ksbes

It's true. But question was about turning without raising apoapsis. As I understood it is all about time. If you want to do smth quicker you need to waste more fuel. I use this method for my kethane probes: they have 3000 dv (at 800 kg weight) and are expendables. So, in most cases saving fuel is not my concern. But time(ingame and real) is

There is a little bit more efficient way to transfere to polar orbit without using any navnodes. All you need is a control unit (e.g. docking port (the best) or spurnik) pointing 90 degrees to the major axis of you craft. All yo need is to switch to control from this node, point it to the orbit vector, tilt your ship to north/south and burn. While burning yo should control 2 things: 1) control node must point orbital velosity vector all the way 2) your orbital speed shouldn't change (greatly): if it is increasing, tilt litle up (reletive to orbital velocity), if it is decreasing - down your will need sqrt(2)*(orbital speed) to do the trick. E.g. for LKO your will need 3400 m/s deltaV

If we look for root cause, we wil see, that problem is in weight of orange tank. It's mass is 32t. But when you accelerate it's wheight might be 48-64t (if you are sane, if not - up to 320t). While link strenth is the same as for all other nodes. So, i thought, why struggle with links, while I can directly strugle with the weight? And I put some (many) radial engines on this tanks and it helped me alot. It is better to put, say, 8 radial engines on 4 orange tanks, then wire them with half a handred of links. It reduces total deltaV, thogh.

Men has onli 30% of science. So it is a long way to "cubic struts". A lot of LV-T45 bp VERY laggy (they all trying to keep rocket oncorse, but with little laggs to each other wich makes rocket wobbling). It is better mix LV-30 and LV-45 in 2-to-1 proportion. The best solution is to use orbital building, or low orbit refueling (at space station). Intercepting is not as hard as it seems even in vanilla. With MehJeb it's a child play.