Got to Mun and Minmus and Back: What Now?

[goon46]

Hey guys, I'm new to this forum so forgive me if this question has been asked already...

What do you do once you get to the Mun, Minmus, and collected the data? More contracts? More trips to the moons to get as much science as possible? Do you try for Duna right away? If so, how will I get there without burning too much fuel? I have just gotten the basic parts for heavy rocketry (fuel tanks, command pod, engines, and one fuel booster) so I am not familiar at all as to how to make efficient rockets with them. Any tips as to how to reach there properly?

Thanks everyone 

[Alshain]

Duna or Eve are your most logical choices.  They are both relatively easy to get to as they have minimal inclination and have a fair amount of gravitational pull.

Duna has the disadvantage of requiring much more solar power because of it's distance to the sun, however its gravity is lower and atmosphere thinner.  With a well planned rocket you might be able to land at one or two locations and still get to Ike as well. 

Eve has the disadvantage of not being able to land and return on it easily which means you can send down an unmanned probe (or sacrifice a Kerbal), but due to it's gravity and thick atmosphere, returning is not for beginners.  Howeve, it does have Gilly, which is the smallest, lowest gravity static object in the game and requires next to nothing to land and return from (seriously, 30 dV).  With several biomes you can bring home a handful of science.

Edited January 18, 2016 by Alshain

[Foxster]

Ike is my next choice. It's easier to get to than Duna (or Eve) because of the low gravity and gives a better science multiplier than Duna. It also has a number of biomes, so you can get lots of science from just a <50km orbit as you cross each biome and then lots more from one landing+return. 

[maceemiller]

Try scanning the Mun or elsewhere in sandbox mode and attempt to land at each anomaly. If nothing else this perfects your landing in an exact spot.

[KerikBalm]

Well, I ussually set up an orbiting fuel depot on the mun/minmus, and do some science harvesting from different biomes.

How many orbital rendevous have you done?

You can put the fuel depot in a polar orbit to get every biome, or an equatorial orbit for easier rendevous, faster collection of certain biomes (no need to wait for mun t rotate underneath you), at the expense of missing a few biomes because they are too far from the equator.

[Freshmeat]

I sent probes out for the nearby planets and built a small space station around Minmus for more nearby exploration and science. While greater minds probably can do it easily, I have great difficulty planning return missions without access to Nervs.

I also do a bunch of rescue missions to get funds and crew, as well as satellite contracts to get funds. Rescues train rendezvous, essential for advanced missions with multipart ships (although I surrendered and installed Docking Port Alignment Indicator to ease docking), and satellite contracts give you a feel for precision manoeuvring and making cheap lifters.

[RizzoTheRat]

Historically that's about the point they release a new version and I start a new career game

You can get most of the way through the tech tree just visiting the Mun and Minimus, and after a Mun landing or two you've got the technology to put fuel depots in orbit as Kerik describes.  This game I did all biomes on Minimus in one mission and had enough fuel left to go and do a couple more on the Mun, so you can really start to refine your ship designs in the early game and learn valuable lessons for later exploration (why I think career is far better than sandbox for new players).  By the time you've done that you'll be getting pretty good at landing roughly on target and at docking in orbit, both very useful skills.

Duna or Ike are usually my next stops as they're the contracts that usually come up, no point paying to go somewhere else when I can be paid to go to them.

[Evanitis]

Welcome to the forum!

1 hour ago, goon46 said:

Do you try for Duna right away? If so, how will I get there without burning too much fuel?

What you need for an efficient interplanetary transfer is a launch window - as in a certain time when Kerbin and the target planet is alligned so that you need the least delta V (=/= fuel, but close enough) to get there. Here is an excellent tool to find your window. It might give you an intimiditaing amount of information, but all you -really- need is to enter your starting conditions, click plot, find a deep blue spot on the graph, and check the departure time. From there, it's pretty much the same as going to the Mun.

I'd also like to suggest a slingshot tutorial. I consider it the most undervalued and overmistified bit of obital physics. Coincidentally, the linked page uses Duna as an example - following the steps will get you to there by using pretty much the same amount of fuel dV as you would to go to the Mun.

Happy landings!

[AbacusWizard]

You might also enjoy setting up some orbital infrastructure close to home--I usually build space stations at Mun, at Minmus, and Low Kerbin Orbit, plus small atomic-powered crew transport skiffs to travel between them and a fuel refinery on Minmus before I even start going interplanetary.

[soulsource]

I second what the others said. Try an uncrewed probe for Eve, and crewed or uncrewed trips to Duna, Ike, and Gilly.

Gilly is a particularly interesting object, as it has so low gravity, that you can go to all three biomes nearly without using fuel. It might be difficult to get an encounter with it, as it has very low gravity, but it's definitely doable also for a beginner - just go to Eve orbit that approximately matches the one of Gilly, and do a normal rendezvous with it, just as if you wanted to rescue a stranded Kerbal from high Kerbin orbit.

Duna is very similar to the Mün, but has slightly higher gravitational pull. You can in principle land there using parachutes, but I'd use a mod to verify that they are going to work - RealChute is quite handy. Or, you can just land like on the Mün - powered. Having an aerodynamically stable lander is a plus, but above 5 km the atmosphere of Duna should be thin enough to allow free orientation of your craft with respect to the airstream. That's why for a powered landing I'd try to kill most velocity already above 5 km, and then go down nearly vertically, but that's just a rule of thumb.

Ah, and don't get frightened by people claiming you'd need immense amounts of solar panels to go to Duna or Ike. The efficiency goes down to about 40% (Gauß' law - (Kerbin-Orbit/Duna-Orbit)^2=(1.3e10/2e10)^2=0.4), what's far from an issue for regular probes or ships.

For transfer Windows there is the excellent Transfer Window Planner mod, that'll allow you to calculate how much dV you're going to need as a function of both, departure time, and transfer duration. By graphically representing this information as a so called porkchop-plot, you can easily choose optimal transfer conditions. The mod takes into account planetary inclination, and orbital eccentricity, so you can even plan ahead for several years to find sweet spots, what's especially relevant when going to Moho or transferring between the moons of Jool. Furthermore, its calculations include Oberth Effect.

Another mod that gives you information on transfer windows is Kerbal Alarm Clock, but in that case the information is limited to the date around which conditions are best.

You can of course also calculate the transfer windows by hand, as all you need to know is the angle that your target planet is going to travel while your ship is on the way. So, first you'll need to calculate how long the transfer will take. Approximating the planetary orbits as circles makes this pretty easy, as your transfer orbit will be half of an ellipse that has a semi-major axis that's just the average of the semi-major axes of both planets. Then, following Kepler's third law (the square of the orbital period is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis) you can calculate the time. By either calculating or looking up the angular velocity of your target planet, you'll immediately get the angle it will cover during this time, which will allow you to estimate already by looking at the map view, when it'll be best to launch.

Also it pays off to rely on Oberth Effect, which directly comes from the quadratic velocity dependence of kinetic energy. It's actually pretty straightforward to understand, and I've once written a nice short guide on how it works (I'd just self-quote, but I don't know how to do this properly with the new forum software...).

[goon46]

Thanks everyone for the amazing responses. I will try getting as much science from the moons as I possibly can, and then finally learning how to dock my ships so I can refuel to my next celestial body.

And then maybe establishing a base on either the Mun or Minmus.

This seems like a rough challenge for a beginner like me, but I will learn in time. Thanks again 

[RA3236]

15 minutes ago, goon46 said:

Thanks everyone for the amazing responses. I will try getting as much science from the moons as I possibly can, and then finally learning how to dock my ships so I can refuel to my next celestial body.

And then maybe establishing a base on either the Mun or Minmus.

This seems like a rough challenge for a beginner like me, but I will learn in time. Thanks again 

Thank you for giving me an idea on what to do in my career now. I've never gotten past Minmus and I only just got back from Minmus in my Kerbal X replica. That is another thing you could do; in preparation for Duna and Eve try to land on Mun and Minmus with your own replica to test your skills in conserving delta v.