Hidden gameplay utilities

[Sharpy]

I remember my gameplay from... 1.0.2? when I was docking, and wondering "why the heck are my lights flickering so?"

Then I correlated it with "translate right"...

[LordFerret]

16 hours ago, jlcarneiro said:

Thanks!

Didn't notice that, gotta read changelogs more carefully...

Changelogs?!? Who reads changelogs??? I just get in there and fly ..... or not.

[Perry Apsis]

Backspace to restore focus to the active vessel when in map mode, rather than tabbing through every body in the system. 

Oh, and hiding the navball in map mode lets you shift-tab to shuffle through bodies in reverse. Just don't come crying to me because you held down shift to get back to your ship, and found that when you got there, you had run through your orbital station at full throttle.

[Superfluous J]

Hmm. I didn't know they were buggy. I've even used them in 1.1.3 with no problems.

1 hour ago, Perry Apsis said:

Oh, and hiding the navball in map mode lets you shift-tab to shuffle through bodies in reverse. Just don't come crying to me because you held down shift to get back to your ship, and found that when you got there, you had run through your orbital station at full throttle.

Related to this, I always run at 5x time warp to avoid just such a problem.

[Corona688]

12 hours ago, W. Kerman said:

Once you have your encounter, you can focus on the planet, pull up the hidden navball, and use it for getti ng insanely close flybys.

"use" as in what?  Does poking the navball somehow adjust the node, or do you mean old-fashioned burning in random directions until it fits?

[Kergarin]

If you want to switch between two or more nearby vessels in mapview and can't get a click on the desired one, you could change the type of the actual vessel in the rename window to something else (if it is not already), and then make this type of vessel invisible in the map view.

At least that's faster than leaving the game to do this in the tracking station.

Or is there an easier way?

 

 

It also took a long time until I realized that you can use mirrored symmetry in the VAB and radial symmetry in the SPH.

 

[W. Kerman]

38 minutes ago, Corona688 said:

"use" as in what?  Does poking the navball somehow adjust the node, or do you mean old-fashioned burning in random directions until it fits?

Point in one radial direction for up or down, and use prograde and retrograde for side to side. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes being able to change throttle in the map+being able to point into a certain direction via SAS. 

Not random directions.

[Kelvin Kerbin]

17 hours ago, Snark said:

My favorite "hidden utility"?

The way that toggling on "fine control mode" (caps lock) causes RCS thrusters to engage proportional thrust so they automatically compensate for placement around CoM, so that you get waste-free lateral translation ability without having them try to rotate the ship.

Are you sure about that? I think pressing caps lock cuts the output thrust such that the RCS induced rotation is controllable by the SAS. Have you used RCS with caps lock on and SAS off to see if you rotate?

[Corona688]

39 minutes ago, W. Kerman said:

Point in one radial direction for up or down, and use prograde and retrograde for side to side. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes being able to change throttle in the map+being able to point into a certain direction via SAS. 

Not random directions.

Fair enough.  The 'right' direction is often a combination of two of those vectors, however.  Making another planning node can narrow that down.

Lately though, I've noticed that fine intercepts are so unstable there's little point fine tuning until you're closer to the destination.  Squad is reportedly working on improving this situation.

Edited August 25, 2016 by Corona688

[Leafbaron]

Didn't know this until a few days ago but Alt + L locks staging.

[Superfluous J]

22 minutes ago, Leafbaron said:

Didn't know this until a few days ago but Alt + L locks staging.

I learned that one the hard way: I triggered it accidentally and nearly tore my hair out trying to figure out the "bug" where nothing would stage.

[W. Kerman]

1 hour ago, Corona688 said:

Fair enough.  The 'right' direction is often a combination of two of those vectors, however.  Making another planning node can narrow that down.

Lately though, I've noticed that fine intercepts are so unstable there's little point fine tuning until you're closer to the destination.  Squad is reportedly working on improving this situation.

Sometimes my encounter would turn out not to exist, so yeah.

[Snark]

3 hours ago, Kelvin Kerbin said:

Are you sure about that? I think pressing caps lock cuts the output thrust such that the RCS induced rotation is controllable by the SAS. Have you used RCS with caps lock on and SAS off to see if you rotate?

I'm not in front of a KSP computer to check right now, but I'm pretty sure it works the way I said, yes.

[HvP]

If you right-click maneuver nodes it will give you two buttons (- +) on the underside of the icon. One advances the maneuver forward in time one orbit, and the other brings it backwards again a full orbit.

Placing one maneuver node down in front of you and pushing the + orbit button after right-clicking on the node will show you the effect on your orbital intercepts if that burn happened one orbit later, adding another orbit every time you press it.

HOWEVER

Place a maneuver node ahead like normal, and don't advance the orbit buttons, but instead create your rendezvous burn node to show the predicted orbit after the burn just like always. Then place a second maneuver node on the predicted new orbit and you can see what future intercepts look like several orbits after your first burn by simply advancing the + from the node right-click buttons on the second (otherwise un-adjusted) node. You can now adjust your first node to fine tune to see if you get a close approach after three or four or five revolutions of your new orbit (rather than so many revolutions of your current orbit.)

The orbit buttons on the first node shows you what your intercepts look like if you burned on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd + revolution of your CURRENT orbit. The buttons on the second node can show you what your intercepts look like after 1,2,3 + revolutions of your NEW orbit after the burn.

[tetryds]

Using the rotation gizmo, press F to turn on absolute mode.

Then turn on angle snap.

Have fun with your perfectly aligned wings and parts.

Also works for translation, makes it easy to align panels and make a big one.

[Sharpy]

Scrollwheel with Alt changes FOV/zoom.

[FullMetalMachinist]

4 hours ago, Sharpy said:

Scrollwheel with Alt changes FOV/zoom.

And double-click the scroll wheel resets it. 

[ThatPilot]

On 8/25/2016 at 1:58 AM, FullMetalMachinist said:

Use the list on the left to focus on the ship you want to rename. When you do, a few orange button will pop up on the right. Click on the one that's an "i". After you do that a small window will open giving you more detailed information on that ship. Click (or is it double-click?) on where it says the name of the ship. That will bring up the rename window, where you can not only rename it, but also change what type of craft it is (ship, probe, station, etc.). 

Good lord. Thank you forever for this knowledge.

[Kergarin]

Using alt + q/w/e/a/s/d  to trim the controlls

[MarkusA380]

On 25.8.2016 at 3:37 AM, Snark said:

My favorite "hidden utility"?

The way that toggling on "fine control mode" (caps lock) causes RCS thrusters to engage proportional thrust so they automatically compensate for placement around CoM, so that you get waste-free lateral translation ability without having them try to rotate the ship.

Are you serious?!

[Snark]

51 minutes ago, MarkusA380 said:

Are you serious?!

Yup, quite serious.  A very handy functionality that has been around since forever, and I've been trumpeting it at every chance, since it's so cool and so little known.

Try it. 

I like to have all my RCS thrusters set, always, to translation-only (i.e. I turn off their pitch/yaw/roll authority)-- I've got a snippet of ModuleManager config to make that the default, so I don't have to remember to do it manually to all of them every time I build a ship, which would be tedious.

With zero-rotation-authority RCS, all I have to do when I'm docking is hit caps lock, and presto:  I get 100% efficient use of my RCS, used for translation only, and my reaction wheels take care of any rotation I need to do.  Works great.

(Though if my RCS thrusters are reasonably well-balanced around the CoM, they don't have to be perfect:  it's OK even without the caps-lock feature, as long as I've got their rotation authority turned off.  They'll try to rotate the ship a bit when they translate, the reaction wheels make up for it, and it ends up working out anyway.)

[Trann]

48 minutes ago, Snark said:

I like to have all my RCS thrusters set, always, to translation-only (i.e. I turn off their pitch/yaw/roll authority)-- I've got a snippet of ModuleManager config to make that the default, so I don't have to remember to do it manually to all of them every time I build a ship, which would be tedious.

And here I've been turning off RCS during rolls and pitch maneuvers like a chump!  (Is that config file sharable?)

 

Obligatory on-topic comment: this month, I found "Tab" cycles through celestial objects in the map view.  Every time I discover a key doing something interesting, I go back to the http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Key_bindings reference and, yup, I should have remembered that it but in-game discovery seems to always supersede "I read it back in 0.24 days" or whatever.  8)

[Snark]

10 minutes ago, Trann said:

And here I've been turning off RCS during rolls and pitch maneuvers like a chump!  (Is that config file sharable?)

Yeah, that's excruciating-- especially since in flight, unlike the editor, RCS actuator toggles are per part rather than per symmetry group, so ya gotta go around and hit all of them, and of course they're really small and half of them are always on the dark side of the ship...

Anyway, sure, the config file is trivially simple and just a few lines, I can paste it right here.  Don't have it with me at the moment, or I would have already done so-- will try to remember to provide it when I get to my KSP computer.  I might forget.  Please ping me if you haven't seen it here within 24 hours. 

[Trann]

@Snark Give yourself 36, if you'd like; it's the weekend!

[Jovus]

Probably fairly well-known, but in the editor, if you have a part selected and you hold down the Mod* key, that part will only attach node-to-node. Useful for all kinds of things - placing antennae just right, getting things in cargo bays, you name it.

*Usually Alt