Mercury-Redstone-3 Recreation in RSS

[Hobizor]

Hi, today I finally got around start my recreations of actual NASA missions using FASA parts. But first I wanted to check how close the stock FASA crafts are, performance wise, to the real deal. Juno-Explorer-1 was weird- the second SRB cluster went completely haywire but it still limped into orbit. Next I went for Mercury-Redstone. Again, I used the stock craft file, but this time I added two parts: The posigrade rockets (which were somehow left out) and an accelerometer. I tried various ascent profiles and recorded the flight data using Graphotron (no part.) The resulting graphs were all supposed to look like this:

However I used time-warp so most of them got misshapen (at least I learned that Graphotron does not respond to changes in values during time-warp.) For range data I had to use the flight log and for max ascent G I had to write it down before reentry so it doesn't get overwritten. In the end I did four flights using various pitch programes and compared them to the actual M/RS-3 data.

1. Was mostly my standard eyeballed gravity turn plus some manual corrections to keep speeds and Ap from deviating too much from RL. Overall I got kinda close if you squint, except for range which was massively off. No clue what happened there.

2. Gravity turn at the T+16 seconds. Ended up closer to 4 degrees than 3. Q was a lot higher due to much greater speeds early on. Range was closer, though.

3. The real-life pitch programe. Yeah, no dice, either I am doing something terribly wrong or my mods are set up wrong but the turn was simply too early and too fast. Q twice what it was supposed to be, speed pretty similar to the previous attempt.

4. Gravity turn after hitting 75m/s at a moderate 2 degrees initial pitch. The other attempts got closer in certain areas but this one was closest overall, if I did the pitch maneuver slightly latter I'm pretty sure I would have gotten very close to the real deal.

Mission times (from ignition to splashdown) are shorter in all cases in part due to a lack of a drouge chute.

Overall, I found out that the FASA Mercury-Redstone can get pretty close in performance to the real thing but not using the real-life ascent. Comments, suggestion? Did I screw-up colossally somewhere?