Precision Flight to Minmus

[egnio98]

"ello, fellow rocketists(?).

I've got a problem bugging me for quite abit, so here goes.

As we know, Minmus is ~46km away from Kerbin, on an inclined orbit. After building a base on the Mun, I decided to go further to Minmus, and had wanted to set up a station there first. However, it's pretttyyy darn hard to get on similar orbits after every launch from Kerbin. I set my station up on a ~ 90 heading on Minmus (OCD strikes), but no matter how I try, I can't get another orbit similiar to it. Am I doing something wrong? Just to clarify, you go to Minmus like you would for the Mun, but only that you'd change your inclination at Kerbin Pe right?

[sadron]

It's a lot more than 46km

[Vanamonde]

egnio98, were you aware that Minmus is on an inclined orbit? Rotate the map view camera down until you are looking at the plane of Mun's orbit, then zoom out. You'll see that Minmus bobs north on one side of its orbit and south on the other side. That means that ships launched toward it from the equator will sometimes seem to arrive below or above Minmus. That's easy enough to fix, though. Halfway to the moon, check and see if you're going to miss above or below the path of Minmus' orbit. If you are going to pass below, point the nose of your ship due north (where the gold line meets the horizon on the navball), and burn until you are arriving at Minmus closer to its equator. If passing above, burn toward the south. You'll still need to do another plane correction burn when you get there (most efficiently, while passing over the equator), but this should get you pretty close.

[Dictator Dan]

Try changing your inclination at your ascending/descending nodes. If youve set Minmus as the target, they will be the dotted lines with a green DN and AN on them.

[egnio98]

46 Mkm.*

My bad. Wait, it's about 50 MegaKm away right?

Yes, I am aware it is inclined, Vanamonde. That's exactly why I'm bugged out at trying to get 2 similar orbits about Minmus. Also, I don't quite understand...?

[The Wall]

I've never had issues with going to Minmus by setting it as the target (so it and its orbit light up yellow). Then I can see little AN/DN (ascending/descending node) markers on my Kerbin orbit; burning normal or antinormal here to my orbit until the nodes are 0.0-0.01 degrees before doing the transfer burn has always worked fine. I do the same thing when I arrive in Minmus' SoI; doing the same kind of plane adjustment lets me tilt the orbit to the inclination I want.

I have occasionally had an issue with the Mun where I've ended up reaching orbit going the wrong direction compared to what I want to dock with, but if I've caught it before the periapsis retrograde burn to get captured by the Mun, it didn't need ridiculous amounts of delta-V to correct. It took much more when I had to swap the direction once captured, doing alternating normal/antinormal burns to flip the orbit over the poles and back down.

I'm not entirely sure where your issue lies here, but I hope this helps?

[egnio98]

I've never had issues with going to Minmus by setting it as the target (so it and its orbit light up yellow). Then I can see little AN/DN (ascending/descending node) markers on my Kerbin orbit; burning normal or antinormal here to my orbit until the nodes are 0.0-0.01 degrees before doing the transfer burn has always worked fine. I do the same thing when I arrive in Minmus' SoI; doing the same kind of plane adjustment lets me tilt the orbit to the inclination I want.

I have occasionally had an issue with the Mun where I've ended up reaching orbit going the wrong direction compared to what I want to dock with, but if I've caught it before the periapsis retrograde burn to get captured by the Mun, it didn't need ridiculous amounts of delta-V to correct. It took much more when I had to swap the direction once captured, doing alternating normal/antinormal burns to flip the orbit over the poles and back down.

I'm not entirely sure where your issue lies here, but I hope this helps?

Ah ha! Perfect! Just what I need. Thanks alot, wall!

Say, does the normal/antinormal burn take about 200 dV? Because I sure am.