Frame of Reference, in Map View or around Vessel

[Tynrael]

I am curious to see if anyone has a good technique or method to know (immediately) what their reference point is in the map view or third person camera view looking at their ship.

What I mean for the map view is, is there an easy way to instantly know if you are looking at it from the top down, as opposed to bottom up? I find myself having to timewarp to see the bodies moving to determine if they are going clockwise or counter clockwise.

For the vessel my trouble is when I am attempting to land I occasionally overshoot and get too much speed going another direction, so instead of slowing to a halt horizontally I pick up speed in elsewhere. I can see that my vessel is moving too fast in a certain direct and want to bleed speed off that way, but since the navball markers are combination vectors that may not be currently visible on the navball anyway I can't just aim for them. Visually I know which direction I want to tip my ship but I am not sure how to know how the ships rotation matches my vessels direction based on any given camera angle. I hope that I am making some sense here? I find myself tipping my ship around and adjusting it based on visual queues (of that not being what I wanted at all) to go through a conic movement until I find the position I wanted. A similar issue with RCS, knowing what translation will push my ship in what direction without firing it off to see what does what first. I guess, is there a good way of knowing what "true" north would be for the ship and what it aligns to on the navball? Maybe I should be building my rockets to maintain a standard convention for that.

**UPDATE to Answered**

OK guys, it sounds like the solution is to use markers to help note the orientation of the ship relative to the Navball. Thank you for the responses! I had just been using the "guess and check" method for years and thought I would ask if there was a better way that never dawned on me.

Edited July 9, 2015 by Tynrael

[Randazzo]

I am curious to see if anyone has a good technique or method to know (immediately) what their reference point is in the map view or third person camera view looking at their ship.

What I mean for the map view is, is there an easy way to instantly know if you are looking at it from the top down, as opposed to bottom up? I find myself having to timewarp to see the bodies moving to determine if they are going clockwise or counter clockwise.

For the vessel my trouble is when I am attempting to land I occasionally overshoot and get too much speed going another direction, so instead of slowing to a halt horizontally I pick up speed in elsewhere. I can see that my vessel is moving too fast in a certain direct and want to bleed speed off that way, but since the navball markers are combination vectors that may not be currently visible on the navball anyway I can't just aim for them. Visually I know which direction I want to tip my ship but I am not sure how to know how the ships rotation matches my vessels direction based on any given camera angle. I hope that I am making some sense here? I find myself tipping my ship around and adjusting it based on visual queues (of that not being what I wanted at all) to go through a conic movement until I find the position I wanted. A similar issue with RCS, knowing what translation will push my ship in what direction without firing it off to see what does what first. I guess, is there a good way of knowing what "true" north would be for the ship and what it aligns to on the navball? Maybe I should be building my rockets to maintain a standard convention for that.

If you switch to "surface" mode on the nav ball (not actually sure you can do that on the map view) it changes your prograde/retrograde marker to be relative to the movement of the surface.

I'm not 100% sure if that's what you need or not, but orienting to the retrograde marker of "surface" allows me to cancel out horizontal velocity as well as vertical.

[Tynrael]

Thanks Randazzo, I will have to try and see if that helps. I had a problem in the beta where when I used surface mode to center my retrograde marker in the top center of the navball it resulted in me still carrying horizontal speed and so I got used to going back to orbital mode to try and kill the horizontal speed so I didn't scrape/bounce across the surface. I have not tried sticking with surface mode when landing since the 1.0 release.

[Randazzo]

It occurs to me that your orbits inclincation is going to play a big role here too, I generally try to stay pretty close to the equator.

[Tynrael]

I guess my problem is I don't immediately make the connection between my rocket, the navball, and where I want to go. Take this picture for example, if I want to fly over the hill in the direction of the blue arrow- I have no idea where to position myself on the navball to point that direction. I would lift off and gain some vertical speed and then tilt any direction and then swivel around on the navball until my rocket was finally pointing in that direction.

[Guest]

Land navigation and space navigation are similar but not the same. The navball can be used for land nav, but it requires you to know what the heading to your target is. One way to use the navball to get a heading to target is to radially attach a small probe like this :

So, if you want to go to that hill over there, control form the main pod, throttle up just enough to use q or e to rotate the craft until the little probe points in the direction you want to go then shut down the throttle and let the craft settle on the landing gear. Right click the little probe, control from here, and take note of the heading. Now, go back to the main pod, take off and get some altitude, then rotate the craft so that your engines will fire at the desired heading.

[ajburges]

I think the locked camera view will align your camera as you want, try that. Otherwise, make sure your ship has features to identity roll.

[Vanamonde]

There may be tricks to help, but really it's just a matter of practice and experience. Map view only rotates across the 180 degree arc from north to south, so when looking at its primary, every celestial object is going to be moving from left to right if it's in the foreground, and from right to left if it's behind the primary. And as the old pros told me when I was a newbie, you should do most of your flying by the navball anyway, so visual perspective is nearly irrelevant. I use the main camera view when I am within 20kms or so during docking, during the last few minutes of landings, and to take scenic screenshots, and that's about it.

[Wemb]

The NavHUD mod might be useful? It projects a navball onto the view as if you were inside a giant NavBall. Though you really shouldn't need it after a while - eventually you get to just recognise how things are orientated.

http://kerbal.curseforge.com/ksp-mods/220889-navhud

Wemb