Hammerthrows anyone?

[KerikBalm]

One technique I've been using with my landers, but I haven't see discussed here, is what I'm calling the "hammerthrow" - you know, the olympics event, similar to the dicuss throw, or the shotput, a person with a relatively heavy weight spins, gaining momentum, and releasesthe "hammer"/"shotput" "/discus at the appropriate time (there's not so much rotation with the shotput, but... whatever)

Well, I do the same thing with my lander and interplanetary stages.... I get the craft spinning really really fast, and decople at the right moment... my lander gets a lower perapsis, my interplanetary stage gets a higher perapsis, it saves a little delta-V.... it sort of exploits the unrealistic reaction wheels (you can only spin them so fast before you can't spin them any faster and break them, so you'd need to use RCS while the reaction wheel decelerates to "reset" it).

On my Duna mission yesterday, I had a ~16 km perapsis on my 2nd aerobreaking go-around, and had the desired apoapsis, and wanted to raise the interplanetary stage's perapsis (to take it out of the atmosphere), and lower the lander's (to put it deeper in), so I spun up the craft, and released the lander... the lander was flung off and enfed up with a ~7.5 km perapsis, I forgot what my IP's perapsis was changed to, but it was higher, and I burned to raise it to 43km.

The lander's trajectory was acceptable for its landing site (It went a little farther than I wanted, but oh well), and no additional burn was needed.

So far, I haven't read about anyone else doing this... is it just me? have other people had the idea, but the delta-V savings are too small to be relevant? is it too cheezy to "exploit" the reaction wheels in this way?

[KerbMav]

You use RCS to spin the craft - instead of using RCS to change its orbit?

I use spinning sometimes to get a clear separation.

[WhiteKnuckle]

I've tried doing this to get my spent lift stage to fall back into Kerbin's atmosphere so it doesn't stick around as space junk.

[MonkeyFuzz]

I'll do this occasionally just before reentry to fling the capsule away from its service module. Other than crude tossings of parts, I haven't tried to actually alter orbits based on rotation and detachment.

[KerikBalm]

You use RCS to spin the craft - instead of using RCS to change its orbit?

I use spinning sometimes to get a clear separation.

No, I use reaction wheels, but IRL, a reaction wheel could only do so much.... although now that I think about it, you could time the RCS thrusting so that the delta-V from monoprop is not wasted

[TechnicalK3rbal]

I think Scott Manley had a video on this, and I've done it once or twice.