Getting to Duna - Fastern than Hohmann

[PLAD]

Some time ago I searched for a variety of departure times for going from Kerbin to Duna, the premise was that it takes time to prep a rocket and launch pad for a mission so  one would want to launch whenever the pad becomes available throughout an entire synodic period. By using different routes I found relatively low-dv launch windows all over the place, though the travel times vary quite a bit. Here's a chart showing the best paths I found during the first 226 days of the game. (Note: 24-hour Earth days, not 6-hour Kerbin days!)

http://imgur.com/a/H8boT

The Kerbin-Duna synodic period is about 227 Earth days, but if you are using Eve to get to Duna then there is a quasi-synodic Kerbin-Duna-Eve period of about 681 Earth days, so this chart should roughly  repeat that often. More precise is to check the windows for the specific time you are interested in. Note that I use my Flyby Finder to find the flyby windows, but Alex Mun's porkchop plotter to find the multi-revolution Kerbin-Duna flights (where your ship goes more than once around the sun during the voyage). The multi-rev paths have long flight times though, I only use them for cargo missions.
   Every one of these flight types can be run in 'reverse' to get back to Kerbin from Duna with departure times all over the place. Starting with Duna-Eve is a big dv hit though. As for Eve, I've never looked, I would imagine K-D-E would add some windows.

[Laie]

On 9/16/2016 at 1:50 PM, Kobymaru said:

Thanks, I do know about this. This is still almost exclusively Hohmann transfers, and I'm still severely limited by the transfer window. Although I'm willing to pay "extra", the off-season price of 5 km/s to 18 km/s seems quite far off.

I'm afraid that there really is no way around it.

Occasionally it may be possible to get a nice Eve assist, but that's also a launch window, even more rare and narrow than Duna windows themselves.

Just look at where Kerbin and Duna are during off-season and try to imagine what kind of trajectory it would take to get from here to there. If you lack imagination, just plot a number of possible transfers and look at the trajectories. Once you resolved to use a brute-force approach, 10km/s on either end isn't excessive, it's par for the course. Get a warp drive.

[NeverEnoughFuel!!]

I don't want to spoil the party but if you want the speed use Interstellar mod... nothing beats the warp drive... to Duna in 10 minutes ;-)... with half the throttle... I would punch it all the way but I'm afraid of hitting into planet  before I could deactivate it...