Orbital Injection

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

I've gotten pretty good at getting spaceships to other planets. I have landed a Kerbin on the surface of Duna and returned him safely to Kirbin. Several, in fact.

My problem is it seems I have no control over the type of orbit I'm going to have when I get to another planet.

I could be orbiting extremely inclined...or even "backwards."

I use ksp.olex.biz for phase angles and what not. When I reach the ascending / descending node, I adjust to 0 inclination, but when I arrive at my destination, could be a polar orbit, a backwards orbit, or a dream orbit.

Any advice for giving me some control over this?

Thanks in advance.

[tomf]

When you are at you node you can use the other dimensions on a manoeuvre node to fine tune your trajectory. (or at any other time)

If your issue is that you can't accurately see what effect your adjustments are having you can set a settign called something like CONICS_DRAW_MODE to 0 which will mean that you can zoom in on your destination body and see the resulting orbit drawn there while you adjust the node.

[RoboRay]

When you arrive at the destination, your orbital inclination is related to the latitude of your periapsis above the surface. So, if you put your Pe right on the equator, you'll have an equatorial orbit (and if you put it on the "outer" side away from the body it's orbiting, you'll be in a standard easterly orbit). If your Pe is over the north or south pole, you'll have a polar orbit.

Note that your minimum inclination will increase if you're not approaching the destination world on its equatorial plane... you have to be perfectly parallel with the equator and directly above it to attain a zero degree inclination without a plane-change burn during the capture.

Edited May 16, 2013 by RoboRay

[DMagic]

It can really be tricky to fine tune your approach from very far away. The best option is to use this maneuver node mod. It doesn't do anything automatically for you, it just vastly improves your ability to use nodes. There are 3 things it does. You can use the 'o' key to reopen a node that closes itself (this is absurdly useful when you're trying to manipulate the node when zoomed very far out), you can type in exact numbers instead of only being able to drag the icons around, and you can change the way that your orbit is shown while setting up transfers to another planet/moon (you can also do this by changing the settings file, but that is way more trouble, and I think you have to reload the game every time you change it).

[AnalogAddict]

A neat trick for these issues is to bring in your approach as close as you can get it from your mid course correction near an Ascending or Descending Node, once you have that, time warp to SOI swap.

Directly after SOI exchange, burn radial/antiradial until you pull your perigee in to the desired altitude then burn normal/antinormal to adjust inclination (I.E. Polar, Equatorial, somewhere in between)

These maneuvers after SOI exchange are not the most efficient in terms of interplanetary travel but you can make them as efficient as Kerbally possible by performing directly after the SOI swap. This method also allows one to see the "true" perigee of your orbit versus the data you get from interplanetary trajectory assumptions by the flight computer.

[ThreeMartiniLaunch]

Thanks guys.

I wound up finding this tutorial which uses the improved maneuver node plugin mentioned above.

Just injected myself into a perfect Eeloo orbit.

Now to land....