Flight Question Flying to the rocks (Phobos, Deimos and other asymmetricals)

[Wishbone]

Doing flight testing of the Intercept (successful) and Proximity (not yet successful) modes of the Precession MFD, I stumbled on the not-so-neat feature of Phobos and Deimos and other rocks' meshes. The surface as defined by Orbiter does not correspond to the meshes (we all knew that!). Is there any way of finding the local latitude/longitude pairs that denote spots where the mesh-defined altitude equals zero? (IOW, where my spacecraft neither are hidden underneath the terrain nor soar high above)

 

[Izack]

I would like to be able to do this as well.

As for Phobos, there's a decent place at -108, 25.6 where you could land a whole Arrow if you wanted to.

 

[River Crab]

I think such could be accomplished visually by extracting the mesh to any modeling program, and creating a sphere at (0,0,0) with a radius corresponding to that in Orbiter. The configs put the radii at 11e3 km for Phobos and 6.5e3 km for Deimos.
Once you do that, you can see where the collision sphere intersects the mesh, and which parts correspond to it more closely.

Maybe. :idk: Not sure, but you can try.

 

[IgnoreThisBarrel]

I'm not sure if this will work, since I don't know anything about Orbiter's collision system, but you could set Phobos' radius to a very small value (or the lowest point on the mesh) and then rescale the mesh to balance out that change.

Then if you cared about collision detection Meshland should work for that.

 

[statickid]

I put a base on one of the moons and its so small I was able to find a good place by simply creating a ship on the surface, then using the lat/lon location editor. I just moved it about in directions that look good and found the exact locations of such places.

 

[Wishbone]

The scen editor thing is OK for manual finetuning, did that for both Phobos and Deimos after landings, but it doesn't seem too realistic. Extracting the MSH and conducting the search on-line, without manual interaction - that would be much better. I have looked at Phobos.msh, it is a text file with AFAIK triangle coordinates in triples. The search need not be continuous, only finding the mesh triangle that fits our constraints ( range to center equal Orbiter's stated body radius, and normal to the triangle equal (within 0.5 degrees or so) to the normal to the ideal sphere at this point, to make the ground level. And then, of course, converting back to lat/lon...