Vanamonde

You need to move to the side as well as go up. Objects in orbit actually are falling down, because gravity is pulling them. The trick is to move to the side so fast that when you fall, you just keep missing the planet and keep on falling. That's why it's called "free fall." Start off going straight up to get out of the atmosphere (which you're right, will slow you down if you don't get above it), and then gradually turn your rocket so the engine is pushing you to the side as well as up. Watch your projected path on the map screen as it stretches to the side, and eventually it will curve around the planet and meet itself to form a circle or an oval. When that happens, you are in orbit. Different players do this in different ways; I like to go straight up until the atmosphere gauge goes from light blue to middle blue, then turn 30 degrees to the side. When the atmosphere gauge goes from middle blue to dark blue, I tilt at 60 degrees. And when it gets to black, I turn level and point the prograde marker at the horizon. (You can fly in any direciton, but it's a little easier to go east, which is the 90 mark on the compass.

Chooses a challenging game instead of a shoot-'em-up. Asks about it. Then knows how it works. I ask about aspects of the game I don't understand all the time, and I learn all kinds of stuff.

That was just a recording of some stuff that happened in a game, yet it had more emotional substance and impact than most of what comes out of professional movie studios.

Tectonic activity of one sort or another.

There are complex ways to explain it, but here's a kind of sloppy simple method. Face your ship in the direction it's currently travelling (the prograde marker), rotate 90 degrees in the direction that you want to be orbiting, turn the engine on low and watch how your orbit changes on the map screen. The best times to do it are the two points where your current orbit is passing through the plane of the orbit you want. This will mess with your orbital speed too though, and you'll need to correct for that by slowing down later. It helps if you keep the nose of your ship aimed at the horizon the whole time, because then more of your thrust is changing your direction rather than your altitude. Play with that until you get an intuitive feel for what's going on, and then read some of the fancy and scientific methods that helpful people post here.

Thanks for the feedback, Ziff. I'll try those suggestions and let you know how they work out, though it may be a while because I'll be at work most of the day tomorrow. I realize my ships are wonkily overbuilt, but my practice is to cobble together something that works and then trim it down where it proved to be excessive. Since the big one can't reliably get anywhere, I haven't been able to see what's left over when it gets back. Doing the math takes the fun out of it! Okay, to be honest, I'm too impatient and not sophisticated enough in such matters to do the math. I'll trust your figures. And really, I don't suck at rockets as much as that .craft might make it seem. That one was only a rough draft, which I only posted in its unfinished state to illustrate the deciduous engine problem. Weird, huh? Actually, that's part of the reason the mass distribution is suboptimal on the other ship; I've beeen afraid to use side-mounted engines in .16, though so far it doesn't seem to have cropped up again.

Thanks, that's a more concise way to phrase one of my major points. Similarly, any forces the controls are exerting should be enough to eventually stop a rotation, unless something is sustaining the rotation. If a rotation is getting worse in direct contradiction to the control forces, then something is wrong with the simulation rather than the ship design. I mean, I'm sure there's room for improvement in my ship design, but it's terribly frustrating to be struggling to overcome a problem that shouldn't be arising in the first place. That being said, I'been playing the game for 3 months and have never had problems with the kraken before, I suppose because I like to build the smallest ship that will get the job done. One suggestion was to orbit higher. Any other tips for avoding the kraken?

Do you have SAS turned on? If so, it resists turning. That makes the plane more stable, but less manueverable. You can either turn it off again, or temporarily deactivate it with the F key just long enough to make your sharp turn.

I see your point point BillWiskins, but it's not that just it's more difficult. When I've got RCS firing, an ASAS, the capsule's inherent attitude control, and 3 SAS modules all trying to hold the ship still and the random rotations are not even slowing down, that's a problem. And the rotations are not constant anyway, as if forces are acting on the ship while it's in freefall vacuum, which is not a piloting challenge but a physics flaw. Furthermore, the SAS and ASAS modules need to be reworked anyway because they are too narrow to form stable structural components between the wider tanks and capsules. In short, it might be a challenge to try to fly a 787 with the steering controls of a Cesna, but it's not much fun.

Apocalyptica602, that sometimes happens to me because of my custom Windows color scheme. It's really kind of weird and random; for example I can see single Imgur images, but not album images. If you've changed yours as well, try reverting to the default.

The sky also turns dark for airplanes that fly very high, like the U-2. (I wish I could find a better picture of it, though.)

After wrestling with big rockets for several days I went back to my tested and proven 1-man ship. And you know what? It had EXACTLY the same problems. EXACTLY. The difference is, the control systems are scaled to rockets of that size, and you can easily get it back under control or keep it from getting out of control in the first place, so that I never thought of them as problems until now. I'm coming to the belief that the issue is that much like the large decouplers that crush under the new loads, they didn't scale the control systems up in proportion to the size of the larger tanks, engines, and capsules. As supporting evidence, I point out that even my worst 3-man rockets fly straight while gimballed engines are thrusting, and only start going ape**** when I shut those powerful attitude controlling devices down and try to rely on the old, non-scaled SAS and RCS. I'm tempted to just not screw around with the large rockets until the developers give us a full set of components scaled to work with each other. Either that or rely on BlazingAngel655's suggestion and just keepy continually thrustin until I'm up to 200,000m or something ridiculous like that.

Altitude plays a part in the kraken thing? That actually fits. As I noted before, it's actually easier for my ships to land on Mun than to stay steady in Kerbin orbit. So what constitutes a "low" orbit for the purposes of kraken evasion? Meanwhile, I just tested another variation of a 3-man that also failed miserably, but I watched it more closely. There was a wavering reading of about 1/4th G while I was in freefall with the engine shut off, where there should have been no forces at all. That force is measured by the capsule in the nose and might read if the ship was rotating (like the capsule being swung around on a string), but it was there before the ship started rotating, and seems to be a cause rather than a result of rotation. When I turned control off and let the ship wallow around, it didn't simply spin, either. It would yaw 30 degrees, than yaw back the other way 20 degrees, then pitch 140 degrees, for example. What the hell are these transient forces rolling my ship around? And why don't I hear other players complaining about them?

Thanks. Good to know. By the way, that .craft file is my eff'ed up rocket that the engines fall off of, not my eff'ed up rocket that won't fly straight. I'm still tinkering with the S.S. Drunken Cow.

Alright, I'm trying mediafire. Does this work?: http://www./?r8a19eh6ru9baa3 That should be the .craft for the ship in the pics, though I modified it slightly since I made the screenshot. Let me know if the download doesn't work, and if you can, what I did wrong.

I wish I could post the .craft, but that doesn't seem to be working through this site currently. I know you can do it through file-sharing sites, but I'm already learning the other workaround for stuff that isn't working right now, and fumbling my way through imgur. In fact, I can't seem to remember where the attachment thingy has gone since the forum upgrade. Is it still not up and running? Thanks, but it's actually kind of a clunky kluge. What I do is try to cobble together something that works, and then go back and optimize it. So far, I'm still at phase #1 of that process in .16. I was thinking it would be easy to carry my experience and knowledge over from 15.2, but for some reason I'm having as much trouble the second time as I did the first time. I haven't even tried to get to Minmus yet.By the way, the reason my ship has such a forest of struts on it is that I'm finding it EXTREMELY hard to remove struts that have been attached to the larger tanks. There just doesn't seem to be any clickable spot you can grab to remove them. So whenever I alter the design, half the old struts can't be removed, and I just add more.

BillWiskins, I and at least one other player have had problems with cantilevered engines simply falling off of upper stage side-tanks like the ones in your pic. It seems to be happening while coasting, possibly associated with going into or out of warp. We both encountered it with the little 20-thrust engines. Are those the 135 thrust engines on your sponsons, and have you noticed any weird behavior with them? Question: SAS stops rotations when activated, but does it help you rotate when not activated but applying steering commands? In other words, will adding more of them help my ship turn faster?

That's a very interesting idea, and I got to wondering why nobody's tried a gyrocopter with real probes. I suspect that folding the arrangement for liftoff and unfolding at the destination would be frought with ways the thing could go wrong, and in a thin atmosphere, I'm not sure it would be more effective than the structurally much simpler parachutes. And if you only had one rotor and it was powered, you'd have to worry about the torque on the vehicle. But it is interesting.

As I understand how the components work, I installed the ASAS to control gimballed engines (for attitude) and fins (for roll) on ascent from launch, but it exerts no torque itself, so I also installed an SAS to keep the ship oriented in space. The capsule's own SAS effect is trivial for a ship of this size, I believe, so I don't take it into consideration. It's true that the ship is extremely slow to respond to steering at theses stages, which I also consider trivial because you don't need to make any rapid manuevers until you're close to Mun's surface anyway, and I've discarded the orbiter stage by then anyway. Although I've got linear RCS on the orbital-transfer stage, I really don't like to use RCS for anything except landing fine-tuning because the tanks run out so quickly. The struts may look a little sloppy, but are all placed on 2X symmetry, and so should balance. It never occurred to me that SAS might be more or less effective depending on where it's located on the ship, though that makes sense now that you point it out. I can play with that. If that's the case, then I guess the middle, where I have it, is just about the worst spot for exerting control. I really dislike the idea of putting anything on top of the capsule. I tried it after seeing other players do that, but found that chutes were more likely to break loose if attached elsewhere, and the improper balance prevented the capsule from facing its heat shield the right way on re-entry. I know that doesn't matter now, but it feels like cheating to exploit things that I know are not included in the game yet but will be eventually. So thanks for the suggestions. I think I will try multiple SAS on spots such as the side tanks, and moving the ASAS down a stage so that it's discarded altogether by this point. I believe SAS and ASAS compliment rather than conflict with each other, but maybe it's just as well not to have both working at once. Well, that seemed to help a little but not solve the problem. But I couldn't really tell, because in the middle of my test flight the game locked up on me for the fifth time today. This is just loads of fun. How are other players handling these larger rockets? Are SAS and RCS just not scaled to handle these larger ships? Mine are controllable under strong thrust, but not when coasting or under light thrust.

It's the VAB. I just turned it on its side so the light would be better for a screenshot.

I'm having a hell of a time adjusting to the 3-man rockets. This is the upper stages of my best one, but once in Kerbin orbit with the gimballed engine shut down, it can develop fast and uncontrollable rotations. Do I need more basic-SAS? Some players are reporting that ASAS causes wobbles rather than controls them, so should I remove that? Turning the RCS on helps, but the rotations are so strong that it can run through a whole fuel tank without bringing the ship under control. The odd thing is that it blasts off and reaches orbit okay, lands on Mun well enough, and returns to Kerbin pretty well. The only time I experince this problem is between Kerbin orbit and Mun orbit.

Are you trying to fly the 3-man rockets? Because I'm having a lot of problems with those. I don't have any advice for you right now, though pics might help.

Simcity 4 had a nifty feature in that you could place a sign on a spot on the map and type a name into it, and if there's any naming to be done in KSP, that's how I'd like to see it. Trying to get people on the internet to agree on a consensus is like blowing on an ant hill.

Scenery can be good: Or scenery can be bad: (Still learning the ins & outs of imgur. Let me know if I didn't do this right.)

In addition to the suggestions above, I like to shutdown my main engine an instant before touching down. I hit slightly harder, but have no thrust adding to that %^(-ing shipkiller bounce. I've lost more ships to that than just about any other cause in KSP. If your ship is tottering, you can hit N to have the RCS thrust straight down, jamming your ship to the surface. As for lateral RCS control, have you tried mounting the "linear" RCS thrusters on the side of your ship? They're stronger than the cluster-type thrusters. I like to put several of them on the underside of my lander so that I can hit H for fine control of descent speed and last-second braking: the more gently you hit, the less you bounce.