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Are they going to improve the steering?


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I have bought and played around for a while in this game, but getting to the moon is hindered by one obstacle: steering.

Now I know that you can\'t easily steer big ships, but it would at least help to know in what specific direction you will move when pressing either W, A, S or D. Winglets also seem to not make a difference at all, but that might be just me.

I can hardly imagine astronauts having to guess which button goes to left, right, up or down when steering their high tech spacecraft.

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I have bought and played around for a while in this game, but getting to the moon is hindered by one obstacle: steering.

Now I know that you can\'t easily steer big ships, but it would at least help to know in what specific direction you will move when pressing either W, A, S or D. Winglets also seem to not make a difference at all, but that might be just me.

I can hardly imagine astronauts having to guess which button goes to left, right, up or down when steering their high tech spacecraft.

It\'s because true pilots in space look at their navaid for heading whenever they are (or just have) been spinning out of control. Also, astronauts don\'t experience this confusion in the same way, they don\'t view themselves from 3rd person.

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It helped me to remember this:

When I move the controls, the ship responds by moving around the artificial horizon. The artificial horizon holds still while the instrument moves around it.

Does that help?

P.S.: I don\'t prefer winglets either.

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Got to think in three dimensions. Easiest way for me is to keep the thought in mind that the 'target' is down. Keeping that thought in mind while maneuvering tends to free you up from 2 dimensional thinking.

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I don\'t have any problem with it.

Now granted, it\'s not realistic. A 'regular' rocket would not need 36 winglets to be controllable. But it\'s certainly possible to design a craft which is perfectly 'steerable.'

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There is no problem in what you describe that could or needs to be improved. The problem is with your understanding, grasshopper.

The ship will move relative to the Navball, not your view. Up is still up and down is still down, but up and down have nothing to do with what you see, only with your instrument. If you roll (q/e) so that the brown section is on the bottom and the blue is on top with a nice horizontal line in the middle, you\'re straight and level. If you move now your rocket will move as you expect to see. If you roll 45 degrees or so and try again, you\'ll move in a totally different direction visually, but still move appropriately relative to your inputs on the Navball.

The lesson is: Don\'t trust your eyes. They will decei.. I mean, use the Navball instead of what you see of your rocket to know where you\'re going to steer.

And.. of course winglets help.. But only below about 10,ooom and only with decent airspeed and you\'ll probably only notice their added effect on very heavy ships.

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I can hardly imagine astronauts having to guess which button goes to left, right, up or down when steering their high tech spacecraft.

At the risk of being the grumpy cynical guy here, I am going to guess you are having a problem imagining astronauts doing anything. It may do you a service to study up on what is required for piloting rockets and shuttles, and to find out that there is a lot more involved to it than what goes on with airplanes and automobiles. It\'s pretty complex stuff but is well worth it to expand your personal knowledge.

Bear in mind that when you speak of an astronaut recruited by NASA to crew the Space Shuttle, the Apollo craft, the Gemini craft. and so on, you speak of someone who has gone through so much training and education that they are quite capable of many other fields, as well. Many of them are responsible for the instruments and systems on any rocket you see these days. Many have them also have doubled as Flight Commanders and other ground control technicians indispensable to any mission.

Now bear in mind that KSP is intended to give us a taste to what all of that is about. Many here not only enjoy flying the rockets(and crashing them), but also enjoy crafting new modules, engines, and other parts to share with the rest of the community.

There is just so much symmetry going on here between what is kerbal and what is real, it boggles the mind.

But if I may provide a bit of advice after all that defense of what an astronaut is, you may want to spend on mission with your eyes focused on the navball alone. You will find it a powerful tool on piloting a rocket. Or, as you refer to it, steering one.

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I think some people need to color tune their monitors. :P

Arrr!

Capt\'n Skunky

Nope. My monitor is perfectly color tuned and looks the same as any other one. Just to make sure I wasn\'t color blind and couldn\'t tell orange from brown, I google imaged 'Brown' and saw the color brown. Did the same for orange and saw orange... One second.

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And I suppose you think the TVV marker is YELLOW, right? ::)

No. In EVERY video of KSP, the navball is always a darkish orange kind of color... and I google imaged to make sure I wasn\'t color blind or something. (Even though I know I\'m not.)

index.php?action=dlattach;topic=10317.0;attach=16973;image

Actually, it does look rather brownish, but still... More orange than brown...

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Nope. My monitor is perfectly color tuned and looks the same as any other one. Just to make sure I wasn\'t color blind and couldn\'t tell orange from brown, I google imaged 'Brown' and saw the color brown. Did the same for orange and saw orange... One second.

I wasn\'t referring to you.

Arrr!

Capt\'n Skunky

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...or just apply MechJeb and concentrate on navigating rather than piloting. For most common tasks it does a fine job while still requiring you to actually decide what you are trying to do.

I mean, real astronauts would pretty much do the same thing; Instructing an onboard computer to execute required maneuvers and monitoring how things are going, always staying on top of 'what is supposed to be happening' and ready to take manual control *if* what you are seeing the MechJeb do isn\'t what you are expecting... :D

Once you have succeeded in what you were trying to do with MechJeb, you can start playing super ace space jockey and do it 'by hand'.

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I have bought and played around for a while in this game, but getting to the moon is hindered by one obstacle: steering.

Now I know that you can\'t easily steer big ships, but it would at least help to know in what specific direction you will move when pressing either W, A, S or D. Winglets also seem to not make a difference at all, but that might be just me.

I can hardly imagine astronauts having to guess which button goes to left, right, up or down when steering their high tech spacecraft.

As mentioned before, the navball will tell you a *lot* about where you\'re facing and how the ship will turn. Look to it more than the spacecraft. If you\'re looking for additional maneuverability, RCS and vectored thrust engines help greatly.
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There are hardly any windows on real space capsules. They are mainly for enjoying the view, not for orientation. Real astronauts use the instruments, and notably a navball.

Look, no windows:

Soyuz:

4437.jpg

Apollo;

98-16043_640.jpg

In KSP, it is possible to fly a mission blind with only the navball and the map view (and even the map view can be superfluous if you have the MechJeb orbital information view).

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I think the OP makes a good point, it is hard to relate the keyboard commands to the 3rd person model. Personally I do notice this difficulty too and I don\'t think we are alone so I think it is going to help KSP if we think about it instead of just deny it.

I note there are some individuals who have the hang of the navball who are all too ready to put the slap down on people remarking about this issue but I think that is childish and I dont think they are doing anyone any favours.

However it is also true that once you get the hang of it you can fly with the navball, it is a tricky learning curve/crevass crossing.

FYI I made the adjustment by switching the W-S keys so that when I fly by nav ball the keys do to the navball display what their layout suggests. The W key is always up and the S key is always down, A is left and D is right on my PC, moving the inclination marker relative to the nav ball.

It seems insane to me to attempt to fly the ship as though an aircraft in third person (by retaining default W-S setting) when you can only truely coordinate the craft using the navball.

Currently the capsule windows are the only visual cue we have regarding the orientation of the craft. Space planes would be different because the assymetry of the wings would indicate the craft axese but these are all but invisible for a stock rocket.

One thought I had was that it might help if the craft could be given red-green convention navigation lights.

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I made this same post when I was starting out. Nice to see I am not alone. Everybody is correct, the navball is really much better for all orbital maneurvers, but it is nice for new players to be able to see that the craft turns the way they want it to in the space view!

Also, the navball tends to be of very limited use when trying to close that last 400m in orbital rendevous. A simple port/starboard nav light as the poster above me has suggested would be unobtrusive, helpful, and sensible.

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I made this same post when I was starting out. Nice to see I am not alone. Everybody is correct, the navball is really much better for all orbital maneurvers, but it is nice for new players to be able to see that the craft turns the way they want it to in the space view!

Also, the navball tends to be of very limited use when trying to close that last 400m in orbital rendevous. A simple port/starboard nav light as the poster above me has suggested would be unobtrusive, helpful, and sensible.

Rather than changing the controls, because I think standard pitch, roll, yaw, and translation controls are fine, we should have different displays other than the nav ball. Orbiter has a surface display, and orbit display (which is basically the navball), a docking display (which shows your orientation and speed relative to a docking port that you have targeted), and maybe even a landing display, though I think that overdoes it.

Basically, when docking comes out, we\'ll need a HUD in order to complete a docking easily.

The orbiter HUD:

fSfvM.jpg

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One thing that I learned quickly - there are certain designs that make your life easier when it comes to steering the ship. I have found that if you build the spacecraft in a roughly pyramidal stack with (only a few!) winglets near the bottom, it steers fairly well. I\'m fairly sure this isn\'t a stable design in Real Life (from memory real rockets need most of their mass towards the front) but it works well here.

Once you\'re out of the atmosphere, you need either a gimballed engine or RCS (probably both) or it won\'t steer very well at all[1].

Also: When you have the SAS on, the spacecraft works against your steering inputs. To all intents and purposes it will appear not to move. In actuality it moves a little, but not so you\'d notice (because it almost immediately jerks back).

[1] The fact that it steers at all is a blessing, really - the capsule has a piece of magic technology that allows that. Real spacecraft steer almost exclusively by vectoring thrust and RCS. . . . (not counting the funny wheel things on the Space Station . . :) ).

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Rather than changing the controls, because I think standard pitch, roll, yaw, and translation controls are fine, we should have different displays other than the nav ball. Orbiter has a surface display, and orbit display (which is basically the navball), a docking display (which shows your orientation and speed relative to a docking port that you have targeted), and maybe even a landing display, though I think that overdoes it.

Basically, when docking comes out, we\'ll need a HUD in order to complete a docking easily.

The orbiter HUD:

MFD_Deorbiting_2.2.JPG

Image isnt showing unless I copy the URL.

Either way, I wasn\'t suggested changing the controls. They work great. It is simply a matter of knowing which way is pitch/yaw as you look at the craft in space. A light on port and starboard side to show you left/right yaw would allow this.

I would however like a docking display, that would be great. However, a simple way to show that I think would be a prograde/retrograde marker on our existing navball of your motion relative to the object you are docking at (Replacing orbital prograde/retrograde when you toggle to docking mode on the selected object).

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Using the NavBall, I still get confused which way the ship is being affected.

e.g. I don\'t remember if \'Q\' will turn me clock wise, or counter-clockwise

I don\'t remember if \'W\' will push the Horizon up or down.

And when you\'re trying to rendezvous two craft, forget about it, the NavBall is near useless.

I think it could be improved somehow. I would really like the option to invert controls, much like Invert Mouse Axis options on many games.

Using the NavBall amazing for travelling long distance and orbits.

But precision rendezvous need something more

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