pre-planed flightpath?

[Perotis]

I was wondering if there was a way to plan your flight path before launch. It just seems to me that a REAL space program would operate that way.   I'm not sure if it is something that you unlock as you upgrade you flight center, or if it's not in the game at all because the game maker wants it to be a purely seat-of-your-pants experience. 

...or at least being able to pause the flight while planning your next maneuver.

[Snark]

42 minutes ago, Perotis said:

I was wondering if there was a way to plan your flight path before launch. It just seems to me that a REAL space program would operate that way.   I'm not sure if it is something that you unlock as you upgrade you flight center, or if it's not in the game at all because the game maker wants it to be a purely seat-of-your-pants experience. 

...or at least being able to pause the flight while planning your next maneuver.

Nope.

The extent of pre-planning flight paths in KSP is the ability to create maneuver nodes, but you can only do that if you have an orbit, which means it's not something you can do while sitting on the launchpad.

About the best you can do is to launch to a low Kerbin orbit first, then plan out your flight path.

Yeah, if you think about it in "real-life" terms it does seem kinda silly.  However, in practice it's not much of an issue because pretty much anything you do is going to involve getting to orbit first.  So it's not that much of a loss.

Edited December 28, 2015 by Snark

[Geschosskopf]

I would add that the limitations on pre-planning don't end when you get to orbit, although this depends somewhat on what you're trying to do.

By default, the game will only show you a few patched conics in advance of where you are now.  Normally this isn't that big a deal because most flights involve just 1 main maneuver en route, such as burning to Mun or moving to rendezvous.  But if you want to plot out a long string of moves, such as a Voyager-type multiple interplanetary fly-by series, you've got a big problem.  While you can edit your settings.cfg file to show more conics in advance so you can plot such things (assuming you've got the mods to plan such things), having lots of conic patches is REALLY inconvenient for normal flying.  And even when you set up such a thing, you've still got the issue that crossing SOI boundaries jiggles your trajectory a bit, even if you take care to walk across the line at 1x warp.  Thus, you'll need some mid-course burns after the 1st SOI change, which will throw off everything you already had set up.

So basically, the game limits you go planning about 1 step ahead at a time, maybe 2.  But you can plan these single steps out months, even years, in advance.  Having Kerbal Alarm Clock is pretty much required for this, and KAC works WAY better with Snark's Better Burn Time.