notasurgeon

Thanks so much for this, it has been very helpful! Today I tried to use it to get to Duna for the first time, and did a burn from a zero inclination circular 100km Kerbin orbit when both angles were zero (the phase angle was actually 0.00 exactly during the burn), but I ended up missing Duna by several degrees of its orbit. The interplanetary burn was short too, because I had a very small lander with an aerospike. Total burn was maybe 20 seconds, with most of the delta-v happening in the first 10. And this exact same method got me to Eve just fine, so I feel like I did everything correctly. Problem was, I arrived at my apoapsis at Duna's orbit several million miles ahead of Duna. I'm going to try it again with Duna's phase angle at 350 or 355 instead of 0, because 0 was definitely far too early to launch. No interference from the mun or anything else on the way out either. Any ideas what went wrong?

Thanks guys. Another question: I'm using the protractor mod, and it was several degrees off on predicting the right duna phase angles for me. If I started my burn when the phase angles were at zero, I got to Duna's orbit several degrees ahead of it and missed it by a few million miles. Is this a common problem? Eve worked fine for me once I figured the inclination part out, so I'm a little surprised. I guess I'll launch at 355 instead of zero and see what happens.

Hi! I suck at designing spaceships, apparently. I really like the look of this lander, but I haven't been able to build a booster that can get it into a stable Kerbin orbit with enough fuel left for an interplanetary transfer. My biggest problem seems to be that no matter what I do it becomes highly unstable at higher altitudes as it becomes more and more top heavy. Any ideas? https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37537505/Spectre1.craft https://dl.dropbox.com/u/37537505/Spectre2.craft I've tried at least a half-dozen different approaches, but little success so far.

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Hi! When attempting to align my orbital inclination with that of the target's orbit (e.g. while going from Kerbin to Eve), I need to be at the point where both orbits are passing through the same horizontal plane at the same phase angle around Kerbol. But this is difficult to eyeball sometimes, and depending on where the two planets are in their orbits when the phase angle is right to start the transfer burn, I might not actually cross that point until after I should have intercepted the target planet. I hope that makes sense, and that I'm using the terminology correctly. Is there a better way to do this?

I'm 0/5 now on the stage separation happening without this thing destroying itself.