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[MarcAFK]

Downloading the nova punch pack, Also playing around with stupidly large and complicated vanilla rockets.

[JWNoctis]

For a touchdown landing you'll want the small size of liquid engine.  You pretty much need 1x fuel tank, 1x small engine, and 3x landing legs as your ONLY gear, in order to land.  Or add a mechjeb, it'll still work.  The main issue is to go straight down - with your nav ball fully orange/brown and facing the exact top - and to go VERY slow.  The absolute slowest you can manage.

Also if you have problems with high center of gravity i.e. falling on one side with the slightest lateral velocity or sloping, you can try with 3x small fuel tanks laterally mounted to the stage decoupler below the return stage on triple symmetry, with a small engine and two to three landing legs on each. Locking SAS on will also help.

Maybe there will be proper RCS lateral translation ala Orbiter for things like this. Some day.

[LoSboccacc]

? what's wrong with rcs controls? (apart you never know which direction is currently mapped to your jhku keys)

[andrea]

(apart you never know which direction is currently mapped to your jhku keys)

that seems a quite big problem actually...

[Rex_Nex]

Im having trouble knowing what direction is which in space. Is there a way to chose a point on the map and have it appear on your nav ball?

[Eagle_eye]

I can't get anything into orbit around kerbin. All of my ships end up crashing or orbiting the sun.  :\

[Sordid]

Im having trouble knowing what direction is which in space. Is there a way to chose a point on the map and have it appear on your nav ball?

No.

I can't get anything into orbit around kerbin. All of my ships end up crashing or orbiting the sun.  :\

Go straight up at first to get out of the thick atmosphere, then gradually pitch down to horizontal once you hit 10k meters altitude. Your aims is for the rocket to travel horizontally (i.e. yellow indicator on the nav ball just on the horizon) at about 2400 m/s at about 70k meters altitude.

[vaaern]

Got a quick question; when in orbit, should I stay going round the earth? cause that doesn't happen, I just fall back down

[head]

Got a quick question; when in orbit, should I stay going round the earth? cause that doesn't happen, I just fall back down

In physics, an orbit is the gravitationally curved path of an object around a point in space, for example the orbit of a planet around the center of a star system, such as the Solar System.[1][2] Orbits of planets are typically elliptical.

[LordSlowpoke]

I now want to build a rocket so powerful I could change the orbits of planets at will.

Oh, the kerbailty.

[Sirus]

Keep in mind that flying straight up doesn't put you into orbit (well, maybe if you went far enough, though you'd be more likely to simply fly away). You need to tilt your spacecraft to the side until you're nearly parallel to the ground and continue boosting until the blue line on the map screen makes a complete circle. Only then can you be considered to be in orbit.

I now want to build a rocket so powerful I could change the orbits of planets at will.

Oh, the kerbailty.

I don't think you can do that in this game :|

[Sordid]

Got a quick question; when in orbit, should I stay going round the earth? cause that doesn't happen, I just fall back down

That means you're not going fast enough. You need more horizontal speed.

Keep in mind that flying straight up doesn't put you into orbit (well, maybe if you went far enough, though you'd be more likely to simply fly away).

If you go up at the right location you might possibly be able to reach one of the Lagrange points and stop there, though the odds of pulling that off are pretty slim (or actually zero in KSP, since the game doesn't have Lagrange points). Other than that specific scenario, you'd either fall back down or fly away if you reached escape velocity.

[Girlinhat]

Orbit is not reaching a height and sitting there.  Orbit is when you fall towards the ground so fast that you miss - constantly.  The aim is not to achieve specific altitude, but instead to achieve sufficient horizontal movement that as you fall, you're moving so fast that your landing point is over the horizon.

Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.  Try to fly so fast towards the east or west that your crash point is beyond the horizon.  Once you achieve that, then your ballistic trajectory stops being an arc and starts becoming a circle.

[Rez]

If air resistance was negligible and the planet was perfectly spherical, you could orbit 1 foot off the ground if you were going fast enough (and your vehicle/body wouldn't melt under the forces involved, but lets not belabor the point).

no I'm not a physicist.  Let's assume the cow is a perfect cube.

[TheBronzePickle]

Assuming you get and keep the momentum from the planet's spin as you launch, you could theoretically launch straight up into a geosynchronous orbit or a similar but slightly eccentric orbit since you probably couldn't get it perfect.