AbhChallenger

I just did a quick test and found that at 89 deg inc. Total dv favored saving fuel on the departure stage. However I did find that for a small increase in cost for departure. The theoretical tanker would slowly drift into a great LAN at SOI change. Your display options helped me to find that balance so thank you! When I send the crew. I would spend the extra propellant to arrive at a normal time.

Actually I would not mind having a more expensive ejection burn. If for instance. If I needed to spend 150 extra m/s on the ejection stage to save the tanker 78 m/s later that is fine because I normally have a dedicated ejection stage. Could there be perhaps a way to add weights or optimize for the insertion burn? Regardless as it is now I should be able to do the missions I want once I return to playing KSP again. Thanks!

I actually want to request this if possible. You are right that it is not too difficult to find a smaller insertion burn. But for near polar orbits it is a bit more difficult to find a good one. Heavy fuel tankers really eat their propellant reserves with every meter per second they have to spend. Edit: For instance playing with a random orbit I am able to get that normal burn down to 78.41 m/s That is already far far better than what I was able to do before. Yet if I could just get that number down even further. I could save propellant for the lander.

It must have been because I did not set an inclination. As I was focused on LAN. That indeed seemed to have fixed it! Thanks!

I don't have any exact orbits in mind. Just situations that have messed up my attempts to do different types of missions in the past. For instance. I wanted to place a dedicated lander that can be refueled into lunar orbit first then transfer a crew to it for landing. What I quickly found was unless I was lucky. I almost never arrived in a similar LAN to the lander from Kerbin. So I ended up having to use large amount of propellant to correct the plane. So I tried to use your app to target just the LAN and even with those options off. The ending orbit is still a completely different LAN than I need. I know you compute time is limited. So in my case. I just need the ability to match the plane. Or even just the LAN. I don't care if the ending orbit impacts the moon or barely scrapes the SOI. I can fix the orbit the moment I enter SOI. But LAN has to be changed at the node.

I messed around with the app. However, unless I have messed up the settings. I can't get it to actually target the LAN of the arrival orbit. This is important for say resupplying a lunar station or proceeding to landing soon after orbital insertion. As correcting LAN is very costly in propellant. Any possibility of implementing that?

The low thrust trajectory thing is not very important to me. It was more of a question about how high to be so that the trajectory is relatively flat at say 0.2 TWR. Not how to do spiral trajectories or the nearest onramp to the interplanetary highway. Most gate orbits should be fine for this I think. If you happen to have the time one day. Perhaps you could just make an example post about how you would go about setting up that TLI burn? That is really the main thing I want to use TOT for.

I just want to give the teams of Kopernicus and JNSQ time to work out all the issues and integrate whatever new 1.10 features they can before I do a long term save. As I don't want to have to break the save later. And I want to wait for any updates to USI-LS and associated mods dealing with habitation and life support.

Just wanted to add my thanks for you spending time to keep this project updated. Stock is fun but I look forward to playing GPP again and trying JNSQ. Yet I don't want to be trapped in an old version of KSP forever. I also hope that one day you will be hired to integrate Kopernicus into the stock game and KSP 2.

Is there any chance of a series of video tutorials or just videos of how you do various things with TOT? A few I have in mind if you have time to do so. I intend to play using the JSNQ system once it is updated to 1.10 but any system will do. The main one is doing a TLI burn to end up at the correct inclination and LAN after SOI change. So that you are in plane with a station or fuel depot orbiting the Mun. The other is lets say you have to launch into a polar orbit but you want to go to Duna. How do you figure out the correct LAN to launch to? The last one is finding the best orbit to put a fuel depot or perhaps the best orbit to depart from if using a very low TWR engine and want to do the transfer in a single burn.

Sorry to make a third post in a row but I wanted to see what you have done with classic stock so far and when I configured one of the Titan tanks to use Proplox. It seems you have already made it Hydrolox like when it comes to ratio and density. https://imgur.com/KGbzKQw vs https://imgur.com/lddaKYG If this was intended. Then the ISP values you had before seem more balanced. (Its just the thrust that is less balanced) However, If you are willing to edit the density and ratio (If that does not break other things that use classic stock) of Proplox and the tanks and rockets that use it. I think that middle ground between stock and cyrogenics can be achieved. And it is a way to do away with boiloff and still keep balance. So maybe 5-6 tons or so after the rebalance? (That 6 ton tank combined with proplox at 402 ISP is going to be amazing even with the lower thrust) After that is done you can again find a halfway point and use that for Raptalox. I would guess that perhaps the end result would be around 7.5 tons for that tank? You will want it to be a bit less dense than LiquidFuel but the challenge to come from the tech level requirements and perhaps fuel/engine costs. Again all of this is just what I think balance should be. There have been plenty of times when I have use cryogenic engines and thought as I have to stack tank after tank to make an all hydrolox lifter "It would be nice to have a midway propellant between this and LiquidFuel"

Thinking about the Fulcrum. I think it should not get proplox at all. Yes there are multiple first stage engines in real life that use hydrolox. Yet generally they fall into two categories. Very low thrust and meant to use as a sustainer engine (That does not work well in KSP stock scale where launch times are typically well under 5 minutes) Or they have good thrust but are very very expensive. I know KSP is not supposed to be compared with real life engines but it makes it difficult to balance an engine like this when the entire point of the engine is to be very powerful. Raptium makes far more for an interesting alternative fuel here.

So far the thrust and ISP levels look way too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RL10 This is a good example of hydrolox when used for its maximum ISP at the expense of thrust. And it tops out at 465 isp. I think cryogenic engines has one with similar ISP but of course it is difficult to use because of the lower thrust. Perhaps 402 or so? Thrust reduced to 80 for Proplox and 110 for Raptalox (ISP for that should be slightly reduced. But more balance can be achieved via a high cost of the fuel and tech tree requirements) I don't know how to calculate the correct density here. Look at the difference between stock tanks and those configured for cyrogenic and cut that in half? You will want players to need to possibly add another small tank or two. But not have to build rather large rockets to take advantage of the benefits of proplox.

I don't think that is enough of a tradeoff considering how simple it is to make rockets in stock scales. There would be absolutely no reason to use anything but Proplox (Or Raptium if the goal is to make fuel elsewhere) as it would be simple to defeat the lower ASL thrust with boosters. I think a better balance is for Proplox to be balanced to be a halfway point between stock LFO and Cryogenic engines hydrogen. That should make the math to balance it easier. You will want players to still use LFO for the second stages for really heavy payloads into low orbit. But explore the benefits of proplox for payloads going to the Mun and beyond.

First of all. This is awesome! Having a choice in propellant will lead to interesting new design choices and less reliance on building monster rockets to achieve high delta-v. A question of balance however. Will PropLox be balanced to be lower thrust and lower density like Cryogenic engines? Raptium can be balanced via cost but hydrogen without the negatives of density and lower thrust it will possibly end up overpowered.