User manual?

[VACaver]

Started playing off and on a week ago and, while I am indeed having fun, I'm also quite lost on how to do things. Has anyone done any kind of users manual?

For example, I watched a video on Youtube and part of it showed getting the liquid and solid motors to ignite at the same time, but it didn't show how to do it.

Thanks!

[Capt'n Skunky]

There's no manual yet since the game is still in development and anything can change.

To get LREs and SRBs to fire at the same time, just make sure they are in the same stage. That should be all that's needed, although not quite sure why you'd want to.

Oh, one other thing....

Welcome to the KSP Forums!

Cheers!

Skunky

[Baldr]

Touch random things and see what they do.

Or like me somehow got speakers on full and goof around with some stuff and hit the spacebar on accident.

[Moach]

for now:

cheers to XKCD :cheers:

...and if all else fails - ask here! that's what we're around for :

[Azach]

To get LREs and SRBs to fire at the same time, just make sure they are in the same stage. That should be all that's needed, although not quite sure why you'd want to.

My largest ship, the Interstellar 1, requires both to get off the ground. If I added any more solids the extra weight would break the ship apart. The purpose of such a large ship is to get into space with as much extra fuel as possible. So far I've managed to get her into orbit with 5 tanks of fuel left. Better results are probably possible with this ship, but ol' Jeb had to start body-building just to handle the stick in the first few stages.

Not to thread-jack too much, but what is the best way for picking up lots of speed with all this leftover fuel? An elliptical orbit with a burn of some sort at the nearest point?

[Killerhurtz]

I'm no rocket scientist, but if I follow the vectors we did in physics last year (high school physics), you should just go and do full-burn and adjust your direction so the thrust is as close as the direction you're currently going at as possible.

[rdfox]

I'd like to be able to have both my stage 1 liquid sustainer and my stage 0 SRBs light simultaneously, but be able to jettison the solids after burnout... ah, well, maybe in a later version.

As for picking up speed, depends on what you wanna do. If you want to go into an elliptical orbit or acheive escape velocity, then wait for perikee and fire full thrust along your current velocity vector ('posigrade', in rocket science-ese). (If you want to be *really* technical about it, fire just enough *before* perikee that you hit perikee right at the midpoint of the burn, but really, don't make it more than a ten-minute total burn; if you have more fuel than that, wait until the next orbit and repeat the process.) This'll maximize your velocity and get you the highest possible apokee, if you don't hit escape velocity.

If you're trying for as high a circular orbit as you can, you'll actually need to make two burns. First, at perikee, you'll need to make a posigrade burn to raise your apokee to your desired level. Then, half an orbit later, at apokee, you'll need to make another posigrade burn to raise the perikee to the same level.

Remember, if you want to bring the boys home, you only need to make one retrograde (opposite velocity vector) burn, preferably at apokee, to lower your perikee to below 35km, at which point aerobraking will perform the rest of the deceleration needed to deorbit them! Horizontal burns perpendicular to your velocity vector, for the record, will shift your orbital plane (inclination) so that you are travelling north and south of the equator on each orbit. (You *are* launching due east, right?)

So, short version: Burn at perikee to adjust your apokee altitude. Burn at apokee to adjust your perikee altitude. Don't bother burning in any direction off your current velocity vector unless you're trying to change your orbital plane; vertical burns (usually) just waste fuel, though some low-orbit-only spacecraft (Mercury, Space Shuttle) have included a downward component in their retrofire to get them into the atmosphere faster and save weight on retro fuel.

[DrZaius]

I'd like to be able to have both my stage 1 liquid sustainer and my stage 0 SRBs light simultaneously, but be able to jettison the solids after burnout... ah, well, maybe in a later version.

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you can in the current version. If I have 3 stages, 1 being liquid tanks & engine, 2 being decouplers, and 3 being SRBs, if I move just the engine icons down to stage 3, the engine will light along with the SRBs. Once they run out, you can decouple them (stage 2), and the ship will proceed with the remaining fuel left in stage 1.

-DrZ

[rdfox]

Thanks! Never tried that before... it's pretty non-intuitive, but then, I've not had *that* much time to futz around with staging. Useful tip is useful!

[Rotten194]

The staging gui is getting redone at some point anyways.