Intercepting the plane of highly inclined contract orbits

[Axons Amok]

I have taken on a few contracts that require highly inclined orbits. For example, this polar Mun orbit and this gigantic Duna orbit. I know that I can adjust my transfer burn and enter the SoI low (or high) to spend less fuel on inclination adjustments. But I'm having trouble figuring out a repeatable procedure for arriving at the right time so that my inbound orbital plane is decently close to the contract orbit's plane. It's especially hard with the Duna mission because the transfer window limits how much I can mess with maneuver nodes and warping to get it by trial and error.

Is there any good video tutorial or written procedure on this? Would it just be simpler to haul along lots of extra dV and perform the plane change after capture?

[ComradeWolfe]

I can't speak for timing on the Munar front as I tend to just fidget and warp a lot.

For Duna, I would aim for a polar or near polar orbit and perform plane change after as transfer windows make it more difficult to get properly lined up. My pointer on this is to get your transfer set up at ~0 inclination... Once you burn to transfer do a new node at about half-way to Duna intercept and then double-click Duna to focus your camera on Duna itself -- this will give you a good view of your final path in Duna's SOI albeit it can make tweaking your node for desired effect a bit fidgety.

Once you adjust your intercept to be kinda-sorta close to what you want, go ahead and make the burn. Then just repeat the process once or twice each time you get half of the remaining distance from Duna intercept. With a couple of iterations you will be fairly close to where you want... Finally enter Duna SOI and adjust as needed.

The key thing here is that by focusing on Duna in the map view while you are still way out you can make much more controlled changes in your intercept with much less dV and much earlier. It won't normally put you in a perfect spot, but it will greatly increase the accuracy of your starting position vs. a 0 degree intercept.

[M4ck]

You will have to set conics mode in settings.cfg to 0, IIRC, for the trajectory to be drawn like said before, but it really is useful for precise encounters.

By the way, if you don't mind spending a dozen or so extra dV, you can warp to the middle of interplanetary transfer, hit Tab until you focus on the destination and thrust a bit in each cardinal direction on navball to see which one does what you need for the trajectory. Seems easier to me than fiddling with node half a solar system away

[Axons Amok]

Yeah, Conics Mode 0 and focusing on the target is very useful for planning. I have the Precise Node Editor mod which lets you use the numpad to change the cardinal directions and the timestamp of a maneuver node so it's very easy to work on it with this method. I was just hoping there was some way of planning for the proper plane, like some sort of rule of thumb for intercept angles so that I could just wait for a window that was the proper number of degrees along the orbits.

[TheXRuler]

Not really, all I can say is aim your arriving orbit into the center of the planet and then do a small inclination change at the ascending or descending node to come in just above or just below your target body.