Recently returned to Orbiter after a very long absence.
I did my research to remind myself how things work, and I've been using IMFD 5.5 with Orbiter 2010. I mostly use the old version because I enjoy the Arrow freighter so much.
Things were going great. I flew the Arrow from Cape Canaveral up to the ISS (yes, I have modified the Arrow's thrust to make such a flight possible).
From the ISS I went Mars -- Olympus -- Jupiter -- Europa -- Jupiter -- now enroute to Neptune.
Up until my shot to Neptune, everything was going great. I got comfortable with the IMFD (I have a quick reference sheet with notes beside me). Frankly, I've been so impressed with the accuracy of the module. Then I went to Neptune.
Right away I remembered why you don't go there... it takes soooooo loooooooong even at max time accel.
But here's the problem... IMFD had a nervous breakdown. Once I was way clear of Jupiter's SOI, I did a correction burn. Jut a few seconds, and the prediction looked spot on as usual.
Then getting close to about half way, I saw the dV was getting up a bit, so I slowed time and fired off the auto burn... only to watch in horror as it started decreasing the eccentricity of my orbit, bringing it way short of Neptune's orbit. I aborted the burn, then looked at BV. The normally sensible dV readings made no sense. Values like "-1 #R" for example.
I tried everything I could think of to fix this, but in the end I used to scenario editor to bring the date forward to my EIn, and placed the Arrow in orbit.
Then I plotted my burn for Triton. Now I get totally confused. The Course Target Intercept showed a meaningful solution, but opening a second shared IMFD with Orbit Eject said it wasn't receiving information from Course. At a loss, I did the burn from the Course program. It looked fine. I appeared to have an accurate intercept solution, and the graph made sense too. About halfway, as usual, I made a course correction... yep, burned in some insane direction that appeared to be trying to circularize my orbit. Again, the BV data was showing bizarre symbols.
Does anyone recognize this? Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong?
The only things that changed, as far as I can think of, are:
EDIT/UPDATE
I just reloaded fresh (same bizarre BV data), then used the scenario to advance time to put me about 3/4 of the way to interception. With this much shorter remaining distance, the data when I then checked BV was normal, and a burn produced a small correction.
I seem to remember reading some comment referring to distances... Is this course too long for IMFD to handle without a config file adjustment?
I did my research to remind myself how things work, and I've been using IMFD 5.5 with Orbiter 2010. I mostly use the old version because I enjoy the Arrow freighter so much.
Things were going great. I flew the Arrow from Cape Canaveral up to the ISS (yes, I have modified the Arrow's thrust to make such a flight possible).
From the ISS I went Mars -- Olympus -- Jupiter -- Europa -- Jupiter -- now enroute to Neptune.
Up until my shot to Neptune, everything was going great. I got comfortable with the IMFD (I have a quick reference sheet with notes beside me). Frankly, I've been so impressed with the accuracy of the module. Then I went to Neptune.
Right away I remembered why you don't go there... it takes soooooo loooooooong even at max time accel.
But here's the problem... IMFD had a nervous breakdown. Once I was way clear of Jupiter's SOI, I did a correction burn. Jut a few seconds, and the prediction looked spot on as usual.
Then getting close to about half way, I saw the dV was getting up a bit, so I slowed time and fired off the auto burn... only to watch in horror as it started decreasing the eccentricity of my orbit, bringing it way short of Neptune's orbit. I aborted the burn, then looked at BV. The normally sensible dV readings made no sense. Values like "-1 #R" for example.
I tried everything I could think of to fix this, but in the end I used to scenario editor to bring the date forward to my EIn, and placed the Arrow in orbit.
Then I plotted my burn for Triton. Now I get totally confused. The Course Target Intercept showed a meaningful solution, but opening a second shared IMFD with Orbit Eject said it wasn't receiving information from Course. At a loss, I did the burn from the Course program. It looked fine. I appeared to have an accurate intercept solution, and the graph made sense too. About halfway, as usual, I made a course correction... yep, burned in some insane direction that appeared to be trying to circularize my orbit. Again, the BV data was showing bizarre symbols.
Does anyone recognize this? Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong?
The only things that changed, as far as I can think of, are:
- that I deployed a few UMMU objects (made a base) while on Europa.
- The Arrow floated off the ground at one point, perhaps 20 m up, then slowly came back down (who knows why). When I got back on board, the ship was fine but the crew were all dead. (I replaced them).
EDIT/UPDATE
I just reloaded fresh (same bizarre BV data), then used the scenario to advance time to put me about 3/4 of the way to interception. With this much shorter remaining distance, the data when I then checked BV was normal, and a burn produced a small correction.
I seem to remember reading some comment referring to distances... Is this course too long for IMFD to handle without a config file adjustment?
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