Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit in KSP

[RizzoTheRat]

Has anyone played with this in KSP?

NASA and ESA's plan is to put the Luna Gateway in an eccentric polar orbit with a 7 day period, allowing it to change plane's quite cheaply at Apoapsis to support missions on the surface.

In KSP terms, the Mun has an SOI of about 2400km, so an orbit with Ap out there and a Pe of 25 has as a period of a bit over 10 hours, and a velocity at Pe of about 725, compared to 525 for a circular 25km orbit.  This means a lander needs to use an extra 400m/s to slow from the station and then accelerate back up to dock.  However the station takes a very small amount of DV to change planes, compared to about 580 for a 90 degree plane change at 25km altitude.  But that 400m/s would give you about a 45 degree plane change at 25km, and lifting to a higher altitude before changing plane would use less dV, in fact without the station there you could use the 400m/s to lift to where the station would be, do the plane change for very little dV, and drop back down again.

So is there any benefit of using this orbit in KSP?

One thing this has taught me though, for my upcoming Duna mission I think I'm better off putting a station in Polar orbit and waiting for the relevant landing zone to come around rather than an equatorial or angled orbit and wasting dV on plane changes.

[Pecan]

It is something I've been thinking about because of the NASA proposal, yes.  I've even gone one stage further than that and made it a three-ship setup.  Station in orbit fixed for ease of Kerbin transfers, space-only tug for towing landers into required orbit (ie; doing the necessary plane-change) and landers only designed to drop and return.  The reason for this is that it always seemed too much hassle to shift the orbit of the whole station, especially as it had to serve Kerbin transfers, science probes and ISRU miners all with different requirements.  On the other hand adding the plane-change capacity to each lander seemed excessive, hence separating it off to a single all-lander tug (which could also act as a rescue vehicle).