North now at top of navball?

[TheAngryHulk]

Since I began the game north has always been facing down on the navball when on the launchpad. Now north faces up every time I try to launch a rocket. Did they do an update that changed the orientation of the navball?

[MDZhB]

It looks like your command pod is facing the opposite direction. The navball is always from the point of view of the currently controlling part.

[BlackHat]

Yes. Cant see the hatch. So the command pod (or the whole ship?) has been rotated 180 degrees in the VAB during construction.

[TheAngryHulk]

Thank you both. I'm still getting used to the game (obviously).

[Zeiss Ikon]

If you were to install Principia (n-body physics -- orbital perturbations, no SOI boundaries, actual LaGrange libration points and chaotic orbits) you'd have north at the bottom again.

Or maybe Principia just expected me to rotate all my control parts 180 degrees?!

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Select the command part and press space to re-orient it to the default direction.

[Mahnarch]

Side note: Put your radial decouplers up high (near your landing legs) and your struts near the bottom. That way the decoupler will push your spent side tanks out - and away.

Otherwise, they can tip in and wreak havoc.

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

On 8/11/2018 at 12:22 PM, TheAngryHulk said:

Since I began the game north has always been facing down on the navball when on the launchpad. Now north faces up every time I try to launch a rocket.

As folks have mentioned, it matters which way your pod is facing, since that's what determines which-way-is-up on the navball when you go to the launch pad.  (If you think about it a moment, it makes sense that it works this way:  the navball represents the pilot seat's "view" of the world, so if the pod rotates, so does the navball.)

By default, the game orients newly-placed parts such that they're "facing north", i.e. if you go to the VAB, place a command pod without rotating it and then launch the ship after adding parts to it, then the ship will be facing north and the navball will be what you're used to.

The particular ship you've shown in the picture has the command pod rotated around 180 degrees, which is why the navball is, too.

A side note:

Some people like the default north-facing orientation (so that your ship needs to yaw right as it climbs to orbit).  Other folks prefer their ships to face eastward (so that the ship pitches down as it climbs).  I'm in that latter group, myself.    If you happen to prefer an eastward-facing ship and get tired of having to manually rotate ships 90 degrees in the VAB every single time, there's a mod for that, which can set the default direction to be east instead.  Just in case you may be interested.

[Mjp1050]

16 hours ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Select the command part and press space to re-orient it to the default direction.

That's a thing?

I've been playing this game for 3 years and I never knew that! 

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

4 minutes ago, Mjp1050 said:

That's a thing?

I've been playing this game for 3 years and I never knew that! 

It works with all parts too, not just command pods.

[adsii1970]

17 minutes ago, Mjp1050 said:

That's a thing?

I've been playing this game for 3 years and I never knew that! 

I learned it by accident when 1.0 came out. It's much the same way same way I learned to dock back in .22... and been having happy little accidents (and a few not so happy accidents) ever since.

[Mjp1050]

20 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

It works with all parts too, not just command pods.

For the past 3 years, I've been deleting my misaligned parts and grabbing new ones from the parts window. 

The more you know....

[Snark]

1 minute ago, Mjp1050 said:

For the past 3 years, I've been deleting my misaligned parts and grabbing new ones from the parts window. 

Not only does it work with all parts, it also works with all assemblies of parts.  If you detach an entire sub-tree of parts from your ship, hitting the space bar will re-orient the root part of that sub-tree to its default orientation.

[HansonKerman]

Woah.

[TheAngryHulk]

19 hours ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Select the command part and press space to re-orient it to the default direction.

This will come in handy. Thanks.

8 hours ago, Mahnarch said:

Side note: Put your radial decouplers up high (near your landing legs) and your struts near the bottom. That way the decoupler will push your spent side tanks out - and away.

Otherwise, they can tip in and wreak havoc.

I try to do that for my existing rockets but the booster gets connected by the bottom tank and I can only use the move tool to get it halfway down the main rocket. So the engine is in the middle of the main rocket. 

[bewing]

Try holding down the left Shift key while you use the move tool.