Tutorial:Game Manual

Welcome to what I intend to be a fairly comprehensive one stop guide for beginners to get started with playing KSP. This is going to be a bit of an ongoing project that I will do my best to keep as up-to-date as possible. Please do feel free to provide corrections to things I get wrong, but I would appreciate if the content is left for me to write up, but you can put suggestions or requests in the discussion page if you would like.

Specifications

• Length: 5-10 minutes
• Difficulty: Easy
• For version: Every version

Steps

Over view

These proceeding sections will provide an overview of roughly what the various buildings as used for, how to set up the game for your self etc. I will also have a section or two that will detail how to build your craft

Get to know the HUD

At this stage, you should be sat on the launch pad, desperate to send some poor Kerbal on a wild mission. Before you go a crash in blaze of fiery glory, I suggest you take a moment to see what is going on. The main feature you will see in the middle bottom of your screen is the Navball, this will be the main way you know what is going on with you ship; I suggest you follow that link and read up what it does and how it works. Down the left hand side of the screen you have the staging for your ship, which if done in a sensible way you can more or less ignore, but it is handy to have. Down in the lower left hand corner are a few fancy dials, they show you the pitch, yaw, roll and stage for you ship, and again for the most part you can ignore this.

At the top is a fancy gubin that shows 'height' related details. The altitude gauge is vital when it comes time to land, onyl thing you need to keep in mind is that it is the height above sea level the your command pod is, so if you have a ship that is 10m tall and it is currently reading 11m you better hope you are ready for a nice soft touch down. The circular dial is for your vertical velocity, you should keep in mind that this has 'zero' vertical velocity in the 9 o'clock position and that it is not linear. The fact it is not linear means it can show you rather precisely as you transition from 3m/s to -1m/s but when you reach higher velocities it becomes rather vague, showing your speed in ever large increments. The last detail to look at on this panel is the atmosphere, this shows you a rough guide of how thick the air is, the thicker the air the fast you slow down, and the less you can time warp.

The last detail to mention about the HUD is that in the lower right hand corner, you have a live feed of your kerbal crew, usually either screaming in delight or terror. As far as I can tell, their reaction has no relation to the peril they may really be in, though they always seem to welcome a gentle approach to the surface.