destinos
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I've started experimenting with the MER addon, and the possibility of carrying the missions out "by the numbers" excites me.
When I launch Spirit at the appropriate time, manually correct its escape inclination down to 0 degrees, and let the autopilot handle all of the ejection burn, I still end up needing to burn the coasting stage rockets for a few minutes immediately on termination of Stage III to clean up some remaining Dv from the ejection. It's as if there needs to be just a little more fuel in stages II and III to fully complete the burn.
If you've run this add-on, is this what you've experienced too? If not, what are you doing differently? Is there some science to doing the burns at the historical times, and deliberately not burning off all Dv?
---------- Post added 02-10-10 at 06:28 AM ---------- Previous post was 02-09-10 at 05:32 PM ----------
after messing with things a little more, I'm still not sure how to get a precise burn with the realistic procedure described in the add-on's documentation, but I've had a lot more success getting on an accurate path with the following procedure:
-let the autopilot handle the main bulk of the burn
-after the burn is reduced to a fraction of a second remaining, autopilot will begin turning the probe toward the small correction vector. Disable the autopilot at this point, steer manually toward the new vector, and then complete the burn with a series of short pulses of the main thruster, correcting the heading as necessary.
My hunch is that the craft's engines don't work with IMFD's autopilot in a way that yields a totally accurate burn at the outset, and that this is corrected during the cruise phase, but the first couple times I tried the flight I was getting correction burns in the hundreds or thousands of seconds.
When I launch Spirit at the appropriate time, manually correct its escape inclination down to 0 degrees, and let the autopilot handle all of the ejection burn, I still end up needing to burn the coasting stage rockets for a few minutes immediately on termination of Stage III to clean up some remaining Dv from the ejection. It's as if there needs to be just a little more fuel in stages II and III to fully complete the burn.
If you've run this add-on, is this what you've experienced too? If not, what are you doing differently? Is there some science to doing the burns at the historical times, and deliberately not burning off all Dv?
---------- Post added 02-10-10 at 06:28 AM ---------- Previous post was 02-09-10 at 05:32 PM ----------
after messing with things a little more, I'm still not sure how to get a precise burn with the realistic procedure described in the add-on's documentation, but I've had a lot more success getting on an accurate path with the following procedure:
-let the autopilot handle the main bulk of the burn
-after the burn is reduced to a fraction of a second remaining, autopilot will begin turning the probe toward the small correction vector. Disable the autopilot at this point, steer manually toward the new vector, and then complete the burn with a series of short pulses of the main thruster, correcting the heading as necessary.
My hunch is that the craft's engines don't work with IMFD's autopilot in a way that yields a totally accurate burn at the outset, and that this is corrected during the cruise phase, but the first couple times I tried the flight I was getting correction burns in the hundreds or thousands of seconds.
