Getting home from Mercury

[Lazers]

After a five month flight to mercury, deploying an observation satellite, i'm stumped on how to get home.
I use IMFD to calculate the trajectory, and am trying to use it to get back, but it doesn't seem to work. The orbit eject burn continues long after the 'Have a nice voyage.' message shows, and aborting it and checking the map just shows a a swirly path through the solar system. What am i doing wrong?

 

[Liberator]

I have no idea. Best shot would be saving it and testing anyway possible to get home. (If I were you I would put a ISS in orbit around Mercury and fuel up and go back home.)

 

[Lazers]

That's what i'm doing. Trying both IMFD 4.2.1 and 5.3 and nothing seems to work. I have almost half fuel left, and still nothing.

 

[Liberator]

I said is you should put a ISS and dock with it so you can refuel and then go pack to Earth and is it the Deltaglider IV?

 

[Lazers]

It is the DGIV, but what refueling would do i have no idea. I have plenty fuel to get back, it just doesn't work.

-- I just traveled from Mercury to Venus, and am now going to try Venus to Earth.

---------- Post added at 02:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:29 PM ----------

Well, it worked! ...Sort of.
I left Mercury, did one orbit around Venus, and left for home, entered orbit, and tried to do a re-entry. Which all went fine. And then comes the landing bit, where neither the Elevons or RCS were responsive, and smashed into the ground at 300mp/h. Only three crew survived the ejection, two being caught in the explosion.

 

[Liberator]

(Plays sad song) Well, you made it. Try to make a replay and post it so I can see what went wrong.

 

[TMac3000]

You did better than me: I can't even get to Mercury in the first place. The last time I tried, I ended up 80,000 km out, way outside Mercury's SOI.

In-system trajectories are a PITA, that's just all there is to it.

 

[atuhalpa]

TransX is never a problem in these situations. For the life of me I have never understood why anyone uses IMFD.

 

[Lazers]

Because it's horribly, horribly complicated? The fact I have never mastered TransX, but have got to Mercury and then Venus means it's the one I use. It just balked at going straight home. :embarrassed:

 

[Epsilon]

First off, from what I've heard (I never had this issue, myself), once you get the "Have a nice voyage!" message, you need to cut the auto-burn and recalculate, using yourself as the reference instead of the planet you just left. Secondly, it's funny - I actually find TransX far -less- complicated for setting up a transfer. You twiddle the settings, and roll with it. Very simple if you understand what the settings mean.
The biggest bonus I've found for IMFD is the fact that it'll automatically do your burn for you. I find that while the setup gives more information on IMFD (most notably, the delta-v budget), there's also many more variables to screw around with. For TransX, you simply get all the lines to meet in the middle. Takes longer, but it's simple, mindless work.



IMHO. >_>

 

[Kveldulf]

TransX is never a problem in these situations. For the life of me I have never understood why anyone uses IMFD.

For me, its a matter of performance. I've stated elsewhere that IMFD runs flawlessly for me (and I learned it before TransX), but TransX is slow, sluggish, and at times unresponsive.

 

[TMac3000]

For me, its a matter of performance. I've stated elsewhere that IMFD runs flawlessly for me (and I learned it before TransX), but TransX is slow, sluggish, and at times unresponsive.

I hate them both, but Transfer MFD just doesn't work for me, and IMFD is even harder than TransX, so TransX it is. Now, I had once set up a maneuver burn that TransX said would put me right over the surface of Mercury. I ended up missing the planet by over 80,000 km, despite following procedures to the letter.

 

[ar81]

[ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3403"]Tutorial: Concepts for Interplanetary MFD 4.2.1[/ame]

 

[bradfirj92]

Little tip for anyone finding transx sluggish. I don't know why, but if you set x10 time acceleration it becomes very responsive again. I don't know why, just a little tip I picked up from flytandem's videos.

 

[flytandem]

The response in terms of rapid update of adjustments in TransX is done in the orbiter launchpad, parameters, MFD refresh rate,= set it to either 0.1 or 0.01 if you really want fast refresh even if time warp is ever slowed .1
rob