ive had this orbiter sim for about a week now and i alread managed to fly from earth to mars. it probibly took me 30 hours to pull it off (for the poor crew flying the thing it was a 23 year flight
). i frequently had to read to learn how to accomplish the next step. the first thing i did when i left earth was fly to the moon, of course i had not yet mastered reading all the mfds and over shot my orbit by several astronomical units
. so 20 of those years went to fixing that little blunder.
once i was in a slightly more stable solar orbit, i began the task of deciding what planet to land on. i was debating trying for one of jupiters moons but i didnt know if i could handle such a gravitationally active planet. venus came across my hud but i decided against it becuse the gravity would have been too much to play with my hover thrusters. so i picked mars.
so i start reading the pdf help files. so i scan through and found out that i had to get on the same orbital plane as mars. it took me about an hour to figure out how the mfd worked, and another hour to get the manuver right. it basicly requires a quick burn at the right time to get your inclination to within a degree. fromehere on the rest of my flight was pretty much 2 dimentional, at least up until i made mars planetary orbit.
at the time i was still in a real funky comet-like orbit of the sun. so i open up the transfer mfd and realise i need to read some more. once i figured out i needed to imput the sun as a reference and mars as the target (and not vice versa
), i pretty much understood it. pretty much you screw around with it untill you get your orbit to intersect your destinations orbit, then you make use of the time compression and wait untill your orbit changes. after that i did a retrograde butn, realised i should have done a prograde burn instead, thus getting into another really funky orbit. my secont try was more successfull. eventually my orbit started looking like mars's.
my now i was getting pretty good with all the mfds. so im in the sync orbit mfd trying to figure it out. after screwing up 4 times, i called it quits for the day. so the next day i get back in the sim and decided id just put my crosshair on mars till i got there. this didnt work as well as i had planned. iafter overshooting it a couple times i give the sync orbit panel another shot. once i got within a hundredth of an astronomical unnit from the rock, i go back to my wing it strategy. it took me several burns before i got close enough to the gravitational influenceeventually i got into a fairly stable orbit.
so onto the fun part. i turned retrograde and fired those thrusters untill the orbit mfd showed my orbit hitting the ground. realising that i had checked the unlimited fuel box in the launcher i thought id have some fun with it. i eleminated all forward momentum so that id fall straight onto the planet withought the thermal nightmare of reentry. about a million meeters altitude i activate the autoleveler, likked rotation, and switch my rcs system into linear mode.i tweak my course with the thrusters so my motion vector pointed straight down. i begin using my hover thrusters to cancel out some of the downward acceleration. it didnt take much.
once my orbit display has become totally useless by my diminishing altitude i swicheed it to ascent profile, which showed me a couple graphs that i didnt understand. they looked cool so i left em on, in the other mfd i put on surface mode, which had typical aircraft gauges, stuff i recognise and know how to use. with the auto leveler doing a really good job i use my l9inear thrusters to gep my velocity vector down and my hover engins to keep my acceleration low. at about 100 km out i set my hover thrusters so they provide just enough thrus to maintain a constant balence between upward acceleration and gravity, using my vertical thrusters for fine tuning. so i do this untill im at about 100 feet. im movving downward at a lesurly pace of about 15 meters a sec. i drop my gear and thrust down to kill off the remaining momentum for a nice soft landing. whoeer thought spaceflight could be so much fun. once i get the hang of more stuff il tryit with fuel limits:D
