What you should know by now (and you don't)

[Fierce Wolf]

I have a lot of hours invested in game, and I realize I still have a lot to learn. But what about "lakes" in information that somehow you have bypassed/ignored?

 

Mine:

 

a) Where am I going? I still cant read the navball properly, often mistaking east and west.

 

b) Where are the monoliths? No clue about how to use Kerbnet to find anomalies. Never found a single monolith or easter egg.

 

What are yours?

[Piper]

I've always used ScanSAT, so I've never learned how to use Kerbnet either.  For me though, the biggest thing has always been aircraft.  I've always played KSP for its rocketry, and while I've build a few aircraft (just yesterday I landed and flew my first Eve aircraft), compared to rockets/spacecraft I've done very little.  I don't believe I've ever built an SSTO either.

[MechBFP]

4 hours ago, Fierce Wolf said:

a) Where am I going? I still cant read the navball properly, often mistaking east and west.

90 degrees is always east. 0 degrees (the orange line) is always North. 

[Xavven]

2 hours ago, Piper said:

I've always used ScanSAT, so I've never learned how to use Kerbnet either.  For me though, the biggest thing has always been aircraft.  I've always played KSP for its rocketry, and while I've build a few aircraft (just yesterday I landed and flew my first Eve aircraft), compared to rockets/spacecraft I've done very little.  I don't believe I've ever built an SSTO either.

This guide helped me a TON with airplanes. A few years later I started taking private flight lessons IRL and this honestly made reading the pilot's handbook easier because I already had some (very) basic understanding of how positive aerodynamic stability works from playing KSP.

 

[Concodroid]

3 hours ago, Piper said:

I've always used ScanSAT, so I've never learned how to use Kerbnet either.  For me though, the biggest thing has always been aircraft.  I've always played KSP for its rocketry, and while I've build a few aircraft (just yesterday I landed and flew my first Eve aircraft), compared to rockets/spacecraft I've done very little.  I don't believe I've ever built an SSTO either.

I'm the exact opposite.

 

Until a year ago

[Superfluous J]

Other than "no seriously double check that you have antennas, solar panels, rcs, and batteries. Now check again" there is nothing that I feel I should know but don't. Amusingly that's one of the reasons I don't play much anymore.

[N_Danger]

How to make the fuel priority system work. I can never get an balanced flow. 

I still use fuel lines. 

Edited September 26, 2019 by N_Danger

[AHHans]

Check yo' staging!

Happened just yesterday. I don't recall what exactly I was trying to launch, but after <T> <Z> <SPACE> the engines fired but the rocket didn't leave the launchpad. Well, O.K., I probably forgot the launch-clamps. So I hit <SPACE> again (probably not the smartest move), and the SRBs took to the skies. Beautifully straight. But the rocket still remained affixed on the launchpad. Straight out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon .
Well, nothing exploded, so it wasn't anything that a quick trip to the VAB couldn't fix. But I laughed as hard as when I saw Jeb's face after his little test-flight mishap.

[Piper]

13 hours ago, Xavven said:

This guide helped me a TON with airplanes. A few years later I started taking private flight lessons IRL and this honestly made reading the pilot's handbook easier because I already had some (very) basic understanding of how positive aerodynamic stability works from playing KSP.

 

It's not that I don't understand how to make airplanes, or the principles of flight.  I have a private pilot's license IRL, it's mostly just that until recently, I've never really explored much of building aircraft in KSP, so whereas I could build a rocket and launch it to the Mun and back with no testing and be confident it will work just fine, I can't say I can do that with aircraft.  For example, that Eve aircraft I mentioned, I spent a good full afternoon going in and out of KRASH designing something I'm happy with.  Ironically I ended up going with something a lot simpler then all of my initial designs, because I originally was trying to build a tail-sitter, but I was having too many stability issues when I tried to transition to the tail-sitting position.  With Eve's thick atmosphere, even the smallest difference in position between CoL and CoM caused the aircraft to flip.  I may have been able to work something out if I used a ballast system, but I ended up deciding to use Eve's thick atmosphere to my advantage, and built a simple STOL instead, that ended up working as a pretty good boat as well.  The only real mistake I made is I didn't put the Bathymetry experiment underneath the thing, so every time I want to use it I have to drive forward and push down in the water to dive underneath and use it.

[Pecan]

20 hours ago, Fierce Wolf said:

a) Where am I going? I still cant read the navball properly, often mistaking east and west.

I am a qualified navigator in real life.  Yacht inland, offshore, ocean & celestial navigation, light aircraft overland, rally cars, orienteering, (ex) Army navigation instructor, you get the idea.  I often mistake East and West in speech (which is, as you can imagine, hugely embarrassing).  I have no idea why, I've got no problem with plots nor absolute or relative bearings but for some reason 'East' is almost as likely to mean 'West' as not.  Possibly it's because they're only used in talking to amateurs, I'd normally say (0)90 or 270 degrees.

20 hours ago, Fierce Wolf said:

Never found a single monolith or easter egg

Which IS strange, since there's one just North* of Kerbin Space Centre where every game - and most launches - start.

(*North/South never cause any confusion)

Within KSP I've hardly ever built aircraft because they don't interest me.  Spaceplanes are mildly interesting as a way of getting to orbit (but no fuirther) but normally, I'd prefer a pure rocket approach.

Edited September 26, 2019 by Pecan

[Piper]

1 minute ago, Pecan said:

Which IS strange, since there's one just North* of Kerbin Space Centre where every game - and most launches - start.

Funny you mention that.  In all the time I've played KSP, I've only gone and visited that one once.  In my current playthrough, I've visited anomalies on the Mun, Minmus, and Eve, but yet to investigate a single one on Kerbin.

[Pecan]

4 minutes ago, Piper said:

yet to investigate a single one on Kerbin

Probably goes together with, as you said ealier, "whereas I could build a rocket and launch it to the Mun and back with no testing and be confident it will work just fine, I can't say I can do that with aircraft".  The best way to explore Kerbin is with an aircraft and, conversely, the best way to test an aircraft is by exploring Kerbin.

Like me, if you're building rockets the last thing you want to do is go sightseeing at home; that's for tourists *grin*.

[Piper]

17 minutes ago, Pecan said:

Like me, if you're building rockets the last thing you want to do is go sightseeing at home; that's for tourists *grin*.

Lol, that has been EXACTLY the case with me.  After beginning to circumnavigate Eve, I'm seriously thinking of building a proper aircraft for exploring all of Kerbin, because as of right now I've explored more of places like Dres and Eve then I have of my own homeworld.  There are biomes on Kerbin I've never even been to, let alone collected all the science I can.

Now that I stop to think about it, I actually feel kinda bad that I've given Dres more love then I have Kerbin.

[klgraham1013]

How to choose a non-ludicrous amount of mods.

[XLjedi]

How to add my own mods to the game... 

I know what I want to add, I've just been so lazy about tinkering with Unity.

I blame the new parts that have me sidetracked once again on storybook missions.

[DStaal]

How to throttle down.  I can full-throttle, throttle up by increments, and throttle *off*, but I've never worked out how to throttle down by increments - I just throttle off and then throttle up to where I need to be...

[fulgur]

It's [CTRL] (EDIT: well, it is on Windows and Linux). And what I don't know is how the heck I actually do anything. I can do it, but why it works (and sometimes what I'm even doing) is beyond me. Eg rendezvous or interplanetary transfers.

Edited September 28, 2019 by fulgur

[DStaal]

5 hours ago, fulgur said:

It's [CTRL].

Huh.  I'll have to double-check if it's the same on Mac (some of the option/control/command keys get switched around a bit).  If so, that's a really awkward key for me...

[Guest]

How to control EVA Kerbals without the follow moselook option turned on.

 

14 hours ago, DStaal said:

If so, that's a really awkward key for me...

You can rebind it... probably. It's always a trial to find out what nonstandard keys a game will respond to.

[DStaal]

I can probably rebind or remap...  But why?  It's not like I need to throttle down...   

[Kernel Kraken]

How on God's green earth am I supposed to get to the Mün and back without having to de- orbit Jebediah without his capsule and hope he survives long enough to bounce back on his head? I usually stick to medium- sized subsonic aircraft, I have no clue how to rocket.

[Fierce Wolf]

22 hours ago, Kernel Kraken said:

I have no clue how to rocket.

1) Put a capsule

2) place a big fuel tank under it

3) strap the biggest engine you can find under the tank

4) Launch!

5) Understand that placing no batteries and no solar panels was not a good idea

6) Revert launch

 

 

EDIT: I remembered something that I'm still missing. A check list of what every module of my staged ships need. I often forget drone probes or panels in sky cranes, middle stage ships and such. The good news is that i have no mirror nearby, so i can't see my dumbfolded face when I see i have to revert because i forgot ONE PART in a 300+ part vessel.

Edited September 30, 2019 by Fierce Wolf

[Guest]

Docking mode. I always mean to figure it out but when I actually need to dock I never bother, just switch to regular staging mode and do it like I've always done.

[GluttonyReaper]

On 9/26/2019 at 3:32 PM, Pecan said:

I am a qualified navigator in real life.  Yacht inland, offshore, ocean & celestial navigation, light aircraft overland, rally cars, orienteering, (ex) Army navigation instructor, you get the idea.  I often mistake East and West in speech (which is, as you can imagine, hugely embarrassing).  I have no idea why, I've got no problem with plots nor absolute or relative bearings but for some reason 'East' is almost as likely to mean 'West' as not.  Possibly it's because they're only used in talking to amateurs, I'd normally say (0)90 or 270 degrees.

It's not something I use super regularly in my life, but I really do struggle to keep what East and West are in my brain for whatever reason. I always have to check which is "left" and "right", no matter how much I'm using them at any given time, yet North and South being "up" and "down" seems to stick quite happily. Fun thing - I've been doing some stuff with solar astronomy recently, and one of the conventions that is often used for observations is to project the Earth's compass points onto the Sun. This has the really unfortunate effect of actually flipping East and West when using that system, which really doesn't help the confusion...

Edited September 30, 2019 by GluttonyReaper

[kerbiloid]

Than angular scale on top. Always miss it in KSP.

Spoiler