfer Planning window and the departure burn is aimed at a periapsis you choose instead, so Create fires the flyby directly.

• Periapsis is entered against a selectable reference: Surface (altitude above the mean radius), Center (radius straight from the body center), or Atmosphere (altitude above the atmosphere boundary). The Atmosphere option only appears for bodies that have one, and a request below the safe floor is refused.
• Flyby side picks which side of the body you pass, named in the target's own orbital frame: Inner (toward its parent), Outer (away from it), North or South. The aim offset has to stay perpendicular to the approach, so a side whose axis lies along the approach direction cannot be reached and is greyed out. That is also why there is no leading/trailing option for a Hohmann-style arrival.
• Works for moon flybys and for interplanetary targets, either as a single burn or split across multi-pass passes.
• The section reports the approach speed, the impact parameter, the departure delta-V next to the impact-aimed one, and the periapsis the propagated trajectory actually reaches. While a flyby is armed the preview shows that retargeted trajectory in place of stock's center-aimed one.

Limitation: the plan is impulsive, the burn is not. On a near-escape departure the apoapsis moves by thousands of km per m/s of periapsis velocity, so the periapsis actually flown drifts from the requested one by roughly the finite-burn loss (order of one percent of a multi-km/s injection). Expect to trim it with a small correction burn, or split the departure across several passes to cut the loss.

Multi-Pass Burns

Split any planned burn into multiple passes across successive orbits to reduce finite-burn loss. Instead of one long burn that sweeps a large arc away from periapsis, the engine fires in shorter bursts near periapsis on each orbit.

Supports Hohmann departures, apse burns (Set Pe/Ap), inclination changes, and circularize. Includes 3D orbit preview with per-pass markers, automatic execution via Auto burn mode, and an inline pass list showing remaining dV and burn time.

Particularly useful for low-TWR spacecraft (ion engines, small kick stages, nuclear tugs) where a single departure burn would spend too long thrusting away from periapsis.

Works best together with AutoStage and AutoRemoveFinishedBurns for hands-free multi-pass execution.

RCS Translation Burns

Execute a planned burn on RCS thrusters alone, no main engine. Useful for small corrections, where rotating the whole vehicle for the main engine can cost more than translating, and for vehicles with no active main engine and only multiple thrusters like e.g. small probes.

The stock Auto burn button stays the trigger: a burn runs on the engine when an active fueled one exists, otherwise on RCS. Per-burn options sit below the burn editor: Execution, Attitude and Allocator.

Two attitude strategies: Hold keeps the current attitude and fires the axis mix that points at the burn vector, Align first rotates the strongest thruster axis onto it. Auto estimates the propellant for both, including the slew, and picks the cheaper one. The editor shows what each strategy would cost in propellant and time before you commit, and warns when no thruster can translate or the propellant will not last.

Execution is closed-loop against the game's own delta-V accounting: pulses shrink as the remaining delta-V approaches zero, and the burn stops within the thrusters' minimum impulse of the target. Burns stay in the stock save format, so removing the mod keeps every planned burn, and RCS arming survives save/load including mid-burn.

An optional LP allocator solves the fuel-optimal jet-select linear program over the raw per-thruster wrenches with zero net torque folded in. It fires cleaner on balanced layouts, but can cost more where a thruster axis sits far off the centre of mass, so it stays opt-in.

Hyperbolic Targets

The stock Transfer Planner filters out bodies with eccentricity >= 1. This mod lets it target interstellar comets (Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov, 3I/ATLAS) by patching the planner's time-of-flight and alignment math to handle unbound orbits.

Installation

1. Install StarMap (required) and KittenExtensions (required for hyperbolic targets feature).
2. Extract the SpaceDock zip into Documents\My Games\Kitten Space Agency\mods\AdvancedFlightComputer\.
3. The game auto-discovers new mods on next launch.

Dependencies

License

MIT. Source code, issue tracker, full changelog: https://github.com/Maximilian-Nesslauer/KSA-AdvancedFlightComputer

Forum thread: https://forums.ahwoo.com/threads/advanced-flight-computer.783/