Altaïr
Space Stig, Master of gravity
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I realized I never made a project thread myself, so here is one for my crazy usual stuff 
So here is one.
I'll start with something simple and totally casual. I suppose that you remember that ship right?
If you already tried that mighty Mercury mission from team Hawk you necessarily recognize it. Well, it's practically identical, the probe is not on the same place, but it has the same characteristics.
The mission is usually to land on Mercury with this thing, but I'll try to go as far as I can with it. But the first thing is to land it on Mercury obviously!
I'll do this under the rules with those mods enabled: SmartSAS, Vanilla Upgrades, and ANAIS.
Logically, when you go to Mercury, you start aiming for Venus:
The burn is done over two passes to gain efficiency, and I'm on the road to Venus:
The plan is to chain 2 gravity assists with Venus, because a single one is not enough to send my ship towards Mercury. So another encounter is planned 4 turns after the first one:
Unfortunately, even the 2nd slingshot wasn't enough, my periapsis is still above Mercury orbit, and I can't lower it more:
That will be easily fixed: once at the periapsis I burn to raise my apoapsis to cross again Venus with a slight angle, and an encounter is planned again:
Finally all good, I can finall encounter Mercury and start a series of gravity assists:
For the last encounter, the trajectory is made tangent to Mercury's orbit to lower the next encounter's ΔV requirements:
And finally...
The ship is satellized in Low Mercury Orbit with 39.5% of fuel remaining. It means that I now have 2038.8 m/s of remaining ΔV from the initial 3597.3 m/s.
I have only spent 1558.5 m/s. For reference, according to ANAIS, a direct transfer in optimal configuration would have costed 2610.6 m/s:
So this allowed me to save 1052 m/s of ΔV. In theory, probably more in practice
To be continued!
So here is one.
I'll start with something simple and totally casual. I suppose that you remember that ship right?
If you already tried that mighty Mercury mission from team Hawk you necessarily recognize it. Well, it's practically identical, the probe is not on the same place, but it has the same characteristics.
The mission is usually to land on Mercury with this thing, but I'll try to go as far as I can with it. But the first thing is to land it on Mercury obviously!
I'll do this under the rules with those mods enabled: SmartSAS, Vanilla Upgrades, and ANAIS.
Logically, when you go to Mercury, you start aiming for Venus:
The burn is done over two passes to gain efficiency, and I'm on the road to Venus:
The plan is to chain 2 gravity assists with Venus, because a single one is not enough to send my ship towards Mercury. So another encounter is planned 4 turns after the first one:
Unfortunately, even the 2nd slingshot wasn't enough, my periapsis is still above Mercury orbit, and I can't lower it more:
That will be easily fixed: once at the periapsis I burn to raise my apoapsis to cross again Venus with a slight angle, and an encounter is planned again:
Finally all good, I can finall encounter Mercury and start a series of gravity assists:
For the last encounter, the trajectory is made tangent to Mercury's orbit to lower the next encounter's ΔV requirements:
And finally...
The ship is satellized in Low Mercury Orbit with 39.5% of fuel remaining. It means that I now have 2038.8 m/s of remaining ΔV from the initial 3597.3 m/s.
I have only spent 1558.5 m/s. For reference, according to ANAIS, a direct transfer in optimal configuration would have costed 2610.6 m/s:
So this allowed me to save 1052 m/s of ΔV. In theory, probably more in practice
To be continued!
