Long range networks -- draft

I spent two hours the other night trying to do a suboptimal transfer capture in Eve to deliver some emergency fuel and food to some stranded Kerbals. The problem was that i was trying to burn several thousand dV with two nuclear engines on a pretty large tank, and it was a 16 minute burn.

I had to restart at least 20 times with different apoapses and periapses, and every time I had to restart I had to throttle up for a second to get the flight computer to correctly assess the burn window. With a 5 minute delay, this brought my window down enough that I eventually had to start setting manual burn times.

The problem I was running into was that dumping that much dV on that far of a burn was impossible for the flight computer to accurately calculate to execute the burn. If I just set up the node and say "burn", it goes about 400 dV too far and dumps me in the planet. If I do a little bit less, I skip through the orbit.

Eventually I had to just set up manual burn times and kept trying them until I found a burn time window and a start time that left me in a reasonably stable orbit that would let me do an adjustment after it had a chance to circle around once.

The point I was making is that the flight computer *sucks* at precision for extremely long burns, especially when the periapsis (and thus the margin for error) is very low. if you can make an orbital injection burn with normal engines to shorten that burn time, you get far cleaner results.