Devlog 7: Kerbal Gravity Program (KGRP)

For anyone who’s new here, KGRP is a mission planning tool I’m building for KSP (and hopefully real-world missions too). The goal is to make planning orbital transfers and interplanetary missions a lot easier. Think of it as something inspired by libraries like Skyfield and Poliastro, but with a bigger focus on actually planning missions.

What happened today?

Today was surprisingly productive and useful.

The biggest thing is that the renderer finally works. I spent way too long fighting with it over the past few days, so it’s nice to finally be able to move planets around without everything exploding.

I also added a few other things:

You can now create entire planetary systems from a planet.json file.
Added adapters for PySide6 and NiceGUI, so there are a couple of different ways to use the renderer now.
Started working on a more realistic gravity simulator that can deal with things like Lagrange points.
KGRP finally has an actual logo (＼(＾▽＾)／) instead of me pretending the text was good enough for docs and stuff.

One thing I still need to fix is the JSON loader. Right now it only really likes absolute paths, which is… less than ideal.

The renderer tried to gaslight me

I swear I’m not making this up.

Earlier today I found this absolutely cursed bug where, if you flew the camera into the Sun and zoomed out, the whole scene turned into this weird fisheye effect with random lines stretching across the screen.

I was already mentally preparing myself to spend the next few hours digging through camera code and VTK documentation…

…and then it just stopped happening.

I didn’t fix it.

I didn’t even change anything related to the camera.

It just… disappeared.

So either I accidentally fixed it without realizing, or it’s waiting until I show someone the project before it decides to come back.

What’s next?

Nothing too exciting, mostly polishing things up.

Fix the JSON loader.
Squash whatever bugs are still hiding in the renderer.
Improve the CLI a bit more.

Anyway, here’s the renderer doing the thing (oh, gotta fix that) and the logo (idk if it’s good, comment about it).