Hi folks, so I just purchased KSP and I'm currently messing around with the tutorials but finding them a little difficult to follow. Now I'm fully aware that I might just be that stupid to not make any sense of it but there are parts of the process of launch/flying that I feel the tutorial doesn't exactly explain as well as it could. You see the issue I'm facing is staying in orbit. I'm currently on the second tutorial where I'm fine getting into orbit but once I'm asked to level out the ship and 'close orbit' I find I just continually fall back down to the planet... what am I doing wrong?

So I've done a little research and some folks have said you actually need to go back to full throttle before you warp to AP and not once you reach that like the tutorial text actually explains. Once I've figured it out I'm sure it'll be easier to achieve but right now I'm a little lost. Anyone got any tips that might be of help?

Plus is it possible to control your ship using controller? I don't own a flight stick so that's not really an option and I'm finding the keyboard a little tricky to handle slight movements, or am I best just learning to get use to it.

Thanks for the help.

Timing is a big thing hitting right on the Apoapsis is a bit risky unless you have a great amount of initial thrust.You can aim a little higher away from the planet to give yourself more height at the loss of distance, which if you have enough fuel then you can sacrifice this. So instead of having the nav ball on the horizon you aim more like 25 degrees of your prograde and this can aid in keeping height while also closing the orbit.

What does the game tell you a close orbit is? i find that if you dip under the 70 mark on your closest approach then you'll start to fall out of orbit.

The keyboard can be tricky you just have to worry about how your camera is orientated so the key directions make sense. Thats the best way i find.

Thanks for the tips, I wonder if it's due to the lack of thrust that I'm not getting into orbit without instantly falling back into the planet. The tutorial tells you to press X to stop all engines then turn thrust on to close orbit. Via the map I can see the trajectory but it never really gets big enough to reach around the planet I just fall back down. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it, but seriously if its this tricky to get into orbit how do folks land on the moon. Seeing Vinny try to do in the QL was eye-opening.

Thanks again.

I shoot rockets up then they come down and blow up all my shit. SCIENCE

@machofantastico: never mind getting to the moon try this instead :)

Woo! Finally got into stable orbit. The basic trick is not to listen to the tutorial text because it tells you to warp to AP which I found is to late to use the thrust (you already start falling at that point). This time I warp a distance before I reached AP and thrust until I used up the fuel, disconnected the tanks and just thrust with my final engine power and reached closed orbit. There probably is a way to get into orbit in the manner the tutorial tell you to but who cares. Now I got to figure out the rest of this insane confusing but fascinating game. You got to love physics.

Kerble space program has one hell of a learning curve but its pretty satisfying when you do get it right, unfortunately are the no in game tutorials on the ui so it is trial and error til you get everything. I suggest looking at youtube for guides.

@rethla: That is amazing.

I never knew the words Apoapsis and Periapsis until KSP. It was satisfying when I got my first stable orbit. Landing on Mun was strangely exhilarating. Docking mid-orbit was cathartic :P

Go check out Scott Manley's videos. He is an actual astronomer and orbital mechanics are his day job.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEkUeJRCh083UT-Lq5ZIKI75

nothing much to it really, just use the apoapsis and periapsis to manipulate the orbit also I believe you have to keep it above 25k feet or something like that or else the atmosphere will eventually slow you down enough for reentry

Holy shit

Second the Scott Manley recommendation; he's got a whole beginners series on YouTube with a lot of really good info. Another to look out for is KerbalSpaceAcademy / DasValdez who runs regular beginner streams and guides on twitch and youtube.

On the burn timing thing, I found it way more intuitive to use manoeuvre nodes where you want to orbit / transfer etc as they show you the expected outcome, where to point and how much thrust/fuel it will take along side a timer. The tutorial briefly mentions it but for all burns you should aim to do half of it before the point, and half after, so a 20 second burn goes from T-10 seconds to T+10 seconds. Took me ages to realise that :D

If you prograde burn past the AP point, you're going to have very little time to get a working orbit. Start before it. So speed up time a bit until you get just before it, then throttle up until the orbit circles the planet. If it circles on the orbital map, you should be ok, unless one end of the orbit is very very close to the earth.

A tip for performing maneuvers in orbit: after you set the maneuver, you will want to start your burn so that you hit the maneuver marker halfway through your burn. For example: if you set a maneuver and it estimates it will take 30 seconds to complete, start your burn when you are 15 seconds away from the maneuver. You'll burn for 15 seconds on one side of the maneuver, and 15 on the other, and it will be incredibly close to what you had planned out.

Ok, I almost had the orbit without maneuver nodes and such (haven't unlocked those yet) but one side was too low so it started decaying. Question is, how do I go back to the space center to build a new ship while leaving the other one drifting? I could only revert the save, or can I not go back while the other ship isn't stable yet?

Good thing I didn't though because I thought it would take longer for it to hit the atmosphere again than it actually did.

@selbie: I also followed Scott Manley's youtube videos. He made a sequential series which eventually leads to a Mun landing. I found it very very helpful and really got me into the game. If you still want to figure things out yourself, you can attempt what he is going to do in the next video and then watch the video after.

Landing on the Mun is indeed an experience I will never forget.

Also, I recommend Science mode for new players.

@sogeman: Yeah, this is why I recommend Science mode. The maneuver nodes will be unlocked from the beginning. Also you can send rocket after rocket to their doom without having to worry about losing money and hitting a dead end. But its not like sandbox in that you still need to unlock parts through more and more elaborate missions. There is a rewarding progression in Science mode.

@sogeman: If you move your mouse to the top of the screen above the altimeter, some buttons will drop down, and one will be space center. Click on that and it will leave the other ship drifting.

@brandondryrock: ah thanks. I managed my first orbit now. Though it was far from circular. Did manage to bring the ship back down though. The game didn't give me the 2500m/s milestone though even though I was orbiting at around 2600 at one point. :(

@sogeman: You may have to hit 2500 m/s while your engine is on for it to count. If you have an orbit that isn't circular, then you will gain speed as you fall to the periapsis, especially if the apoapsis is much higher than your periapsis.

@brandondryrock: hm, I sped up from around 2,1k. Maybe I hit it before with engines off and it didn't count it again.

Just now I put a test ship for the big solid booster in a Kerbin sized orbit around the sun by accident. Good thing it was unmanned.

I definitely need to unlock those maneuver nodes before I mess around with the Mun or putting stuff into orbit.

@sogeman: I think orbital speed around Kerbin is around 2300 m/s. I can't remember off the top of my head. Just upgrade the astronaut complex and you unlock maneuver nodes. I think it is rather cheap to upgrade it.

@thunderstorm101: @machofantastico: Regarding the keyboard controls and camera orientation, in general you want to do everything based on the navball. It's way easier, since you never have to factor in the camera's orientation. Pressing left always moves the ball to the left or up will always move the navball the same way. It does take a little getting used to, but it's definitely worth it.

For really detailed maneuvers, you can hit caps lock (by default) to toggle "precision" mode. This makes your controls a LOT less sensitive, allowing you to make small adjustments without swinging around wildly. You can tell that precision mode is on if your pitch/yaw/roll meter is blue instead of orange.

And yeah, 70 km is the edge of the atmosphere. At or above 70 km, drag is not a factor. But once you dip down to 69.999 km, you're losing speed to atmospheric drag until you pull back up about 70. This can be used to your advantage (look up aerobraking), but the main thing to remember is that if you dip into the atmosphere at any one point during an orbit, you WILL eventually fall out of orbit. It might take a while, but it will happen.

Won't even take that long to drop down. I think I hit the planet from around 60k in 2 or 3 orbits.

@bbalpert: Oh nice, I didnt know about precision mode. I wonder if that also applies to IJKL controls for RCS thrusters. That would make in-orbit docking/rescue missions easier.

One thing that might help people wrap their heads around the navball a little easier is to note that you can think of it as the rocket's point of view. If you superglued a GoPro to the nosecone of your rocket, the navball is what you would be seeing. The blue hemisphere is sky, the orange is the ground. The line where orange and blue meet is the horizon.

So when you're sitting on the launchpad, the ball is entirely blue because you're facing straight up at the sky. If the ball is entirely orange, that means you're pointed directly at the planet/ground/whatever you're orbiting.

One of the bigger implications of this (when you're taking off, especially) is that it's one of a few ways to quickly tell whether you're rising or falling. If your velocity vector is in the blue, you're going up (or away from the planet). If it's in the orange, you're falling.

I don't know how much of this is obvious or explained in tutorials, but I know I had a really hard time grasping a lot of this initially, so it wouldn't hurt to share some tips.

I put 40 hours into this bad boy before it hit 1.0.

But man is the campaign hard! who knew rocket science with limited resources was hard!