Tips and tricks you found out yourself

[ArmchairGravy]

One thing that isn't mentioned enough ...

Aircraft (atmospheric/SSTO): Learn to use the trim controls, mod+WASD (mod=Alt under Windows). These set your pitch/roll/yaw 'defaults' so you can 'more-or-less' fly hands-free and without SAS, with just the odd tweak to trim every now and again (eg; as fuel drains).

In practice:

1) get your plane pointing roughly where you want it.

2) if it tends to nose-down when you release the keys/joystick press mod+S (ie; trim up) - probably no more than three or four times

if it tends to nose-up (eg; as fuel drains and the centre of mass moves back) press mod+W.

etc...

3) as it wanders off-course, just mod+(whatever) to correct the drift

Thanks for this one! I had no idea how to adjust trim.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

If you press middle click in IVA, you zoom in.

[Caelib]

Burning out of the Kerbin's SOI for interplanetary transfers.

[Skorpychan]

They really mean it when they say to pull craft rather than push.

RCS thrusters at each end of a craft, rather than just center of mass.

And leaving SAS on while making translation burns covers a lot of design sins.

RCS can stabilise a dodgy landing.

Quicksave before you attempt a landing, in case you botch it.

DO NOT EVER EVER EVER night-land an unfamiliar ship. Wait, and do it in the daytime. Your landing gear will thank you.

Just stick a few solar panels on there so it won't run totally out of power.

[Red Iron Crown]

Burning out of the Kerbin's SOI for interplanetary transfers.

If you mean leaving Kerbi's SOI before setting up your transfer, it costs more delta V to do it that way.

[StrandedonEarth]

If you mean leaving Kerbi's SOI before setting up your transfer, it costs more delta V to do it that way.

True, but if you don't have any sort of transfer window calculator, then you have a whole kolar orbit to play with the maneuver node. I did my first Jool tour that way, and probed many planets before .23, before I discovered Kerbal Alarm Clock. 2-4 LV-N's and 2 jumbo tanks usually gives dV to spare.

[wolfedg]

This is probably the wrong way to do things, but I found it is easier to land on moons by getting into a low circular orbit-usu 20km and then just burning retrograde until my orbit velocity is zero. this allows me to "drop right in" vs trying to slow down my horizontal velocity close to the surface.

[_jack]

The big SAS units are perfect for hiding away ugly rcs tanks, batteries, and rtg's.

[我们�能死]

ion engine is the most useless thing for large ships...do not try adding more ion engines，because the TWR itself is only 0.2!

[mellojoe]

For planes, sometimes WIDER is better than LONGER.

Your center of lift will not change. Your center of mass WILL change, though, as fuel drains. Having a bunch of long tanks in a line means your center of mass will change quite a bit. Having multiple smaller tanks spread wide ensures your center of mass doesn't change much, helping to keep the ratio of CoLift and CoMass proportional like it was when you initially launched. Stock aerodynamics is not punishing of wide planes (yet), so for now, wider is better.

[Traches]

Floppy rocket causing SAS to go wild? Stick a probe core on a lower stage (mechjeb case works well!) and right click -> control from here before you launch. Your attitude reference won't be as affected by your rocket flexing, which will cause SAS to be more stable.

[cantab]

Floppy rocket causing SAS to go wild? Stick a probe core on a lower stage (mechjeb case works well!) and right click -> control from here before you launch. Your attitude reference won't be as affected by your rocket flexing, which will cause SAS to be more stable.

Indeed this can be helpful. Just remember to hit the square brackets after you drop the stage to switch to the upper part of your rocket.

[Traches]

Indeed this can be helpful. Just remember to hit the square brackets after you drop the stage to switch to the upper part of your rocket.

Yeah, it's always awkward when you end up flying the wrong part of your ship.

[TYRT]

Don't try any orbital rendezvous without mechjeb:sticktongue:

[zarakon]

When trying to fly a jet engine at the flame-out boundary, it's more effective to cut the throttle (X key) and immediately raise it than to simply lower the throttle

It comes from the fact that thrust is programmed on jet engines to ramp down gradually when you adjust the throttle.

When a flameout occurs, you lose all thrust immediately. If you just start lowering the throttle slowly, it can take a significant amount of time before the requested thrust actually goes below the threshold where it can turn back on at all. During that time you lose a lot of speed.

If you press X to fully cut the throttle, the engine actually turns back ON as quickly as possible as it's ramping down from your previous setting toward zero. Then you immediately raise the throttle to stop the fall in thrust. You spend a little bit of time at below-ideal thrust, but that's far better than spending that time at zero thrust.

[magnemoe]

The big SAS units are perfect for hiding away ugly rcs tanks, batteries, and rtg's.

http://i.imgur.com/r1LrK2F.png

Almost as they are designed for it with all the empty space, perhaps some would add reaction wheels to the service compartments.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/61040-0-23-6S-Service-Compartment-Tubes-Design-smooth!

[Rus-Evo]

I never appreciated at first that when docking you can just thrust towards an object with RCS and then adjust the velocity bubble on to the target so you can go straight in (provided you already had both craft pointing north south or such). Its about a trillion times easier than doing it by eye.

My advice to Padawan-Kerbs is "the Navball is your friend".

[ArmchairGravy]

You control the prograde and retrograde markers, they should not control you.

Pull the prograde marker, push the retrograde marker.

Once you get this the navball becomes your friend.

[StrandedonEarth]

Feeeel the navball. Become one with the navball. Fly the navball. The pretty picture of ships floating in space is just decoration

[O-Doc]

- Angled wings and winglets are a great way to put a lot of lift or, re-balance lift on your plane.

- An unbalanced plane induces a lot of drag from control surface angle so, balance before adding power.

- Put on and hold your vertical velocity in the lower atmosphere in a space plane so that your turbos maximise energy into orbital velocity.

- If parts pop off you craft on load it is most likely too 'stiff'. Try removing struts or distributing them more evenly between parts.

- Elevons behind the center of thrust are the best solution for pitch authority and stability. Use long wing sections hanging off the back of your plane as a mounting point for control surfaces.

- Simple dV calculation with nuke engines: 1% fuel mass = 100m/s

[Rickenbacker]

I never appreciated at first that when docking you can just thrust towards an object with RCS and then adjust the velocity bubble on to the target so you can go straight in (provided you already had both craft pointing north south or such). Its about a trillion times easier than doing it by eye.

My advice to Padawan-Kerbs is "the Navball is your friend".

Yeah, once you learn to dock without looking out the window, it gets a lot easier . When docking without the alignment mod, I line up the ships roughly, make sure I select "control from here" from the docking port I'm using, and set the other docking port as the target (not the whole ship). After that, it's a simple matter of keeping the yellow marker in the middle of the pink one, and not hit harder than 0.2m/s, and you're done!

[ouion]

you can put stuff inside 2.5 decouplers.

[AustralianFries]

I don't even look at the ships while I'm docking. I just stare at the navball until I notice the camera change.

[problemecium]

Dunno how "already known" this is, but: Mod+F9 pulls up a menu to pick a save file to load. Unfortunately I haven't found any keys to get a menu to write a save file, so it only lets you get to the default scenarios.

(Hopefully I'm not an idiot and this didn't come from HyperEdit or something. I haven't made sure.)

And for a simple one: Planes are a hell of a lot easier to land with a bunch of parachutes than by trying to... well, land the conventional way. I almost always put parachutes on my planes just in case.

Edited March 30, 2014 by parameciumkid

[Antikris]

- A lot of people who want to make geosynchronous orbit seem to focus a lot on getting a perfectly circular 2868.75km altitude orbit using RCS and whatnot. I find it more feasible to aim for the altitude and when finetuning rather look for a perfect 6.00 hours orbital period (Engineer or MJ can tell you). Your Pe and Ap can be off slightly (they always are) but as long as you have that period right your probe will not drift off course. I have 3 geostats up for years and they are still at where I put them.

- You can save yourself a lot of RCS by disabling SAS and just give it a gentle burst in the direction you want to go. Instead of holding down the RCS thrust buttons while SAS is working against you.

- Aerobraking around Jool, aim for around 127km altitude at Pe. It should get you into Jool orbit with an Ap at Tylo. Raise your Pe at Ap, then you can plot a gravity assist around Tylo to go anywhere within the Jool system.

- It's the most efficient to make inclination burns at the ascending or descending node of your target, whichever is furthest away from the gravity well you're both orbiting. Look for that white dotted line after you select a target.

Edited March 30, 2014 by Antikris