Interstellar and back

[DocDan]

Downloaded the most recent update yesterday and loaded my most recent save file just to check out the game for the first time in about 4 months. My girlfriend and son recognized the music and asked me to put it up on the tv.  We made a few rendezvous' with long forgotten debris before I was asked to just burn up all our fuel and just see how big of a kerbolar orbit we could make. Well, it turned out to be the case that Kerbol now has a sphere of influence that I hadn't noticed before. We still had a little over 6000dV when we decided to shut down our SWERV engine. Time warp took us a few decades into the future where we found ourselves outside the SOI of Kerbol. Looking back, our home sun could not be distinguished from the ocean of stars behind us.

We decided to make what was supposed to be a one way trip into a rescue mission. Returning to Kerbol orbit only took about 500dV, but reaching the apogee of that orbit would've taken 1400 years, so we burned towards the sun until we could arrive at our apogee in only 5 years. We were several degrees antinormal from the Kerbolar-Kerbin ecliptic, so we burned normal at the apogee about 300dV until our ascending node occurred several years outside of Eloo's orbit. At that node, we aligned with Kerbin's orbit. We were going to reach the closest approach a few months before the planet would be there so we burned a few dV retrograde in order to get an intercept. We were lucky enough to get a close flyby of Minmus on our way back to Kerbin so we set ourselves up to fly by at 16km while moving at just over 12km/s relative to the minty surface. We EVA'd our pilot so he could ride out the scene like some kind of space cowboy. Even without timewarp the planet whipped by in only a few seconds. Lucky for us(and our pilot), reentry heating hasn't been implemented yet, so we aerobraked with Kerbin's atmosphere. It took a few tries to figure out that 27km periapsis was enough to shed the right amount of speed to put us into a stabile orbit. We burned most of our dV getting back and I keep forgetting to equip pilots with parachutes, so we've got a recovery mission planned for next time. 

Ultimately, what was meant to be a quick test of frame rate turned into several hours of fun and experimentation that was not dominated by the few small manageable bugs we ran into. I'm glad to see the result of the hard work the devs have been putting in.

[Bej Kerman]

How long did the mission take by the in-game timer?