Edmond’s Komet Discovered

*“It’s truly exciting news,” says Walt Kerman, head of Public Relations at the Kerbal Space Center. “The Sentinel telescope,” Walt said, referring to the SENTINEL Infrared Telescope, a special instrument designed to hunt for asteroids that might harm Kerbin, “discovered something new. We found a komet! We’re calling it Edmond’s Komet, after Edmond Kerman, who accurately predicted its orbit.”

Astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Edmond Kerman was attempting to use Newton Kerman’s laws of motion to predict where an asteroid would appear so that it could be targeted and identified by the Sentinel telescope. But what he found was no asteroid. “The readings were all wrong,” Edmond said, “it wasn't as rocky as it should be. It had a long particle trail flowing off of it. No other asteroid had ever done that before. We finally determined that the particle trail consists of water vapor.

“I wanted to call it Edmon’s Giant Space Snowball,” he continued, “because that’s what it is. A giant snowball in space, with water vapor sublimating into the vacuum and forming a giant tail as it orbits near Kerbol. But when I wrote my comment on the printout, somebody misinterpreted what I wrote, then a spellchecker failed, and before you know it, my ‘Comment: Giant Space Snowball’ became known as a komet.”

“Never before have we seen such a phenomenon,” says renowned theoretical physicist Albert Kerman. “The very notion of a komet is so new, our instruments still treat them like asteroids. We track them like asteroids, our older sensors still see them as asteroids, and it's only after careful analysis that we are able to determine their true nature. We'll probably have to put out a press release when we discover a new one...”*

Ever wanted to have komets orbiting your solar system? With KerbalKomets, now you can! This modlet adds the ability to transform asteroids into komets! Features include:

• Komet tails!
• Newly created asteroids have a random chance to become komets.
• Optional support for Community Resource Pack (CRP).
• With CRP installed, komets are mostly water.
• Unique komet names.
• komet-specific surface sample results.

How It Works

KerbalKomets works by converting asteroids into komets. As such, they are tracked like asteroids from the Tracking Center. Komet orbits are highly eccentric, so when you track an asteroid, you'll know that it's a komet by the shape of its orbit and long orbital period. You can also tell by the name of the object; komets begin with the "Kmt.:" prefix while asteroids begin with the "Ast.:" prefix.

Each time an asteroid is created, there is a 5% chance that it will be converted into a komet. You can increase or decrease the chance of converting into a komet by changing the presenceChance field in the Settings.cfg file. By default it's set to 95; on a roll of 1-100, you need a 95 or greater for an asteroid to flip to a komet.

Important Note

Asteroids are procedurally generated. Should you decide to uninstall KerbalKomets, all existing asteroids that you've visited with a spacecraft will be rebuilt into a new size and shape. Be sure to plan accordingly! The only way to circumvent this is to edit your persistence.sfs file and replace all instances of ModuleKomet with ModuleAsteroid. There's no other way around this that I know of..