Lunar orbit going awry

[Wintermute]

I've been working my way through Irving's Go Play in Space and I'm having some frustrating issues with Once Around the Block, where you perform an elevator takeoff from Brighton Beach, make a single orbit, then de-orbit and land back at Brighton.

As far as I can tell, I'm following the directions exactly: I aim for a 90 degree heading, hover at full until 2.2km, then cut the hover engines and go max horizontal thrust. When the ecc bottoms out, I cut the engines and my numbers look more or less the same as the screenshot. Ecc is around .029, ApA 60km, PeA -40km. Velocity 1.6k or so.

This is where it goes wrong. As I'm moving toward apoapsis, the PeA starts plummeting and the orbit goes completely bad. By the time I'm ready to turn prograde and burn, the PeA has dropped down to around -1.0m and my velocity has fallen to 1.1k. I have to burn forever to raise the PeA back up into the positive and it just plummets down again after I cut the engines.

What am I missing? Any advice would be very appreciated!

 

[the.punk]

Are you sure that ALL thrusters are cut down?

 

[Wintermute]

The hover and main engine sliders are all the way down, and I'm not touching the rotation/translation controls. Is there anything else?

 

[the.punk]

Does this happen when you're switching between internal and external view?

 

[Scarecrow]

First press * on your numpad to zero your main/retro thrust, then press and hold . on your numpad (or 0, whichever one it is) for about 15 seconds, to make really really sure that your hover engines are at exactly 0. Then turn off all the autopilots. If you've done it right, your orbit should be stable. And just as a sanity check: After you've achieved a supposedly stable orbit, press the PRJ button on orbit MFD until it says SHP in the top right corner. Then you'll be looking at your orbit straight on, and you can make sure it's a circle that doesn't intersect the ground. If all else fails, post screen shots. It could be that you're missing something subtle that a more experienced orbiteer will catch that way.

 

[Wintermute]

I don't know, I'm staying in internal view the entire time watching the numbers, and never going above 1x time compression--just down to .1x to synchronize the hover shutoff/max horz. thrust and to spot the ecc bottoming out.

 

[the.punk]

Yes post a screen or post a quicksave scenario when your orbit beginns to change a bit.

 

[Wintermute]

Oops.

Stupid oversight. I was dragging the thrust slider-bar down into the retro thinking I had it shut off. I realized it when I followed Scarecrow's advice and hit * instead of trying to manually drag it, then I realized the 0% is above the red part ... LOL

Thanks for your help guys! :speakcool:

 

[insane_alien]

do you have non-spherical gravity sources turned on?

 

[RisingFury]

do you have non-spherical gravity sources turned on?

He accidentally turned on the retros.

 

[insane_alien]

yes i noticed. but he posted that as i was typing my post.