Planetary Gravity Calculator

[b00st3d]

Hello fellow CMDRs,
I have been out exploring between Colonia and Sagittarius A*. While out, I realized that I wanted to know what the gravity of various planets was so I could decide if I wanted to land there. The problem was, in order to do this, you have to scan the planet. If the interesting planet was a good distance away, I didn't want to fly that far to see a 4g planet. With ~40m worth of scan data, I'd rather not risk trying to land my Anaconda there.
In response to this problem, I have written a tool to calculate the gravity of a planet given the planet's Earth Masses and it's Radius. This information is located in the info tab of the planet in the system map without actually doing a scan of the planet. Feel free to give me some feedback on this tool. I do plan on updating the page to display better on mobile devices.

You can find this tool at https://b00st3d.github.io/

[b00st3d]

Just updated the tool to use E:D color scheme. Also fixed an error that prevented you from using the enter key to submit.

[ZombieHunter]

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/circles/Lesson-3/The-Value-of-g
http://nova.stanford.edu/projects/mod-x/ad-surfgrav.html

Calculating G is fairly simple.

[b00st3d]

Yeah pretty simple. The formula I used is as follows. If you look at the source of my tool you can see the calculations it does. I just didn't want to have to do a calculation every time I see a cool planet to land on

(((6.67x10^-11)x((5.98x10^24)x(Earth Mass Ratio))/(planet radius)^2)/9.8.
This formula outputs the percentage of earth's gravity therfore, if the first equation comes out to less than earth's gravity, say 9.4 or so, it will show .95G

or more simply put,
((Gx(EMxMR))/PR^2)/9.8

[funkynutz]

Huh... I just look at them in the system map. If they're small, they're probably low g... If they're big, they're probably high g...

Then again I tend to eyeball my maneuvers in KSP as well...

[b00st3d]

Yeah you can do that but some of the big planets are lower gravity than you expect. The example I use is a ringed planet I came across. The planet was huge but the gravity came in at around 1.5g With my exploroconda, I prefer not to land on anything higher than 2g after being out for 2 weeks.

[funkynutz]

I prefer to land on anything below 0.2G. Much more fun in the SRV

[b00st3d]

haha I obliterated an SRV on the way to Sag A* taking a huge jump in low gravity