If your periapsis is too high you will need to burn retrograde after the aerobrake to achieve an orbit. Aerobraking from escape velocity requires you to place your periapsis at 15 km or less, which can be quite a rush given your surface speed is likely 2 km/s or more. As shown on the information page, Duna's atmosphere is thin and only begins around 40 km. You can reduce the amount of fuel required to enter orbit around Duna by aerobraking. If you have fuel to spare, simply burn retrograde at periapsis to achieve some kind of orbit. When you enter Duna's sphere of influence you will always be traveling at escape velocity. While you are traveling around Kerbol, consider tweaking your trajectory until your periapsis around Duna is at the equator, and lower than 100 km. If you overshoot, just turn the craft around and do a slight retro burn until you are caught again (or just do it with RCS). If all goes well, there should be a brief moment where you are captured by Duna's gravity well right around the target velocity. As you accelerate your Kerbolar orbital path should move to intersect Duna's. It's really important to watch the map while you are accelerating. Keep an eye on your map, wait until you are at about 5 o'clock around Kerbin (150 degrees), and get your velocity up to approximately 3020 m/s. When you reached your desired orbit around Kerbin, begin your high-velocity burn. Unless you've done your own calculations, try to aim for a circular equatorial orbit at around 120,000 meters.
#KSP DUNA SPACEPLAN HOW TO#
Take off as usual (see Tutorials for how to achieve orbit), heading east for a counter-clockwise (CCW) prograde orbit. If you look at it in degrees, with Kerbin at 3:00 relative to the sun, Duna should be ~45 degrees ahead of Kerbin.Īlternatively, you can visit The Interplanetary Guide and Calculator to calculate your own path. Warp until they are in this position relative to each other. If Kerbin is at 3 o'clock relative to the Sun, Duna should be at 1:30. To do so, check your map and make sure that Duna is ahead of Kerbin in its orbit around Kerbol. Otherwise, you may spend a lot of time (possibly years) and fuel drifting until they happen to match up. While not absolutely essential, the easiest and fastest way to reach Duna from Kerbin is ensuring that they are properly aligned. For reference, it should be about 1.5x bigger than what you would need for a 1 way trip to Eve. It will require several large thrusters to lift the interplanetary vehicle itself into orbit, probably assisted by some SRBs. This stage should take you at least into Kerbin's orbit if you hope to reach Duna. It must carry enough fuel for the DeltaV you will need to successfully pull this off. It must be capable of getting from Kerbin to Duna, and positioning your lander craft for the terminal descent. This is the stage that will be doing a lot of the work. You will need at least 2000ms Delta-V for the orbit and return, you can test this by seeing if your lander is **almost** capable of reaching Kerbin orbit by itself. The best way to describe something that can get off of Duna, is a ship somewhere between one that can take off from the Mun, and one that can take off from Kerbin.