Why no RCS-style controls for Kerbals in Space ?

[Xenon135]

Hello,

I have been playing KSP for about a week now, and so far it has been mostly fun. One thing however, that I find extremely annoying and cannot get used to, are the keyboard controls for Kerbals with jetpacks in orbit. Maybe it is just me, but I find it very hard to steer these little creatures where I want them too (in most cases, that would be towards the hatch of some capsule).

Do not get me wrong here, I certainly like games that provide hard challenges - But in this case, the main difficulty I experience when moving a Kerbal in Space is struggling with view rotation. I certainly do not appreciate these kind of "challenges" in games.

The way it is now - using arrow keys to focus the camera towards the intended direction of movement - is annoying, because view rotation permanently gets stuck whenever reaching some maximum rotation angle!

IMO it would be much better to have the same keyboard mappings as for RCS, that is six keys for rotation (wasdqe) and six other keys for translation (ijklhn). In combination with chase-mode cam, this would provide perfect control over movement in space. As a Bonus, beginners like me would need to master just one mode of movement that worked for spacecrafts as well as Kerbonauts.

Is there any particular reason why Squat chose different, hard to use controls for Kerbal movement ?

Any suggestions how to overcome the issue with "stuck" rotation?

Regards,

Valentin

[Whirligig Girl]

You can turn off camera-based rotation in the settings menu.

And I don't know what you mean by this. Controls are W(Foreward) S(Backward) A(Left) D(Right) Shift(Up) Ctrl(Down) Space(Orient Rotation to front of screen). You can left-click and drag the screen to rotate a Kerbal using the jetpack, and if you are in the wrong axis of rotation relative to your ship's hatch you can switch from Orbit to Free camera modes and you will have you default view switched.

I've had no problems with jetpacking (aside from the fact that it's insanely hard when you're first learning)

The other day on stream I was flying a rescue mission in multiplayer with a friend. He's been playing KSP off and on for about 1.5 years, I've been continuously for over 2 years. I was close enough to his Kerbal for him to fly up and get in the command seat. After a few seconds it became evident that he had not had much experience with EVA jetpacking, and I was getting worried. He then said "You know I've never really done EVA Flying before" At this point I told him to stop using the jetpack, and so I had to use my ship's RCS to push myself closer to him. Fun times.