Interesting challenge. I haven't flown the AMSO but thought I'd take a stab at a landing at Phobos and return to Earth.
I stumbled my way through getting Apollo 17 into orbit and eventually used the autopilot wwith the stock scenario. From there I searched TransX for a future date that had the existing orbit to be not too far off plane from what could work and then advanced the date to that time.
Did you try adjusting the AZIMUTCOR parameter in the scenario? That sets the launch azimuth for the autopilot (0 = heading 90 degrees)
The TMI burn went like clockwork but ended up burning up all of the 3rd stage down to the last drop. I knew it was gonna be close. But it was just what was needed. A different orbit and date would have been nicer as it would have allowed less DV for the transfer burn.
After my TMI burn, I still had 3% fuel left
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On the way to Mars I used the CSM fuel (is it called AS-512?). Between the required MCC of about 80 m/s and the insertion burn at Mars that tank went dry but had me captured at Mars (but very eccentric = .94), perfectly aligned with Phobos and the Pe matching Phobos orbit. The phase was good with Phobos too, just a few hundred Km away. The insertion burn was about 1750 m/s as I recall. A different transfer from Earth to Mars might have made for a slightly softer arrival speed. But I had made it and hadn't even started using the LM fuel yet.
You didn't aerobrake? I did and took a different approach, I used the LM for as many burns as possible and saved the CSM for the trip home.
I undocked the LM and in 1/2 orbit had a landing on Phobos. I then continued the rest of that orbit partly on the surface then lifted off in time getting ready to rendezvous with the command module. Back at the Pe of the AS-512 command module just a bit behind it's position I raised my Ap to make a clean rendezvous with the AS-512 command module at about the command modules Ap.
That's where I am currently sitting.
You didn't leave the descent stage on Phobos? I didn't know you could do that. I thought any thrust would auto-separate the ascent stage (hover engine does). Did you lift off with linear RCS?
What I did was aerobrake into a high elliptical orbit, align with Phobos as the Ap, then aerobrake again for an Ap near Phobos's orbit. Then I used the LM to raise the orbit, then rendezvoused with Phobos. I took the CSM and LM all the way to Phobos. I didn't think of leaving it CSM behind and rendezvousing later.
I have found a TransX future date that allows to burn at the Pe of the current orbit to transfer back to Earth. Because the orbit is already so eccentric, the actual DV needed for this burn will be only 790 m/s. So even with soome MCC I should be able to get hom with about 830 m/s. I have 20% of a tank in the descent stage, 100% fuel in the ascent stage and no fuel in the CM. I think this should be plenty of fuel if I could get rid of the service module.
I used the soonest launch window after I arrived, in 2005. My TEI burn was about 2493m/s from an orbit slightly higher than Phobos. I used the rest of the ascent stage fuel take about 200m/s off that.
My thought is to jettison the service module now to reduce weight but I can't figure out how to do it. Every time I hit J to definitive undock it I hear the detachment sound effect but it immediately crashes orbiter, CTD.
Advice?
(i took the rocks out of the scenario code thinking they may have been causing the program crash.)
Trying to jettison the SM with the LM still docked crashes for me too. One time, I tried to work around that by undocking the LM, then jettisoning the SM, then re-docking, but AMSO deletes the CM's docking port so you can't re-dock. It probably crashes because it deletes the docking port while the LM is still docked.
Edit: I wanted to add some observations that made for tough flying...
When the LM was attached to the CM SM any thrust from the SM was not through the center of mass and it caused a rotation. I had to constantly pitch and yaw to keep the little green target X in TransX centered. I have no idea why.
It's like that for me too. It's the SIM bay panel not being jettisoned that's unbalancing it. I just loaded an Apollo 17 scenario with the SIM bay panel already jettisoned and burned the SM engine and it didn't rotate. Unfortunately, I found AMSO only lets you jettison the SIM bay panel if you are inside the Moon's SOI, or are entering the Earth's SOI, which is when I did it. Press K to bring up the menu then Up to jettison it. You actually can't jettison the SM before reentry unless you do this first. Maybe it could be jettisoned before reaching Mars if you did a lunar slingshot on the way to Mars and do it while passing the Moon.
When interplanetary and warping to 100K Orbiter crashed constantly. I think it may be a problem with several ships docked together while changing stages in TransX or perhaps while warping. I had to shut off the MFDs, do saves and reopen the save for the warping. Then do MCC and, save, quit, reopen,... repeatedly.
That never happened to me, although I took the 3rd stage to Mars with me so I technically didn't have several ships docked together. However, when trying (and failing at) a
different challenge, I used all the 3rd stage fuel on a burn to Venus, so I had the CSM/LM in interplanetary space, and it didn't crash for me then.
When flying with the LM the main engine key (+) wasn't working. I figured it out eventually, to use the hover engine. Duh. But TransX is set up with the maneuver direction target for the main engine so it was almost useless. I decided to first rotate to center the X and minute before the burn, then I would use the Orbit HUD to pitch 90 degrees down so that (hopefully) the hover engine would thrust in the correct direction. It actually worked out fine and with a bit of LIN at the end it would clean to an almost zero error maneuver.
Docking the LM is strange being at the top since I am used to docking to a different direction (the nose) but I got used to the reorientation of the axes.
That's what I did too when using the LM engine, although I sometimes just pointed the CSM in the opposite direction I was thrusting in.
-----Post Added-----
Here is the writeup of the trip that I wrote while I was doing it:
I launched on June 8, 2003. For the TMI-burn, instead of starting the burn at Begin burn: 0 in TransX, I started it at Ang. to Pe 11.5. For some reason, this made my actual trajectory almost perfectly aligned with the planned trajectory. After the TMI-burn, the SIVB 3rd stage still had 3.3% fuel remaining, enough for a few hundred m/s of dV. Awesomely, after I left Earth's SOI, the perturbations from Earth actually decreased my closest approach to Mars, so I let the Earth do most of my course correcting for me. At GET 2316, I made a ~14.5m/s course correction to get a low PeA at Mars, and align my Phobos-crossing node with the Pe (and of course, the Ap).
On reaching Mars (GET 4863), I turned to 270 degrees and burned to set a PeA of 26km, then extracted the LM from the SIVB, and readjusted the CSM/LMs PeA to 26km. After detaching from the SIVB, AMSO apparently sets the fuel in the SIVB to 5% (even though there was only 3% left), so I copied its fuel amount before extraction and set it back afterward, then turned it to 250 degrees so it wouldn't hit the CSM/LM, and burned the rest of the fuel with the Remote Vessel Control (RVC) window so it would crash-land on Mars (its Pe ended up being near the center of Mars, and Docking HUD showed a relative velocity of 996m/s!). When almost at the atmosphere, I turned on the retrograde autopilot so I didn't spin out of control. I ended up with an ApA of 40,790km.
At Ap, I used the LM descent engine to align with Phobos with Align Planes MFD. I'm using the descent engine for these burns because I want to land the LM on Phobos, and once you land, AMSO won't let you fire the descent engine again (it will just separate the ascent stage), so I want to use it for as many burns as possible. I waited until my Pe was less than 20000 seconds away so I could use Aerobrake MFD again to setup a path (using LM descent engine again) that lowers my ApA to ~6000km. However, just burning until it predicted an ApA of 6000km resulted in death by atmosphere (PeA went too low, but my ApA did hit 6000 before I died). Turns out I needed to burn just a little in the opposite direction, outward not inward, as doing nothing after the alignment burn got me an ApA of 5376km (even though Aerobrake MFD predicted 22,136km). I raised the predicted periapsis in Aerobrake MFD to 32.42km and got an ApA of 5903. Perfect. At Ap, I used TransX to raise my PeA such that I would encounter Phobos (within 210k) in 1 orbit. Then I coasted to Ap and circularized, burning all but 1% of the LM's fuel (which *almost* matched orbits with Phobos), then using Transfer MFD to make a 15m/s burn with the SM to get a closest approach of ~29km.
Along with Seth's beautiful L10 Mars textures, I also use the hi-res Phobos and Deimos meshes, which are different from the default ones (Dan Steph's Prelude base is below the surface). I hadn't decided where to land on Phobos yet, so I opened Scenario Editor, spawned a DG, put it on Phobos, and changed its longitude/latitude until I found a place where the mesh intersected the collision sphere. I made a base with nothing on it at latitude 45.06, longitude 90 (for the default Phobos mesh, use latitude 41.45). After arriving and nulling my Phobos-relative speed (by setting the Orbit MFD to Phobos, pressing the HUD button and manually turning retrograde), the landing site was still in darkness. At this point, the SM still has 95.5% fuel, while the LM has less than 1% (only 78.66kg!).
Now for the landing. I undocked the LM and flew it to the landing site with linear RCS, using BaseSyncMFD to show my distance to it. Before actually landing, I accidentally touched the surface and "bounced" off, and this triggered AMSO to spawn Moon rocks, however, they spawned in orbit around Mars well below Phobos's orbit (they all had an ApA of 4891km, PeA of 2763km). By the time I reached the landing site ~30 minutes later, it was lit, and I landed with the LM having only 27.56kg of fuel left. Then I checked the CSM, which I left hovering over Phobos, and it was falling towards Phobos at ~6m/s, so I nulled that. When I EVA'd the first astronaut, he bounced a little and landed near the LM. However, trying to turn or walk forward causes a very high bounce and a landing far away from the LM. So, I had to "cheat" and use Scenario Editor to move the astronauts along the surface. I got the Flag, moved a bit away from the LM, and dropped it. It bounced but landed a few seconds just a few meters away from where I was. All the items bounce and land like this (in Orbiter, not the real Phobos). Then I deployed the Lunar Rover and boarded it. On Phobos, it can drive forward/back, but I can't seem to make it turn, so I just changed its heading with Scenario Editor to turn it.
To conserve fuel for the ascent, I fired the hover engines manually to separate from the descent stage, then cut them about 1 second later. Then I flew back the the CSM with linear RCS only. After rendezvous, the SM had 94.9% fuel, and the ascent stage had 98.5% fuel. It was enough to get back to Earth. In fact I had about 3192.4m/s of dV left, more than enough to escape Mars. I found this number by using TransX's manouvre mode to plan a prograde burn of 4km/s, then burning all the ascent stage's fuel, undocking, then burning all the SM's fuel, and the remaining dV was 807.6 m/s, meaning I had a total dV of 3192.4m/s (204 from ascent stage, 2988.4 from SM). After docking I tried to jettison the SIM bay panel, but apparently AMSO only lets you do that if you're inside the SOI of the Earth's Moon (or when you enter the Earth's SOI).
I escaped Phobos by turning towards Mars retrograde and making a 10m/s prograde burn with the ascent stage engine, then planned my TEI burn in TransX. The eject date was MJD 53545, or about 1.5 years later. To avoid any collisions with Phobos, I raised my orbit 150km above Phobos's orbit with the ascent stage engine, then time accelerated to 3 days before the TEI burn. The escape burn was a bit less than 2800m/s, but the Rinc was way off, about 36 degrees after adjusting Ej. Orientation. Aligning with that would take way too much dV. I decided to adjust the Rinc by changing the Ch. plane vel in TransX until the Rinc was 0. After more adjustments, the closest I could get to Earth without a plane change burn was about 2.5 million km, with an eject date on MJD 53549, and a dV of ~2469m/s. On the orbit before the TEI-burn, I burned the rest of the ascent stage's fuel at the eject trajectory's Pe, then undocked the ascent stage.
On the next orbit, I ejected from Mars. The TEI-burn was ~2289m/s. After the TEI-burn, the SM still had 17.2% fuel remaining! I would still need to course-correct to actually hit the Earth though. I waited until I hit the white line where I crossed Earth's orbit and turned on Manouvre mode. However, doing the MCC here required a plane change dV of more than 1km/s, which I didn't have. So I turned off Manouvre mode and waited until I was halfway between Mars and Earth. Here, about 1/4 of an orbit from the Earth encounter, plane change dV would be much more effective. The MCC was just over 440m/s, leaving me with 7.3% fuel. I did the next MCC was exactly 27.321662 days (Moon's orbital period) before arrival, and used only ~2.8m/s. When I got to Earth, I turned to 270 degrees and used Encounter MFD to set my PeA to ~40km. However, when I jettisioned the SM, Orbiter crashed. While trying to find out why, I found that when entering Earth's SOI, I could jettison the SIM bay panel, so I did that, deployed the sub satellite (which passed above the atmosphere), and did the EVAs to get the cassete tapes, hoping it then wouldn't crash. *presses J* It didn't crash!
I landed at night, in the Indian ocean just off the west coast of Australia, on March 7, 2006. Since it was dark, I time acceled a few hours until the sun came up, then picked up the astronauts in the SeaKing helicopter. Mission time 24071:26:44.
