Optimising your Mun hopping

[Jesrad]

If you haven't yet read Hop's blog you are missing out on excellent resources for everything spationavigational (if that's a word). Latest post is about optimising one's hops from place to place on airless bodies - in KSP that would be anywhere landable except Laythe, Duna, Eve and (of course) Kerbin.

Hop's got limpid pictures for explaining this stuff too:

The rules for optimal bunny-hopping in vacuum is a launch angle of (180° - angular distance) / 4. Say you wanna jump over 20° of longitude: it means you have to launch at 160/4 = 40° up from horizon. Simple enough.

And the impulse you need at both ends is more complicated: V = sqrt(Mu(1/chord - 1/r)), with chord = r(1 + sin(angular distance/2)) and Mu your planet/moon of choice's gravitational parameter (courtesy of the wiki).

I'm off to make another spreadsheet in Google Drive. Yay science !

[Tw1]

This looks very useful.

[AlexisBV]

Hmm, who wants to try a 1.7 km/s launch at zero pitch? Premature lithobraking imminent...