Hello, first post here.
Excellent tutorial but I have a few questions.
1. Does it matter where Venus is in relation to earth for the first burn to Venus? I ask this because it seems to make a difference as far as the angle that the ship approaches Venus which also affects the escape point dramatically. In some cases I cannot get the same orbit that I achieve in other instances.
2. Your tutorial talks about distance in MM which I’m guessing is mega meters? And version 1.5 now uses kilometers. Has something changed in version 1.5 because the numbers don’t seem to line up.
3. After successful entry into Venus’ influence you mention to adjust the trajectory to capture earths entry the first time. Is it important to have that done before you cross Venus? Again with the new version it’s a bit tricky as far as the transfer point and in counterpoint are displayed.
funny enough, after I thought I did this right my little rocket burned down to 44% fuel. So I was excited to do a direct burn from earth to run out of gas and was projected to be a Jupiter with 44% fuel so I’m obviously doing something wrong, haha.
Thanks in advance!
Hi and welcome to the forum
Walkthesky
Horus explained it well, just to add a few precisions, the biggest problem is that the Solar system's scale has changed in 1.5, and the Sun has been made heavier too. All distances have been multiplied by 2.5, and the Sun mass has been multiplied by 3 approximately. All in all it doesn't make the game significantly harder, but the gravity assist procedures are no longer valid, I have to recalculate them.
For your questions:
1- Yes, Venus position is important. The VEEGA path implies to burn slightly past the optimal transfer, which was shown by the transfer window before, but this has changed too. Now your transfer is showed in a dotted line with the new navigation feature. To have a favorable approach angle, your periapsis should go below Venus'orbit. It would be interesting that I calculate that periapsis
Now you'll probably have a different result on 2 successive attempts, but that's what the corrections are for.
2- MM is mega meters indeed, it's how it used to be displayed in 1.4. And yes, distances have changed, I already answered that.
3- You can't really do the corrections before entering Venus's SOI, because the purpose is to get an encounter with Earth. You can only visualize the trajectory once you've entered Venus SOI, so it's best to make them at that moment.
Also, something that will be hard to manage is the second Earth encounter. The first gravity assist with Earth sends you onto a resonant orbit, which in short means that the ship will naturally encounter Earth again after a few turns. Because the distances changed, you would have to multiply your great axis (periapsis + apoapsis) by 2.5 for this to work.
I'll redo this when I have some time, feel free to ask if you have more questions