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If you'd like to know more about logarithms (it's really not necessary for this), check out this website. M is how much mass your ship has with all of its fuel on board, and m is how much fuel your ship has with no fuel on board. Just accept that you have to plug that into the equation as a thing. ln is "natural log" and you don't need to worry about that too much. 9.81 is a conversion factor used when your I sp is given in seconds (which it is in KSP). So you're probably wondering now, "How do I calculate this dv thing?" The answer is fairly simple, but might look a little scary if you aren't too good with math:ĭv, also known as delta-v, is the number you want. This is more than it takes for a complete round trip to Duna. An interesting side note is that it takes roughly a 9300m/s potential change in velocity to reach orbit around Earth. If you only want to get to orbit around Kerbin, you only need about 4000m/s at most, and the some of the most efficient launches have reportedly gotten below 3000m/s of delta-v. You can technically get by with as little as about 6000m/s, if you're good at it. It's technically possible for around 6,000m/s. If you want to go to the Mun and back, 7200m/s of dv is a good number to aim for, and gives you plenty of room for error. As you might have guessed, this is a very important concept to understand if you want to build a rocket to get to a specific place. Delta-v is a fancy term that means change in velocity, or more crudely, "how far your rocket can go." It's most often measured in either meters per second (m/s) or sometimes kilometers per second (km/s) if the value is large enough.
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