Good Aerobraking altitude for EVE

[Dingbat1967]

Howdy,

I'm planning on sending a flotilla of spacecraft to EVE. I have enough Delta-V to decelerate using engines (and replenish my fuel stores via Kethane mining on Gili), however I would much prefer using Aerobraking/Aerocapture to decelerate the ships from the interplanetary transfer to an EVE orbit (even if it's very excentric, I can always do more aerobraking passes to drop down the orbit and save on the fuel).

What would be a proper altitude for the first capture?

-- Dingbat.

[xxjetterxx]

I would say just quicksave in orbit, and guess. if something goes wrong, you can just reload the quicksave.

[chemieglennie]

Around 75km should work. You can do some extra orbits if you need to slow down more. (As long as you get an orbit on the first deceleration)

But yes always quicksave before any risky manoeuvre like this.

[Richy teh space man]

Depends on what final altitude you want, around 65 km should get you into orbit, don't go any lower then 50 km though or you may have to try landing instead.

[check]

This is a very handy tool for calculating aerobraking altitudes: http://alterbaron.github.com/ksp_aerocalc/

[Dingbat1967]

Thanks Guys. That's what I needed. I'll use the tool although from what I heard, around 70ish is a good target. I'll try that.

Otherwise I'll need to do more refueling runs from Gilly which is fun, but time consuming

-- Dingbat.

[Blue]

Don't get eliminated!

[capi3101]

In my experience, 72.5k is as low as you want to go for aerobraking. And I'd still advise quicksaving as soon as you hit Eve's SOI.

[Geschosskopf]

Every single aerobraking pass is different, even for the same ship going to the same planet. This is because your speed is going to be different each time and just a few hundred m/s makes a profound difference on what you get aerobraking at a given Pe altitude. Then, as others have mentioned, there's the other variable, the orbit you want to end up in. There's an utter and complete lack of in-game instrumentation for aerobraking and off-line calculators are only rough guesses due to the variables involved. Therefore, you have no choice but to F5, set your Pe at your best guess, and see what happens. If you don't like what you get, F9, tweak the Pe, and try again. And make your final Pe tweak about 2x the atmosphere diameter because it's more accurate that way and you probably have room to reverse directions and tweak back if you overshoot.