Ten Commandments for KSP beginners

[EasyPlayer]

Hi. Can someone write something about his personal rules to have good fun in Kerbal Space Program and to make good flight? Not only for me, buf for whole community!

Edited November 20, 2013 by EasyPlayer

[Rusty6899]

Triple check your staging before take off.

There's always room for more struts.

Quicksave.

Remember to add solar panels.

Always, always land on the bright side of the Mun.

[Tex_NL]

Don't be afraid to fail. Sooner or later it WILL happen. No amount of planning can totally exclude failure.

[Scarecrow88]

Triple check your staging before take off.

There's always room for more struts.

Quicksave.

Remember to extend solar panels.

Always, always land on the bright side of the Mun.

Corrected that for you.

[KvickFlygarn87]

1. Boosters.

2. Boosters.

3. Boosters.

4. Boosters.

5. Boosters.

6. Moar Boosters.

7. Moar Boosters.

8. Moar Boosters.

9. Even Moar Boosters.

10. Never forget to deploy solars.

[wasmic]

I've played more than 300 hours of KSP, and I still forget to quicksave from time to time. When I forget to quicksave, the Hell Kraken usually attacks me after I've done a lot of stuff. I lost two out of three probes that were going to Eve that way. I've also lost quite a few probes to undeployed solar panels, and yesterday, I had a probe crash into Pol's mountains. I thought I was in a safe orbit.

[UmbralRaptor]

Skipping the math aspect, and going with general principles...

0) Plan ahead, but don't be afraid to blow up a few rockets. There are many existing resources (such as the KSP wiki and wikipedia!), and you can fairly easily look ahead at what you'll need. At the same time, experience is highly useful, and may tell you where you need to look ahead in the future. (This applies to both construction and piloting)

0a) You don't need very many struts. Just place them more carefully.

0b) If you use MechJeb, use it to learn more, not less.

0c) A craft needs: Propellant, engines, control systems, and payload. Some parts may fulfill more than one of these. Losing any may end the mission, or force a rescue. Additional parts (or ones that only sometimes fall into one of these categories) also exist.

1) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is not your friend. (If you can reduce your ÃŽâ€V requirements, things will be easier.)

2) Less is more / more is less.

2a) Especially anything that isn't fuel. (Less payload, control systems, even engines, mean better mass ratios.)

2b) If you're new, this also applies to mods.

3) KSP rockets and especially aircraft do not operate under the same conditions as real world ones. Copying real-world designs and mission architectures is very hit or miss. Adapting real-world ideas to KSP's environment can be hugely successful, however.

3a) Examples include asparagus staging and direct ascent vs orbital rendezvous.

3b) If it looks right, it flies wrong. (partial exception: FAR)

3c) Rockets are easier than jets.

3d) Sending a kerbal is simpler and gives more recovery options than sending a probe.

4) If efficiency and simplicity are opposed, it may be worth choosing simplicity. If they are aligned, then what you need to do with your design should be obvious.

5) There's playing to be silly, and playing to do something (relatively) serious. If you have questions, we tend to assume the latter, and making the former entertaining to others is an art.

Edited November 17, 2013 by UmbralRaptor

[Tank Buddy]

When in doubt add more rocket.

Edit: That's a joke, don't get too carried away. Smaller rockets are easier to manage.

Edited November 17, 2013 by Tank Buddy

[Garek]

My personal VAB/pre-launch checklist:

1. Control on every module I want to control

2. Sufficient batteries and power generation

2a. Don't forget, Solar panels don't work all the time!

3. Do I need RCS? If yes, make sure it's balanced!

4. Docking Port - do I actually need one?

4a. If I want to push/pull something, make sure it's balanced!

5. check the staging, and check it again after every modification of the rocket!

6. Check action groups!

7. Which crew do I actually want to launch? (beware, Kerbals sneak back into rockets once you modify them)

8. SAS on

9. RCS off

10. Throttle up before(!) launch

Some other important tips:

- Be always aware of orbital mechanics! If you do, you will learn to do awesome maneuvers. If you don't, they will come and slap you in the face.

- Remember, you use most of your fuel to lift your fuel. So if you can make it work with less upper-stage fuel, you will need much less lower-stage fuel.

- Be aware of the effects mods have on gameplay. Using FAR, KJR and DR, entirely different designs work opposed to e.g. a pure stock game.

Also, if your running around on the forums, remember:

- This is a singleplayer game. Everyones style of gameplay is valid. Every combination of mods is valid.

- This is a singleplayer sandbox game. Achievments, and their conditions, are yours to define. (Of course, this doesn't apply to forum challenges and the like)

[Superfluous J]

If you slap an orange tank and a mainsail to the bottom of a capsule (come on, we've all done it) you get almost exactly the same distance as if you slap 6 more orange tanks and mainsails to that same ship.

Or, to make it a commandment, The weight of your fuel and boosters is important! Moar Boosters will (sometimes but not always) get you going faster, but they will - in many cases - not get you much (or any!) farther.

[Taki117]

1. Learn what Terminal Velocity is and how it affects your launch.
   
2. Learn what the Oberth Affect is and how it affects your orbital maneuvers.
   
3. Learn what a Hohmann transfer is and how to use it.
   
4. Learn what a Gravity turn is.
   
5. Learn how to do a Gravity Turn (At least in KSP)
   
6. Focus less on size and more on dV (delta-V).
   
7. Pay attention to your Thrust-to-weight Ratio (TWR)
   
8. Bigger is not always better.
   
9. When in doubt, add a strut, it's impossible to over strut things.
   
10. Check the quote in my sig
    
11. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
    
12. Have fun
    
13. Action group your solar panels (especially if you have more than one) and if you have access to RTG's (Radioisotope thermoelectric generators) add at least one to every ship
    
14. Each stage should have a purpose, and they should get progressively smaller
    
15. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky may not be your friend, but he is not your enemy.
    
16. Learn what Asparagus Staging is and how to use it.
    

[Smidge204]

Less is more.

Remember that more mass means more fuel to lift that mass... and that the fuel itself has mass, so now you need more fuel to lift the fuel to lift the mass, and fuel to lift the fuel to lift the fuel to lift the mass, and yet more fuel to lift THAT fuel, etc.

Shave every kilogram you can and your entire rocket will be smaller, more agile, and more reliable.

=Smidge=

[RSwordsman]

If maneuverability is poor, consider adding an additional reaction wheel. They don't weigh much, and if placed near the center of mass, can make a big difference unless your ship is an absolute beast.

**Just because an engine has greater thrust doesn't make it better. I learned soon enough that LV-909's and the other small engines are great outside of LKO.

[capi3101]

I. Thou shalt screw the pooch at least once.

II. Thou shalt start small.

III. Thou shalt learn what a natural logarithm is, both forwards and backwards.

IV. Thou shalt learn to keep thy TWR in that sweet spot between 1.7 and 2.2 at all times during thy launches.

V. Thou shalt learn the importance of a delta-V map and when to tell when the damn thing is lying to you by just a little or by quite a lot.

VI. Thou shalt see Commandment Number Five again. And again. And yet once more.

VII. Thou shalt remember to pack chutes, particularly if thou likest St. Jebediah, patron saint of moar boosters.

VIII. Thou shalt remember that including batteries and solar panels is not just a good suggestion.

IX. Thou shalt learn that it is a personal choice whether or not to use Mechjeb and not ridicule those who think differently than you.

X. When thou hast figured out a better way of doing things, thou shalt screw the rules.

Edited November 17, 2013 by capi3101

[Deadweasel]

Corrected that for you.

Unless you're using the surface-mount panels, which don't extend and are always "on" anyway...

[Seanner]

Which is why you should *always* use such panels, only augmenting with extendable ones where necessary. No reason to risk failing a mission depending on whether you time warp your 4k energy per second sputnik probe because you forgot to press 1, or because you forgot to press it a second time when you descended into Eve.

[nhnifong]

I have played KSP probably 20 hours a week since version 0.13. Here are my 10 commandments for beginners.

1. Work backwards from your final stage to your launcher. This is how they did in the past, and you should do it too.

2. Correct your staging before you launch.

3. Struts are the solution to stability problems, not SAS modules. Add struts all over the place, even between stages and between things that are directly connected to one-another. Seriously, a large ship should be about half struts.

4. Liquid fueled boosters which crossfeed fuel into the main stack are always better than solid boosters.

5. Do not forget batteries, solar panels, rcs fuel, and rcs thrusters.

6. Don't bring more fuel than you need, But especially don't bring less fuel than you need.

7. put a docking port on it, you never know what might happen.

8. Do not point thrusters into other parts, and sepatrons should point mostly upwards and a little bit inwards.

9. Do not be afraid to muck around with the cfg files.

10. Create your own fun

Bonus Commandment: Back up EVERYTHING

Edited November 18, 2013 by nhnifong

[Jananton]

When you start building be aware of the orange list at the right of your screen. Everything in one slot will be fired at once when you press the spacebar. Certainly when you start in career mode your first 'rocket' - capsule plus tank plus parachute - will have all in one slot. Press the plus button at the bottom of the list and drag the engine into the new slot that you've created, so your parachute isn't deployed when you launch that contraption.

Greets,

Jan

[Superfluous J]

Good list, mostly, but I have 2 nits:

3. Struts are the solution to stability problems, not SAS modules. Add struts all over the place, even between stages and between things that are directly connected to one-another. Seriously, a large ship should be about half struts.

I rarely put more than a dozen or two struts on a ship. Mostly it's one per radially attached fuel tank to the main stack, and another one per radially attached fuel tank to another radially attached fuel tank. My biggest ship so far has had 18 such tanks, so that's 36 struts. Plus 4 more up top because the payload was really wonky shaped. 40 struts in a 300 part ship. And that felt like overkill.

8. Do not point thrusters into other parts, and sepatrons should point mostly upwards and a little bit inwards.

I think you either mean "downwards and a bit inwards" for where the nozzle should point, or "upwards and a bit outwards" for how they should push the thing they are separating. I generally don't use them at all, though.

[tk5800thesecond]

1. Do like NASA and have redundant systems. e.g. Have 2 solar panels (that are deployable) and that square solar panel that doesnt (if the first two deployable solars fail the last one can still supply power)

2. Always test a craft extensively (dropping the craft to test the landing legs/making sure no parts clip into eachother)

3. when making a pass for Mun and Minmus bring periapsis down to atleast 10000m

very basic but it solves a lot of problems later on

[Deadweasel]

Dang! Two pages filled with some excellent responses, and this is still [unanswered]? OP, you're either slacking, or brilliant... Or both! :-D

[Rusty6899]

I think I may go over the top on struts. It's fairly common for me to top 700 parts, which slows the frame rate to about 2 fps. Probably, when I think about it, over half of them are struts. I think it comes with being a Civil Engineer, I'm a sucker for cross bracing.

[Cheaterman]

I think I may go over the top on struts. It's fairly common for me to top 700 parts, which slows the frame rate to about 2 fps. Probably, when I think about it, over half of them are struts. I think it comes with being a Civil Engineer, I'm a sucker for cross bracing.

Thou shall avoid cross-bracing moar than once even if it looks awwwesome, for this very reason. Keeping the part count low in general is an extremely good advice - when you're ready for it, see Scott Manley's smallest interplanetary vehicle. Oh and very important: as someone mentioned above, when you found better ways of doing things, screw the rules and do it your way. If you can handle lower simplicity for instance, go for efficiency, etc - shaving off the 300kg of that handy reaction wheel you used on your interplanetary spacecraft for instance (not a great example though - rather lower the delta V budget of your payload/interplanetary stage to ~10% fuel margin first if you can).

[FlamedSteak]

My no 1. rule is to spend a lot of time watching youtube videos of ksp when starting out. Guys like Scott Manley can and will make your life easier. This is especially true when learning the node maneuver tool and how to conduct a rendezvous and dock.

[nhnifong]

While smaller is better, and you don't want to kill your framerate, there are still a ton of use-cases for struts that I think are under-appreciated.

Bracing the ends of your wings to your fuselage makes your plane more responsive (if the control surfaces are connected to the wings), and makes it fly more predictably even when the center of mass moves too far away from the center of lift, because you don't have as much positive feedback in the angle of attack. If you want to see what I mean, try it on the ravenspear mk3.

Connecting 3 to 6 struts from a 2m tank directly to the mainsail that is stack-attached to it's bottom allows the forces from the thrust-vectoring feature of the engine to be communicated directly into what is likely one of the most massive single objects on the ship, the center 1st stage fuel tank. Adding these inter-stack struts between every tank in the center stack until no single stack-joint is supporting more than about 10 tons allows you to use a TWR far greater than 3 Gs which is the point at which a lot of non-reinforced stack joints fail for 20 to 50 ton payloads, especially with perturbations from a vectoring engine.

Connecting struts from heavy parts directly to any force-bearing docking rings, (for example, in an orbital tug or it's payload) greatly mitigates the instability in a burn for those big ships assembled in orbit. This usually allows you to turn 2x to 4x phys warp back on with no worry.

Strutting your parachute to the most massive parts on your craft, including the part it is stack attached to, even if they only weight 0.5t, almost eliminates the risk of parachute-deceleration joint failure. You can now just bring one parachute for most craft, and that's a nice savings considering that they weigh 0.22t and they will be on your payload the whole mission.

Edited November 18, 2013 by nhnifong