Can someone help me with the globe?

[MineOfTheCrafts]

I have been playing KSP for a few months and I am a noob still. Can someone explain the globe at the bottem? What is the difference between the orange and blue side? Which way does the orange dot in the middle face? What does the globe itself represent? What are those purple and green circles in it? And where is this green X everyone talks about? Sorry that I am a noob.

[Shpaget]

It shows you the way the rocket is orienter. Brown/orange is down (planet), blue is up (sky). Orange -v- represents your vehicle. Green marks are prograde and retrograde markers. They show the direction your rocket is flying (the one with four lines) and the direction opposite to it (the one with three lines). Purple marks show the target, whatever that might be (not sure). Green x is the retrograde marker (the one with three lines).

[Vanamonde]

That globe is called the navball. It comes from airplane instruments, and so is easiest to explain in terms of airplanes. The blue side represents the sky, and so is "up" relative to the world that is currently the center of your frame of reference, or in game terms, the Sphere of Influence (SOI). The brown side is dirt, and so represents "down." The symbol that is always in the middle and looks like this -v- is a little picture of an airplane-from-behind, and represents your ship. It tells you which way your ship is pointed. If that symbol is over blue your nose is up (away from the planet), if the right wing is down you are tilted to the right, and so on. However, unlike an airplane, a spaceship is not always travelling in the direction the nose is pointing, so the navball has two other symbols. This one:

|

-o- is called the prograde marker, and that is the direction your ship is currently moving. If it is over brown, for example, you are heading down, even if your nose is pointed in another direction. The other marker that looks like this:

|

X

/ \ Is called the retrograde marker, and it tells you which way you've come from. (It's most useful when you want to point your engine ahead of you to slow down.) One of them is supposed to be green and the other yellow, but the prograde and retrograde both look yellow to me.

The purple marks are supposed to always point to KSC and away from KSC (they are opposites like prograde/retrograde), but there's a little mistake in the game and they actually point to something else right now.

It's also useful to know where planet-north and planet-south are, but they don't have their own symbols on the navball. Instead, there's that one gold meridian line that goes from the north pole to the south pole. Where it touches the horizon (brown/blue transition) at compass heading 0 is north, and where it touches the other horizon at heading 180 is south. The little numbers around the navball indicate degrees up, degrees to the south, etc.

[Endeavour]

Edit: Beaten to it.

Check out the thread called Orbital Mechanics 101 in the How-To section if you still are confused.

Edited September 2, 2012 by Endeavour
Beaten to it

[UmbralRaptor]

That would be the navball. It work similarly to the artifical horizons that you see in flight sims. The blue area represents the sky (area above the horizon), and orange the ground (area below the horizon). The orange dot faces out the front of your craft, typically out the nosecone (if applicable).

The green/yellow markers show what direction your ship is traveling to/from, with the "x" being the from. prograde marker retrograde marker

The purple markers point to/from KSC in the demo, and to/from the second space center in the paid version.

Edited September 2, 2012 by UmbralRaptor
Feh, ninja'd

[SNapple]

Turns out that print screen takes a screenshot of BOTH my screens.

Oh well. Right click on the image and press "Open image in new tab", there you can zoom in to read the text.

And yes, I have KSP running constantly.

Edited November 26, 2015 by SNapple

[EndlessWaves]

Turns out that print screen takes a screenshot of BOTH my screens.

Use alt+printscreen for just the active window.

[SNapple]

Use alt+printscreen for just the active window.

Ok, thanks. That was the last printscreen I have done in years.