Brainlord Mesomorph

[quote name='ineon']Cool stuff. You've given me another method in my arsenal for trading time for dV too :). If you do manage to do it reliably can you post a screenshot of the maneuver (with the mechjeb planner numbers if you use it)?[/QUOTE] [IMG]http://benmargolis.com/ksp/screenshot329.jpg[/IMG] Here. The brown burn is first, leaving lunar orbit. That puts you in the purple orbit. Then the green burn puts you in the green orbit. Which then becomes the red the spoon-out maneuver, and finally leaves you in the blue orbit more than halfway home.

My usual way home from the Mun is to leave lunar orbit retrograde (to the Mun) which leaves me in a roughly circular orbit of Kerbin just inside lunar orbit. From there, I’d do long retrograde burn at apogee to reduce perigee until it touches the atmosphere for aerobreaking. But I had a ship that was low on fuel the other day, so I started playing around, and this is what I came up with: We leave lunar orbit prograde (that seems to take less fuel) just barely enough delta V to get out of the SOI. That puts us in an elliptical Kerbin orbit just *outside* lunar orbit. Apogee around 26,000 km. Then at the perigee of that orbit, we plot a retrograde burn about 15 m/s. Play around in there, you’ll find there is a maneuver that puts you back into the Munar SOI. You can plot a ridiculously tight horseshoe shaped spoon-out around the Mun that cancels a huge amount of your forward velocity. I turn that 26,000 km apogee into a 2000 km perigee with a 15 m/s burn! That's like two thirds of the way home! Granted, it takes a few days (OK, weeks), but the Kerbals don’t mind and I seem to be saving hundreds and hundreds of m/s of delta V. In the past, I have stumbled spoon-out maneuvers around the Mun usually while coming home from Minmus. But those were just happy accidents. This is something I can do reliably every time, as if I know what I’m doing. :D So am I right? Is this something other people should do? Or (more likely) are one of you about to tell me that I’m fooling myself? “Blah blah blah Holman, blah blah blah Oberth, blah blah blah is really cheaper“ EDIT: NO, a direct burn is the same.

I spell out most TLAs. I say S.Q.L. not "sequal"

I'd rather lose all the progress since my last save, than lose Jeb. :D OTOH, now you can name an EPIC spaceship after him!!

[quote name='Xyphos']if his malnourished, already-dead corpse doubtfully survives re-entry, sure.[/QUOTE] He's happily in torpor, and by the time he completes one orbit, I'll have a massive interplanetary fleet ready to receive his incoming ship.

[quote name='pincushionman'] All orbital-motion effects such as SOI changes are respected, and in fact in 1.0 the SOI-boundary behavior was changed under the hood to ensure it always happens (prior, you could skip through at high warp under certain conditions). [/QUOTE] Ah HAA! I *KNEW* I had seen spaceships fly through planets!! EDIT: AAMOF, I used to put nodes right infront of SOI changes, because I was afraid of warping past them

I see, not atmospheric effects, BUT gravity effects. (I guess it could do that math once per orbit and not in a constant sub-second physics loop.) I was thinking atmospheric effects and gravity were handled the same way on rails. But you have to agree that it doesn't SHOW us any of that in map view. for a ship you're not "flying" it shows a simple ellipse whether it hits an SOI or not. Hence my confusion. [COLOR="silver"][SIZE=1]- - - Updated - - -[/SIZE][/COLOR] [quote name='hugix']Even when a vessel isn't loaded it will transistion SOI. When you launch a vessel on a interplanetary trajectory it will still leave the Kerbin SOI and enter the sun's SOI when not loaded.[/QUOTE] Yes, but that's this ONE orbit, I figured that if it cleared the first orbit, THEN no more gravitational math. (i was wrong)

[quote name='Thegamer211']What is this, 2008?[/QUOTE] Everything is Awesome!

Really?! always? I thought the gray lines where the on-rails objects. And they always show a single conic section. You never see a bezier curve in gray. I thought the ship had to be loaded for patched conics to work. You're telling me the system is doing much more complex math than its showing us in map view. I assumed the system projected a single orbit for a given object and if it didn't collide with anything in THAT one orbit, just left it on that rail forever. Guess not. EDIT: WAIT: then what *isn't* it doing "on rails"?

New career game, haven't landed on the Mun yet, I accepted a contract to rescue a Kerbal in LKO. When I looked, he’s not in LKO, he is in a failed transfer orbit to the Mun (Ap in lunar orbit, Pe in LKO but in the wrong direction) I don’t have a manned vehicle with that kind of delta V yet, so he’ll wait. I proceed with my first robot lander on the Mun, all goes well. Now I look at my map, and this guy is on an escape trajectory heading out toward the sun! His Pe is beyond lunar orbit and this guy is out of here! At first I thought it was a different guy, wondering if I had accepted (and missed) a contract to rescue interplanetary traveler(!) then I realized the one on the transfer orbit was missing. And it was a very dangerous orbit. So I figure one of three things had to have happened: 1. The Mun came by and pulled him out of orbit, but that violates everything I know by the on-rails physics system. 2. I guess it’s *possible* that he flew by the Mun, and within 22 km(?), while I was doing my robot landing. (what are the odds of that?) 3. Or the game glitched out and moved his orbit. So now I’m going to have a shipwreck in interplanetary space to go rescue once I have ships with enough delta V to get out there. (and an open contract until then)

Each of my missions has TLA (three letter acronym) Joolean Exploratory Fleet (JEF) Jool 5 challenge (J5C) Munar Resource Survey (MRS) etc. Then each ship uses the TLA as a prefix on its name: JEF Megatanker One JEF Tylo Station J5C Challenger MRS Orbiter II MRS Rover 1. It helps a little.

.....in' about Microsoft is preaching to the choir to me, man. How about if MS "updates" makes your 20 years of programming experience obsolete, and pretty much screws you out of your career (IRL, not game.) Just so MS can push everyone to their insecure cloud and start charging everyone in the world rent. :mad: (that's the first frowny face I've ever posted in these forums.! Fact is, I play KSP to forget my Microsoft problems)

[quote name='Red Shirt'] I have made an 80k Ap but ran out of O2 before being able to sufficiently raise Pe. This brings up my last issue - why are there no oxidizer only tanks? I have plenty of liquid fuel left. I guess I can try adding a short rocket fuel tank and removing the fuel. Seems like a poor fix.[/QUOTE] if you have leftover LF but not enough O, then don't ADD a tank (and remove LF) REPLACE one LF tank with an LFO tank.

[quote name='Polnoch'] What Transfer window planner mean with "303.72" Degree? It 57 Degree if we have retrograde orbit? But 57 degree from what? Kerbol? The angle does not seen like acute - it like obtuse (to the Kerbol) And, I have no encouter. How I can change Inclination? Or I needn't do this?[/QUOTE] 303 degrees from prograde of Kerbin's orbit around its sun. At the time of departure. (look at the illustrations in the tutorial in my sig) 270 would be directly between the Kerbin and the sun(noon) , 90 would be opposite from the sun (midnight). You are still orbiting Kerbin counter-clockwise, so 303 means you are on the sun side, going backwards against the orbit of Kerbin, so yes, retrograde to Kerbin's orbit, (more accurately just slightly slower than kerbin, relative to the sun) and toward the Sun. There will also be a "plane-change" up/down (purple triangle) component to the maneuver because Moho is not perfectly in the solar plane.

I got a rover to work in a service bay by suspending in the middle of the bay, by hanging it from a docking port attached to a girder segment.

My advice: 1. go to [URL]http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/[/URL] and get a departure window date and ejection angle. 2. read the tutorial in my sig to find the departure angle plot the burn and GO! all stock

There is a bug with random point lights showing in places ships have been. I've had one on the KSC runway for over a year. I play stock, (exp, KAC, and Hyperedit)

happy w/ my Logitech Extreme 3D Pro

sorry guys, my first rescue contracts since 1, I guess.

That's pretty high up the tech tree. So, yeah you'll have crap to clean up. Eventually

so now rescue Kerbals aren't just floating in suits (an improvement) but their pods are cluttering up my orbit with debris! In a game where I decided "This time, no debris!!"

that's why all my vehicles have probe cores!

I turned off the music over a year ago.

OPTION 2: If you can get the plane into space it will continue "on rails" until reentry. So you can get the whole package into space, separate the payload, have it make orbit, and get back to the plane before it hits the atmosphere, and pilot it in.

I can see why they did that, the answer is one more new part: The Mk1 Inline Airlock. A parallel to the inline docking port, but its a hatch!