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What was your longest burn?


Ultimate Steve

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Including lag or not? My longest in-game burn was about half an hour, for a NERVA or ion interplanetary transfer, IIRC. I have launched some massive launchers that easily took that long due to part count, in both RO and normal KSP, those took about 20-30 minutes, IIRC.

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With Chemical, I woulds say dozens of minutes.  With nuclear, a fair fraction of an hour.  With ion, 2 hrs, maybe more ( can't remember, I might have done one that is a number of hours)?  I just set them up (before a TV program, going to bed, etc.) and use Kerbal Alarm contract to stop the game just before they are done.

For me, ion engines are good.

Edited by davidpsummers
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  • 3 years later...

Does the burn have to be of a single stage or multiple, one immediately after the other.

I've had a few very long ion drive burns, some with multiple stages. I definitely remember a 3 hour burn on a single stage while I was at the machine, albeit I spent a lot of my time in my browser and cutting back occasionally to check on things. There was also a burn that was 6 hours or so long, which I left running when I went to bed, then detached before lighting up the next ion drive stage the following morning.

If combined stages count, then probably something in the region of 10-12 hours would be my max.

BTW... these super long burns would have all been for challenges to get from Kerbin to another planet in the shortest time.

Something like this xenon packed nonsense that got from Kerbin to Eve in 5 days.

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gPIFZBE.jpg

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~34 mins. Nukes SUCK. It’s so worth it tho. I’ve never really used ions, so I’ve never done more than one pe kick. Also, this was before I knew how to phys warp outside of the atmosphere, so I just had youtube open on my phone and was browsing my subscriptions while keeping an eye on the bar. JEEEEZ EDIT: oh yeah, by the way, I had a stupid laggy computer and 3 real seconds passed every Kerbal second! I can’t be bothered to do the math but *JEEZ*

7 hours ago, purpleivan said:

Something like this xenon packed nonsense that got from Kerbin to Eve in 5 days.

 

 

7 hours ago, purpleivan said:

10-12 hours would be my max.

the fricK

That is faaaarr from worth it. I mean... congrats, five days, but no.

7 hours ago, purpleivan said:

which I left running when I went to bed,

the world of ion engines

Edited by HansonKerman
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I did a 30-40 minute burn once, and i could use physics warp. this was with a 2700 ton craft, which i refueled on Gilly. The craft had 28 NERVs and 4 Rhinos. the rhinos ran out fairly quickly (to quickly reach escape velocity), and then it was on the nuclear engines for another 33 minutes, burning to go to the mythical planet of Dres.

vryrKIt.jpg

but that was in gametime, because of the lag from parts (and activated engines... apparently), when i did 4x physical warp, it was going at just two ingame seconds per real second lol.

RySzGD9.jpg

it also had around 8km/s delta V left after finishing the long burn. in that pic above, i was docking a space station to the ship. the ship had SO MUCH delta V, i made it go from a 1000km kerbin orbit, all the way out to duna, orbited ike to refuel a spaceship, went into low duna orbit, and went to eve, and just about made it to Gilly. my fps with this monster is about 6-8 lol.

nervs are inside fairings, and somehow, SOMEHOW this ship is the ONLY craft i have that has any sort of engine heating issue with the stock nuclear engines, the fairings usually glow after a 20min burn lol. every burn was quite long due to the low twr of 0.09 when full, and 0.25 when empty, and it turns slowly.

 

and then there was that time when i made an ion mun lander, and i didnt know about physics warp, so i sat through 16 minutes of burn, a few times since it kept failing

Edited by JcoolTheShipbuilder
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I can't bother sitting through a burn more than 10 minutes long, even with time warp (which for the big ships still isn't really an option).

My longest burn - at least the longest I've memory and record of - was my Pol All-In-One that I flew over 6 years ago. KSP back then didn't have all the bells and whistles it has today so the maneuver node told me the burn would be 5 minutes but it actually ended up at about 15.

And I had to restore from a quicksave and do it twice.

No thanks. I'll just pack an extra engine and some more fuel if you don't mind.

 

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3 hours ago, RoninFrog said:

I don't like long burns.  If it doesn't have a Kerbin vacuum TWR of at least 0.3, I add more boosters.  I don't think I've ever done a burn longer than about 5-10 minutes.

 

You clearly have never used NERVs or ions my inexperienced child.

56 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

I can't bother sitting through a burn more than 10 minutes long, even with time warp (which for the big ships still isn't really an option).

My longest burn - at least the longest I've memory and record of - was my Pol All-In-One that I flew over 6 years ago. KSP back then didn't have all the bells and whistles it has today so the maneuver node told me the burn would be 5 minutes but it actually ended up at about 15.

And I had to restore from a quicksave and do it twice.

No thanks. I'll just pack an extra engine and some more fuel if you don't mind.

 

nice mindset. Good job avoiding the burns tho.

3 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

multiple 5 1/2 hour

well I’ll be...

3 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

t was a rescue challenge, rescuing Burberry Kerman from a retrograde solar orbit

contract or forum/reddit post. If it was a contract, I wouldn’t consider it, being a *retrograde solar orbit* and tell <agency> to build their own rocket thank you very much.

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Capture & Plane Changegroundwork69.jpg

Single nuke and by no means the heaviest asteroid, acceleration was 35-40mm/s² (or TWR 0.004 in forum parlance). Capture and plane change worked out as usual, after that I moved it down to LKO in two long maneuvers of 6 and 10 hours burn time, respectively. So, rather quick by the standards of this thread. Paging @johnsonwax and @Rune who have done similar missions.

Always pointed retrograde, throttle was controlled such that I'd maintain a certain distance to periapsis -- so, throttle down when PE slips away, and crank it up when PE comes too close. It took me an afternoon of experimenting to devise an automated kRPC throttle controller, the actual maneuver then played out unattended while I was sleeping. It stopped up in an 180x200km orbit.

 

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2.5 hour transfer burn to OPM’s Neidon, only the game ran so slowly (3FPS and about 0.2x speed) that it actually took 11 hours to complete and was massively off course by the end of it, requiring another hour-long correction the next day. That was before I discovered that you can activate physics warp in space using alt + .

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vpanshPh.png

Far from the longest burn but think it require honorable mention. Had an kerbal to rescue in retrograde orbit between Dress and Jool. Buiild rocket above, refueled chemical stage in LKO, plotted an intercept trajectory, around a year later I did an 7.4 km/s burn to match velocity. 
However I should still have more than 9 km/s left, enough to both change back to prograde and do an Kerbin injection burn, reverse of the 7.4 km/s burn. 
Yes probably, however I made one mistake, it was 200 days of life support on the intercepter. 
I could get to Kerbin in 200 days but I would have an relative speed with Kerbin of above 6 km/s.  

Solution was to send out an copy of the same high dV interceptor and intercept the capsule a bit outside Minmus orbit, burn to intercept speed, catch and then brake down to orbital speed around Kerbin for deorbit. 
Yes burn time was just some hours but it was an +30 km/s missions using LV-N. 
30 km/s would not sound very impressive then you get deep into KSP2 so this post will not age well :)

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