Copyright (c) 1996 by MA Lloyd (malloy00@io.com) The requirement for a Hohmann transfer orbit is that the position of one planet at departure be 180 degrees away from the position of the other at arrival. For concentric circular orbits the time between launch windows is S = (Pi * Po)/(Po-Pi) where Pi and Po are the periods (year lengths) of the inner and outer planets respectively. Note, the windows don't occur at the same times for the inner and outer planets. If you travel to the outer planet and want to come home you will need to wait a while, Tw = S (J-(2*Tt/Pi) where J is any integer (2 for the minimum wait), and Tt is the Hohmann orbit transfer time equal to O.1768*Pi*(1+ao/ai)^1.5 where Pi is the inner planet period, and ao and ai are respectively the semimajor axes of the orbits of the outer and inner planets. For scheduled flights rather than single missions its the difference in departure times between the inner and outer planets that matters rather than the wait time, obviously this will be Tt + Tw = Tt - S(2Tt/Pi) + J * S. There are two realistic cases where interplanetary trajectories can be solved analytically without ignoring gravity: One is the Hohmann transfer orbit, the minimum energy course resulting from a short (compared to trip length) high acceleration starting phase. Trip time is .25 x P (1+R2/R1)^1.5, where P is the period of the starting orbit (1 year for a vehicle leaving Earth) and R1 and R2 are the distances from the sun of the starting and ending orbits. The other is the constant low acceleration transfer, which goes to the limit t = 6.2832 (R1/P*a) * (1-R1/R2)^0.5, where a is the acceleration approaching zero (valid approximation where a << R2/P^2). Careful, units matter here.