Squad, "Target Mode" is DRIVING ME CRAZY

[RocketBlam]

Of any one "feature" in KSP, "Target Mode" causes me to have to reload more than any other.

You're flying along, and you need to burn prograde or retrograde, and you're low on fuel, and you try it. You notice something is wrong. The orbit is not changing the way you expected it to. Then the horrifying truth dawns on you: You just burned a third of your remaining fuel burning to the TARGET retrograde, not ORBIT retrograde, so you just wasted that fuel, if not made things even worse.

I DO NO UNDERSTAND why you change the navball mode from "Orbit" to "Target" automatically. It is way too easy to miss that. Please just leave it alone! Don't change things automatically, especially things that are easy to miss.

Sorry if I'm ranting, but this is literally the third time I've thought about posting on this, because it happens all the dang time.

[pandaman]

Yes, I've fallen foul of this a few times too.

[Allocthonous]

Yeah, that'll happen every so often.

Really, we just need distinct navball symbols for 'target prograde' and 'target retrograde'. Or whatever they actually are. I don't think those are quite the right terms. More like 'increase velocity difference' and 'decrease velocity difference'. Add a couple symbols and you could ditch target mode entirely.

[Streetwind]

In contrast to the previous posters, I've never fallen victim to this... in fact I wonder how it even happens for you guys o_O

The auto-changing from Orbit reference to Target reference only happens once you're really close to your target... AKA, you're on a close intercept already. At that point, you want to be in target mode. You need the Target Retrograde marker so that you can easily match orbits. It makes perfect sense to auto-switch.

If you're making rendezvous burns that cost a third of your remaining dV or more - or in fact, if you're making any burn at all that changes your orbit in any significant way while having a vessel targeted and being in close proximity of it - you're probably doing it wrong. If you want to rendezvous with your target, you need to burn Target Retrograde for a small amount of dV, and not manually muck about with your orbit for large amounts. If you don't want to rendezvous with the target, why have you targeted it in the first place? Put the thing you actually want to go to as your target instead! If you really need to make that big of a burn to reach it, it's going to be far enough away that you never have the auto-switch problem.

I've always enjoyed the automatic switching to target mode. In contrast to surface/orbit, which sometimes switches too late or too early for my tastes, and requires me to manually switch, the target mode has always come up precisely when I needed it, and never in any other case. Which is why I'm surprised that three people at once seem to have a problem with it.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Streetwind

[KOCOUR]

As streetwind said. You guys doing somthing wrong. I did seven randevouses, and five dockings yesterday building my orbital station, and the autoswitch came every time just the time i needed it. 

[Magzimum]

I don't recognize the problem. I do lots of rendezvous-ing in the game, and every time I made a burn the wrong way, I had myself to blame, not the game. The game almost always gets it right which mode the navball should be in.

Depending on your play style, your solution to live with this 'nuisance' could be:

1. Have a good system of save games. If you lost too much fuel, but you can revert back to the situation just 5 minutes ago by loading a save game, the problem is not too great.
2. If you play hard-core without saving: Use many many many many checklists. Don't do anything impulsively. Check check check.

Personally, I make lots of stupid mistakes (burning the wrong way, decoupling stages that aren't empty, etc.), so I use lots of save games, with coding so that I can always revert back.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Magzimum

[Technical Ben]

I've done nav ball mistakes before. But it's any mistake from switching it to "surface" or "orbit" or "target" at the wrong time. I landed on Minmus sideways last week because I targeted a flag to land near it, then used the navball to land and try for zero mps. Only to notice it was my relative velocity to the flag, not to the surface!

 

But it was my fault, I'd selected that landing spot, then gone for just north of it. So while this happens on rare occasion for most of us, actually having the option to switch is really really important for different tasks. However I understand some would not want an automatic switch (though most new players would). I guess it's another one of those "change it please in settings files/gui" things.

I really hope Squad realise it's because we like them and their game so much we ask for these small changes. As lots of new players need/like/use training wheels/smaller bikes... but then when we get good, the training comes off, and we move onto pro race bikes Rocket boosters.  

[Sharpy]

IMHO switching 'control from' is a much worse problem. When a rescue drone picks up a capsule in orbit, I really don't want the control switched to that capsule. If I decouple a rover from the main craft, I want it controlled from its probe core, not from structural plate the decoupler was attached to. And if I switch control to that probe core, and change vessels, I want control to remain on that probe core, when I switch back to the rover.

Persistence of control-from point is IMO much worse problem than Target mode switching.

 

Also, dammit, if a craft moves over terrain on Minmus, don't switch it to Orbit mode when crossing 3500m altitude.

[RocketBlam]

2 hours ago, Streetwind said:

In contrast to the previous posters, I've never fallen victim to this... in fact I wonder how it even happens for you guys o_O

The auto-changing from Orbit reference to Target reference only happens once you're really close to your target... AKA, you're on a close intercept already. At that point, you want to be in target mode.

OK, I'll stop you right there. How do you know I "want to be in target mode"? Frankly, I didn't ever use target mode, or even know it existed until a couple of versions ago (in fact I'm pretty sure it didn't exist until recently.) I already know how to match velocities with a target I'm close to. I did it manually for the first thousand hours of playing the game.  If I really always wanted to be in this mode at that time, I obviously wouldn't be having this problem.

Please, Squad, don't try to predict what I want. If I want to be in target mode, I will switch to target mode. 

1 hour ago, Technical Ben said:

I've done nav ball mistakes before. But it's any mistake from switching it to "surface" or "orbit" or "target" at the wrong time. I landed on Minmus sideways last week because I targeted a flag to land near it, then used the navball to land and try for zero mps. Only to notice it was my relative velocity to the flag, not to the surface!

But it was my fault, I'd selected that landing spot, then gone for just north of it.

Right. But then I know it's my fault. Trust me, KSC is littered with the wreckage and corpses of long-dead Kerbals who died because I screwed up. I think everyone's is. Watching your first rocket corkscrew into the ground is part of the fun! But that's MY fault, and I can learn from that. In fact learning from those mistakes is a big part of the challenge. The game didn't take over from me and make a decision that screwed something up because I didn't expect it.

Edited November 14, 2016 by RocketBlam

[The_Rocketeer]

37 minutes ago, RocketBlam said:

OK, I'll stop you right there. How do you know I "want to be in target mode"?

Because being in target mode is the easiest way to match velocity with your rendezvous target. Why else would you a) be targetting it, and b) be that close to it?

37 minutes ago, RocketBlam said:

Frankly, I didn't ever use target mode, or even know it existed until a couple of versions ago (in fact I'm pretty sure it didn't exist until recently.)

No, it did. It's been in KSP for almost as long as I can remember. TBF, I learned to rendezvous and dock without it before I discovered it too, but once you know how to use it there's really no reason you'd go back.

Edited November 14, 2016 by The_Rocketeer

[RX2000]

Yep, been there, done that.

[stibbons]

It must be even worse for you when your navball automatically switches from Surface to Orbital mode.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

IMO the worse thing that happens is that you have a pilot hold retrograde while landing and notice at the last second that the mode is still set to orbit instead of surface- this seems to happen on Minmus quite a bit.

[Firemetal]

Your target velocity is almost never greater than your orbit velocity. Didn't you look at your target velocity before burning retrograde? If you had, you would have noticed that it was significantly less than your orbit velocity and you would have changed it. Furthermore, the retrograde marker on the nav ball is always near the horizon in orbital mode in a circular orbit. Wouldn't it be a nice coincidence if the target mode retrograde was there too?

Hope this helped.

Fire

Edit: Sometimes, it automatically unsets your target as target for me. This is really annoying because it also switches to orbit mode as well. But given the things I said in this post, you should notice it.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Firemetal

[tater]

I've not noticed this as a problem, and I rarely if ever kill anyone.

[moogoob]

3 hours ago, The_Rocketeer said:

Because being in target mode is the easiest way to match velocity with your rendezvous target. Why else would you a) be targetting it, and b) be that close to it?

This. If I want to use TGT mode on the navball, I have a craft targeted. If I don't, I un-target it.

TGT is excellent for docking too - that's what I mostly use it for - it lets you see which way you're drifting when on approach, and if it's off to one side or too high or low you can easily and efficiently correct with RCS.

[HebaruSan]

It's fine for most scenarios, except for direct launch-to-rendezvous. The switchover tends to happen during the coast to Ap, when I have SAS set to prograde for the eventual circularization burn, so the rocket flips around 180°.

[Guest]

It's space. It does not cooperate. You have to triple check everything before doing anything and watch your spacecraft and mission closely.

Make a checklist "Before burn" and attach it somewhere near your monitor.

1. Make sure that correct core is in control

2. Make sure that correct engines are active

... and so on.

[Jarin]

This has killed me several times now, since I use flags to target my final approach for aircraft to KSC.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Jarin

[ZooNamedGames]

...never happens to me... maybe because my natural pilot instincts overtake me to check my instruments before performing a maneuver?

Sorry but please don't change. I like this.

[Wjolcz]

Same thing happened to me. I was on my ascent profile going suborbital and I saw an old sat flying by so I went "Hey, I can target it now and rendezvous with it later to perform an EVA inspection just for fun". But I didn't. Everything went wrong. The vessel I was flying was set to prograde keeping mode and all hell broke loose. Tumbled, wasted tons of fuel and fell back into the atmosphere.

[suicidejunkie]

This happens to me when launching to rendezvous.

Having the hold prograde change suddenly on you when you're in the middle of the main burn to orbit hurts bad.

I have to switch the sas to hold early and notch the nose down manually for the middle portion of the gravity turn.  Once the nav ball auto-flips to target mode, I can flip it back to orbital mode, and then safely use hold prograde again until I'm in orbit and ready to dock.

[Jarin]

I'm mostly confused how "target speed" and "surface speed" can be so incredibly different when I'm targeting a stationary object on the surface. My target speed always shows significantly higher, despite the fact that my surface speed and approach speed should be nearly equal. Instead, it's 100+m/s off, and I stall out on approach if I don't catch it in time. (yes, I always check now, but I didn't even realize what was wrong the first few times)

[Gordon Fecyk]

There are other reasons for wanting to avoid an automatic switch between navball modes:

For instance, launching rockets that I want to keep on a ballistic trajectory for atmosphere pressure tests.

--

[Capt. Hunt]

Just FYI, the Surface/Orbit mode switch occurs at Max-Q, on Kerbin at least.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Capt. Hunt