Hardest thing in Orbiter

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bj
  • Start date Start date
The first Slingshot tried around Jupiter to reach Saturn.
after some tries i could accomplish it passing very close to IO and Ganimede too
 
The first Slingshot tried around Jupiter to reach Saturn.
after some tries i could accomplish it passing very close to IO and Ganimede too

Hi Matte, welcome to the forum! :welcome:
 
Hi Tex, thanks for welcome :speakcool:
Have a nice day you all
 
Completely the opposite for me...I can dock to anything anytime. I can only travel to the moon using transfer MFD, as I don't like IMFD. IMFD does the burns for you, I want to use TransX, where you have to do the burns manually, and where you have more control. Anyone have a good TransX tutorial?


agreed... meeting and docking to ISS or any ship, MMU, anything in orbit is easy. Interplanetary travel using the TransX MFD is..... :blink: :lol:

Going to the moon or any moon (staying in reach of a planet) using the transfer mfd is also easy, its just that TransX that is so complicated...
 
agreed... meeting and docking to ISS or any ship, MMU, anything in orbit is easy. Interplanetary travel using the TransX MFD is..... :blink: :lol:

Going to the moon or any moon (staying in reach of a planet) using the transfer mfd is also easy, its just that TransX that is so complicated...

Yes it is complicated, but so is interplanetary travel ;)
 
Yes, welcome to this forum, Matte.:speakcool:

Hope you find this forum more user friendly, and, the users more friendly.:cheers:
 
I can do interplanetary and lunar transfers just fine, but the part I find hardest to do is to enter a proper orbit around these bodies. For instance, last time I arrived in orbit ove Mars, my desired landing site was always in the dark, forcing me to adjust my orbit for a daylight landing. Had I been better able to plan my orbit insertion I could have saved lots of propellant.
 
At first, I found re-entry into Earth's atmosphere to be nearly impossible. I imagine several of you can probably relate to feeling like a stone skipping across a pond with this one.

After doing this successfully, I thought landing on the Moon would be easy!

It's a good thing Orbiter is a sim, because I killed myself spectacularly many times before I finally pulled this one off. Though the Earth's atmosphere provides its own challenge for re-entry, I still find landing on a body without one to be particularly challenging.

But I haven't killed myself landing on the Moon for a loooooooooong time now. :P


 
Getting the DG IV to re-entry from the moon to land at the KSC. I tell you its impossible.
 
Oh geeze, that's a hard one. When I started, getting into a simply circular orbit was anything but simple. However now, I think the hardest stuff is simply mission design and management (namely conserving fuel, burn timing). The actual trajectory of the spacecraft (fly-bys, orbit insertions, etc) are easy by comparison now.
 
Using a paper, pen and a scientific calculator. No orbiter instruments (besides the hud, which I've only used to guesstimate the direction I needed to burn in). I did the whole mission in realtime, planning my sleep schedule and computing time to coincide with the course correction burns. I ended up arriving only 17 minutes ahead of schedule and 1,3 degrees out of plane for a landing on brighton beach, which I corrected over the next few orbits and landed.

I think I still have all the paper I used for that stored somewhere (around 30 A4 pages of calculations, sketches and random doodles)...might take some photos and upload if I can find it.

I used to do unassisted flights to the Moon (I think more complex travels are out of the question) back when I didn't knew how to use TransX. Nothing of that magnitude since I'm not that motivated, but TLI burns when the Moon was in sight, using only the OrbitMFD and things like that. You don't need the HUD either, just find 2 planets or the Sun and one planet (or the Moon) to find the ecliptic and align the VC dash with it, keep the AOA and slope 0 and you are Prograde. It's plausible too since all you'd need to do this are gyroscopes. From what I've read they've used stars to track the position (Apollo missions) but I'm sure a big part in the navigation were the gyros.

For me it's hard to set a complex interplanetary plan since I'm not the most patient person alive and I only know and use TransX. I'm sure IMFD makes it easier but I don't think that "easy" is the point, plus I'm not into interplanetary travels. I'm an expert with everything else (if I may say this myself) without any failed missions to date, not even a hard landing with my 30t XR1. Reentries ware hard but are piece of cake once you understand what's going on and have a tool that calculates the deceleration necessary to get to base. I must admit I don't know how to use TransferMFD...
 
For me the hardest thing is reentry with capsules (Apollo, Soyuz, CTV, Orion). I already made perfect landings with DG-IV and Space Shuttle, but with capsules I only can land hundreds of kilometers away from my target. Last year I tried to land the CTV capsule in the Mediterranean
Sea, near France, but I landed in the middle of the Sahara:tumbleweed:.
Does anyone know a good tutorial?
 
It seems that getting to the moon is reasonably straightforward, but getting back to Earth (e.g. in the AMSO CSM after landing) - I haven't figured out a tried-and-true strategy to time the TEI such that I get home with a minimum burn (sometimes I miss home completely and run out of gas).

I basically burn when I am a little past opposition with earth as seen from the moon, and then I wait until I am in the Earth's SOI to do a (sometimes large) correction burn to get me in a re-entry corridor.

I do tend to see a lot of angels coming back from the moon in AMSO - not a good thing. My most memorable angel sighting occurred when re-entering at a nearly 90 degree angle over Kansas. Oh my, the g's did pile up oh so quickly...
 
"interplanetary using TransX" yep same goes for me

farthest planned trip i've been to is the moon

and once i also struggled with TEI (i.e. getting back to earth from moon) but now I think I got it.

-RODION
 
Back
Top