Strange time-to-encounter anomaly

[Gamera Obscura]

I had a contract to put what turned out to be a very simple spacecraft in orbit of the Sun. I had made the decision to fly it back to Kerbin immediately because it had to have three pilots on it and didn't want that many pilots just screwing around out there. This is on my hard mode career, so I can't exactly pluck pilots out of thin air at will. Anyway, as soon as it was fulfilled I started burning back straight toward Kerbin in hopes of getting recaptured relatively quickly.

Oddly, the more I burned toward Kerbin, the father away my encounters would supposedly become. The very first one that popped up said it was 17 years away. I kept going knowing there was no way that could be true. Each new encounter was even worse until at one point, it said my next encounter was over 5400 years away!  What was really strange to me was if I tried to set up a maneuver node on the orbital path just before the encounter it showed me, the node was only a few hundred days away. Knowing this had to be an anomaly, I just kept burning toward Kerbin and ended up getting recaptured in less than a day.

Has anyone else ever experienced this? I have no mods installed btw.

Edited June 23, 2021 by Gamera Obscura

[Vanamonde]

Got a screenshot of map view? "Burning straight toward Kerbin" sounds like your problem. 

[Caradhtinu]

Seems to me like the best way to get back into the SoI you just exited. What shape is the sphere of influence anyway, I'm pretty sure it can't be a perfect sphere. There might be some chaotic math there

[The Aziz]

3 minutes ago, Caradhtinu said:

Seems to me like the best way to get back into the SoI you just exited. What shape is the sphere of influence anyway, I'm pretty sure it can't be a perfect sphere. There might be some chaotic math there

It is a sphere, at least in the game, it just ends at predetermined altitude.

But then a lot depends on escape trajectory, even few m/s on escape burn make a lot of difference in final solar orbit. Sometimes "burn towards the planet" can't help.

It's better to set up a maneuver node and fiddle with it until you get an encounter. Sometimes it can take few days after a burn to reach it.

[herbal space program]

As has been said, a screenshot would be very helpful here, but when I got a mission like this what I did was launch into a polar orbit so that I could exit Kerbin's SOI in the normal direction to a solar orbit that's the same shape  but in a slightly different plane. Getting back from that is pretty easy, because all you have to do is more or less "boost towards Kerbin" like you said, which is why I suspect that's what you did as well. As a matter of fact, if you actually exit Kerbin's SOI in a perfectly normal direction, all you need to do  is wait until you  approach your Kerbin nodal point and you will re-encounter Kerbin automatically. In fact if you don't see that encounter in the map view right after you exit Kerbin's SOI, then you know you  had some non-normal component to your motion when you exited, which means your orbital shape/period is no longer identical to Kerbin's. In that case, if you  wait too long to get back down to Kerbin's orbital plane, you will come in either ahead of it or behind it,  potentially requiring a whole bunch more solar orbits before your intersect and Kerbin's position line up again.  So it's not really an anomaly so much as an artifact of trying to encounter a body that is in nearly the same orbit and position as yours. Of course if you boost significantly more towards Kerbin from this situation, so that you reach its plane again before you have time to get too far ahead or behind of it, this won't be an issue. Anyway, does that make sense to you or have I got the wrong idea?