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Post by cardshark on Sept 24, 2016 2:31:16 GMT
I'm hitting a wall here and considering the time i spent on it it is most likely i'm locked in a wrong mindset about it or I'm missing something about the tools at disposal. I start with a burn as advised by in game tips, when the ship is closest to the sun, very economical one, i only need something like 300m/s to get on the right path on a near circular orbit along Mercury I perform a burn to decrease my orbit and my semi-major axis and catch up to L4. Easy enough thus far. I attempted to be conservative, i tried numerous burns between 1 and 2km/s, which seem (emphasis on seem here ) to bring me back close-ish to L4 within the timeframe. Unfortunately i either miss the time limit or lack a bit of delta-V once I finally catch up to L4. I tried circularising my orbit rather than staying elliptical to give me time and see when climbing back toward L4 was the cheapest, i always, always hit the time limit or lack, in my best attempt, 2km/s delta-V, and many times so much, much more. Approaching that disabled ship uses SO much delta-V... What am I so obviously missing? My results are so wildly random from an attempt to another i am clearly not progressing, nor am I seeing what i should be changing to my early burns to increase my chances of success. I clearly don't understand how to use the tools at my disposal to perform a more precise burn than my ballparking which will bring me back closer to L4. Is there a way to show L4's orbit around the sun so i can use the "Match orbit" option? Is there any use to set L4 as your frame of reference ? I really struggle to make sense of my trajectory that way.
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Post by elbrak on Sept 24, 2016 11:33:37 GMT
Ya i'm having a pretty tough time with this mission as well.
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Post by cardshark on Sept 24, 2016 14:27:00 GMT
I GOT IT! Dear god was that frustrating @qswitched : Any chance we get someday an ingame notepad to take notes about how we beat missions?
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Post by etranger on Sept 24, 2016 14:29:45 GMT
I made a burn to break Mercury orbit on a trajectory towards L4 and about half way was able to adjust to merge with the gunship. Took a lot of playing around with the parameters to make the merge.
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Post by jonatanhedborg on Sept 24, 2016 14:34:10 GMT
I GOT IT! Dear god was that frustrating @qswitched : Any chance we get someday an ingame notepad to take notes about how we beat missions? Don't just rub it in. HOW?! -.-
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Post by cardshark on Sept 24, 2016 14:44:37 GMT
Shortened my orbit with a longer burn than my economical 1-2km/s attempts (i'll let you explore that yourself^^) mostly out of spite I admit, never really thought it would work, offered me a nice cheap-ish interception at next apoapsis,total 15.4km/s of spent dV and 2 months 19 days elapsed. I was starting to wonder if the intercept tool was bugged seeing how often i felt like I passed so close to that L4 and that tadpole orbit, but I guess that was solely on me.
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Post by lelden on Sept 26, 2016 17:22:06 GMT
One tip I have for you is that you can click on your path well before it shows the symbol for the option to join fleet and you can still often get the option. Earlier burns usually use less delta-v to match up. I was able to do it with two manual burns, one to break from Mercury's orbit and another a bit in, and then I got the option to join fleets. I clicked well in front of my symbol on my path and it actually didn't take too much delta-v (still a few km/s, but that was much smaller than I was getting when I clicked later in my path).
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Post by jakjakman on Sept 26, 2016 18:07:19 GMT
For this mission, remember to do your burn to break Mercury orbit when you're at the point between Mercury and Sol. At this point you're "flying away" from the L4 point, so it's a bit counter intuitive. But you want to enter into an orbit around Sol inside Mercury's orbit around Sol so that you'll pull ahead of Mercury to catch the L4 point. That maneuver only takes about 300 m/s I think, so you can use everything else in your tank to match up with the gunship.
I also found it helpful to put the gunship as the frame of reference, then play with the trajectory values until I got one ending right on the gunship for it to join up.
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Post by geraldmonroe on Oct 1, 2016 8:51:03 GMT
I need to see a video of how to do this. I don't really understand what I'm seeing when you put the target as your frame of reference, you get some crazy spiral and I don't know how to use that information to actually intercept the target.
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Post by apophys on Oct 1, 2016 18:02:18 GMT
As I understand it, the actual reason to burn on the sun side is because of the direction of the particular orbit the craft starts in. Let me explain.
In general, to catch up to a target, you want to burn retrograde (which happens to be away from your target), to slow down and drop your orbit closer to the body you're both orbiting (here, the sun). Because you're going to be burning fuel to escape your planet anyway, you might as well make that burn also go toward your next goal; this means matching up the burn point in the orbit around Mercury that points in the same direction as your next burn. The backward direction of the point in the orbit around Mercury happens to be sun-side in this case. If the orbit was reversed, you'd want to escape Mercury on the side away from the sun.
I cleared using 12.9 km/s, at 2 months 10 days. (I swap my frame of reference to always be the nearest body I'm orbiting, in this case Mercury -> Sol -> L4. I've never used the target as a reference, way too confusing.)
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Post by WafflesToo on Oct 3, 2016 16:01:02 GMT
Another trick that might help squeeze just a little more dV efficiency out is to drop your perimerc as low as you can get it without pancaking into Mercury to maximize Oeberth effect. Nice tip from lelden, I keep forgetting you can do that. I'll give that a shot later today and see if I can at least silver the mission.
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Post by Nitehawk on Oct 4, 2016 2:11:09 GMT
The trick is once you break out of Mercury's orbit, to make your adjustments to intercept the gunship as early as possible.
Set up your burn to get away from Mercury and moving generally close to L4. Then set the frame of reference point to the gunship. You might already have an intercept icon, but it will take too much fuel to perform the manuver.
Once the frame of reference is set, select a point on the blue line as early as possible and perform a small burn to move the intercept closer to the gunship. At some point the final intercept will cost less delta/v and you will be able to do it.
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Post by shurugal on Dec 10, 2016 22:02:40 GMT
re-attempting this mission... are the goals set even possible in the current build??? I can get to L4 in ~ 45 days, but every intercept I plot ends up taking another full month... what the actual fuck?
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Post by shurugal on Dec 10, 2016 22:29:03 GMT
okay, got it in 1mo23d... the auto-intercept plotter is in desperate need of help, though. I manually plotted a nearly perfect join, and still had to be careful where i selected on the trajectory to initiate join, because the auto-tool still wanted to sit there for a month before making that last few dozen m/s....
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 11, 2016 0:11:16 GMT
okay, got it in 1mo23d... the auto-intercept plotter is in desperate need of help, though. I manually plotted a nearly perfect join, and still had to be careful where i selected on the trajectory to initiate join, because the auto-tool still wanted to sit there for a month before making that last few dozen m/s.... Yeah, I never hit the damn autoplot until the projected trajectory lines are on top of each other in all three dimensions and stay that way when I zoom in. Even then, I may have to click on random points of the trajectory before initiating autoplot to try to get the dV expenditure to reasonable levels.
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