maltesh

If you want to just hit the Mun, start slowing down as soon as you enter the Munar SOI. That\'s where it\'s easiest to pull your periapsis below the Munar surface. On a first Munar Landing, though, I\'d wait until I hit periapsis, and then slow down to put my spacecraft into a low Munar orbit. I\'d then hit F5 to Quicksave, relax, take a few deep breaths, maybe get a drink, then come back and plan out a landing. Then, after I failed to land correctly, I\'d hold F9, reload the quicksave, and try again.

I landed a gun platform 15 kilometers from a Munar arch, and took a few test shots.

Are you starting from a circular orbit that\'s lower than 100km? Apparently a change in one of the more recent updates puts everything below 100km in a rotating frame of reference, which the current version of Mechjeb doesn\'t like to deal with. Once someone told me about it, I started doing my MechJeb-assisted munar transfers from orbits at 125 km altitude, and they went fine.

The difference between an apoapsis of 1.8 GM and solar escape from Kerbin orbit is pretty small in velocity. I\'d estimate another 500 m/s would have put you on solar escape. Basically, get your spacecraft into an eastward low Kerbin orbit, wait until you cross the midnight line, and run it up to about 5 km/s. That will typically get you solar escape on exit of the Kerbin SOI.

The information part of the rendezvous module works brilliantly. The ship-pointing part of the rendezvous module less so. It actively fights with the Smart ASS system, so be sure you\'re only using one or the other at any one time. I tend to use the buttons on the Smart ASS over the ones on the Rendezvous module. I pretty much ignore the 'Do this for me' part. As for how to use it, these are the instructions that taught me when it was still RinComp. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?action=showpost&postid=404079876

It\'s also fairly hard to tell what you\'re illustrating. We can\'t tell what the configuration of Kerbin is at launch; there are too many sats in the way Are you advocating a direct-ascent flight to the Mun? How fast is the spacecraft you\'re using? Screenshotting out the whole process would be extremely illustrative.

In free space, with no gravitational sources, yes, that\'s exactly what you could do. If you have a fuel that has a constant mass consumption ratio, you can use the Tsiolovsky Rocket Equation to calculate delta-V. Where ve is the Exhaust velocity, m0 is the full mass of the spacecraft, and m1 is the mass of your spacecraft with all the tanks in that stage drained. The result is the delta-V for that stage. Once that stage is gone, you calculate it for the spacecraft as you burn the next stage, and add it in, and so on. Exhaust velocity can also be labeled as Specific Impuse, when Isp is measured in m/s. The Kerbal Space Wiki has values for the standard fuel tanks. Kerbal Space program doesn\'t quite have a consistent mass fuel expenditure rate for liquid fuel, so things get more complicated. I suspect Mechjeb figures out delta-V by knowing the mass and thrust of your spacecraft as you burn. I\'d esitmate the delta-V neccesary to return to Kerbin from the Mun to be about 850-950 m/s assuming you do all your burning as low as you can, and aim for a hyperbolic exit that takes =you out the center of of the trailing hemisphere of the Munar SOI, and drops you directly onto Kerbin. Any method that requires you to brake outside the Munar SOI is going to cost you more delta-V than that.

\' is minutes, ' is seconds. Apparently there\'s a page dedicated to typing the Degree Symbol/ Personally, I typically the third option mentioned there: do a search for the degree symbol and copy and paste it in, like so. °

Nifty. Was the Mun\'s orbit inclined by Minmus interaction in the simulation?

The sun did it. It\'s a fairly-standard Hohmann transfer. Disregarding the minor course corrections, Curiosity\'s in an elliptical orbit whose periapsis is at Earth\'s orbit and whose apoapsis is at Mars\'.

While you can edit the asteroid into orbit, its wonky collision box means that no part will stay attached to it for long at launch, and bringing things into contact with it will generally destroy the asteroid and severely damage whatever touched it.

SunJumper is correct. It\'s a valid enough method of measuring the delta-V that your spacecraft\'s engines can produce on an escape course. To get more acurrate, you\'d have to have an accurate mass profile of your ship\'s remaining fuel and stages, and pull out the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. THe rules he provided are not \'Fastest spacecraft out of the Kertbol system.' They\'re 'Most delta-V left after setting up an escape trajectory from Kerbol.' As a result, truth be told, the rules banning sundiving aren\'t actually neccessary. Your hyperbolic excess velocity can change depending on /how/ you spend the delta-V your ship is capable of, but the delta-V your ship is capable of remains the same. Edit, at any rate. Submission. Yanked out Sunspotter 4 and redesigned her a bit. Fully stock, now, double-layer Asparagus staging. Should have redesigned her more, unbalanced booster stacks result in a wicked spin that cost me a fair bit of delta-V under power. We\'re parabolic here, so the escape trajectory\'s flickering in and out. Velocity. 13244.4 relative to Kerbol. And with all fuel burned, we\'re at 20707.3 m/s relative to Kerbol. Estimated delta-V, to 3 significant figures, 7460 m/s.

In fact, if you use the Cuttlefish Lander as your first stage, you can fly a BigTrak from KSC to a safe landing on the Mun or Minmus. Flying a BigTrak is tricky, and landing doubly so, but the current version of MechJeb can handle the off-center thrust. Just remember to open the petals before jettisoning the stage, or the results will be...unpleasant.

So... question. Did you land after the screenshot was taken? Or before? Because you appear to be moving ridiculously fast hazardously close to the surfacr in the image. If the former, can you throw a link to the parts?

You actually get best use of the fuel by smoothly going into low orbit first, and then burning at the point where the limb of your planned hyperbolic escape will take you in the correct direction. As mechjeb\'s acnet stats will show you, this minimizes the gravity drag, for a more fuel-efficeint departure. If you /really/ want to save fuel on a sundive though, you need to do a Bi-Elliptic transfer. Leave out the leading edge of Kerbin\'s SOI for a very distant apoapsis (I usually go for 131 GM from Kerbin orbit). Gravity drag will slow down your ship for you, leaving you with a lot less velocity to kill when you get out there. From Kerbin orbit, a Bi-Elliptic sundive can cut the required delta-V by half, at a cost of a trip that takes dozens of times longer (My typical bi-elliptic Sundive is a 1200-day trip). In fact, the numbers work out that it\'s more fuel-efficient to go the bi-elliptic route to sundive from any distance more than about 6 radii from the star. This was actually one of my first attemtps at it. The ship is fairly poorly designed, and I start burning to exit the leading pole of the Kerbin SOI too early, and compound the error by wasting fuel trying to bend my trajectory in LKO. This was also in version 0.12 something, where, like in the Demo Version, the sun doesn\'t yet have the kill line added in 0.14, resulting in a maximum velocity of about 4000 km/s at periapsis.

Note that the docking will only really last as long as you\'re still playing the ships in the current version; When you switch to something that isn\'t in the same 2.5 km physics sphere, or if you warp faster than 2x, they\'ll pass through one another and disengage.

The most fuel-efficient way is to pop yourself off the Mun, get into a low orbit, and burn hyperbolic into an orbit that leaves out the rear of the munar SOI, directly into a return orbit. What you\'re looking to do is have about 545 m/s velocity relative to the Mun just before you leave the center of the SOI. That will basically drop you straight down onto Kerbin once you leave it. The velocity window is fairly wide, as I recall, about 120 m/s either way. If you want best advantage of the Oberth Effect, you\'ll want to get int a low, circular orbit heading eastward, and, a bit before you cross the center of the near side, burn up to about 850-950 m/s, similar to what\'s done in this video: Leaving out the trailing edge of the Munar SOI also neatly avoids the bane of the low-fuel Kerbin return; Having the Mun catch up with you when you\'re trying to decelerate to hit the planet, and throw you wide again. It\'s much more obvious if it will happen in v. 0.15 than it was in previous versions, admittedly.

The Munrise Burn method (get into an Eastward Orbit (090), wait for the Mun to rise, burn to raise your apoapsis, coast and capture) has benefits of both costing you less fuel, and taking less time. The method I like to call 'Wrong Way Charlie' would be to get into an equatorial westward orbit (270), pushing your apoapsis to the Mun\'s altitude,then circularizing and waiting to come into the Mun head on, has a lot of built-in fuel penalties. When you take off eastward, you get about 200 m/s free orbital velocity from Kerbin\'s rotation. WWC means you not only don\'t get the free velocity, but you have to fight the planet\'s rotation velocity. So you\'re 400 m/s behind. If you get to the Mun\'s orbit on a Munrise burn and the Mun\'s there, your relative velocity to the Mun is about 250 m/s on a Munrise Burn. On a WWC, if the Mun\'s there, it\'s about 750 m/s. If the Mun isn\'t there and you had to circularize (costing you another 250 m/s in delta-V) your relative velocity is about 1100 m/s, and it could take as long as half the Mun\'s period to get into its SOI Regardless of how you got into the Munar SOI, you\'re going to have to slow to near zero relative to the Mun if you\'re going to land. So if you do a WWC ascent to the Mun, you\'ve got to spend between 900 m/s and 1400 m/s of extra Delta-V to go from Kerbin Surface to a Mun landing. Most people\'s Mun rockets could probably do that, but 1400 m/s of extra delta V spent getting there means less fuel for maneuvering and landing when you arrive.

You can sundive at roughly 4.5 km/s if you do a bi-elliptic transfer instead of a Hohmann descent. It just takes much, much, much longer. If it weren\'t for the Kraken, you could then scrape Kerbol\'s surface (in the paid version, Kerbol will kill you at closer than a few thousand km) for a powered gravitational slingshot and use the Oberth Effect to carry even more velocity off into the void.

The off-claimed 90-degrees most likely comes from a misconception that the visual edge of Kerbin is horizontally in front of you at ~100km altitude. It isn\'t. It\'s about 31 degrees below horizontal. So when the Mun rises, it\'s about 59 degrees away from where your apoapsis would be if you started burning right then. An object in an orbit whose radius is your apoapsis will travel about 63 degrees along its orbit in your travel time from periapsis to apoapsis when your apoapsis is far higher than your periapsis (such as when you\'re heading from LKO to the Mun or Minmus) And since the Munar SOI is a bloody huge target, and Kepler\'s second law means that you\'ll be hanging out at Apoapsis for quite some time, the Munrise Burn method works.

Also keep in mind that, with the Munrise burn method, you will get out to the Mun\'s radius before the Mun gets there, but you will be moving slowly enough that the Mun will catch up and sweep you into its Sphere of Influence. The Mun\'s SOI is nearly 5000km across.

Went after the Disasteroid again. Been awhile scince I\'d played the scenario, figured I might as well make sure everything was still working.

Describing an impact with 'pounds of force' is using the wrong units to measure it, analagous to saying 'He ran as fast as 38 seconds.' Not enough information\'s been provided to say definitive things about the impact. At any rate, any resource that you\'d use to make useful calculations out of the information you\'d get from the UI is going to use SI units. You\'d have to spend some time looking to find what the imperial units are for the Universal Gravitational constant, and then there\'s the issue of things like pound (force) and pound (mass). Sure, you could use the slug as your unit of mass, but that\'s a far more obscure unit than the kilogram. Could it be done? Certainly. Probably in an hour. But what meager benefits might come from adding imperial units aren\'t really worth the effort.

The sun\'s been an impactable object since v 0.14. The challenge description implies it\'s a paid-version-only challenge.

The larger orbit you burn to has a period 4/3 that of the circular orbit. In the time it takes you to go around once in the larger orbit, an object in the circular orbit has gone around once, and then moved ahead another 1/3 of its orbit. So when you get back to your original altitude, and circularize, you\'re 120 degrees behind the first satellite you dropped. I imagine there aren\'t many articles on putting satellites evenly-spaced in orbits in this fashion, because in the real world, rocket science is harder, you have much better instrumentation for launch timing, and the method risks losing all three satellites at once in a launch mishap.