Islands of Laythe - one flag at a time

[Wayfare]

This has been an epic project and a great read. Well done!

[GJames]

Nice cliffhanger...

[Agent30632]

I'm guessing you're gonna plant a flag on each of Kerbins islands. Oh god, that's gonna be painful

[GamerswithCookies]

Erm... why is his helmet full of water as well?

[Cashen]

You need to navigate craft from Kerbin to Laythe... and note that I always aerocapture direct to Laythe, which seems lost on many players.

Question about that, since I plan to do extended missions to Laythe later on in my own mission logs. How do you establish that encounter with Laythe without first aerobreaking at Jool? Understandably Laythe may not always be in your approach trajectory, do you adjust Jool periapsis to get an encounter after passing around it? The route I had thought of was probably the standard route everyone uses, which is to aerobrake at Jool at the correct altitude to get your apoapsis at the same altitude as Laythe's orbit and waiting for the encounter.

[Zephram Kerman]

How do you establish that encounter with Laythe without first aerobreaking at Jool?

Immediately after entering Jool SOI, quicksave, make sure your path crosses Laythe's, then slow down carefully until you get the encounter.

[bsalis]

Immediately after entering Jool SOI, quicksave, make sure your path crosses Laythe's, then slow down carefully until you get the encounter.

Yup - exactly that. Though a very slow pro-grade burn works just as well.

It works because you are so far away (in distance and time), such that very small burns change your arrival time significantly. Laythe will actually orbit Jool several times before you get there.

To add to that. I made sure my intercepts put me into a counter-clockwise orbit, with a Pe fine-tuned with RCS to be around 20Km. Then quickly after entering the Laythe SOI, I made Radial burns as needed to adjust my Pe in order to get the (aerocapture) Ap I wanted, using the calculations shown in MechJeb. If you are not planning to use MechJeb, then it's luck/quicksave/quickload. Sadly the game does not give the player much feedback for aerobraking outcomes, which is a shame. I expect that to change.

Edited July 7, 2013 by bsalis

[Cashen]

Yup - exactly that. Though a very slow pro-grade burn works just as well.

It works because you are so far away (in distance and time), such that very small burns change your arrival time significantly. Laythe will actually orbit Jool several times before you get there.

To add to that. I made sure my intercepts put me into a counter-clockwise orbit, with a Pe fine-tuned with RCS to be around 20Km. Then quickly after entering the Laythe SOI, I made Radial burns as needed to adjust my Pe in order to get the (aerocapture) Ap I wanted, using the calculations shown in MechJeb. If you are not planning to use MechJeb, then it's luck/quicksave/quickload. Sadly the game does not give the player much feedback for aerobraking outcomes, which is a shame. I expect that to change.

Thanks for the reply. For aerobreaking there's an online calculator somewhere, where if you feed in the target, your velocity and altitude, and desired apoapsis, it tells you what periapsis you need to aerobrake through. I do have MechJeb but I've not tried to use it for aerobraking.

[jinnantonix]

Hi I was just wondering if you ever found the Crater Bay biome?  I have been searching for it and cannot find.