Old Style Gameplay Questions

1. Adding fins to the rear of small rockets can improve aerodynamic stability during early parts of flight. This may not be needed if you have engines with a high degree of gimbling instead. Most but not all rocket engines in KSP have quite large amounts of gimbling (this is shown in the right hand side of the part menu in the VAB) 2. In the VAB turn on the Centre of Mass (CoM) and Centre of Lift (CoL) indicators (buttons near bottom left of screen) and check to see that the blue ball (CoL) is lower than the yellow ball (CoM). If you want to be extra thorough check to see if this changes if you empty the fuel tanks. Having the CoL above the CoM will cause the nose of the rocket to be more prone to moving off course if you deviate even slightly from prograde. Conversely, having the CoL far below the CoM may make turning slightly sluggish and the rocket more "determined" to stay pointing in the direction its currently travelling. 3. During early parts of flight, it is generally a good idea not to turn too far away from your prograde vector. A good rule of thumb is to keep your direction indicator inside the prograde vector circle on the navball. Tap controls when turning rather than holding them down and use fine control (caps lock on keyboard) if necessary. 4. Start turning early and smoothly rather than trying to make larger corrections later in flight. This will vary depending on the exact design of your rocket (mostly based on the TWR of your stages), but a general rule of thumb is to fly vertical until you reach about 80-100m/s speed then pitch over 5-10° and then keep pitching over gradually until you reach about 45° at around 25 km altitude and be pointing more or less horizontal by 50km. NOTE: these figures refer to stock Kerbin atmosphere if you have any mods that replace Kerbin or change the atmosphere, then you may need to adjust for those. 5. Don't worry too much about getting to a perfectly equatorial orbit for going to the Mun. An small orbital inclination can be corrected quite easily (and for little cost in fuel) during transfer.

I know its 3117km

Never tried this myself, but off the top of my head, the positioning of the perigee point (and hence timing of launch) will be dependent on the burn time of the initial boost phase. If you are recreating the Artemis SLS launcher then it might be worth looking at the real world launch date/time and trying to match that lunar phase angle as closely as possible since NASA will have done all the hard maths already. You might also be able to track down documentation of alternate launch windows they had planned. For a more practical approach you could start with a test satellite in the plane of the Moon in a circular orbit at the planned periapsis height then plot a manoeuvre to raise the apoapsis to 1800 followed by a TLI at perigee and then adjust them until you get a suitable Moon encounter. That should then let you plan your actual launch time to hit 1800 km apogee at the correct time for the perigee TLI.

I think that they don't have drag if I cover two out of three nodes?I'll test that. Edit:They have drag,and that is where the drag reading is coming from.Node covering only covers the two surfaces,not the sides.They still have got an excellent LDR though!The flag wings had no drag though,because they have no sides that don't have nodes.But now there are no flag wings.

Moved to Gameplay Questions.

Reviving an old post here: I'm running a ACER Predator Bifrost ARC a770. So far I'm rather pleased with the results so far. I've had issues with Scatterer (game crashes) but for the short time I ran it it did look fantastic. EVE I confess I never tried it. The Intel ARC's might not be top of the line, but for the price they aren't bad at all. Heck of alot better than the integrated chip graphics.

day 82/83 does work at the first several years of a new game. While as time passes, it looks like the actual day will drift. I am planning a transfer from Kerbin to Moho at about year 200 kerbin time, and I have to wait until day 100 to start burning, rather than day 83. Any ideas what is happening there or am I missing anything ?

With the altitude you are at I wouldn't worry about this. While the speed of sound is around 250m/s up at the altitudes where I was flying in my example, down where you are it's going to be closer to 285m/s. So your props have gone slightly supersonic, however, slightly supersonic is ok, as the ducted fan blades don't hit their performance wall until around Mach 1.2 You could extract a bit more speed with more tweaking of the prop, but if you are happy with what you have, its a pretty good result.

That is exactly what I have already done

Sometimes during eva construction the kerbal is pushed by the part they are picking but in my experience those are noticeable but gentle push. What you describe seems way more dramatic. In regard to loss of control, if memory serve me well, you need to exit construction mode to move your kerbal.

Here's a thought, It may have a relative velocity in more than one direction. Another point is sometimes you have to use your RCS thrusters instead of your main engine because it's too powerful you don't have fine enough control over it. Just a thought

You actually can target Kerbin from the Mun, you just have to change your perspective. So what do I mean by perspective, zoom way out, swivel it around so that you are looking at the Mun from the other side of Kerbin and then zoom in tell your viewpoint is close to Kerbin and just selected it. Works really great try it.

Option 4, use the object thrower to destroy them. It’s a bit fiddly to use but also quite fun to use on the KSC…

It's the first time in my whole life when I see "It's not a bug, it's a feature" phrase as literal explanation for the topic and not used as a joke / meme. Also, thank you very much as I had the same problem when adding my own custom flag and learned a lot by this post!

Zhetaan, still absorbing the breadth and depth of what you wrote, but quick note that I really appreciate the time you put into this knowledge transfer. Thank you.

For anyone else having this problem in the training sessions, I experienced it as well after playing around a bit during one session, doing a few things that were outside the instruction parameters. Even after reverting things to what they should be, the Next button wouldn't light up. I had to restart the session and adhere to the instructions to make it work.

I'm a bit of a purist, so I don't use Mods, at all, when playing KSP. Using the rotation adjustment with Snap on means that the minimum change in angle that can be achieved is 5 degrees. For making various spaceplanes, especially SSTO's, it is desirable to be able to pick a smaller angle. To do this I have made an Inclinometer that I use for getting precise angle with snap off. The inclinometer has been set with graduations of 0.5 degrees using small solar cells as "markers. I have saved the Inclinometer as a subassembly so I can bring it out as I need it. In this case I'm using it to se the wings for an SSTO cargo carrier. I want to set the wings at 2 percent. I attach an arm made of wing sections to the wing I'm adjusting and move it back and fourth until the arm matches with both arms on the inclinometer. Then I turn snap off and rotate to the angle I want, in this case 2 degrees. Using this I can confidently set an angle within a tenth of a degree. Then I can delete the arm and inclinometer and set the wing to where I want it! Can this be done with Mods? Absolutely, and no doubt more precisely.

Are you playing in a console? If so you can find the control schemes for KSP in console Here for xbox and Here fo PS4 If you are playing in a PC go to main menu > Settings > Input to see and adjust your controls Notice you may be unable to throttle because lack of craft control or some technical issue with your controller.

have you ever wanted to change your sandbox world to a science world well heres a reddit post on the subject I've made https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1aibo51/how_to_convert_your_game_from_sandbox_to_science/

Thank you. After much fiddling around I saw this, and there's no signal. On the far side of the Mun. I guess I'll have to relay a signal or something? Lots of learning always to be done in KSP.

Thankyou to everyone replying to the thread, but especially to Serenity The bit about removing rigid attachment and Auto-strutting to Grandparent Part has made a real difference in my experiments in making an Eve SSTS. At first I made a spaceplant that was difficult to land so I went to great efforts to tweak it, in doing so I sure that everything was strutted and rigid. This had the opposite effect and got to the point where my craft was basically unlandable! I opened the saved craft last night, removed all rigid attachments and auto-strutted everything to grandparent and Presto! I could practically throw the craft at Eve and and land it! The plus side is that my piloting skill gets better, and I learn how to make more forgiving craft!

Glad you solved it. Maybe you already know this, but another tip I didn't see mentioned is to rotate wings so they have some angle of attack/incidence. Your photos look like maybe the main wing is angled and the front strake is not angled but it's hard to tell. Rotated wings allow you to keep the nose lower while climbing. The fuselage especially mk2 parts will create much less drag, more than enough to offset any extra drag from the wings. I like around 3 degrees of wing incidence because it creates lift while not making the plane look too weird. I've seen other people claim 5 degrees is better for supersonic speeds but I don't care for the way that looks on large wings. My usual method is to start with 0 degrees because that's easy, do a test flight, and if I need more performance then I experiment with wing incidence and position. In order to allow easier tweaking of wing incidence when using multiple wing parts, attach the first wing part to the plane, then attach additional wing parts to the first part and offset them where you want. If you later reposition the 1st part all of the other wing parts will move with it. Consider autostruts to reduce wing flex.

If you use BDB then go all in an use 2.5 rescale. It's actually not really any harder than stock because the engines are considerably more powerful. BDB is the best mod I've ever played in any game. The attention to detail is something else. Loading times can be a pain in the ass but it's worth it.

Thanks to all who have given their input so far including Leganeski, Lt_Duckweed, and DeadJohn. You guys are masters and very helpful. This is actually a great thing to hear, as I thought I was just doing it wrong, but judging by real life, it simply might not be feasible to make an SSTO at 7.6x scale with the ability to bring payloads into orbit. It might be just cheaper and easier to do it with disposable rockets instead. I mean NASA's space shuttle ended up being overly complex and in the end kind of useless, yet it was still able to put massive payloads into orbit. I might try doing something more along those lines, rather than a pure SSTO. I'm still open to more comments so keep em coming if anyone has anything to add, and I'll be tinkering away as time goes on. Thanks all!

My basic advice? Enable "advanced tweakables." Autostrut will save your life. (Stick with 'heaviest part') It also lets you split maneuver burn times 50-50 on either side of the maneuver, making them more accurate. Speaking of maneuvers, the green double arrow on the left of the maneuver dv indicator lets you warp to just 1 minute before burn time. Works great for me so far, saves time trying to warp to it manually. Don't overcomplicate things. Set a goal for your design, and meet that goal. Don't try to upgrade and go bigger and farther. You will end up biting more than you can chew and the project will fail. If you want more capability, start fresh. SSTOs- it takes a long time to get them to work. You will not get them right away. It will take you a long time. A very long time. Just because Matt Lowne threw together something in 3 minutes does not mean you can too. Practice! Don't be afraid of failure. Use quicksaves, specifically Alt+f5 and Alt+f9. These let you use named quicksaves that you can load at will. Revert the flight if you can't fix it. This can avoid kerbal deaths or fatal mistakes. If I had known these things when I started playing KSP, I would have started a lot better. I hope these help someone else too!