Navball Orientation

[Lucky Spacer]

What heading do you have to be on so that when you press the "W" key you tilt your ship directly away from you?  I have run into problems landing on moons trying to control my craft because I Press the "w" key and instead of tilting away from me it tilts some other direction I did not expect.  This is not fun when you are close to the surface.  And yes, I know I should be using RCS.  Some silly engineer decided we did not need RCS on the lander.   Anybody ever put special marker on the outside of the craft so you know its orientation by looking at it?  Or am I just confused on how the controls work?

[Plusck]

When landing, with the craft heading retrograde and the camera looking at the terrain ahead, one set of directions is always going to have to be reversed, because you're looking backwards towards the tail of the craft rather than forwards towards its nose.

I find it easier to deal with forward/back reversed, keeping left/right the right way round. Therefore, the craft has to be "face down" on the suborbital approach, which means rolling the craft until the brown "ground" part of the navball is at the top. Like this:

[Leeman]

you could add a docking port or something simliar on the tail and rightclick *controll from here*

[Reactordrone]

Blue side up, brown side down will give you the normal up and down tilt control (useful for controlling rate of descent) but as Plusk says that does reverse your left and right controls since you're flying backwards.

[Plusck]

I'm surprised nobody has complained about getting the screaming heebie-jeebies just by looking at my pic.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Plusck

[Geschosskopf]

9 hours ago, Lucky Spacer said:

What heading do you have to be on so that when you press the "W" key you tilt your ship directly away from you?  I have run into problems landing on moons trying to control my craft because I Press the "w" key and instead of tilting away from me it tilts some other direction I did not expect.  This is not fun when you are close to the surface.  And yes, I know I should be using RCS.  Some silly engineer decided we did not need RCS on the lander.   Anybody ever put special marker on the outside of the craft so you know its orientation by looking at it?  Or am I just confused on how the controls work?

Hmmmm.....

You do know that the camera is not fixed in relation to the ship, so trying to orient the ship based on the direction you're looking at it will give you a different result depending on where the camera is in relation to the ship.  You can rotate the camera around the ship by holding right-button and dragging the mouse or by using the arrow keys, and zoom in and out with the keypad + and -.  Also, you can change the orientation of the camera to the ship by hitting the V key, which changes through "free", "orbital", "chase", and "locked" view modes.

But anyway, on the navball, there is a fixed --w-- shaped symbol in the middle.  Using the WASD keys rotates the navball under this symbol.  So you look at the navball to see where the icon you want to align with (prograde, retrograde, radial + or -, normal + or -, target, or maneuver node) is and use the WASD keys to move that symbol under the --w--.  The navball rotates in the opposite direction as your ship because the --w-- symbol is the direction your nose is pointing and that's fixed, so the navball has to rotate.  Thus, if the desired icon (say retrograde for landing) is above the --w--, you use the S key which rotates the navball down so the icon comes to the --w--.  ONLY watch the navball when you're doing this, NOT your ship, because the navball icons are what matters and you can't see them when looking at your ship, plus the ship is actually rotating the opposite direction as the navball so that will only confuse you.

Anyway, if you're in orbit around a planet, you land by first clicking on the speed readout above the navball until it says "Surface".  Then you rotatet he navball so that the regrade marker is under the --w-- and burning until you have the descent profile you want.  Then you have several options on the way down, coasting and burning as needed to control your speed.  Eventually, however, you'll need to kill your horizontal velocity which is down by moving the retrograde icon to the center of the blue part of the navball.  You do this by rotating the navball so that the retrograde marker is on a line between the center of the blue and the --w-- symbol.  Burning there will move the retrograde marker towards the center of the blue.  Once it's there, you're falling straight down.  Rotate the ship so that the --w-- is on the center of the blue with the retrograde marker and burn as needed to touch the ground at a slow, safe speed, then kill the engine as soon as you touch.

[Alshain]

9 hours ago, Lucky Spacer said:

Anybody ever put special marker on the outside of the craft so you know its orientation by looking at it?  Or am I just confused on how the controls work?

In most cases you can take visual clues from the controlling part.  The lander cans and command pods typically have the hatch at the 'rear' (or almost rear) so having that facing you will have your craft rotate as expected when landing if you are looking at the craft from the side.  If the craft starts to roll, say backward toward you, you know you need to press 'W' to seat it back down using your reaction wheels/rcs.

This is a little harder to see with probe cores, so you will need to add your own identification marker.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Alshain

[bewing]

19 hours ago, Lucky Spacer said:

 Anybody ever put special marker on the outside of the craft so you know its orientation by looking at it?  Or am I just confused on how the controls work?

I do this all the time for my space tugs. They have klaws on their noses, so I need to be able to aim in order to dock. So I put two fins on the top and bottom -- this lets me always know at a glance which way is W/S. I can quickly rotate the craft until the fins are perfectly vertical in the camera view. I can move the camera until I can aim along a fin like it is the sight on a rifle.

For landing, you have plenty of time to prepare. So I agree with Reactordrone -- get retrograde and then rotate to put the blue side up. You don't really need to look at anything but the navball until you are almost on the ground, unless you are trying for a precision landing.

[Lucky Spacer]

First off thank you everyone for your very prompt and fantastic answers. But I don't think I was as clear as I should have been.  I have not unlocked any motorized wheels in the tech tree yet and I am trying to land all of my base modules close together so I can connect them with pipes.  As you can see I have landed near my other landers but still several hundred meters away.  What I was trying to do is just slightly leave the surface and scooch towards the other landers. I was trying to do this by tilting slightly towards the other landers while under a small amount of thrust.  If you do not tilt correctly the first time it gets ugly real fast.  So Based on this photo and its nav ball what do I need to do to make sure I understand what the WASD keys are going to do?

7 hours ago, bewing said:

I do this all the time for my space tugs. They have klaws on their noses, so I need to be able to aim in order to dock. So I put two fins on the top and bottom -- this lets me always know at a glance which way is W/S. I can quickly rotate the craft until the fins are perfectly vertical in the camera view. I can move the camera until I can aim along a fin like it is the sight on a rifle.

When you are in the VAB placing the fins is there a way to determine the top and bottom of the rocket? You can change your camera angle to be anything so how so you determine top/bottom.  I really like this idea for my tugs.

17 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Hmmmm.....

You do know that the camera is not fixed in relation to the ship, so trying to orient the ship based on the direction you're looking at it will give you a different result depending on where the camera is in relation to the ship.  

Yes this is exactly my issue. My camera can be pointing anywhere and I'm trying to figure out how to align it so I know what direction I'll tilt when I press "w".  I am going to try and set one of the landers as a target and see if I have better control just using the nav ball.  Thank you for the idea.

[Plusck]

1 hour ago, Lucky Spacer said:

First off thank you everyone for your very prompt and fantastic answers. But I don't think I was as clear as I should have been.  I have not unlocked any motorized wheels in the tech tree yet and I am trying to land all of my base modules close together so I can connect them with pipes.  As you can see I have landed near my other landers but still several hundred meters away.  What I was trying to do is just slightly leave the surface and scooch towards the other landers. I was trying to do this by tilting slightly towards the other landers while under a small amount of thrust.  If you do not tilt correctly the first time it gets ugly real fast.  So Based on this photo and its nav ball what do I need to do to make sure I understand what the WASD keys are going to do?

Yes, I understand.

Although some people may prefer doing the opposite, I am convinced that inverting up and down is "best" : most of us have played some sort of flight sim, then some games where W moves you up and S moves you down, plus there are some computers/phones which scroll upwards when you swipe down and vice versa. However in every single case, left is left and right is right. So we're constantly dealing with inverted Y-axes but never with inverted X-axes. You should get used to it very quickly.

Still, that doesn't solve your problem because you're vertical, and there is no simple way of knowing which way is which.

In your situation, assuming that RCS isn't activated for nothing, I'd bring the camera up directly over the rocket to start with, then just tap RCS translate right and left to see what fires. I'd then bring the camera down so that is looking down at about a 45° angle, with "left" and "right" the right way round, and force myself to invert the Y-axis in my head. So pressing W will bring the nose towards you and S away from you.

Quicksave and try it, I'm sure you'll pick it up quickly and be able to scoot along just a couple of metres off the surface in no time.

However, if the craft is heavy and doesn't rotate quickly, the simplest solution might be simply to select target, climb vertically 50m, maintain a constant altitude and perfectly skywards heading, and use RCS translate and target mode on the navball to do it as if you were docking.

[Reactordrone]

3 hours ago, Lucky Spacer said:

First off thank you everyone for your very prompt and fantastic answers. But I don't think I was as clear as I should have been.  I have not unlocked any motorized wheels in the tech tree yet and I am trying to land all of my base modules close together so I can connect them with pipes.  As you can see I have landed near my other landers but still several hundred meters away.  What I was trying to do is just slightly leave the surface and scooch towards the other landers. I was trying to do this by tilting slightly towards the other landers while under a small amount of thrust.  If you do not tilt correctly the first time it gets ugly real fast.  So Based on this photo and its nav ball what do I need to do to make sure I understand what the WASD keys are going to do?

 

In that case all you need to know is the relative position of the ships on the surface. If they're directly east tilt towards the 90° mark on the navball. North, go towards 0/360°, south 180°, west 270° etc.

You should never need to have a visual reference off the ship, only the navball and map view matter.

 

ETA- from the position of the galactic disc the other ships are either east or west of you so to head east you'd hit "S" with a little bit of "D" to hit 90°. West would be Mostly "W" with a little bit of "A".

Edited May 19, 2016 by Reactordrone

[Geschosskopf]

3 hours ago, Lucky Spacer said:

Yes this is exactly my issue. My camera can be pointing anywhere and I'm trying to figure out how to align it so I know what direction I'll tilt when I press "w".  I am going to try and set one of the landers as a target and see if I have better control just using the nav ball.  Thank you for the idea.

Yeah, when trying to align on a navball marker, only look at the navball, not the ship.  Looking at the ship will only confuse you.

See, in orbital maneuvers, only the pitch and yaw axes matter.  Roll doesn't matter at all for maneuvering.  Because of this, KSP ignores the roll axis so much that it introduces arbitrary rolls into the ship while doing pitch and yaw maneuvers, doesn't care that it does, and doesn't bother to correct them.  To see this in action, have a probe core or pilot with all the "point in a given direction" SAS buttons available.  .  Turn on SAS with the T key, then hit the "point prograde" button.  The ship will pitch and yaw to put its nose on prograde but will roll some along the way for no reason.  Now hit the "point retrograde" button.  Instead of simply yawing or pitching 180^, the ship will do some of each and toss in a bit of roll for no reason.

The result of all this is that a ship is almost always rolled in an arbitrary direction.  Because the angle of the roll determines which way the nose moves relative to the camera when you pitch or yaw, just hitting the WASD keys will make the ship rotate in an arbitrary direction.  And if you habitually use the SAS "point to" buttons, this will always be the case, so just ignore it like the game does and don't look at the ship when you're trying to point at a navball icon

Seriously, in space, the angle of the ship's roll only matters in 2 cases:  The 1st is docking.  Often you want the ship you're docking to be rolled in a certain direction relative to the station or other ship. so it will fit between the station's solar panels or the ladders on station modules will line up.  The other is landing on a planet where you want the crew hatch and/or any science instruments you plan on accessing on EVA facing the sun so you can see them.  Both of these desired roll angles can be set at the very last moment, and should only be done at that point because if you do them earlier, the game will probably roll the ship somewhere else and you'll have to do it again.

HOWEVER, if you really, really want to look at the ship, here's what you do.  First thing is to roll the ship so that the pod/cockpit probe core's upper surface is actually facing "solar up", which is parallel with the lines running up out of the north poles of every planet and the sun.  To do this...

1. Make sure your navball is in "Orbit" mode by clicking on the speed readout until it says "Orbit"
2. Point the ship at its prograde navball marker.
3. Roll the ship until the line dividing the navball into blue and brown halves is vertical.  The brown side should be on the same side of your ship as the planet you're orbiting and the blue side should be on the same side as deep space.
   • If you are in a PROGRADE orbit facing the prograde direction, the brown will be to the left and the blue will be to the right.
   • If you are in a RETROGRADE orbit facing prograde, the brown will be on the right and the blue will be on the left.

Once you have the ship oriented this way, position the camera wherever you want.  Now, when push WASD, the ship will move in the expected directions.

But don't get used to this because the game will figure a way to change the roll angle arbitrarily again if you use any of the "point to" buttons, MJ's SmartASS, kOS, or anything else that reorients the ship without your manual control.

[Lucky Spacer]

On 5/18/2016 at 4:06 PM, Plusck said:

 

Still, that doesn't solve your problem because you're vertical, and there is no simple way of knowing which way is which.

In your situation, assuming that RCS isn't activated for nothing, I'd bring the camera up directly over the rocket to start with, then just tap RCS translate right and left to see what fires. I'd then bring the camera down so that is looking down at about a 45° angle, with "left" and "right" the right way round, and force myself to invert the Y-axis in my head. So pressing W will bring the nose towards you and S away from you.

Quicksave and try it, I'm sure you'll pick it up quickly and be able to scoot along just a couple of metres off the surface in no time.

 

This worked very well.  I forgot to upload the results of my efforts. I'll do that when I get home from work.  Thank you for your help.

Edited May 20, 2016 by Lucky Spacer

[bewing]

On 5/18/2016 at 2:05 PM, Lucky Spacer said:

When you are in the VAB placing the fins is there a way to determine the top and bottom of the rocket? You can change your camera angle to be anything so how so you determine top/bottom.  I really like this idea for my tugs.

If you place a single command pod in the VAB, you find that the ladder points to the right (when looking out the door). This is the S direction. Looking out the door of the VAB is the D direction.

[Lucky Spacer]

On 5/18/2016 at 9:08 PM, Geschosskopf said:

Hmmmm.....

You do know that the camera is not fixed in relation to the ship, so trying to orient the ship based on the direction you're looking at it will give you a different result depending on where the camera is in relation to the ship.  

Yes this is exactly my issue. My camera can be pointing anywhere and I'm trying to figure out how to align it so I know what direction I'll tilt when I press "w".  I am going to try and set one of the landers as a target and see if I have better control just using the nav ball.  Thank you for the idea.

Well Thank you everyone.  Mission accomplished.