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My First Month on KSP


CharleyPink

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Hey everybody, I'm Charley and although I am pretty late to KSP, I am determined to become very good in it. I have been watching KSP on youtube for many years and now I realise, youtubers make it look so easy!! I am currently in the process of trying to build a space station, however building a rocket which actually fits the heavy load is quite hard for me. I have a variety of mods, all but 2 of them are visual. I am pretty good at getting things into orbit, however rendezvousing is my worst nightmare, and once thats mastered, docking will be my new worst nightmare. Any Tips and tricks would be very appreciated!

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How to Rendezvous (Beginner version):

  1. Launch your first thing into a high-ish orbit. 200km is nice. Sure it'll take extra fuel to get there but the sanity savings is immeasurable. Take the time to make the orbit pretty circular. 199km-201km is fine, 182km-217km is not.
  2. Launch your second thing into a lower orbit. 80km, 100km, whatever. Just well under your first thing. Again, take the time to make this orbit circular.
  3. Target the 1st thing while controlling the 2nd thing.
  4. At the next An/Dn marker, make a maneuver node to burn Normal to make those an/dn markers wobble crazily and report 0 degrees. Do that burn.
  5. Make a maneuver node somewhere on your orbit to burn prograde such that you're new orbit will just touch the orbit of Thing 1. This will give you encounter markers.
  6. Drag the maneuver node around until the markers are close to each other. 0.0km is the ultimate goal but anything under 5km is fine. Anything under 2km and I wouldn't bother trying to get closer. Note you can add or remove prograde burn to tweak, and use the little maneuver node editor in the lower left (or a mod) to help you tweak exactly. Do that burn.
  7. Warp to before but near the encounter.
  8. Click your speed indicator on your navball until it says "Target"
  9. Find target retrograde on your navball and aim at it.
  10. Find your target on the screen (it'll be somewhere "behind" your rocket, really ahead of it but your engine will be aimed somewhere near it)
  11. As you pass your target, hit the gas. Be ready to cut the gas because you may only have milliseconds of burn. Experience will tell you how much you need to burn. You get experience doing this over and over :)
  12. Once you're going relatively sedately compared to the target (say less than 1m/s) aim at it, burn to head toward it, so you will reach it in about 10-20 seconds.
  13. You may need to repeat steps 9-12 a couple times. That's cool.
  14. Boom you should now be stopped next to your target.

Notes:

  • Don't do this with your space station. Do it with little mk1 probes with Kerbals in them. There's a reason NASA had an entire Gemini program before they started building space stations and going to the Moon.
  • Do it until it's second hand before you try to build your space station.
  • You can edit the ships into orbits instead of launching them. It's quicker and concentrates on the hard part instead of the boring part.
  • You can do the above on Mun, Minmus, Gilly, etc to see how different it is on different worlds without launching full missions.
Edited by Superfluous J
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8 hours ago, CharleyPink said:

Hey everybody, I'm Charley and although I am pretty late to KSP, I am determined to become very good in it. I have been watching KSP on youtube for many years and now I realise, youtubers make it look so easy!! I am currently in the process of trying to build a space station, however building a rocket which actually fits the heavy load is quite hard for me. I have a variety of mods, all but 2 of them are visual. I am pretty good at getting things into orbit, however rendezvousing is my worst nightmare, and once thats mastered, docking will be my new worst nightmare. Any Tips and tricks would be very appreciated!

This sounds almost like myself 2 years ago. :wink:

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Building a space station with multiple launches is a very rewarding experience. I personally use a Mechjeb-assited rendezvous (The more tedious and less rewarding part for me) and a manual docking

First steps are similar to the ones described by SuperfluousJ (I always park my stations around 350km though), once the station is in orbit launch your docking ship to less than 100k orbit.
-Then target your station -> Maneuver planner-> Hohmann transfer to target.
-Once you are on an intercept course->Maneuver planner-> fine tune closest approach to target (Set it to 50m for small ships/station and to 150m for large ones).
-Once the corrections are made-> Maneuver planner-> match velocities with target (Be sure that the option that is selected is "at closest approach to target").

For docking:

-Switch to to your station, right click the docking port you intend to dock->"Control from here"->set Mechjeb SASS or stock SAS to hold prograde/retrogade/normal/etc , be sure that the docking port is facing your docking ship (It's not required though it just makes maneuvering easier)
-Switch back to your docking ship and set target to the station docking port you intend to dock. You docking ship will be holding the opposite of what you choose on the previous step, meaning for example if your station docking port is holding "retrograde" your docking ship will be holding "prograde".

Then is just a matter of using translation RCS to maneuver your way to docking. I highly recommend using DPAI (Docking port alignment indicator) for this process though,  it makes things less tedious, try it and you'll see what I mean

Hope this helps

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SuperfluousJ and Rocket-propelled Cat have good advice. I'll just add a few bits for docking:

There are different mods for docking port alignment, I like "navball docking port alignment indicator". It just adds a red circle on the navball; aim at that and the docking port axes  will be parallel, but not necessarily lined up. Another trick is to make each craft target the other craft's docking port; be sure to also "set control from" each docking port. This will make the docking ports point at each other, but they may still want to drift apart, causing one or both craft to rotate. This isn't actually necessary; it works well with small craft, but not when docking with a large station.

Finally, I made this handy graphic years ago; play around to see how the how the translation controls (IJKL, H/N for fore/aft) affect the different markers on the navball. Which brings up another point: make sure your RCS is balanced around the CoM, or positioned over the CoM (you can check this in the VAB, with different propellant loads. Don't forget to refill the tanks before launch!) Also, using CapsLock turns on fine control for RCS, and helps balance it so your craft doesn't rotate when trying to translate.

When docking, you really don't need to look at the space view, the navball provides all the information you need, and is all you really need to look at once you have control and targets set.
kQKWpun.png

 

Before long, you'll be building crazy stuff like this...

Spoiler

DlvfKDH.png

 

Edited by StrandedonEarth
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