Jackissimus

How do you do this?

Yeah I just did basically the same thing with the same result. I have a smallish stationary kethane mining rig and a huge tanker that lands next to it and drives on the big wheels to dock with it. I even installed four docking ports each at a slightly different height, see I was thinking ahead. It didn't work though, I still can't dock with the miner. I think it's really tough to dock with these heavy things, because the magnetic force cannot pull such heavy craft together, and the ports have to be aligned just way too perfectly (not only vertically, but also horizontally and at 180deg angle). I think I am will give up and just install KAS. I was trying to avoid it, I heard it has issues sometimes, ripping your vessels apart, I don't save very much ...

Guys, guys, I missed this info! Where did you read it?

Great article! Ok, this cleared it up a little: “It's why racing drivers like racing games…no real responsibility,†Ellison said. “Time to go a little crazy. Some of the engineering principles are very sound within KSP, but you can go just a little bit crazy. Everyone who works in and around the fields of science and engineering has a thousand crazy ideas they've thought of but would never try in real life. KSP is a place where maybe, in Kerbal's unique way, you can give them a try.†And this is quite a something: “The only thing that would make this week complete, and you may or may not know about this game, is if the developers of a game called Kerbal Space Program showed up. Half of JPL is playing that game right now,†I wonder if Harvester knows and whether he would like to meet them I think it could make the game even more realistic if there was some contact with JPL.

I think we will actually destroy this planet and have our society crumble under its own weight before people start looking at the stars again.

I can't do this even in KSP.

I often read on steam and reddit and youtube that KSP is quite popular with NASA employees. I have to say I am kinda doubtful that NASA employees would be interested in a game simulating something that is really their job. You know ... when I come home I want to wind down a bit ... So if there's anyone from NASA, could you reply and maybe say why you became interested in the game?

I am surprised this doesn't get more comments. Great information.

Exactly! I don't know who came up with this fake problem of missing toilets. Anyone who's been using public transportation their whole lives knows it's not a problem. To kocour: Zdravím z Brna!

Yeah, you have to compare it to 9.81 for Kerbin surface acceleration. So if the detector reads 5, then it's about half the surface gravity on kerbin (1/2 g). It's a funny thing, that gravioli detector, in real life it would be something like a detector of gravitons. But gravitons are not proven to exist, although they are part of the Standard Model. In reality there is no way to measure gravitation, because gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration, as described in theory of relativity.

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If you think about it, what's making it constantly change it's orbit? What force is changing the orbit? Because it cannot change on its own and the Big Whack was a long time ago... But yeah, it's all on wikipedia, nobody is smart anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration

I am totally insane. Since I started (.18), I've been playing basically non-stop. I spent whole weekends playing this game. I took a vacation to play this game ...

You got two options: - decrease part count - overclock your CPU Yeah, get rid of those RCS ports, you don't need them. The UAVs don't need that many solar panels either. Also check if the fps drops around the station generally or if it's only when you are looking at Kerbin.

OMG, how do you make those diagrams, is this still mspaint? OK Ralathon, I think we talk about different things again. I never said it's not possible to enter a polar orbit very cheaply. Again, I am just saying there are 360degrees worth of polar orbits and I have to enter the right one. Shifty, that's a great idea. A few posts back I finally realized even better way, when I was talking about "barely scraping" the SOI.

LOL! Anyway, do you know how much dV it will cost you to increase phi to 180deg? The question is not if we can, the question is whether we should.

Well yeah, it is, but the periapsis doesn't lie at point (a). Burning at point (a) doesn't put you in orbit (2). The last sentence is not correct. That would mean that I have to speed up significantly to have almost a straight path around Eve. But actually my path will bend around Eve, maybe by those 90 degrees or something, and that will put the periapsis at roughly 45 degrees behind the planet. I still cannot easily reach my orbital station with the orbital plane perpendicular to the velocity of the planet.

Hi again! I completely understand what you want to say. I just don't agree. It starts with curve no. 1. That's not a real approach trajectory (and I have to admit I didn't really draw this right myself). This may seem trivial, but in fact it's crucial. What happens during a hohmann transfer? You raise your apoapsis to the altitude of the orbiting planet. What are you doing exactly at the point when you reach the apoapsis? You are moving very slowly in the same direction the planet moves (e.g. tangential to your orbit). But the planet moves much much faster, so it catches up to you and you enter its SOI. Then what happens? You approach the planet from the front, have a periapsis somewhere on the rear and escape the SOI somewhere on the front, or maybe the side. What happens to the craft's orbit relative to Kerbol after it escapes? Depending on the gravity of the planet it changed very little or it changed a lot. But that doesn't mean that the craft's trajectory relative to the planet looks any different from what I described! It still has a periapsis somewhere near the rear of the planet and at point (a) I certainly cannot enter orbit (2). The only thing I can do at point (a) is probably reduce the eccentricity of the orbit a bit and maybe shift it a little bit sideways, that's it. You can also imagine it from the craft's point of view. In the craft's frame of reference it was moving slowly near its apoapsis, minding its own business, when a planet whizzed by and tugged it behind it for a while. And now that I think of it, it is true that when a low gravity body whizzes fast by the craft, its orbit doesn't change much and it basically escapes the planet's SOI on the rear side. Which means that the periapsis will be on the side of the planet and I can then easily enter a polar orbit which is perpendicular to the planet's velocity vector. It leaves me in the same trouble however! It's easier to intercept this planet's orbital station when it's perpendicular to the planet's velocity vector, but it's really difficult to do that with the station's orbital plane parallel to the planet's velocity in this case. Well anyway, I have to test this myself I think, but it involves a lot of time to set everything up and I am also afraid it involves a bit more complicated thinking than "burn prograde, burn anti-normal" etc... EDIT: I thought about it even a bit more and now I think it really depends on a planet and it's gravity what trajectory I will have relative to it. Even then I can probably do different things like some strange swing-bys etc. But I am really just dodging the issue that for a Hohmann transfer I will approach from the front, that's a given, and that means I will always be limited in the positions my periapsis can have. There is no getting around it. EDIT2: Yeah and I can always try to really fine tune my approach so that I barely scrape the SOI. That way I will have my periapsis almost perpendicularly to the planet's velocity. It was basically discussed earlier in the thread. Yeah now I think I understand it well. I can enter all the polar orbits, it's just really difficult, especially the scraping of the SOI.

This thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25233-Kethane-Scanner

That doesn't solve the problem I show in the picture above. What if you are approaching the planet perpendicularly to the orbital plane of the polar station? You cannot put your periapsis there easily. The only way to do it is to speed up so much you basically fly around the planet in a straight line, then slow down again when you reach the periapsis. That's a huge amount of deltaV there. In usual hohmann transfers, you will enter the planet's SOI from the front (the planet catches you up) and have a nice hyperbolic orbit that will throw you mostly to the front again (periapsis inside the planet), sometimes to the sides, but never ever to the rear, you need to speed up for that.

Well yeah, I meant in KSP, where there is no axial tilt. Reaching an equatorial orbit on Uranus would prove very difficult. There was already someone who wanted to rotate the periapsis. It seems to me that you cannot rotate the periapsis. The periapsis lies on the major axis of the ellipse (or the hyperbole), the planet is in the focus. When I want to rotate the periapsis, I have to move this axis and that means moving very large distances on the other end. Very costly. Rotating the periapsis can be done easily on a nearly circular orbit, because it's not really rotating the periapsis, but actually raising it over (or close to) the apoapsis, thus changing the periapsis position.

I didn't get you in the beginning - how can you rotate your periapsis before the actual SOI change? Maybe a little, but not like 180 degrees, which is what I might need. The last sentence is complete nonsense to me. It's the same dV as before. If you spend very little fuel at this stage, you still have to add a huge fuel tank at Kerbin ascent. DeltaV is the same no matter where you burn. How do you change you orbital plane? Not inclination, longitude of ascending node. No, this is not the same. Equatorial orbits you can always get into, there is just one single equatorial orbit and you can always reach it easily. However, there are 360degrees worth of polar orbits and it's difficult to reach the one you want exactly. Well it turns out I might not need to wait so many years, just wait for the transfer window. But there are still some unresolved issues. I am getting a bit frustrated because my words maybe cannot really explain the problem. So I made a simple picture with all the mspaint power skills I could muster

So I just got home and got some time to test the idea of approaching at the right angle to have the same orbital plane as the station, as SRVRon suggested. BTW I used the term LAN before, but saying "orbital planes" is easier to understand I think. I was testing on a craft getting from LKO to Mun. I quickly noticed that yeah, I can fine tune my approach angle, but I can only approach the Mun from the front, not from the behind. And that I can do mostly in about 90 degrees range there, I cannot approach the Mun perpendicularly to its orbit for example. And then it hit me that I cannot approach the Mun from behind, I always have to come from the front, because I have much lower orbital velocity than Mun at that point, so it has to catch up to me. Opposite situation would be a transfer to Moho, I cannot approach Moho from the front, I am always going much faster than it is. But basically yeah, I can always overshoot the Mun orbit or undershoot it and end up in different orbital planes, that's what I learned ... the 90degrees range is a bit worrying though, maybe I can improve this. Mechjeb has a great tool for quickly changing conics mode, I didn't even know, I already use its info screens.

Inclination changes are very expensive, it's certainly not a very efficient way. Try to do a 90deg inclination changes in LKO. It will cost you more than twice the cost of getting to the Mun. It's interesting that it's actually cheaper to get to the Mun than to change inclination. Sometimes it's even better to fly to the Moon to make your inclination changes - check out this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGS-1. I'm not sure I understand your last sentence.

This is actually a great table for deltaV budgets that the satellites need to account for to keep them in the desired orbits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget#Stationkeeping It's very little (like 5m/s per year), but it's there. Even the Moon is not in a stable orbit, but that has more to do with tidal forces.