Long burns?

[chd]

How do you guys handle long burns? I have an ion-powered rescue ship meeting up with someone in need of rescuing from solar orbit, and one of the burns to get there is 55 minutes. Can't warp, can't switch away... boring. What do you guys usually do? Go make dinner or do a crossword puzzle until you can play again?

[Superfluous J]

I don't do them. My time is worth far more than my Kerbals' money. I put proper rocket engines on the craft and ignore that ions exist.

 

[OhioBob]

You can use physics time warp by pressing
ALT + .
That's only 4x at most but it's better than waiting the full time.  There's no way to go faster than that as far as I know.
 

Edited September 8, 2020 by OhioBob

[DerekL1963]

21 hours ago, chd said:

What do you guys usually do? Go make dinner or do a crossword puzzle until you can play again?

Catch up on the KSP forums, check Twitter, catch up on blogs I follow, flop on the couch and watch some anime...

Edited September 8, 2020 by DerekL1963
Ug, speeling.

[Entropian]

Usually I use Persistent Thrust, but when it doesn't work, I usually set a timer and go play chess or piano.

[Streetwind]

There is (or at least used to be, haven't checked in a while) a mod called BetterTimeWarp, which lets you configure things like 10x physics timewarp. Five and a half minutes is far more bearable than 55 minutes.

But generally, I'd plan my ship and my mission in ways that avoid such huge burn times, even when I am using electric engines (which I frequently do). Are you going into retrograde solar orbit or something? If yes, reconsider picking up such contracts in the future, they're pretty much never worth the effort to pull it off. If it's a normal, prograde solar orbit though, then you don't need to burn 55 minutes to get there. You just need to wait for the transfer window - the same as if you were going to another planet.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Tell MechJeb to execute the burn, turn on x4 physics warp when it starts the burn, mute PC and do other things while waiting for the burn to complete, plot correction burn to fix the dismal accuracy of long burns. Before I found out about physics warp in space I once had a single burn that lasted over 10 hours (2 hour burn but the game was running at 1/4 speed due to a huge part count) and I had time to go shopping, watch two(!) full length DVDs and more before that burn completed, followed by a rather embarrassing correction burn as I had actually left it too long and it overran by about 100m/s 

[king of nowhere]

my longest burn had been 3 hours. if i recall correctly, i spent most of that reading a book

[FleshJeb]

I make MechJeb do the burn, and I stare at the screen angrily until it's done.

[Spricigo]

Quote

My longest burn..

C'mon guys! My longest burn took less than 20min(game time) and I sweared to never let it happens to me again. What is wrong with you?!!!*

 

*and lets ruin what is supposed to be a well humored quip to avoid bad humored reaction: Not really assuming there is something wrong with you.

 

 

 

 

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, Spricigo said:

C'mon guys! My longest burn took less than 20min(game time) and I sweared to never let it happens to me again.

 

actually, once you get past a few minutes, the lenght of the burn is indifferent. 5 minutes, 20, 3 hours, in any case you are not going to stay there all the time watching it. you set your attitude control to hold the direction (without those advanced probe cores, i would never try it), you press alt-tab, and you do something else while the game runs in background.

in my case, i wanted to make a solar probe to reach the inner solar atmosphere, for that i needed 8 km/s of deltaV (actually i managed to save some withh an eve gravity assist), and once i was there i needed at least the 1.5 ton inflatable heat shield as payload, plus all the science instruments. ion propulsion was the only practical alternative to making a ridiculously huge rocket.

[Spricigo]

7 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

actually, once you get past a few minutes...

I'm well aware of how some other players deal with long burns, and choose to not do the same. If that means an extra hour in the VAB to have a Rhino engine in my interplanetary ship, saving a few minutes in the many trips I will do with that ship I take the deal without thinking twice.

Also, I open KSP to play KSP and enjoy every minute.  AltTab to do something else while KSP play itself don't make any sense for me.