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

Prior reading

There are a few things you should read first as a good over view.

• Read through the Controls and get to grips with them.
• When it comes to flying, you will make very heavy use of your Navball, so read up on exactly how to 'read' it.
• It might be easier to follow a lot of the advice if you understand the Terminology. I shall explain the words as I use them, as I feel context really helps.

Menu System

TODO - This will give a brief over view of the menu system, describing roughly what all the pages do and what they are for, I will not go into detail about what all the settings do.

Basic VAB and Hanger usage

TODO - Will provide a quick overview of the VAB and Hanger

Get to know the flight 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 and 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 your ship.

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. And 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.

Basic Orbit Control

First, let's define an Orbit; simply put, it's falling around another body in space, ideally never colliding with it. The idea of 'all ways falling' is odd I will grant you, but either accept it, or better yet, go read up on it.

As you leave the launch pad, and start to turn to side, your orbit will start to form. The point at which you would crash back to Kerbin (or what ever body you are taking off from) if you cut the engines will slowly start to move further and further around, until eventually you will no longer fall all the way back to the surface. You have now successfully managed to get into orbit! Though chances are, you will have a very erratic orbit; basically egg shaped. Their are two keys points on your orbit, the Periapsis and Apoapsis; the Periapsis is the closest to the body you are orbiting, the Apoapsis the furthest. When you are at these two key points, your vertical velocity is zero. Note that you are still travelling very fast, just your altitude is not changing (for the very brief moment at least). The difference between the Apsides (that being the plural of Apsis, that being what theses two points are called collectivity) determines how eccentric your orbit is considered, though for basic game play, this is not really a concern.

When manipulating your orbit, there are two key things you want to do, change it's height and change the 'plane' at which it sits. Changing the height is very easy to do, aim to adjust the height of one Apsis whilst you are sat at the other Apsis. If you try to change the height at the point you are, you will have to 'burn' a huge amount of fuel to stop your orbit, let your self fall back or burn to push out, then burn to get back in orbit. All told, a whole lot of burning fuel, it is far more efficient to just burn at the opposite Apsis. If you want to raise an Apsis, point into the direction of travel and accelerate, to lower the opposite Apsis, point you ship backwards and fire the rocket so that slows you down. If you use the Map view you should see the Apsis change, don't forget that you can hit 'X' (by default) to turn off your engines. If you are very low on fuel, remember that the most efficient time to burn is that split second when you have zero vertical speed, so you are going to want to do a lot a very small burns.

The other important manipulation you will want to want to do, is rotating the plane at which your orbit sits. This basically relies on Gyroscopes, which are frankly a mess to try to explain how they work, so it easy to simply say, "If you want to push a point in your orbit in a certain direction, do it 90 degrees before the point you want to move". Feel free to go read up on Gyroscopes and how they work and all that jazz, but trust me, "90 degrees" is a lot easier to remember. It will also be easier for you to manipulate the plane the smaller and more circular your orbit is, so getting the nice orbit is worth practising, and will come into play when moving to the next section.

The final thing to mention about orbits, is transition orbits, moving from one body to another. You should try to get your orbital plane in-line with your target body, this way you can allow your self a bit more freedom with exactly where you meet the target body. You should also try to get your orbit as circular as possible, this will make it easier when you are ready to burn to get out to your target. The last detail is hard to provide a generic guide for, as it basically depends on what you are currently orbiting and what you want to move to. As a starting guide, I will say that go from orbiting Kerbin to orbiting Mun you want to be orbiting towards the east, at around 100km altitude, as you see Mun rise on the horizon from behind Kerbin, start your burn until your orbit starts to interact with Mun. You know your orbit is interacting as the 'flight computer' will show an arc for part of the orbit that is around Mun. Once you are set up, time warp until you are just about to enter Mun orbit and prepare to burn to get your orbit to be stable around Mun.

Finishing word

Hopefully (and I know not yet based on the current state of this) you will have a good understand of the basic mechanics of the game. From here I suggest you play around for a bit, maybe set your self a few missions. It might also be wise to read up on how orbital mechanics works, as a better understanding of the maths and physics will really help out.

Good luck!