Rainshine

By default, in my experience, reaction wheels seem to consume power constantly, unless you change their state to either, for example, torque off, or SAS only and then turn off SAS. I can't tell you the number of probes I've had fail because I timewarped without turning the reaction wheels to SAS only, and it drained 24000 units of battery power during the warp.

I'm trying to wrap my head around ejection angles for transfers. The phase angle has to do with where you're headed, and knowing where it will be when you travel from where you are to there -- essentially that it will be there to catch the 'ball' of your spacecraft. That makes some decent sense to me. The angle to exit your system (Kerbin, for my purposes) is a bit trickier to my head. The idea is to make the velocity you already have as a result of the system's orbit around the sun work for you and harness as much of it as you can. Burning a parallel prograde vector from 90 will send you to a higher orbit with nice efficiency, burning parallel to retrograde will send you in-system. The more d/v you burn in that direction, the further you'll go. Of course, you can't burn instantaneously, so you need to start a bit further back maybe. But that's not actually the way the ejection angles work. For instance, I've been plotting to transfer a probe out to Dres in the next window. I've got a comm sat in high (75 Mm) Kerbin orbit, I put some nodes on it to get an idea of the intercept for my probe. The dv from such a high orbit is greater than that for a low orbit, presumably because you don't have quite the orbital velocity from such a high altitude. But it seems the ejection angle is smaller for the higher orbits, despite the larger burn. Why? And why is the angle greater to reach closer orbits (i.e. Duna ejection angle is 150, Dres is 123 from the base orbit, per https://ksp.olex.biz/?) Is it that the closer your ejection angle is to 90, the (roughly) more powerful your burn is, so by burning at a wider angle, you're not going as far outward (perpendicular to the sun)? I've been reading https://ksp.olex.biz/ https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ but I want to understand why the numbers come out the way they do

Thanks for the help and suggestions! I know I was in a good vicinity for the transfer window, but I'm sure I just overburned and didn't play with my maneuver nodes enough for setting up the initial intercept. This was originally actually an Ike mission, the lander was a lightweight one that I've been using for lunar missions. But by spending some of my lander budget (I figured I'd end up leaving it there in orbit anyways and just hauling some fuel for it next time) I managed to get a flyby on Ike, and dropped my Pe to 28k on Duna, which let me aerobrake down to a stable orbit (- the ~50 m/s to boost the Pe up to 60k afterwards). So I got some Ike science, some Duna atmo science, some Duna space science, and hopefully I can figure out my transit back to Kerbin orbit with my remaining fuel

My planned Duna mission seems to have gone awry. Here's the current map of intersects. Not having done any successful interplanetary missions in a very long time, this looked fine-ish. But now when I go to plot my burn to orbit, I'm having a little trouble. Burning retrograde at Pe, it will take ~2260m/s to enter orbit, which would drain my tanks, my lander, and about half my return fuel. I had heard 250 for the number from flyby to orbit. I've tried playing around with going radial or such, but nothing seems to help. Am I missing something, or did I just pick an atrocious angle to enter at; and if so, how should I adjust for my next missions?

I haven't had the issue in a while. It might be coincidence, but I doubt it; I was looking for the premade ships, and ended up in the GameData folder, where there was an old ModuleManager file. Once I removed that and reloaded the game, all my save loading problems seem to have vanished.

I'm on 1.9 with Breaking Ground, no mods, Windows 10 Steam version. When I'm in game, I can save games just fine. If I try to load to go back to a previous state (trying to dock with RCS translation and failing over and over), I can select the game to load from the screen, but pressing load does nothing perceptible, and the selection of saves stays on the screen. If I quit out to the main menu, I can't even load back into that career any more. I have to quit out of the game entirely and restart it. Sometimes the save selection screen will even decide to stay on the screen and not let me close it. My searches failed to find any similar problems. It's not a problem with the save -- if I close out of the game, delete the persistent files and copy the save game in question and rename it persistent, it loads up fine.