Behavior of the Navball Under Thrust

[SCCBrear]

OK, REALLY new to the game, still working through the tuts. In Orbit 101 when thrusting the navball would move away from where you put it, but I managed to complete the objectives assigned to me, so I assumed that this was normal behavior and everything was working right. Onto the Mun part 1 and I set out the maneuver node correctly, I align the navball with the marker correctly and fire up the engines and the navball starts spinning again, I think nothing of this, until I notice that my apoapsis is going down.

So did I do something wrong, do I need to keep the navball aligned or what?

[Reactordrone]

Do you have SAS engaged? The ship won't hold a stable heading and will need to be flown constantly to keep it aligned if you don't. The only other thing I can think of is if you align to prograde early and then complete part of an orbit the heading will change, go around half an orbit and you'll be pointing retrograde.

[Feradose]

Thrusting moves the navball away?

do you mean prograde or retrograde icon or maybe manuever node icon which is blue?

Its common for manuever node icon to move, just you follow it, unless it requires >0,1 m/s, then you might want to ignore it and delete the nodr for a tiny bit of inaccuracy

[Taki117]

You may be executing a maneuver too early. Just because you put a maneuver down doesn't mean you can execute it right away. You need to look at the time to maneuver node next to the navball. If that is about half of the burn time you can execute the maneuver, if it's not you need to wait.

[Red Iron Crown]

Hard to say without seeing a pic of your ship, but it might also be that you have too much reaction wheel steering your ship. Try pressing caps lock for finer control and see if that helps.

[Specialist290]

A few other questions, to help us diagnose what's actually going on:

1. When are you actually burning for the maneuver? With some longer burns, it's actually slightly more accurate to start burning before the countdown fully counts down, as the maneuver node planner assumes instantaneous thrust at that particular point.

2. Which marker are you pointing at when you execute the burn?