Making the best of a bad situation

[lukasni]

Well, I was delivering new Fuel, Food and Crew to my Minmus base. Everything was going smooth, but I touched down almost 400m away from the main base. To save my Kerbals the long walk, I decided to move the lander a bit closer to the base. Alas, I had lost my RCS-Tanks to a freak accident while getting into orbit, so I had to rely on the main Engine. Not something I am excessively good at. As was to be expected, I fudged it up and the Lander ended up lying on the methane upside down. But this is when it got interesting. The command pod got knocked off while the engine was still running, with lots of fuel left. After some careful nudging c/o Jebediah Kerman, I ended up with my new Minmus Communications Array 8)

Screenshots:

EDIT: I\'m not sure if this is the right forum for it, seemed like the most appropriate one.

[nerfboy621]

haha very cool how did u get to minmus in the first place? i can only get to the mun.

[mrxak]

If you can get to Mun, you should be able to get to Minmus fairly easily. Sure, it may take a few orbits of Kerbin, but just fast forward and keep at it if you didn't line up the perfect Minmus shot. As long as your apoapsis is close to Minmus' orbit line, you should enter its SOI eventually, and patched conics helps a lot in showing you when that will be. The only real difficulty is the tilt, which you can try to achieve yourself with a normal or anti-normal burn (that's "north" or "south" while orbiting Kerbin at the equator). Just keep at it a bit, until you see you'll enter Minmus' SOI. When you do, just do a retrograde burn and land. Keep at it, make small adjustments and be prepared to wait. You might not be able to get the most efficient interception all that easily, but the additional fuel needed to reach Minmus, compared with the reduced fuel you'll need landing on and taking off from Minmus, means any Mun rocket should have no problem with Minmus missions.

Cool communications system!

[Baleur]

Only thing missing is a few floodlights so it can be seen from orbit

[nerfboy621]

If you can get to Mun, you should be able to get to Minmus fairly easily. Sure, it may take a few orbits of Kerbin, but just fast forward and keep at it if you didn't line up the perfect Minmus shot. As long as your apoapsis is close to Minmus' orbit line, you should enter its SOI eventually, and patched conics helps a lot in showing you when that will be. The only real difficulty is the tilt, which you can try to achieve yourself with a normal or anti-normal burn (that's "north" or "south" while orbiting Kerbin at the equator). Just keep at it a bit, until you see you'll enter Minmus' SOI. When you do, just do a retrograde burn and land. Keep at it, make small adjustments and be prepared to wait. You might not be able to get the most efficient interception all that easily, but the additional fuel needed to reach Minmus, compared with the reduced fuel you'll need landing on and taking off from Minmus, means any Mun rocket should have no problem with Minmus missions.

Cool communications system!

ok thx dude i will try this

[Znath]

What I usually do, is I try to intersect my orbit's apex where Minimus' orbit intersects the same plane that Kerbin and Mun are on.

Then I do one orbital correction to angle up with Minimus, and sometime I'll retro thrust to shorten my orbit

(that way I can adjust how many times I orbit over and over to intersect Minimus

I can usually hit it in a few orbits, one thing I've found works is: once you're in the right plane of orbit, have your orbit peak out beyond Minimus' orbit by a little bit, this way you 'hang' higher than Minimus for a short time and let it catch up with you.

This is my most recent, most ambitious project to Minimus. I landed and then hovered upside down with the RCS to drop this thing off and then landed again (lander in the background) to raise the signal array (ladders) for my "radio telescope"

I've found, actually, that it is easier/cheaper to land and take off from Minimus than Mun because of its size.

Once you get the handle on orbital corrections, it's not that hard.

Edited August 16, 2012 by softweir
Fixed Spoiler