EVA trouble - stabilising a kerbal

[coljac]

I've just returned to KSP after a year or more away, and I have a lot to re-learn. I took a contract to rescue a stranded kerbal (which I managed), however the EVAs were much more difficult than I remembered. Namely, once a kerbal gets spinning (say, from a collision) then getting him stable is very difficult. Cancelling out rotation on each axis one by one is tough and getting it exact seems impossible. RCS manoeuvres are very hard to do when the orientation of the jets keeps changing. I thought the kerbals had the ability to stabilise themselves in a direction away from the camera, but this seems not to be the case. Am I mis-remembering? 

[Snark]

Hello, and welcome to the forums! 

50 minutes ago, coljac said:

I've just returned to KSP after a year or more away, and I have a lot to re-learn. I took a contract to rescue a stranded kerbal (which I managed), however the EVAs were much more difficult than I remembered. Namely, once a kerbal gets spinning (say, from a collision) then getting him stable is very difficult. Cancelling out rotation on each axis one by one is tough and getting it exact seems impossible. RCS manoeuvres are very hard to do when the orientation of the jets keeps changing. I thought the kerbals had the ability to stabilise themselves in a direction away from the camera, but this seems not to be the case. Am I mis-remembering?

Not sure what you're running into-- I haven't ever noticed this myself.  Turning RCS on causes the kerbal to automatically orient and stabilize.  It's about the same now as it's always been, as far as I can tell.

The only time I've ever had trouble with EVA kerbals getting into spin problems was when I was running KIS (Kerbal Inventory System), a mod that lets kerbals carry stuff.  When they're carrying stuff with that mod, the kerbal's mass increases, and I think that can throw off the PID tuning of the RCS actuators.

But for the stock game?  Haven't run into it myself.  Not sure what's going on in your case.

A couple of ideas to try:

• Have you tried turning the kerbal's EVA thrusters off and then on again?  (R key)
• Have you tried killing the rotation by briefly boosting to 5x timewarp and then back down again?  (Timewarp kills rotation.)

 

[bewing]

The SAS button toggles whether the Kerbal auto-rotates or not.

There's a setting in the Main Settings, also -- "EVAs Auto-Rotate to Camera". Other than that, you can hit space, and that is supposed to make the Kerbal face away from you.

If the camera is facing due north or south, however, the Kerbals are mostly unable to face in that direction (except in a very special free-rotation mode). Attempting to force them to face in an illegal direction will cause fairly wild oscillations in their RCS thrusting.

 

[coljac]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

There's a setting in the Main Settings, also -- "EVAs Auto-Rotate to Camera". Other than that, you can hit space, and that is supposed to make the Kerbal face away from you.

Aha! This tip on spacebar made my life so much easier. Perhaps I didn't notice it because I'm using a joystick. I'll check out the setting as well.

The 5x speedup is a good tip too!