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MARS COMP 1: RHINO_V, TORCH

Dear reader,

You probably came here because you could not make a realistic, efficient rocket that could reach Mars. I had that problem too and decided to learn from others, much like you do now. Additionally, this rocket also participates in a Discord competition.

Pre-flight manual:
1. Make sure the transfer window to Mars is open. Just time-warp until a few hours before the window opens. If you do time-warp, make sure to reload the launch. A bug causes time-warp to destroy things.
2. Check the logical order of all stages, they should make sense.
3. Fully expand the “resources” and “orbital parameters” box
a. Orbital parameters box should be set to equatorial plane (only applicable if you have other spacecraft in interplanetary space).
b. The orbital parameters box shows you apoapsis, time to apoapsis, periapsis, time to periapsis, eccentricity, inclination angle, and orbital period. These are important.
4. Hydrazine as resource should NOT be at 100%, that is fine, I did that on purpose to save mass.
5. Set parachutes minimal pressure to 0.002 and height to max.

Launch manual:
1. Make sure to choose a launch site with minimal latitude, preferably between 0 and ±25.
a. If latitude is higher, proceed but you will have it a different course of action later.
b. Now sometimes (maybe a bug or so) you can decrease your inclination angle w.r.t. your latitude by launching lower than 90 degrees; you can try to check it out but it’s not realistic.
2. Always launch “Due East” (90 degrees).
a. Steering to east is not the same because navballs are skewed to account for the rockets nose which is on the vertical plane while your camera is on the horizontal plane even if you move around with the cam.
b. Make sure to roll until 90 degrees is up.
3. Then of course start the grav-turn at around 1.5 km, gradually reduce your throttle when you hit speed of sound so that aerodynamic forces will have less effect on your rocket’s orientation (GRADUALLY!).
4. Set navball to “Orbit” mode and follow that prograde marker if you launched at 90 degrees. If not, proceed with your current bearings.
5. Proceed how you normally would, I recommend an orbit with at least 200km apoapsis and periapsis. You should have between 0 and 600 dV left for the second stage when having reached LEO.
6. You must use the leftover dV to correct your current orbit, preferably its inclination angle, make it so that you are as close as you can to 0 degrees.
a. Do NOT keep the leftovers for a Trans-Martian Insertion burn as it will ruin the calculations for the upcoming stage once the leftovers are used.

TMI Manual:
This is where the inclination angle will play the biggest difference but again, each option is fine and doable.
Option A: You have an inclination angle between 0 and ±25 degrees:
1. Awesome, you can start your TMI burn anywhere and set Mars as target to intercept it.
2. Just make sure the intercept periapsis is at max 90,000 km. Preferably much lower (up to 1000km).
Option B: You have an inclination angle greater than 25 degrees.
1. Burn prograde until you have a heliocentric orbit between 0.9 au, and 1.02 au. This should take around 2800 and 3200 dV, play around with the maneuver node to use minimal dV.
2. You are now in heliocentric orbit, set the orbital parameters to “ecliptic plane”. Inclination angle should be close 1 degree now, eccentricity very close to 0 by 2 decimals.
3. This can take a lot of time but use the prograde maneuver and get an apoapsis of 1.52 au (yes, you have used between 1000-2000 dV extra because your inclination angle was not aligned with Mars earlier).
4. Swing around until you intercept Mars, please only use the prograde marker. Again, it might take several orbits until you find an intercept with the maneuver tool.
5. The intercept periapsis is at max 90,000 km. Preferably much lower (up to 1000km).

Orbit insertion & Landing:
Well get into orbit and have a periapsis of 80 km. make sure to decouple the RCS and third stage. You should be left with a heat shield, an engine decoupler and the landing module. You are safe to commit to re-entry and lower the periapsis to 70km.
But some people hastily click space twice and decouple the heat shield, if that’s the case. Do NOT abort the mission. Stay at 80 km periapsis. Keep facing retrograde when contacting the atmosphere and when you swing away, face the sun to raise electricity levels. You will find yourself doing this for 10-20 times until your periapsis dropped to 70km. By then, the pressure of the next atmospheric passage will be so strong that you will enter Mars.
This was possible because you spread atmospheric contact over multiple passages, when each passage was done you radiated the heat away in space thus dodging heat accumulation. Besides, the Martian atmosphere is extremely thin at 80km so there was minimal heat buildup. As such, there was minimal heat build-up and heat accumulation; both factors contributed to a gradual orbital energy loss causing the orbital decay until your orbit was so much decayed that it had entered Mars. Congrats, you entered Mars without a heat shield. You are a legend!