Laie

What's that arc spanning across the screen, and is there anything i can do about it? That's Scatterer v0.0540 on KSP1.7.3, by means of installing SVE & TVE through CKAN. This is what I see on the default configuration as it came out of the box. I'm totally unfamiliar with visual mods, first time I'm using any of them. I'm not even sure that the arc is due to scatterer... and I don't know where to start looking.

I'd say: go for it. Provide a ready-made rocket and ask people to optimize the launch profile for this particular thing. There may be only a few participants, but I for one would like to give it a try. Depending on how unhappy I am with your LV, I may swap it with one of my own design after a few tries... it would be good if you gave a few requirements for the LV. Probably lowest cost, but does it need to be reusable? Tech level limitations?

I don't know how you "launch at 10 degrees" so I can't say whether that's sensible or not. Personally, I've got good results with "have prograde be 70° by the time I reach 200m/s" approach (example). That inherently adjusts for TWR (slower rockets make a slower turn) -- not perfectly, but well enough that one set of values suits a wide range of rockets.

So I just clicked AVP in CKAN, let it install and it seems to have worked. City lights, clouds in the sky, aurorae... it's all there. However, looking at the sky, I have a "oh my gosh, it's full of stars" moment: Seriously, is it supposed to look like this? I'm looking into other skyboxes, but am slightly worried, as none of the screenshots in this thread look as starry as my sky. And another first world problem: against the new backdrop, my ships now look clunky. Is there a simple fix like downloading a set of textures?

Definitely. Asteroids are only really created once you get into physics range. You can saveload just before you get close and try again until you get one that suits you -- I had reason to do that just recently. While I didn't take measurements, it was obvious that some were much bulkier than others (at similar mass). By and large, size scales with mass: a 100t rock will certainly be smaller than a 4000t one. But it may be possible for a 500t and a 1000t asteroid to both have about the same size.

On standard settings, tourism pays well enough to run a large profit. Rescue and Satellite Contracts should also pay very well. If you find that you barely generate any surplus, I suspect that your rockets are larger and more expensive than they really need to be.

Silly me. I thought the defining element, and reason why it has bi- in it's name, would be going through two intermediary orbits, rather than only a single transfer orbit. (while we're playing word games, isn't a hohman transfer orbit the particular transfer orbit that happens to be tangential to both the starting and the final orbit?)

I'm aware of that, it's just that I don't think the ratio has to exceed X before one may call it bi-elliptic. Too bad that I can like this only once. And I've been wrong about my numbers: on day 500, it's 1760m/s Duna ejection, 880m/s at solar PE, and finally 1300 to capture & circularize at LKO. A little under 4km/s all told. Considering that even the cheapest hohman transfer costs ~1700m/s to LKO, that's no longer as bad as I first thought. However, it quickly gets worse with delay. Making a slightly faster transfer on the way to Duna may well pay off.

That's the idea: in order to better utilize my craft, I want to get back to Kerbin in time for the next cheap, standard transfer. Mostly because I couldn't think of anything else. Some experimenting suggests that bi-elliptic is the lesser evil, btw, if you account for capture at Kerbin. Still 5km/s when leaving Duna at day 500, though. That's a lot and probably more than I'm willing to afford, yet (gnashing teeth) it's not so much that I'd discard the option outright.

OK, I went at it with a kind of Phase Angle mindset: in the picture above, I'm leaving Duna while it's at the 3 o'clock position. I go around the sun once, lower my AP on the far side, and come back approaching Kerbin's orbit, again in the 3 o'clock position. Now. For any given day, how much time will I have until Kerbin is at the same angle where Duna was? That determines how long the whole transfer may last, and how low my PE around the Sun has to be. Turns out that things are not in my favor: Right when I arrive at Duna from a cheap-as-possible hohmann transfer, I have 360days left to go back by the bi-elliptic route. That already requires a PE well inside of Eve's orbit, and things only get worse the longer I wait. @Zeiss Ikon cyclers are not suitable for what I have in mind. Catching up with a cycler requires more dV in any event, the savings lie in having only a lightweight cargo to accelerate (as in, only crew and supplies in a tiny spacecraft) while all the heavy stuff (radiation shielding and comfort for 3 months) are on the cycler and remain there. Whereas I have to move heavy cargo to Duna, and not very much back.

I've updated the OP to show an example of what I'm looking for. Reducing the transfer time to much less than one year quickly becomes expensive again, but it doesn't become quite as hellish quite as quickly as with hohmann transfers. If it allows me to perform the return trip during the off-years, it might be worthwhile.

OK... Meanwhile I've started laying the groundwork for my mission (report here), now let's see how adaptable my framework really is.

Before I put much time into finding a solution, I thought I'd just ask nicely: Has anyone already figured out how to plan unusual-but-affordable non-hohmann transfers? I'm looking specifically at Kerbin-Duna shuttles right now. With hohmann-ly transfers, I'm looking at a round-trip time of almost five years. I wonder how expensive it would be to return a shuttle from Duna to Kerbin between transfer windows, so that the same vessel can move from Kerbin to Duna on every standard transfer opportunity. I've got nearly two years to do so and don't care how much of that time is spent in transit: that's no worse than sitting idle, waiting for the next transfer window. I wonder if something bi-elliptic might be usable, with a solar PE way down below Eve? (edit) Example: Note that this doesn't involve a gravity assist -- after all, I want something I can plan, for, and cannot rely on Eve always being in the right place. dV requirements are, of course, considerably higher than for a hohmann transfer, but not totally ludicrous. In this example, it costs me ~1800m/s to get from Duna to Kerbin-altitude within a year.

I've parked an asteroid.

This ran overnight on kRPC autopilot. Basic algorithm was to point retrograde and throttle up the closer I get to PE.