Spacecraft Altair

[richfororbit]

Hi,

I have just been trying to do a retroburn orbit, the spacecraft orientates itself for the angle of burn, and when I fire up the engine gently, the orbit doesn't begin to descend.

I'm trying to land at the Malaport, the scenario begins at the end of December 2013, so the date now is ten days later after trying to get a decent number for the distance.

But when it just came to attempting to get the orbit unstable for an attempt at reaching Malapert, it doesn't work.

I did never ever land at Malapert, I only just used the actual flight setup and as the orbit was so low on the other side of the moon did a burn that made it unstable and did a random day light landing. That was last year, back when this was released.

I did check the PDF in the constellation file folder, but there is no issue with it.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I haven't tried the Altair in a very long while. Does the "main" engine burn with the typical engine keys or does it use the hover engine?

 

[richfororbit]

The engine can only be switched on using the Numeric pad 0, and off Delete.

Mr Drake's recent released last year. Nice detailed addon for sure compared to his earlier release, about six years ago.

 

[richfororbit]

Nobody using this craft at all?

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Been a long while. And I'm working 12 hr shifts so it'll be a long while before I do so again. But I'm also working on my own lander.

If you need to use the numpad [0] key then it's a hover engine. Are you telling me that with the craft if retrograde orientation that full power of the hover engine does not make the craft reduce altitude?

 

[Malky]

Does firing engine change any orbital elements at all? If not, then problem is not in craft orientation. You might also want to check if you have 1x time acceleration, not 0.1x, I know it's stupid mistake, but it happened to me one or few times

It's possible that (especially if you control engine with 'hover engine' controls) 'retrograde' autopilot will orient you in such way that you are looking in retrograde direction, and firing in that way would decrease your orbit if you had engines in the same direction. But with 'tail-sitting' configuration your engines are actually in some kind of normal direction. So you might try normal or anti-normal autopilot. Another possibility is select external view, accelerate time to 10x or 100x and orient spacecraft so your engines are in retrograde direction. Then just select internal view and check out where you are looking.

Tl,dr: check out if firing engines change orbital elements, if so, try changing directions until you find where you have to look to have engines in retrograde direction.

 

[richfororbit]

Been a long while. And I'm working 12 hr shifts so it'll be a long while before I do so again. But I'm also working on my own lander.

If you need to use the numpad [0] key then it's a hover engine. Are you telling me that with the craft if retrograde orientation that full power of the hover engine does not make the craft reduce altitude?

No.

All I did was increase the orbit. How I can possibly mess up a retrograde burn, it's like the easiest aspect of Orbiter I have never forgotten.

The autopilot control does the angle, and then fire up the engine.

What I may have to do is record a small clip or so. Since the craft does have internal MFD orbit, it can show, as Fraps won't display the external MFD I have always used since the early months when I first chased the station around the Earth, yeah I'm getting there soon, yeah just keep orbiting. Not!:shifty:

 

[turtle91]

If you are talking about the Altair from "4th Rock" Constellation addon, you should not use "retrograde" autopilot to make a retrograde-burn (as with most hover driven landers).
If you use orbiters default retrograde-autopilot, you will end-up in "orbit-normal/anti-normal). So your burn will be plane-change-burn (with a slight prograde/retrograde component).

To make it short, I have just loaded up the "just Altair" scenario.
To point your hover-engine "retrograde" you could use "orbit-normal or orbit-antinormal" default orbiter autopilots.
If you check the external view, you will see what I mean.
Your hover-egine should point "against" the rotation of the moon(which is, what you want to perform a pure retrograde-burn).

 

[richfororbit]

The constellation module is the lates that was released last year in September.

Up to date well detailed with an interior. I think i really mess about in the scenario just for that, it is the only one that works for me. I think I needed certain addons for the other ones.

And since Malapert is a new addition the terrain, quite a werid spot, the south pole, obviously remains more in the dark than day.

What I have done is used the landed file, and positioned the module away from the landing terrain. Not much to land on. So I'll attempt a soft landing if possible. I was actually curious, I guess I can add a duplicate module to this scenario, so perhaps two landings on this terrain?

But yeah that is the position for the moment.