Moon Missions

@RichGWall Ah, you mean, a correction halfway to the moon ? I had not thought about that at all...

@TomKerbal Thanks Tom. I'll give it a try.
Also about KSC. In the height of summer the worst inclination of Launch would be 10.2 degrees off and most the time around 5 degrees off which could be corrected easily with a mid course correction burn. I would guess that burn to be about 50 m/sec DV. But we are talking the real Solar System here not Juno: New Horizons.

@RichGWall @Wangzc @mrspock15
I have added the possibility to start directly into Moon orbital plane with my Vizzy program SmartGAP. It only works for Kourou Space Center, because Canaveral is only every 6th year in the Moon orbital plane as Mr. Wall explained. Cheers! Tom
https://www.simplerockets.com/c/b2gtqG/Vizzy-SmartGAP-v0-6-with-Moon-Orbital-Plane-launcher

@TomKerbal
@Wangzc
She is beautiful for sure. Another goal of is to get this good at 3d work.

@RichGWall @Wangzc
https://www.simplerockets.com/c/3m43x7/Apollo11SaturnV
So nice

@RichGWall For me the heading direction is the problem. In Juno I just start to East if Kourou is approx. in Moon orbital plane, o.k., nice., but not good. MechJeb in KSP1 simply set's you in perfect orbit even when the launchposition is not in the target plane. If it can be in the plane it waits up to 24h and then starts. If not, it waits until the conditions are optimal, then starts and changes the inclination during ascend... it's just an amazing tool this mod.

@TomKerbal I did suggest back about 4 months ago that the inclination of a target body be projected on the Earth, or whatever launch site, so when the launch vehicle crossed the projected line it was time to launch.....but alas...

Mr. Spock's is a beauty for sure. I hope to have good look at any I can find and compare them and to http://astronautix.com/f/f-1.html as well.

@RichGWall For your Saturn-V experiment you could possibly use the marvelous one from Mr.Spock @mrspock15 :
https://www.simplerockets.com/c/x41zff/RSS-Saturn-V-Apollo
( I think you have already discovered, since you upvoted there :-) )

Well, KSP2... if they had sold the Early Access with 20$ instead of 50$ nobody would have complained... so it has a nice soundtrack, graphics and sound, some nice green cute frog creature animations, and a lot of realy ugly bug problems and most of all: No RSS mod.
And everything looks somehow like plastic, but that is certainly a matter of taste

@RichGWall KSP2 is not worth mentioned. KSP1 with RSS and RO mods is great. If you try it, use CKAN, to manage your mods. It's all very comfortable. But KSP takes much longer to load and needs much more hardware ressources than Juno. Juno is much more intuitive and simply does most things right. So it is easy as cake to use my PS4 controller in Juno but in KSP... buuuh. Construction in Juno is nice because of the scalablity ansatz. You can get this in KSP too but only with mods. So KSP has to be modded to become nice and Juno is nice from the beginning... graphics is surely better in modded KSP, especially Moon looks really beautiful with RSS mod.
For me I prefer Juno now. KSP1 I started for 2 month the first time a view hours ago. The forum is nice here I think. The official KSP forum has nice people as well but it is very strongly monitored by moderators.

@TomKerbal
My guess is if Kerbal1 has the rotational 23 Degree tilt of the Earth it will have the orbital inclination of both bodies correct. If my memory serves, Moon has less than 1% rotational tilt relative to Earth because the Moon is 99% tidally locked to the Earth.

I bought Kerbal1 a long time ago and never played it. I hear of great dissatisfaction with Kerbal2. What's your opinion?

@RichGWall I just checked "Principia" with RSS in KSP1. First impression is very good, a lot of smoke from my computer indicates a lot of calculations btw... Axial tilt of Earth seams to be o.k., send my Artemis I rocket to equatorial orbit and looked at the shadow line on Earth, definitely seasons there. Then I looked at the Moon orbital plane... I am not sure, I tried to compare it to the ecliptic (go behind the Earth and look in direction to the Sun hidden by Earth, then plot the Moon orbit...). Just with my eye I would say that it is about 20 degrees, and this would be wrong, because it should be 5 degrees (due to Wiki). But my eyes are not so good anymore. I am not at the Moon yet, so no info about the axial tilt of the Moon. I am not sure if I want to spent this time, perhaps I find some information in the internet. I would prefer Juno. In Juno the axial tilt of the Moon is o.k. I think. At Southpole the sun is very low on the horizon and in Shackleton there is only light because of grafical bugs I think.

@RichGWall Yes, perhaps I overreacted a little bit :-) So I let the baby in the water, but I wanted to check this principia mod anyway. And I will check if RSS Earth in KSP1 has axial tilt, I am just not quite sure anymore...

@TomKerbal
Maybe you and our friends could bump this thread by upvote to get their attention. I've tried.
But don't throw the baby out with the bath water just yet. The navigation gizmo is superior and there is a vast amount of knowledge to be had here.
The amount of fuel needed to make up for a fictious Solar system is less than 4%.
Build your ships with 4 extra % and they will still be accurate.
What I need to explore is how accurate are the Engine numbers are to reality, also dry mass and wet mass accuracy. I think these could have the greatest impact on true numbers.
I intend to make my own Apollo-Saturn just to check these numbers out. But I am sure there are people here that know these answers already. We just need to get their attention to maybe save some time by telling us what's up.

@RichGWall Great analysis by you, thank you very much ! So KSC is in Moon orbital plane once every 6years, that is completly new for me and I am happy to learn this! Thank you. Tom

@RichGWall I checked this, you are right. That's much worse than the ridiculous fuel cells in Juno... I am speechless. Perhaps it is better to go back to KSP1 with this "Principia" mod. I will think about it. I like well choosen simplifications, like for Moon mission only taking Sun (main effect on Moon, ~2/3), Earth, Moon and vehicle into consideration, neglecting influence of Jupiter and Saturn. Simulation will run smooth and most effects are realistic enough for me. But this is too much simplification.

@RichGWall OH No!!! How could I missed this. So no axial tilt on Earth... that's incredibly bad ! Even worse than Moon without tilt. Even worse than in KSP!!!
I am massively dissapointed. How could I miss this ?

@TomKerbal Hi Tom,
What I know so far is that Juno: New Origins does not use 2 Rotational Elements, 'The Inclination of a planets Rotation', aka 'The obliquity of the ecliptic 'or 'The longitude of solar transit'.

What this means is that all the systems created in Juno: New Origins the planets have no seasons. No tropic of Cancer or tropic of Capricorn for planet Earth. All the planets have their equators pointed at the governing star all the time. Also, with 'The longitude of solar transit' not being used we never know accurately when it is supposed to be noon on any planet on any given day.

I believe the creators wanted to keep this as a fictional game because of potential issues with paranoid governmental elements that exist today. Sounds crazy, I've seen it before. I hope I am wrong.

Back to your question, I have found with Juno: New Origins' superior navigation gizmo that the inclination of your orbit really does not matter except not launching at 90 ° East you will not pick up the extra rotational momentum of the planet. The closer to the equator you launch, the greater speed you will gain from the planet's rotation.

Beside from that there is no issue on getting to the Moon even if you started with a polar orbit because any inclination will intercept the Moon's orbit twice a month.
You can launch and then accelerate time to move the moon into position so your ship will intercept. Again, this happens twice a month.

As a side note, ironically, Apollo 11, at the time of Launch, the astronauts could see the Moon directly above them at zenith. In reality KSC does intersect the Moon's orbital plane, once every 6 years, but not in Juno: New Origins. When the Moon is in its highest orbital position relative to the Earth's equator and its the 1st day of summer you get 23.43623° north, because it is solstice, plus 5.145° form the Moon's inclination. Because of the Moon's inclinical peak position you get 28.58123 degrees north as the highest latitude the Moon at zenith can be. KSC's latitude is 28.573469°. Picking the Cape as our main space port was no accident.

Now I know one of our members made a 'Vizzy in a chip' to alert the player to when his launch location was closest to the targets orbital plane, but I have not tried it yet. I will in time.

@RichGWall If you start from European space center (Guiana Space Centre near Kourou) you can wait until it is in the Moon orbital plane and then start directly into that plane... just start east then. I think that has something to do with the latitude of Kourou and the Moon orbit inclination beeing nearly the same, but I am not sure.
Starting from Canaveral is much more complicated. I have huge problems of imagination because I do not even know if Florida ever crosses the Moon orbital plane... all my experience here stems from KSP1, mod RSS/RO, and here the Moon orbit and axial tilt is fully wrong because of stupid KSP programming (one reason why I switched to Juno btw., between others). But if you know more, please let me know.
According to this: https://history.nasa.gov/afj/launchwindow/lw1.html
there is the possibility to start from Canavaral even with an optimal east direction. You just have to wait, I don't know how long.
In Juno we have some orbit information, for the Moon and the launched vehicle. Perhaps we can use it for getting the optimum launch time somehow.

@SamTheFox

Thanks, I was afraid of that. I was hoping to nip a bit of it at Launch, even if partially. But it answered my question.

do a correction burn for your inclination as you do your lunar injection burn