Planning a gravitational assist

[tomf]

Can anyone help me to do the maths required to plan a gravitational assist?

I have a contract to put a sattelite into a Kerbol stationary orbit.

I can calculate that by burning at Kerbin using the full oberth effect, and again to circularize around kerbol I can do it for ~13300m/s delta-v but I am sure that it can be done more efficiently if I use Eve.

Is anyone able to walk me through the steps of planning a slingshot maneouvre? The result I am looking for is the Eve phase angle, the initial burn at kerbin to send me to eve, and then the final burn to circularize.

[mhoram]

Part 3 of http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/54294-Gravity-Assists could be interesting for this problem.

My approach would be to send the satellite at a time so that it arrives at Eve while Eve is in the plane of the target orbit so that you can use the gravity assist to change the inclination.

Until such an Kerbin-Eve-Constellation is available, it could take a few ingame-years.

Currently I have a contract for a Kerbol stationary orbit with an inclination of ~40° and decided to not use Eve for a gravitational assist.

[Laie]

The "simple" way is to do it twice: first, just get to Eve and do some (any) slingshot maneuver. Your new orbit will still touch Eve' s orbit on about the place where you had the encounter. Sooner or later, you will meet again in that place. This gives you plenty of wiggle room to tune the second encounter at -comparatively- little cost.

There are calculators to get it right the first time -- once you have an idea where you need to be going, this is much easier to pull off than the above solution. Alas, I rely on the wiki to keep such bookmarks, and the wiki is down right now due to server migration.

[Taki117]

You might want to read that contract again. I assume you are using the Fine print mod, in which case it should be a geostationary orbit around Kerbin.