Tips & Tricks
There are plenty of things you can do with KSPTOT/Mission Architect and its accompanying suite of tools that you may not think off at first blush. Here are a collection of things I've discovered so far.
The MFMS will ask you for travel time range in days your spacecraft can spend transiting from one body to the next. MFMS does its best to auto-fill these values for you but it generally overestimates a lot to be safe. The greater the bounds the harder the genetic algorithm will have to work to find a suitable plot. A decent rule of thumb to setting these values is to use the Porkchop plotter in the main KSPTOT window to find the best transfer length from one body to another and then double that value for use as the maximum transit time. You can also halve or quarter that value to use as the minimum travel time.
You may still want to massage these numbers to find results that work for the fly-by sequence you have in mind, and the more experience you gain with using the tool the better you will be at guesstimating what values will be best, but this should get you on the right track.
Mission Architect will give you the orbital period of your vessel's current initial and final state in the text box that pops up when you hover the cursor over either state info box. However this is only to 1-2 significant digits if the whole number is large, since there is a limited amount of space. Too big a number and you're looking at scientific notation.
To get the full value for the orbital period, copy the True Anomaly of your current State event and add a True Anomaly Coast event immediately afterwards in which you paste the True Anomaly and set the Revs Prior to 1. Save the event then re-open it and change the event type to Delta Time - the text box will update and you'll have the number of seconds to complete one orbit out to 8 significant digits and easily copyable. You can paste it into one of the KSPTOT time fields to get the value of the orbital period in years, days, hh:mm:ss - note however that a value of 0 = 1y, 1d!
Want to know exactly where in its orbit Duna will be on y3 d156? Mission Architect can tell you that, if you simply treat Duna as a vessel for it to plot around the sun:
- Make sure Mission Architect is closed
- Open the Rendezvous Maneuver Sequencer from the KSPTOT->Tools->Maneuver Planning menu
- Change "Orbiting About" to the parent of the body you want to plot (in this case the Sun for Duna)
- Select your body from the drop-down box under Initial Orbit Info
- Right-click and select Copy Orbit to Clipboard
- Close RMS and go to your KSPTOT install folder and open bodies.ini
- Delete the entire entry for Duna and Save As bodies_edited.ini
- Goto KSPTOT->File-Load Bodies from File and select bodies_edited.ini
- Open Mission Architect, open the Initial State, right-click and select Paste Orbit from Clipboard
- Ensure that the drop-down box under Orbit correctly contains the parent body (Sun, in this case for Duna)
- Save the event and create a Coast event
- Select "Go to UT" from the drop-down and right-click the text value box to enter in a date/time
- Save the Coast event for y3 d156
You now have not only the current position of Duna, but through the Graphical Analysis tool you can also find its relative distance/speed to any other body in the Kerbol system, for starters. Note that by deleting Duna you prevented Mission Architect from thinking you were impacting the center of Duna, and even after you restore the proper bodies.ini file the Mission Architect save file will still remember that Duna has been deleted.
Couple this with the Graphing Techniques in Mission Architect tutorial and you can find out things like exactly when and where planets/moons will line up for conjunctions/oppositions, eclipses, etc:
Whenever you output a graphical analysis or pop-out the orbital display you get a Figure window, with a toolbar that includes a rotation tool, data point tool, zoom in/out tools, pan tool, color bar and legend displays. These can all be used in a lot of ways that don't seem obvious. First rule - right-click and explore the extra options each tool can offer. For example you can set the Data Point cursor Selection Style from Snap to Mouse Position to get more fine-grained data.
You can also Alt+Left-click to create additional data point cursors that can be moved/deleted independently and stay snapped to whatever line they were originally created on. (Create one on an Ap/Pe marker line and you can drag it down to the altitude plot line to get the exact Ap/Pe value & time)
When looking at a 3D graph like an orbital plot display, selecting a zoom tool and clicking will move your view in/out, but you can also click and drag for much finer zoom movement.
If you select the Rotation tool, right-click and choose the "Go to X-Y view" preset, you can then select the Zoom In tool and drag a box that will crop the field of view so if you go back to Rotate, you'll now only see what is in that box. (as you may have guessed, X-Y is the default view for 2D line graphs)
If you have a Legend box displayed, you can click the currently-selected tool to unselect it and then double-click on the names of the data lines to edit them. Or drag the box to a new location (same for Colorbars).
Yes, you can indeed save and load the figures that you create.