The term "patched conics" is actually a bit of a misnomer in the KSP community. A more "scientific" term would be two body dynamics.
Patched conics techniques are mission planning methods that provide semi-analytical solution to lunar and interplanetary trajectories and help searching for launch windows and planning outbound maneuvers. It's a rather crude approximation for real world use, but it gives good initial values to be used for more sophisticated (and computationally expensive) methods.
This mission planning utility for KSP implements the patched conic algorithms: http://ksp.olex.biz/
Once you find a launch window, you can use that as a starting point for a more fancy method such as this: https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ (this implements "pork chop plots" or solves the two body boundary value problem, also known as the Lambert or Gauss problem)
For real life (or Orbiter) use, the next step would be to numerically integrate the entire trajectory in a restricted n-body setup.
For more information, see: Carlson, K. M. "An Analytical Solution to Patched Conic Trajectories Satisfying Initial and Final Boundary Conditions"
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710007291&qs=Ns=Loaded-D... (NASA has made this NTRS paper available again, I tried real hard to find it a few years ago because it was temporarily but intentionally offline)
Patched conics techniques are mission planning methods that provide semi-analytical solution to lunar and interplanetary trajectories and help searching for launch windows and planning outbound maneuvers. It's a rather crude approximation for real world use, but it gives good initial values to be used for more sophisticated (and computationally expensive) methods.
This mission planning utility for KSP implements the patched conic algorithms: http://ksp.olex.biz/
Once you find a launch window, you can use that as a starting point for a more fancy method such as this: https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ (this implements "pork chop plots" or solves the two body boundary value problem, also known as the Lambert or Gauss problem)
For real life (or Orbiter) use, the next step would be to numerically integrate the entire trajectory in a restricted n-body setup.
For more information, see: Carlson, K. M. "An Analytical Solution to Patched Conic Trajectories Satisfying Initial and Final Boundary Conditions" http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710007291&qs=Ns=Loaded-D... (NASA has made this NTRS paper available again, I tried real hard to find it a few years ago because it was temporarily but intentionally offline)