ErikTheAngry

Just wanted to chine in and say thanks for the very interesting discussion. I have been reading it silently as I have not had anything meaningful to contribute but also want you to know your answers are not going to an op-abandoned thread.

I was thinking earlier about landing with suicide burns. I know they're not as efficient as constant altitude landing, especially at lower TWRs. But then I got to thinking.. the Oberth effect makes a rocket burn more efficient effective(?). Constant Altitude burns generally feel like they take longer, perhaps because you maintain a low altitude while you kill horizontal velocity, which suggests to me that as they decelerate over a longer period of time, the net Oberth effect would be lower. Otoh, a suicide burn would accelerate you to the highest speed before you hit the LFO brakes (and hopefully not the lithobrake, unless your experiment is to find out how big of a hole you can make - which would be wicked fun in a destructible environment). On a scale of something like the Mun or Minmus it's not really relevant, but for something like Moho, where you come in nail-bitingly fast with no atmosphere (or at least... I did the one time I tried - my landing attempt turned into a very fast low altitude flyby followed by many years of floating around in space lol) if you had a sufficiently high TWR to do a meaningful suicide burn from a transfer whose periapsis barely impacts the surface, would it exceed the efficiency of a circularization and constant altitude landing? It would probably never be more efficient if you look at the whole mission (for example, you'd need to heave around a bunch of very heavy engines to try and dump out 3000m/s or so in 20-30s which would be more costly to send in the first place) but it's still a question that came up. Also using something like mechjeb with a sucide burn timer so you don't bugger it up (which you'd have little room for error at those speeds).

Thanks for the prompt response! I'll just have to do it the old fashion way and move the RCS ports around in orbit till it feels balanced enough.

Hi folks, long time lurker. RCS build aid is a must-have mod for me (obligatory brown-nosing). I'm playing career mode, and it is time for me to retrofit my Mun lander. Why retrofit? Because I use Kerbal Construction Time, and Kerbal Attachment System. Way easier to throw the new parts in an SSTO and fly them up to my orbiting mun lander and snap them on in orbit - heck even deorbit the SSTO with the old parts on board for recovery. That way I don't have to build a new ship, and I don't have to burn funds on lifters. My Mun lander was balanced perfectly with RCS Build Aid. Perfectly. 0 torque in any direction. 0 CoM movement while fuel is consumed. It handles like a dream. But it's old, it uses 909s and some simulations show that using Nervs now that I've unlocked them will make it much more flexible - increase the dV a LOT. Now I could just launch a new one. It's small and cheap and funds aren't super-tight due to basically re-using almost every craft I've launched since day 1 of the game. But I think it would be WAY more fun to retrofit it in orbit. My feature request? Integration with KAS. Give us a way to turn on the RCS build aid in flight so that we can build craft in space with perfect precision just like in the VAB/SPH.

I initially thought those were structural pylons. Hitting spacebar would be hilarious.

Thank you Diomedea. Simple is good (single body physics). I remember thinking it would be nice to have lagrange points, and noticing a mod in development for n-body physics. Then I saw the youtube video of orbits being perturbed by the mun and realized that lagrange points are definitely not worth all the station keeping I'd need for remotetech lol.

So, I did search. I honestly did. I think part of the problem is that I am not entirely sure what I'm searching for lol. Perhaps I'm incorrectly applying what is in my mind n-body physics, perhaps I'm just thinking too much, perhaps I'm not thinking enough. In a nutshell I would like to know if there is a more or less effective side of the body (say the Mun) to approach from for a capture burn. In terms of "sides" I mean the prograde or retrograde sides, ending in either a prograde or retrograde orbit. Approaching from retrograde is how you do a gravity assist (right?) so it would impart greater velocity. But since you're moving "with" the target (mun), that velocity is moot (right?). Approaching from prograde is how you do a gravity... er... deceleration so it would reduce your velocity - on that same token, you're moving opposite of the target's path and so that deceleration would also be moot (right?) My monitoring of dV usage has not yielded conclusive results, which would suggest that there is no more efficient side to approach from.