Oh bugger... Injection burn at Moho

[Zhetaan]

@MitchS:

I got the first one at about 298 days.  The nice thing is that the windows are easy to predict:  the first is at 298ish days, the second at 1y 298d, the next at 2y 298d, &c.  This is because you're not trying to get an encounter with Moho; you just want to encounter its orbit.

[Superfluous J]

I fiddled with this a little but have to say - begrudgingly because 99% of the work on orbits and maneuver nodes for 1.2 were fantastic improvements - the encounter prediction changes make this whole thing a lot harder. The predictions flat out don't work correctly and there's no consistent way to show the only piece of information I'll ever want to know: Where the target will be while I'm closest to its orbit AFTER my maneuver node.

I will say though that the An or Dn (Don't remember which and I already ragequit from the game after fighting with maneuver nodes) is actually quite close to the periapsis, so just make sure you leave Kerbin a little before Ap and you should be good.

That said,I couldn't get a combination of burns much less than 6000m/s to encounter Moho, though I didn't spend much time on it. If I tweaked to get my periapsis nearer Moho on intercept I bet I could shave off 500 or so, and more if I waited a few orbits instead of planning a 2000 m/s intercept burn in Sun orbit.

tl;dr, Moho takes a lot of dV no matter how you slice it

[Zhetaan]

I looked at this a bit more with Flyby Finder to see whether there was a lot of room for improvement on what's been found so far.  Earlier posts showed a final dV of around 4000 m/s for an optimum Kerbin-Moho transfer at the node/apsis conjunction.  I didn't have a chance to check this last night on my main KSP test environment, so I won't comment further on it, but I can tell you that there are quite a few fairly low-dV solutions if you're willing to use Eve for a gravity assist.

For K-E-M transfers, I have over 100 flyby solutions with start dates from Day 444 to Day 740.  This is a first pass, but that alone says that this is quite doable.  These range in total transfer time from 253 days to 405 days, so we're not looking at an epic journey, either.  The absolute best transfer I could get was 3317 m/s of dV.  You start on day 672 from a 75 km Kerbin orbit, boost 1276 m/s, fly by Eve on day 865 at 902 km altitude, and brake at 20 km over Moho on day 998 for 2041 m/s.  I can check this one later, but I've got quite a lot of confidence in Flyby Finder.  If you start from higher altitudes, you can trim the transfer dV a bit, but of course you have to expend dV to get to those altitudes; there isn't much point in it.

[MitchS]

@Zhetaan Excellent! Thanks. Time to start fulfilling these Moho base contracts.