EVA Up/Down spacebar

[temetvince]

How do you get a Kerbal on EVA to change orientation up or down when you press the spacebar. They seem to do it if I change camera modes but that's it.

Edited November 15, 2014 by temetvince

[Geschosskopf]

I'm assuming you're in space, not on the ground.

There's a setting in \Kerbal Space Program\settings.cfg called EVA_ROTATE_ON_MOVE. This defaults to true. When set to true, whenever you EVA in space, the Kerbal's body axis (from head to feet) is always going to point in a fixed direction, which depends on which view mode you're in when you EVA him (orbit, free, etc.). IOW, pitch (leaning over forwards or backwards) and roll (leaning over sideways) are locked. You can only change yaw (pivoting left or right) by moving the camera. In this condition, the spacebar doesn't work at all to rotate the Kerbal. You CAN left-click and drag to rotate the Kerbal in pitch and yaw temporarily, but as soon as you stop the clicking, the Kerbal will spin back to his original orientation.

The alternative is to set "EVA_ROTATE_ON_MOVE" to false. Then spacebar does reorient the Kerbal. However, flying him around is rather different than you're used to.

Fortunately, there's a solution to this delimma. Get taniwha's FreeEVA mod. This toggles the setting of EVA_ROTATE_ON_MOVE between true and false at will. Thus, you can fly around as normal but if you need to change orientation, you can, then change back to normal flight.

[psyper]

also, the kerbal is fixed depending on what view you have set - so if you're on the ground (or anywhere for that matter) and have your view set to surface your kerbal will always have his feet pointing towards the ground - this is so crazy things dont happen when you're eva'ing while on the surface - theres plenty of times Ive moved the camera so I have a top-down view of the kerbal as he eva's across the surface and I don't want him to suddenly face the ground when I do it! To change his orientation hit V and each time you will change your camera's frame of reference and will also change the Kerbal's too - this might give you a better angle if you're trying to 'dock' your kerbal with a pod etc.

[Geschosskopf]

To change his orientation hit V and each time you will change your camera's frame of reference and will also change the Kerbal's too - this might give you a better angle if you're trying to 'dock' your kerbal with a pod etc.

Good catch. Forgot to mention that. So I'll elaborate a bit on it .

When you're in orbit view mode (which is what auto mode will do to you), the Kerbal's head will be oriented in the +Normal direction relative to the rocket (same as the upwards-pointing purple triangle on the navball). Thus, rotating the Kerbal via changing camera position changes his facing in the plane of prograde/retrograde/radial plus and minus. When in free or chase mode, the Kerbal's head will be towards the +Radial direction (same as the blue circle with the lines pointing outwards) so rotating the Kerbal with the camera changes his facing in the prograd/retrograde/normal plus and minus plane.

[temetvince]

Thank you!