Project ASARTES, Part 2: Conclusion, or, "Stationary".

Maneuver nodes take the guesswork out. Sorta.

 So, when we left off, we had an elliptical and highly eccentric orbit courtesy of my sloppy insertion burn. The first thing I did was say "Okay, Let's Circularize!".

Easiest way to make any change to orbit in the vanilla GUI is to use maneuver nodes. Since I haven't quite caved in to using MechJeb yet, I grabbed a node at apoapsis and plotted out the yellow orbit in the image on the left.

Then, I accidentally clicked space, giving us the present situation you see in the image, where my maneuver isn't actually on orbit. Whoops. I then time accellerated to get up there, whipped myself around so fast the probe batteries died, and had to reload the save. Hah.

Aramis under sail - Richeleu is "falling" away.

After about ten minutes of Ion Drive. Middle line is a debris.

Service Established!

 Oh well. Such things as these happened. What isn't shown is the three attempts of me playing with different orbit plans until I got the ship in a workable position, or the separation of Aramis from the carrier vehicle.

Once we got up there, though, I had the foresight to grab an image of Aramis burning under its nifty ionic engine - this thing takes some high voltage and uses it to accelerate Xenon ions at high speed. This I like, because the fuel lasts virtually forever, affording tons of Delta-V to the person willing to wait long enough for it to add up.

It was at around that point that I realized Richeleau wasn't going to de-orbit the way it is meant to. However, because I could EASILY have used more ion drive and less chemical rocket in the orbit, I reasoned it wasn't that unreasonable to imagine I had done so, and manually truncated it from the control center.

Space after we "correct" Richeleau

After another twenty minutes of play (comprising about a full day of Kerbin time), I more or-less circularized in KEO. I say more or less because it's not perfect... it is, however, close enough for our purposes, within about 10 km altitude on either side. As long as the ships themselves are properly in phase, it won't really matter anyway - one will always be in view of ground control.

So, for purely roleplaying purposes that have no point since SAS doesn't apply once you leave the perspective of the ship, I pointed Aramis at Kerbin and popped the antenna.

Then, off we went to the space centre to trim out the things that aren't meant to be in orbit.

The final orbit wouldn't naturally degrade. Woops.

Which brings me to the next problem I had. KEO isn't really exciting to shoot. I mean it was fun to do - way more fun than my usual attempts to just get to orbit with way too much kit. I won't be showing the other launches. It's just too tedious. To be honest, I'm going to cheat them into place using the in-game debug menu, and put them into place with the much faster chemical rockets. I know it's a little silly, but I don't want to spend another hour getting them all aligned correctly.

Next: What exactly did we need our own TDRS system for, anyway?