HvP

In addition to making sure that the center-of-lift is behind and slightly above your center-of-mass marker, consider the direction of your thrust vector. The purple marker shows you where your thrust vector is, that's the line of force that your engines create. For stable flight the purple marker should be directly in line behind the yellow center-of-mass marker. This is often difficult to judge because it's normal for the center-of-thrust marker to be to the distant rear of the craft. To make it easier, try lining the camera up directly behind (or in front of) the plane looking directly along the center axis of the plane. If the purple marker is above the yellow center-of-mass then it will cause a leveraging torque that is constantly forcing a downwards rotation - if the thrust marker is below the center-of-mass then it will cause a rotational force resulting in constant upwards pitch. Think of it like this. Your plane is hanging from a string that is attached to a balance point at the spot the yellow mass marker is. Your engines are trying to push the plane forward, and that force is applied to the spot where the purple thrust marker is. You want them to push from directly behind the point the plane is hanging from or else it will cause the plane to tip over. Complicating things though is the center-of-lift. This is a force applied by the air you are moving through. It adds another element of force to your plane. Imagine this force as the place where your plane catches the wind. If you are moving forward, and the blue lift marker is behind your yellow mass marker then you can move forward and the air just pulls the rear of the plane further in line behind the front of the plane. If the blue lift marker is slightly above the center of mass of the plane then you get lift pulling the plane into the air - although it also creates a slight tendency to pitch upwards, but as long as you have enough control from your pitch control surfaces this is desirable. However, if the blue lift marker is a good deal below the center of mass of the plane then you'll find that the plane is constantly trying to turn itself upside down. Try to imagine a lever arm attached to the yellow ball the plane is hanging from, and that this lever extends to the blue ball showing you your lift point. If you thrust forward and this blue center-of-lift catches the wind, what happens? The blue ball will be pushed backwards until it is directly behind your center-of-mass, but doing this will rotate the plane up or down. Your best options are to: A) Adjust the placement of your engines so that the purple center-of-thrust marker is in line behind the yellow center-of-mass marker. Then... B) Adjust the placement of your wings and control surfaces so that your blue center-of-lift marker is slightly behind and either in line with or very slightly above your yellow center-of-mass marker. C) Realize that moving around the wings will also shift the center-of-mass and center-of-thrust, so... D) Go back to step (A) and repeat each step as necessary until things line up properly, then... E) Test your configuration in flight, note the behavior of the plane and... F) Revert to the space plane hangar and continue adjusting as needed for further testing.

Your screenshots seem to confirm that all control inputs are enabled for all your control surfaces. You should deactivate yaw and roll for the largest inner pair of Big-S elevons at the rear of your plane, leaving the pitch input active. Then, for the outer pair of elevons at the tips of the wings, deactivate pitch and yaw, leaving only roll active. For the vertical tail fin make sure that roll and pitch are off and leave only yaw activated. The reason for this is not really a glitch in the game, it's just the nature of needing to isolate inputs for effective control so that you don't get crossed signals. There's just no reason that a vertical rudder should be trying to respond to pitch inputs - it won't be able to do anything but mess up the yaw of the craft. Additionally, having roll input also assigned to the control surfaces for pitch will often cause them to operate asymmetrically, lessening their effectiveness. The problem is exacerbated when SAS is turned on. Because SAS is constantly trying to keep the aircraft flying straight under most circumstances it is always adding a few degrees of roll here and a few degrees of pitch there - but because roll and pitch are both assigned to the same control surfaces it can't add roll without ALSO adding pitch. Sometimes this results in overcompensation, sometimes the inputs cancel each other out, and sometimes they end up doing the opposite of what they should be doing. The answer is usually to keep the inputs and outputs separate and discrete. As for the general design of the craft, as @Kerbal4 implied, the wings are quite far back in delta wing craft like this which often causes very stable, very flat flight characteristics. In other words, they are inherently hard to get upwards or downwards pitch under the best of circumstances. Or alternatively, they may not have enough lift in the front causing them to nose down. In this case however, those tendencies are probably offset by the wing segments near the forward section of the craft, the lifting body properties of the MK2 fuselage, and the very large elevons in the back. It'd try it first with the control inputs isolated for only the pitch, yaw and roll inputs required by each pair of control surfaces. And then if you are still having difficulty with the controls report back and let us know what is happening. This could have been due to very strong reaction wheel torque, or an odd buggy characteristic of the landing gear and wheel physics in the game. The Unity platform that the game is based on has had strange and unpredictable behavior with the wheels, landing gear and landing struts for quite a while that sometimes cause jumping around, weird bouncing oscillations, or gliding across the surface. I wouldn't be surprised if it also caused some craft to become stuck at odd angles. There are any number of reason for a plane to start spinning without SAS. It could have just been an unstable design that was barely kept level by SAS. Or sometimes part clipping and "Kraken" forces can cause wild buggy behavior. The jury is out on that one. I've not seen this behavior before. Batteries don't usually have much effect on flight physics at all. They don't even really have any physical characteristics themselves except that they add a little weight and drag to the part they are attached to. Is it possible that you also accidentally attached an extra copy of the control surface inside the plane? I've done that before and the results were not pretty. I've not investigated this design from The Kerbal Player's Guide (I think you may have pasted the wrong link) but I'm sure it's a tested and functional design. Was it this plane that started working correctly after you removed the battery? If so, I still think it could benefit from isolating the control inputs.

It's difficult to say without knowing more about your craft. Posting a picture of the craft would greatly help diagnosis of the problem. I can give you some basic info to start with though. It sounds to me like you may have multiple pitch, yaw, and roll inputs enabled for all your control surfaces and they will interfere with each other. You should always place your control surfaces in discrete pairs, each relating to the role that they perform, and then make sure to right click them in the space plane hangar and toggle off any function that they would interfere with (yaw, pitch or roll.) It can be tricky to correctly place control surfaces on a delta wing craft, especially if you have designed it as a "flying wing" with no separate tail-plane or elevator. Your control surfaces may be trying compensate for more axis than they are able to control. In a conventional airplane design, only the horizontal elevators in the tail will control pitch, so toggle off the roll and yaw in their right click menu. And the vertical rudder should control yaw, so switch off roll and pitch for that. And of course, the ailerons placed on the rear edge of the wing tips should only have roll enabled. If your design is more like a flying wing with no rear stabilizer then you may simply not have enough leverage in the rear for pitch control authority. Maybe your elevator surfaces are simply too close to the middle of your plane. They need leverage to work, so try and get them to far rear if you can - you can try placing canards near the nose to help with pitch authority. Another possibility is that your design has the center of lift too far to the rear. This causes the plane to be exceptionally stable, but it flies like a dart with very little deviation possible. This is very common for delta wing planes because most of the lifting surface is far to the back. The center of lift should normally be just behind center of mass. And don't forget to check CoM and CoL with the tanks both full and empty. The game determines which direction to move the control surfaces based on their location relative to the center of mass. If the surfaces controlling pitch right on the CoM then the game can become confused as to which direction they should deploy.

Just be aware that if the flaps are too far back then they will cause your plane to pitch nose downwards. Ideally, they should be exactly in line with the CoM. But because in KSP it's usually not possible to control the weight precisely enough to position the edge of the wing right on the CoM, I usually have to surface attach my flaps somewhere on the underside surface of the wing, deploying downwards when needed. Experiment and adjust as needed, and happy flying.

The "Configure Vessel Naming" menu won't be available after launch. It may be best in the VAB to pre-configure new ships that will be docking to your station to have a lower name priority. Although, sometimes this causes docking ships to retain the station's name after undocking, but sometimes it doesn't. I haven't figured out yet what circumstances cause this to happen. Expected behavior is for them both to revert to their original name after undocking.

The game automatically determines the direction that control surfaces will deploy based on where they are relative to the center-of-mass. If they are in front of the center of mass they will go in the opposite direction than if they are behind it. For flaps this shouldn't matter as much because you should have auto pitch, yaw, and roll disabled from their right-click menu in the space plane hangar, and only deploy them from an action group toggle. For clarity, I'm talking about flaps which add drag and lift without otherwise changing the direction of the plane. Ailerons, rudders and elevators control roll, yaw, and pitch respectively and do need to have those specific inputs enabled (and only those for which they are meant to control.) There is an option to reverse the deploy direction of the flaps in the right-click menu (this might need "advanced tweakables" to be enabled in the settings menu.) As I understand it, this only works to reverse the direction they move when using the "Deploy" command assigned to an action group. It won't change the direction they move when under pitch, yaw or roll input - that's based on their position relative to the center of mass. I would suggest either reversing the deploy direction of the flaps if you want them on the leading edge of the wing or moving them slightly behind the center of mass marker. It's important to make sure that you check the position of the CoM marker with the tanks both full and empty, because the balance of the plane will move as you consume fuel.

Flaps would produce the same result, just with less wing area and usually less total lift as a result. Flaps do have the benefit of being able to control when and how aggressively they are used, whereas the wing incidence is a permanent property of the plane's design. If you want to add incidence to the wings: when viewing the plane from the side use the rotate tool so that the forward-leading edge of the wing is raised slightly. If you want to add flaps, put them close to the center of mass of the plane relative to the front/back of the craft. That way the will add lift without causing a torque that would pitch the plane up or down. Then assign them to an action group toggle.

Consider adding a few degrees of positive incidence to the wings. This means that the leading edge of your wings are rotated up slightly. It increases your lift while still allowing you level flight, giving you better control than if you were constantly trying to pitch up to maintain lift. It also allows for better visibility from the cockpit view during maneuvering, especially during landing. Depending on the design it can cause more drag because the main wings present a larger area to the air - or it could actually reduce drag, because the fuselage and tail plane no longer have to add as much drag as they would when you constantly pitch up for lift in a zero-incidence design. Either way, you produce more lift at slower speeds by adding a slight upwards angle of incidence to your wings.

The science category in the map filter was intended to only show the Breaking Ground surface deployed science experiments. If assigning other vessels to that category breaks the map mode then I would say it should never have been provided as a selectable assignment when renaming craft, and thus is a bug.

Embed a small weight on just one side of the nosecone. Not near the tip, you want it near the base so that you can move it as far off the center-line as possible for maximum torque. A Mk-12-R radial drogue chute seems to work well. It's not so heavy that SAS can't compensate for the off center weight, but it's heavy enough that it will torque the nosecone to one side when you eject it.

I'm done. No more money from me TTI/Squad. Sending my certified letter for all the good it will do. This will be my last post here on the forums. Goodbye all. It was fun.

So I now have to send a certified letter to New York at my own expense to ensure that I still have access to my constitutional right to the public court system in the case that my account information stored with Take Two is compromised or misused. Look, I'm well aware that this is a widespread corporate policy, and that's the problem. Rest assured that I only participate in this farce because at least an opt out was offered, however tedious they intend the process to be. To say that I'm disappointed is a massive understatement. I left my bank and switched to a credit union over this; I refused to operate with a car dealership over this; I do not own a cell phone due to this; and I gave my landlord hell over this until I was given the option to opt out. I now refuse to buy any other DLC or paid content from Squad/TTI until this policy is lifted. I'm only keeping my KSP store account for the moment in order do download patches for a program that I already paid money for and assuming I get signed confirmation that my opt out has been accepted. I do not pay money to any company for the favor of nullifying my constitutional rights!

Hello @NutellaonToast welcome to the KSP forums! Very few stock parts completely block fuel crossfeed, and those will have orange text in the part description which says "No Fuel Crossfeed." Those are: the M-series structural panels and I-beams; the SP-series structural panels from the Making History expansion; and all of the heat shields. The launch stability enhancer technically cannot transfer to other parts, although it is rarely an issue. Some parts will block crossfeed by default, but you have the option to toggle crossfeed on individual parts from the right-click part action window. These parts have orange text in the part description which says, "Crossfeed toggles in Editor and Flight. Default Off." Those include: every decoupler and separator, both radially attached and stack node attached decouplers, including the small hardpoint and structural pylon. This does not include the engine plates from the Making History expansion since they always allow crossfeed. All of the docking ports have crossfeed turned on by default, but this can be toggled off in the right-click part action menu. Everything else will always allow crossfeed.

I'd bet on that happening at some point. With the most expensive blockbuster films running a quarter-billion dollars the cost of a SpaceX flight seems like a match made in heaven... er, the heavens. The biggest hurdles to that would be the weight cost of equipment and the space required to block out filming. You can rent a whole "vomit comet" for less than $200,000 with plenty of room to work. Of course, you're stuck with short takes of thirty-seconds or less. Still, with the cost of launches coming down and the cost of movies going up, it's only a matter of time.

Hello @Randalf welcome! How is your trigonometry? I admit that I'm not skilled in the mathematics, but I can help explain why this problem is more complex than you are imagining. Sometimes it's helpful to take an example and push it to the most extreme limit to see where the underlying problem is. Imagine that you have two ships orbiting the planet in coplanar (parallel) equatorial orbits at the exact same altitude. Because their orbits are identical they are going exactly the same speed, let's say 2000 m/s. If they were traveling in the same direction their relative speed would obviously be zero (0). If they were traveling in opposite directions their velocities would combine so you add them together for a relative velocity of 4000 m/s. Now, imagine that one of the ships is on an equatorial orbit going 2000m/s. And the other ship has the same orbital altitude and speed but its orbit is inclined by 90 degrees and is on a polar orbit. They both have the same shaped orbits, the same altitude, and the same velocity. But you can NOT simply add or subtract their velocities to find the relative velocity. It's somewhere in between. Now what about this case? In this case, the data shown in the orbital information is the same: 2000m/s for both ships, same apoapsis, same periapsis. The orbits intersect and you can see that the ships will be in the same place when they converge so they could hit each other. There must be some positive relative velocity; it will be lower, but not zero. But you can't subtract 2000 from 2000 and find the actual relative velocity for orbits that are inclined in respect to each other. You need more information than just what is presented on the screen. In your case, there will always be some small difference in inclination or some small elliptical difference, and the point where those ships are in their orbits also changes the outcome.

Here is a simple wiki on making KSP flags. https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Create_custom_flags! They have to be .png files at 256x160 pixels in dimention. The simple way I do it is to just make a copy of any of the default flags in the GameData/Squad/Flags folder, remove the previous design, add my own and then save it under a new name. You can place them inside the default KSP flags folder at "Kerbal Space Program/GameData/Squad/Flags". Or you should be able to make any new folder in the GameData folder as long as you have a folder called "Flags" they should show up in the game.

When you wish upon a star Makes no difference who you are Anything your heart desires Will come to you... -------------------------------------------- 58 tons and 1176 parts, almost half of them could be lights but I wouldn't hazard a guess on the number. Mods used are heavy use of Tweakscale, Aviation Lights, Surface Mounted Lights, and for camera effects Scatterer, and KS3P with the camera bloom effect turned up. Direct screen captures from in game, no photoshop used.

Welcome to the KSP forums @STORMPILOTkerbalkind, you've certainly found a very Kerbal way to get into the game. How fast were you going when your rocket car failed? At some point it simply won't be possible to overcome even the most minor instability caused by steering wobble before parts of your vehicle slam into the ground. And even if that doesn't do you in, atmospheric heating will probably start to explode things if you aren't using spaceplane parts. At the highest speeds KSP can't even process interactions with the ground consistently. If you don't mind construction spoilers, this video by Stratzenblitz75 gives you an idea of what's possible.

In career mode, only pilots get SAS abilities from experience, not scientists or engineers. If you want to send a mission out without an experienced pilot on board you will need to add a more advanced probe core to your ship. You can check what abilities the probe cores have by right-clicking the part in the VAB parts menu and looking at the extra box that opens up on the right. It will have a list of SAS abilities for that probe such as prograde/retrograde, hold target, etc... When scientists get more stars by leveling up their experience it makes them process data in the science lab faster, and when engineers level up their experience it makes them process ore more efficiently when operating drills and ISRU ore converters. That's what their extra stars mean. When pilots get more stars from their experience it allows them to add more SAS abilities such as the ones you are looking for.

A replica of Drax's Moonraker station from the James Bond film of the same name. This thing is diabolical thanks to production designer Ken Adam.

WELCOME to the KSP forums! This actually sounds more like what happens when you slow down so much that you actually start rising upwards again. Pay close attention to your navball. Is it flipping between the prograde and retrograde markers near the surface? If it does then retrograde SAS will usually just default to standard SAS hold, but it has been known to try and flip your craft over to keep pointing retrograde - except that now retrograde is towards the planet's surface. The solution is to either make sure that you watch your velocity (in the window above the navball) and control your throttle carefully so that you don't arrest your descent too early. Or you can switch to normal SAS hold once you slow down enough. Another possibility is that your engine gimbal is providing most of the control that's keeping you stable until you lower your thrust so much that there isn't enough thrust to compensate for the off center torque. Except for a redesign to center your mass better I doubt you have many options. Instead of another engine you could try sending up a similarly weighted fuel tank with a claw on it and stick it to the other side of your lander as Aegolius13 suggested. Or, since you are able to get to within 50 m/s of landing then you might have some luck trying to pull off a well executed suicide burn - where you wait until the last possible moment to activate engines at full throttle so that your velocity reaches zero at the exact moment you touch down. Calculating this would be difficult and probably requires several attempts with ample use of quicksave/load. Without knowing more details about your craft design it would be hard to be more helpful, though.

As Kryxal said, you should check to see if you have the filter turned off for EVA Kerbals. In the map view go to the top of the screen with your mouse so that the bar drops down showing the little white icons for different types of craft. Make sure that the icon showing a little Kerbal isn't toggled off.

Speed Unit Annex uses the little window at the top of the navball to show apoapsis/periapsis, and can even show time to apoapsis, distance to ground level, target docking pitch/roll/yaw degrees, and various other situation dependent info without any extra windows cluttering up the screen.

You have to first click the "Run Analysis" button on the Surface Sanning Module when in each biome to get site specific data in the narrow band scanner's field.

We need a way to combine science gathering off world with the need for gameplay options once you reach other planets to add usefulness to EVA. The developers have signaled opportunities for offworld launch-sites with the introduction of a Mun base site in the new console upgrade. In the stock game we have orbital and surface survey equipment, surface sampling and seismic testing equipment. I vote we should have the option to use this equipment to build an additional planetary overlay that displays suitable sites for planetary base construction. Ideally, such an overlay would not just list ore concentration, but also pitch of the terrain, length of daylight exposure, distance from nearby biomes and anomalies, elevation, latitude and other data that would contribute to a successful surface base. Perhaps a heatmap of EVA activity on the surface could record how much of the area has been explored by your Kerbals. Areas that have been visited frequently and the number and value of science experiments performed could increase the value of the site and raise the percentage of a "construct surface launch site" option becoming available. Whether there is a sufficient concentration of ore in the area, the frequency of quakes in the area as revealed by seismic scans, soil conditions revealed by the surface samples, how level the ground is, etc... could all actually contribute to opening up the option of starting the construction of a surface base.