Mun to Minmus DIRECTLY?

[NeverEnoughFuel!!]

Well the other night I had an interesting situation, after landing on Mun and grabbing some science, while I was in a parking orbit I noticed that the Minmus is only "across the street" so to say i.e. almost parallel to Mun, when I designated it as a target AN and DN nodes did not appear on my Mun orbit trajectory... is there a some way to turn on this option? Eventually I eyeballed the inclination and burned "directly" to Minmus i.e. no slingshots around Kerbin it took only seven days to get there... a bit faster than usual...  

[Superfluous J]

Sure I do this all the time, though you don't want them in line, you want Minmus in front of Mun, like Duna is to Kerbin on the interplanetary transfer.

Pro tip: it's cheaper to go to Minmus and back from Mun than it is to reverse your Mun orbit, so if you're nailing 3 satellite contracts you may want to consider Mun-Minmus-Mun instead of Mun-Mun-Minmus.

[diomedea]

Nodes always exist for an elliptic orbit (eccentricity < 1). But going from Mun to Minmus involves a conic in Mun SoI, one in Kerbin's SoI, one in Minmus' SoI. Of course you're escaping Mun's SoI (and entering Minmus' at the end), those conics have eccentricity > 1 (are hyperbolic trajectories, open). Nodes exist where the planes of the two orbits intersect, but that may be beyond infinite distance with open trajectories (imaginary solution if nodes are computed with complex numbers) or below surface of the mainbody (therefore not shown). Or simply, could have occurred after the switch to another conic (so, after leaving Mun's SoI) and therefore aren't shown.

[bewing]

You're going really slow out beyond the Mun, so plane changes cost you so little dV that you can count it on your fingers. But as diomedea said -- there are a lot of SoI changes involved. The more there are, the less likely you will get a node to display. Taniwha tried to display them as often as he could. You can usually just eyeball your orbital plane and look for the intersection with Minmus' orbital plane, if you really care. But it may be a year before you'll get a perfect alignment that way, so it's not really a useful thing to wait for.

[Kryxal]

You were expecting to get AN and DN on your Mun orbit?  You wouldn't see those without at least setting a maneuver node for escaping Mun's SoI.

[NeverEnoughFuel!!]

On 11/24/2016 at 8:48 PM, Kryxal said:

You were expecting to get AN and DN on your Mun orbit?  You wouldn't see those without at least setting a maneuver node for escaping Mun's SoI.

Yes I can see that... but IMHO it's a bad gameplay/design solution... we should be able to align orbit inclination (i.e. have AN and DN on orbit)no matter the planet or moon origin and destination... in the same way as TWP mod tells you needed  inclination for ejection burn... i.e. limiting appearance of AN and DN nodes to "parent space/planet" is lousy and lazy easy way out...

[Loren Pechtel]

I wouldn't dream of trying to eyeball this.  Look at one of the interplanetary transfer programs.  (Exactly the same math applies to transfers between moons around a planet and transfers between planets around a star.)

[gc1ceo]

Actually I had a setup like this many versions ago to ferry stuff, mostly kerbals, between my Mun and Minmus bases, it worked.. well.. half the time.. like it was supposed to.