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RE: What is an orbit? Part 3: Orbital Transfers
You've done a great job making orbital transfers easy to understand @proteus-h . With more usage of ion thrusters which need more run time to produce the necessary velocity change I wonder how much that effects the orbital mechanics of orbital transfers?
Glad you enjoyed it! All of the transfers I've talked about here assume a very high thrust so that the acceleration time is almost negligible. Electric thrusters have much higher efficiencies than chemical thrusters, but the thrust produced is so low that you need to burn for many orbits to get significant progress. This makes the transfers less efficient and very difficult to calculate without numerical integration. Optimizing low thrust transfers is a whole different game because the thrust values actually get caught up in the error of the simulation if not handled properly.