Specialist290

Welcome to the forums! Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to pan around the map (shifting focus and rotating are the only controls I'm aware of), but I think I still have some info that might help with your problem. KSP simulates orbits using a technique called patched conic approximation. There's a few different drawing modes that you can set that change how they're displayed. You can either find the "settings.cfg" file in your install's folder and change the number in the line "CONIC_PATCH_DRAW_MODE = 3" to fit whatever mode you think would work best, or you could download a plugin like Improved Maneuver Nodes or PreciseNode that lets you change drawing modes from within the game itself (among other handy features).

To put it briefly: No, it isn't. The focus of any orbit is the center of mass of the gravitational system -- which, for all practical purposes, is the center of the planet or moon your ship is orbiting.

Well, this certainly looks interesting. Hope all goes well.

Most of the other users here have already done a good job explaining things, but like I always do when this topic comes up, I'm going to recommend that you read these four handy pages over at Atomic Rockets, which try to explain the basic principles of rocket science in layman's terms. The author mainly writes with an eye towards real-world rocketry, but many of the things he discusses still hold true for Kerbal Space Program. I'd also highly recommend you check out MyKSPCareer.com, which also tries to break things down in an easily accessible manner from a KSP-specific perspective. Hope this helps

Another tip: If you're in danger of losing your node due to your ship bypassing the point where it was plotted, pick it up and drag it along the path of your orbit in the direction your ship is orbiting until it's almost directly behind the ship. This will allow you to keep the information you plotted and give you another whole orbit to fine-tune it, if you need that much time.

I'd like to point out that, as a real world cartophile who can get lost in his own little world staring at a map and imagining what the places it portrays are like, "mapping for mapping's sake" can indeed be an enjoyable experience in and of itself. There's no real explanation for it, other than some people just enjoy it, just like some enjoy collecting stamps or watching C-SPAN even if they don't actually care about politics.

Another thing that might help, especially with those high-traction wheels on relatively light rovers: Make your rover front-wheel drive as opposed to all-wheel drive. Disable the motors and steering on your rearmost wheels and do all of your active driving with the front set. Otherwise, you'll end up popping several wheelies without even trying, which looks cool and all but isn't really ideal for controlling your rovers. The only real downsides are that you have to be careful when backing up if you want to keep most of your tires on the ground at all times and that you'll have a fairly wide turning radius, but these can be compensated for via other means (usually a set of reaction wheels). Also: At high speeds, rely more on the reverse gear than you do on the brakes. Brakes always stop the wheels cold, and those high-traction tires really do grip the ground, but your rover's momentum has to go somewhere, and if it can't go forward, it'll try to go up, essentially turning your rover into a giant lever with the wheels acting as the fulcrum. If you still want to kill your speed fairly quickly with brakes don't hold them; tap them periodically, and watch that back end.

I'm going to have to steal that "detachable manned rover" idea from you for my own bases.

Nice to know. Hopefully I'll be home from work in time to see this live.

Yep, those medium lander legs love to troll. Nicely done on the video

KSK: He had it right the first time. You're talking about launch headings; he's talking about the inclination value of the final orbit. Inclination represents the offset of the orbit's plane from the planet's equatorial plane.

Small note: All of the forum thread links in the first post are still using the old, borked URLs.

It's due to the way KSP's vehicle designs reads connections. The game only recognizes connections between two nodes at a time -- you can't just invert a 3-way or 4-way adapter and connect it to multiple nodes at once unless you're prepared to get a little creative. I've noticed you're using LV-Ns as well. They have shrouds which fire out to the side instead of decoupling from the bottom when you jettison them, unlike every other engine in the game. When these shrouds hit your engines, they're probably knocking them off the bottom of the fuel tanks. You want to rotate them when you attach them in the VAB using Shift + Q or E so that the seams are facing diagonally, like in this post.

For those who are trying to access old links: Change the "showthread.php/" bit of the URL to "threads/". The link should work as normal.

At least once, I forgot to include decouplers between stages on my launch vehicle. The results were quite spectacular. Somehow it still got into orbit; yay overengineering!

Impressive work I'm sure this will be useful for my designs.

A quick newsbump: Due to changes in the forum's formatting, older links to forum threads were not being read. I did a search-and-replace to alter the link formatting to the new standard, so all links to posts and threads on this forum should actually work now.

Nicely done! Glad to hear things went so well.

The whole thing was basically created to explore the question "What would happen if the Kessler Syndrome actually became a problem we had to deal with?"

Nice on both counts Any word on how progress is going on that first manned vehicle?

The colors just denote which "step" in the orbit you're on. Blue is your current course; each different-colored segment after that is what your orbit will look like if something alters it, either a plotted maneuver or a change between Spheres of Influence (like between Kerbin and the Mun). Solid lines show what your orbit will look like if you just let the craft coast; dotted lines show how a plotted maneuver at a maneuver node will change your orbit once you've finished the burn.

As I always do whenever this subject comes up, I'm going to recommend reading these four helpful pages over at Atomic Rockets. They're meant to serve as a way to ease laymen into the basic calculations needed for rocketry and spaceflight. The rest of the site is worth a read, too, although not all of it can be easily applied directly to KSP.

There are really 2 (possibly 3) factors at work here: 1. Because of the time scales, distances, and velocities involved, very small differences in initial conditions will often be magnified considerably by the time you actually travel from Kerbin to another planet's SoI. 2. It is very difficult to be consistent beyond a certain degree of precision when flying manually. The way KSP uses floating point decimals probably does not help matters. As alterbaron noted in his own experiments on precision landings on atmospheric bodies, small differences in the parameters are often magnified greatly by the time the craft reaches the ground. 3. More subjectively, there are often very good reasons why a player might choose non-optimal trajectories for their flights. With a flotilla of ships all heading to the same destination at the same time, the player might want to space out their arrivals so they have anywhere from a few hours to a few days between them so they don't have to frantically juggle all of their ships coming into the destination's SoI at the same time. Some players may also choose to operate under certain constraints, whether mod-dependent (such as life support mods) or simply for the self-imposed challenge, that dictate that they complete their missions within a certain time frame.

I can sympathize: I remember having similar problems myself adjusting when I made the leap to bigger rockets, which resulted in a few interesting failures. Here's the Mun lander that I'm currently playing around with: It can reliably get me to the Mun safely and back without any real need for super-precise piloting.* All parts are stock, aside from the Kerbal Engineer chip that gives me the handy data readout. The launcher has a Mainsail fed by Jumbo-64 + a white "hockey puck" for the core, with radial Skippers mounted on Jumbo-64s for boosters, which all feed into the central tank during the first stages of the flight; it had no need for any fancy asparagus staging to put me in orbit, so I didn't set that up. The Munar Injection stage has a Poodle, and it has enough "oomph" to get me to the Mun, circularize, and get a nice head start on the landing. The lander itself has an LVT-45 (which is probably overkill on the thrust for the Mun and Minmus and definitely less efficient than the LV-909, but I wasn't thinking about that at the time I designed it) and enough fuel to land, take off again, and get back to Kerbin. The LES isn't strictly necessary, but I like to add a dedicated abort system to my crewed vessels "just in case." (Efficiency experts might undoubtedly notice some other areas I could tweak this design to get it to perform better, but it works well enough to suit my purposes.) In general, the same principles apply as they would for any rocket. Make sure your initial engines can actually lift the ship off the pad. Try to front-load as much of the total weight as possible onto stages that drop early so that the later stages don't have as much to lift. The lighter your final payload, the smaller your total launcher can be... And so on. If you really want to delve into the nuts and bolts so you don't have to purely rely on trial and error, I'd highly advise learning how to calculate your rocket's performance statistics (delta-v capacity, thrust-to-weight ratio, etc.) yourself. It may seem daunting at first, but the Atomic Rockets website has some very helpful pages that explain the basics in layman's terms, and the KSP Wiki has all the necessary statistics for individual parts. There are helpful plugins that tell you these stats as well, but running the numbers by hand a few times and playing around with different layouts and arrangements is a great way to make sure you actually understand what they mean. Finally, feel free to continue asking questions as the need arises, and don't forget to take a look at some of the resources listed in the Drawing Board, which is linked in my signature. Hope this helps * At least not "super-precise" by my own standards; I am slightly OCD about efficient transfers and getting the most out of my maneuvers, though.

I'm most definitely interested!