in-game controls and spaceship parts

[king of nowhere]

A few miscellaneous questions from a new user.

I am pretty knowledgeable about rocketry and orbital mechanics, but I realized that there is a vast gulf between knowing what I want to do and figuring out how to get the game to do it. Especially since the one big flaw of this game is the lack of explanations about controls. So, let's start

1) I am currently trying to recover a stone from Mun. After realizing that just collecting a sample won't do, I discovered by looking on the internet that there are stones scattered on the terrain, and you should be able to pick them up with your astronauts.

I have found one such stone. I have my astronaut on top of it. But I cannot figure out how I am supposed to pick up the stone. Is this something that I can only do with a rover and appropriate robotic parts?

2) i would like to make a rover. I know I want a big flat surface on top of which I can attach parts. Too bad I can't find any such part among everything I unlocked (which includes all technologies with a cost less than 90). I tried to look up tutorials on the internet, but they all either give basic tips that I already know [yes, I know I want to keep my rover low and flat to keep a stable baricenter, I would be happy to oblige if only I could find appropriate parts] or they start with pieces that I can't seem to find. I even tried to use regular rocket parts and rotate them horizontally, but the wheels won't align correctly after that. What are some good flat surfaces that I can use as a base for a rover to strap things on top?

3) I tried to make a plane. Unfortunately, it won't keep a radial simmetry if i attach one single piece. specifically, a plane needs one tail rudder (is this the proper term? anyway, the sort of fin that goes upwards from the back of the fuselage) that's perpendicular to the fuselage. but i can't place one. the game insists in placing it leaning on one side or the other. I tried to fix it by rotating it manually, but clearly I can't get enough accuracy there, as the plane keeps capsizing. Same problem with the front wheel, or any other part that must be aligned carefully. How do I fix this?

4) orbital rendez-vous. getting close enough is simple, if time-consuming. rescuing a stranded astronaut is a long, difficult process. I would like to make space stations, or to leave part of the ship in orbit to make landing more efficient. But then I'd need to make an orbital rendez-vous with the various parts, every single time, and the idea is putting me off. Is there a simpler way to do it?

 

thanks to everyone who will contribute. I will probably have more questions in the future.

[magnemoe]

Its multiple sort of stones, some are for picking up, other for probing with the robotic arm. Its often not clear if the rock can be picked up. 
The pick up ones tend to be smaller but not always. 
I think you can also use the robot arm on items who can be picked up. 

[Stamp20]

1. To pick up stones, stand next to them and right-click on the kerbal. There should be a button that says something along the lines of Pick up Mun Stone.

2. A RoveMate probe core, modular girders, or structural plates are good for rover bodies. The RoveMate is in the pods category, and the structural plates are in the structural category.

3. In the bottom left, look for the small icon that has a circle around a point. Click it so the circles changes to a hexagon, which will make parts snap to angles.

4. To make rendezvous easy, make sure the target's orbit is noticeably higher or lower than your orbit. Make a maneuver to transfer to the target like you would to get to the Mun. To slow down, I recommend installing BetterBurnTime, it has an indicator telling you when to burn to slow down.

[Starhawk]

Hello @king of nowhere and welcome to the KSP Forum!

Much of the user interface is non-obvious.

1) When standing on top of a Mun Stone right click on the Kerbal to bring up the context menu.  There will be a menu item for collecting the Stone.

2) One of the things to learn about the build interface is the gizmos.  When using the rotation gizmo you can set it to either 'Local' or 'Absolute'.  Using 'Absolute' mode you can rotate any part to be perfectly straight on any axis.

3} The symmetry modes in the craft editors can be changed and will cycle through the various symmetry modes.  Using 'Radial' symmetry (default in the VAB) you can select single, two, three, four, six and eight-way symmetry.   The default in the Spaceplane Hangar (SPH) is 'Mirror' symmetry.  This allows one or two-way symmetry.  Also see point 2}.

4} There are a number of tutorials regarding good methods for orbital rendezvous in the Tutorials subsection of the forum.

Glad to have you aboard!

Happy landings!

[king of nowhere]

ok, thanks for the answers!

1) i found it and collected the stone all right. for a while i thought there was a bug because i didn't got a message of mission parameter complete, but i got the objective fulfilled when i got back to kerbin.

2) i still miss many of those pieces. anyway, will try later. now i have a lot of other things that i should do.

3) damn, i saw that command on the tutorial but forgot about it. I hope for the second game they implement a help panel with a list of command

4) will try to install that

 

[Superfluous J]

Good answers so far, but here's some extra info

2. Try building rovers in the Spaceplane Hangar. It's designed to build horizontally instead of vertically. Once built there, you can use the blue button at the top of the screen to switch back to the VAB.

The good rover parts are higher in the tech tree. Yeah it's annoying. I make early rovers with multiple starter struts (they're actually trusses but the game calls them struts) to make the body of the rover, around a capsule or probe core.

4. Rendezvous and docking, even if you understand orbital mechanics, are hard at first. Consider them as a boss in the game. The good news is they get easier with practice and the day may even come when they are mundane. Keep at it, with an eye out for how you can make it easier for yourself.

Edited May 25, 2020 by Superfluous J

[king of nowhere]

ok, new question:

i have tried to attach parachutes to my boosters to be able to recover them (not that i really need it, my program is funded by tourists paying hefty prices to tag along on missions I was going to undertake anyway; but it feels better if i can make my exploration more sustainable). booster is the BACC, which has 1.5 tons of mass when empty. i used the MK-16-XL parachute, which is designed to handle bigger loads. I told it to deploy when risky, because i noticed otherwise sometimes it wait too much to deploy. stages were set up fine, the parachutes had to activate when the boosters were detached. looking back from the rockets, i even saw at least one paracute deploy.

and yet i couldn't find any booster to recover, anywhere.

what am i doing wrong? is it even possible to attach a parachute to a booster and recover it after launch? i read somewhere that debris in the atmosphere more than 25 km from the main spacecraft are authomatically deleted

EDIT: building rovers in the spaceplane hangars didn't help. it still tried to put the wheels in the wrong direction. but with a lot of painstaking manual alignment I managed my first working rover! I was so happy, I started using it as a racing car around the space center until I managed to capsize it by turning at a particularly high speed . I needed to restart it anyway, because i forgot to put a ladder for the crew to get back in

Edited May 26, 2020 by king of nowhere

[Gargamel]

Once any part that doesn't have a control pod on it goes out of physics range, it gets deleted if it is in atmosphere.   You can't recover stages in the stock game (not easily at least).  If you simply want to offset costs, and simulate recovery of remotely landed vessels/stages, the mod Stage Recovery works pretty great for that.   There are other mods that that work too. 

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

Once any part that doesn't have a control pod on it goes out of physics range, it gets deleted if it is in atmosphere.   You can't recover stages in the stock game (not easily at least).  If you simply want to offset costs, and simulate recovery of remotely landed vessels/stages, the mod Stage Recovery works pretty great for that.   There are other mods that that work too. 

would it work if i put a contol pod on each booster? they'd fit very nicely between the booster and the parachute.

otherwise i don't need the money, it was just for the sake of doing something nice.

 

I just started to use a rover, and i discovered a problem: I cannot brake. the wheels can brake by their description (rovemax S2, the only one i have unlocked so far), but the vehicle just won't. when i'm moving i can adapt by accelerating backwards, but as soon as i go on EVA, if there is even a slight incline the rover will start sliding away.

 

And yet another problem: I'm trying to use the science machines in the payload section (not sure on the translation because i have the game in a different language, but it's the second-to-last on the build menu on the left), and there is this Go-ob analyzator, and metereologic analyzator, and a few other tools that look really cool. So far I figured that I must first put the SEQ-3 unit, and then i can put the other stuff inside it. But then i can't seem to do anything with them. How are they used?

 

thanks again

[Superfluous J]

33 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

I just started to use a rover, and i discovered a problem: I cannot brake. the wheels can brake by their description (rovemax S2, the only one i have unlocked so far), but the vehicle just won't. when i'm moving i can adapt by accelerating backwards, but as soon as i go on EVA, if there is even a slight incline the rover will start sliding away.

How are you braking? B will brake as you hold it, but to continually brake you need to click the brake button up by the altimeter. To help find it, tap B and it will flicker.

[Gargamel]

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

would it work if i put a contol pod on each booster? they'd fit very nicely between the booster and the parachute.

There's a technique for doing it in stock, I've never done it, so I can't say.   I just use the mod I listed to recover the dumb stages that have no control. 

[AHHans]

6 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

would it work if i put a contol pod on each booster? they'd fit very nicely between the booster and the parachute.

No. In a stock game any craft (debris or not) that is outside physics range and below a certain altitude (IIRC 20 km for Kerbin) in the atmosphere (i.e. not landed) will just get deleted. The game doesn't compute the physics of craft outside the physics range, so it doesn't know if the part will crash or if it has enough parachutes to land softly or whatever. So to keep things simple anything below the magic altitude is just assumed to be destroyed. In a similar fashion: craft in an orbit that dips into the atmosphere (but not low enough to be deleted) will not have their orbits decay if they are outside physics range.

What I do regularly is to recover the last stage of my rockets that was on a suborbital trajectory and still high enough when the payload finished circularizing into orbit. I.e. I first put the payload into orbit, and then switched to the booster and followed it down to a more or less safe landing.

Edited May 26, 2020 by AHHans

[king of nowhere]

more questions about controls:

- the orbital scanner scans for resources. it takes a lot of energy to transmit data, though, and my first satellite will stop downlink halfway. i thought it would start back where it stopped when the batteries are full, but instead it restars from 0. is there any way to transmit the data if I don't have enough battery power to do it in one go?

- my second satellyte did a good orbital scan for resources. now i see the whole planet covered in purple lines. what does that mean? what am I supposed to do with that?

- the clamp-o-tron is supposed to be able to detach and reattach pieces. it is needed for anything that i want to assemble on orbit. i experimented with it, and i could not find how to reattach the pieces after i decoupled them. how do i reattach pieces through a clamp-o-tron?

- I'm trying to use the science machines in the payload section (not sure on the translation because i have the game in a different language, but it's the second-to-last on the build menu on the left), and there is this Go-ob analyzator, and metereologic analyzator, and a few other tools that look really cool. So far I figured that I must first put the SEQ-3 unit, and then i can put the other stuff inside it. But then i can't seem to do anything with them. How are they used?

 

thanks again

[Rhomphaia]

2 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

- the clamp-o-tron is supposed to be able to detach and reattach pieces. it is needed for anything that i want to assemble on orbit. i experimented with it, and i could not find how to reattach the pieces after i decoupled them. how do i reattach pieces through a clamp-o-tron?

With another Clamp-o-tron.  In the VAB you can attach any part to a Clamp-o-tron and use it like a decoupler, but in flight a clamp-o-tron will only attach to another. clamp-o-tron of the same size.

 

[king of nowhere]

3 hours ago, Rhomphaia said:

With another Clamp-o-tron.  In the VAB you can attach any part to a Clamp-o-tron and use it like a decoupler, but in flight a clamp-o-tron will only attach to another. clamp-o-tron of the same size.

 

i tried that too. i had two clamp-o-tron, i detached them, and then i could not reattach. I just tried again, just in case. the clamp-o-tron were touching each other. I right-clicked on both sides, but could not find any command.

is it another case of having to press a special key that is not written anywhere else?

 

[Rhomphaia]

4 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

i tried that too. i had two clamp-o-tron, i detached them, and then i could not reattach. I just tried again, just in case. the clamp-o-tron were touching each other. I right-clicked on both sides, but could not find any command.

is it another case of having to press a special key that is not written anywhere else?

 

Nope, when you detach though you will have to move a certain distance away before they will dock again though. (iirc 10m)

Also note that there is only one face of the clam-o-tron that will dock, this is fairly obvious on the smaller sizes, but it is somewhat common to see the 2.5 meter size accidentally placed back to front.

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Rhomphaia said:

Nope, when you detach though you will have to move a certain distance away before they will dock again though. (iirc 10m)

Also note that there is only one face of the clam-o-tron that will dock, this is fairly obvious on the smaller sizes, but it is somewhat common to see the 2.5 meter size accidentally placed back to front.

and here i was making all my tests on the launch pad, deattaching the pieces and trying to reattach them back immediately. I tried to move around first, and the pieces recoupled as soon as they were close enough.

[jimmymcgoochie]

@king of nowhere if you right click an antenna and then click ‘require complete’ it will change to ‘allow partial’, which stops it giving up and starting from 0% if it runs out of power; however this does also mean your transmissions can transmit less science back home in some cases and it will bump along transmitting little bursts as soon as it has enough power so you can’t really do anything else. NOT recommended if you have no solar panels or other forms of power generation!

The stripes on the planet are indicators of ore density, you can change the cutoff value in the control panel to only show the most ore-rich regions and change the colour scheme too which might make it easier to see what areas have the most ore. Use both together to find the best sites to start ore mining as mining ore is faster when there’s a greater concentration of it around.

 

The deployed science kit (in the payloads tab) needs to be transported in the SEQ-3 (or SEQ-9) and then deployed by a Kerbal. To deploy it, right click the SEQ-3 to see what’s inside it, then pick a part and drag it over a nearby Kerbal who’s on EVA, outside the spacecraft. Drop the part into the Kerbal’s empty inventory slot and they’ll carry it around on their back. To deploy it, click the arrow beside the carrier part and it should appear in front of your Kerbal; press space bar to deploy.

Note- science experiments work best if deployed by a scientist and power production (solar panels and later RTGs) work best if deployed by an engineer, and higher levels of both result in faster science generation or greater power production. Deploy the control station first, then power, then science. If deploying beyond Kerbin’s sphere of influence (Kerbin, Mun and Minmus) and you have the comm net enabled, you’ll need the deployable dish too or that science will never get back home.

There’s a mod called Deployable Batteries which adds some surface deployable battery packs to power your experiments when it’s dark, as without sunlight they’ll just sit at night without making any science. Higher level engineers boost their total power capacity and so the length of time they can power your modules in the dark, just remember you’ll need more power generation to charge them up in the day as well as run the experiments.

Edited June 4, 2020 by jimmymcgoochie