Comet Redirect Mission

[RoninFrog]

Done!

[minerbat]

On 8/4/2020 at 8:19 PM, EveMaster said:

The crash tolerance seems to be nearly infinite.

Can't you slow down a comet by bouncing it of the mun or minmus then? Why worry about capture burns or aerobraking?

[EveMaster]

26 minutes ago, minerbat said:

Can't you slow down a comet by bouncing it of the mun or minmus then? Why worry about capture burns or aerobraking?

You could do that. But any craft docked to the comet will not survive the impact. Also you can't really control the resulting trajectory after the collision. It might be a suborbital trajectory on a moon, a trajectory that ejects the comet back out of the Kerbin system, or a trajectory that leaves the trajectory of the moon but gets into an Orbit around Kerbin. Even if you are lucky and end up in a captured orbit around Kerbin, the Comet is in an orbit that will hit Mun or Minmus again. So you have to use propulsion if your goal is to put the Comet in a stable orbit around Kerbin.

[minerbat]

Those problems can maybe be solved. If the bounce is not very great you can bounce it into gilly and then dock a lot of engines to it and lift it into space, doing a transfer from eve to kerbin is way less harder than from the very elliptical orbit they ususally are in. If the bounce has about good enough force to put it into kerbin orbit, bounce it of the mun or minmus (try and try again) and have a craft prepared in orbit to rendezvouz and lower the orbit before it gat another encounter. if the bounce is very strong you can do it a few times or only once and do a insertion burn anyway, any amount of slowing down helps.

[Neilski]

On 8/4/2020 at 6:17 PM, Laie said:

The mining bug hasn't been fixed yet, so the comets won't lose mass -- it's still totally possible to do it with the dV you get from mining, but acceleration won't ever pick up.

Is there a thread about the mining bug? I've searched and can't find one.

After hitting the bug, I found it listed on the bugtracker and after some mucking about I have found a workaround that appears to work for asteroids (perhaps it will also work for comets). I'm looking for a good thread in which to post it, but if there isn't one I'll make one I guess.