Polar Solar Orbit

[Some Kerbal]

Got a contract for a polar solar orbit. AP seems to be just outside of Dres, PE is roughly in between Kerbin and Duna.

What would you estimate to be the DV need to make this happen?

[bewing]

About 7 km/s. (Starting in LKO).

Edited March 7, 2017 by bewing

[Some Kerbal]

Thank you Sir

[Superfluous J]

Note: You can find this out yourself if you happen to have any ship in space anywhere. Which is a fairly sure bet usually Even a spent stage of orbiting trash will work.

You can create maneuver nodes that you never plan to execute. Create one on any ship to leave Kerbin prograde, and then focus on the sun and make sure your maneuver node's apoapsis is about where the apoapsis of the contract orbit is (in distance, not necessarily radially correct. Remember this is just to run numbers so it doesn't matter if you're spot on). create a new maneuver node at that apoapsis to rotate your orbit 90 degrees, and see what the dV requirement of it is.

Note also that rotating an orbit 90 degress is expensive the closer you are to the body. You may want to consider leaving Kerbin so your sun Apoapsis is out past Jool, where doing a 90 degree rotation will be much cheaper. You're trading time to save fuel, though, and that may not be in your best interest either. It's all about choices

[Blaarkies]

11 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Note: You can find this out yourself if you happen to have any ship in space anywhere. Which is a fairly sure bet usually Even a spent stage of orbiting trash will work.

You can create maneuver nodes that you never plan to execute.

I don't think we can do that anymore with the whole satellite network thing, since you need an active(green) connection to the KSC, or to a Piloted bigger probe core to be able to add/edit/delete maneuver nodes. Of course, that depends on the difficulty settings. This trick might not be available on default normal difficulty.

[Superfluous J]

1 minute ago, Blaarkies said:

I don't think we can do that anymore with the whole satellite network thing, since you need an active(green) connection to the KSC, or to a Piloted bigger probe core to be able to add/edit/delete maneuver nodes. Of course, that depends on the difficulty settings. This trick might not be available on default normal difficulty.

Oooh good point.

But really it's not that big a deal, as anybody putting satellites in solar orbit will likely have a controllable ship SOMEWHERE.

[Blaarkies]

51 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Oooh good point.

But really it's not that big a deal, as anybody putting satellites in solar orbit will likely have a controllable ship SOMEWHERE.

I so hated that...I made a frontier exploration ship(that ended up going to Eeloo for the 18x science).
I figured there are kerbals on board so i got all my ship control sorted out...expect for maneuver nodes. Once at Eeloo, i could not delete the node. I was 100+ days old at some point, and also pointing wildly in the wrong direction.

Worse, i could not create a new node to find departure windows and eject back to Kerbin...i had to do it like we did 5years ago

[bewing]

34 minutes ago, Blaarkies said:

Worse, i could not create a new node to find departure windows and eject back to Kerbin...i had to do it like we did 5years ago

You can turn off CommNet for a moment to recalculate. Unless you want to punish yourself and your Kerbals for forgetting.

Edited March 7, 2017 by bewing

[Kryxal]

Catch it at the right time and you could probably make a major plane change at Jool to reduce delta-v needs...

[Some Kerbal]

Bewing was right on the money for dv. Once I got her in space I plotted out the moves to be 71xx dv. Unfortunately I did not design properly and came up 1k dv short. Tried catching other bodies to shave off the dv use and, being rookieish at it, was not able to make something work out. Not disappointed in the attempt and have re-purposed as Jool Sat I (have not been there yet so bonus) and will boost up another, slightly more powerful launch shortly.

[bewing]

2 hours ago, Some Kerbal said:

Bewing was right on the money for dv. Once I got her in space I plotted out the moves to be 71xx dv. Unfortunately I did not design properly and came up 1k dv short. Tried catching other bodies to shave off the dv use and, being rookieish at it, was not able to make something work out. Not disappointed in the attempt and have re-purposed as Jool Sat I (have not been there yet so bonus) and will boost up another, slightly more powerful launch shortly.

The plane change is the expensive part. Just getting out to the proper Ap is comparatively cheap, otherwise -- so don't use gravity for that part. You can probably use a flyby over the pole of Duna, Dres, Jool, or a big Joolian moon to get a big chunk of your plane change cost nearly for free.

[TheEpicSquared]

2 minutes ago, bewing said:

The plane change is the expensive part. Just getting out to the proper Ap is comparatively cheap, otherwise -- so don't use gravity for that part. You can probably use a flyby over the pole of Duna, Dres, Jool, or a big Joolian moon to get a big chunk of your plane change cost nearly for free.

^This.

Isn't that how the Ulysses probe got into polar solar orbit in real life? By using Jupiter?

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

The plane change is the expensive part. Just getting out to the proper Ap is comparatively cheap, otherwise -- so don't use gravity for that part. You can probably use a flyby over the pole of Duna, Dres, Jool, or a big Joolian moon to get a big chunk of your plane change cost nearly for free.

^^  This.  As soon as you enter the SOI of the planet you're using, change your inclination to polar.  IIRC you amp the effect by thrusting prograde once you're past the pole.

[Kryxal]

18 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

^^  This.  As soon as you enter the SOI of the planet you're using, change your inclination to polar.  IIRC you amp the effect by thrusting prograde once you're past the pole.

Why wait that long?  Setting up a plane-change pass is probably going to work better halfway there, a lot of it will be about inclination.

[DerekL1963]

24 minutes ago, Kryxal said:

Why wait that long?  Setting up a plane-change pass is probably going to work better halfway there, a lot of it will be about inclination.

Mostly because it's easier for me to see what's happening at that point.  The burn is cheap either way.

[Aegolius13]

On 3/7/2017 at 11:00 AM, Some Kerbal said:

Bewing was right on the money for dv. Once I got her in space I plotted out the moves to be 71xx dv. Unfortunately I did not design properly and came up 1k dv short. Tried catching other bodies to shave off the dv use and, being rookieish at it, was not able to make something work out. Not disappointed in the attempt and have re-purposed as Jool Sat I (have not been there yet so bonus) and will boost up another, slightly more powerful launch shortly.

Ions might work for you,  since TWR is basically a non-issue in solar orbit.   Shouldn't even matter if you have to take a while to recharge batteries out at Jool.  A hybrid system using LFO and fuel cells to recharge batteries gets pretty good ISP, too.