The Complete Idiot's Illustrated Guide to Space Travel (Not Being Updated)

This guide is pretty old so take the advice carefully as things may have changed a lot. I think I wrote this during alpha 0.15-0.20. I will most likely not update it anytime soon but the basic mechanics should still function similarly.

The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)

As you may or may not have worked out from the name, the VAB is where you're sent to create new rockets and spacecraft. There are tons of possibilities with the stock parts; and with mods, which will be discussed in a later section, the fun never stops!

Now, when you enter the VAB, you'll be presented with a screen that looks a bit like this, minus a few parts from the left. I've labelled a few of the buttons you can interact with.



This is where you choose your command pod. Hovering over each one will bring up a tooltip describing crew capacity, weight, crash thresholds, etc.

The buttons at the bottom have been labeled for convenience. By default, X and Z toggle the symmetry tool, and C toggles the snap tool. I recommend using these a lot. They are very useful.

After choosing a pod, you'll be off to build your first spacecraft, and you'll be presented with a few tabs on the upper-lefthand corner of the screen, along with a window full of parts.



From left to right, these tabs are as follows:

Pods

Your selection of pods. You may add whatever extra pods you like to your vessel. Extra pods added will be unmanned at launch. You may have to cart in extra crew from the SPH (Spaceplane Hangar) and climb them up the ladders.

Propulsion

Here you'll find a variety of fuel tanks and rocket engines of all sorts of powers and efficiencies. These are the key ingredients to your spacecraft.

Control

The control tab contains control stability enhancers such as RCS (Reaction Control System) thrusters, SAS (Stability Augmentation Systems) and ASAS modules. These will be discussed in another section.

Structural

Any part that isn't full of fuel or a wingpiece. Here you'll find struts (use these!), truss blocks, girder segments, launch clamps, and empty fuselages, as well as decouplers, one of the ship's most important assets.

Aerodynamic

Wings, winglets, nosecones, the like! Anything aerodynamic is right here.

Utility

Full of very useful items. You'll find docking clamps, parachutes, rover wheels, and solar panels. Everything your ship needs post-orbit to survive its journey, no matter its destination, is found on this tab.

SCIENCE!

Some silly things in here. Antenni, meters and instruments that don't really have a purpose yet unless you're a stats buff.

Here is a screenshot of a very simple, completely orbit-capable spacecraft. It can achieve orbit and return to Kerbin unharmed with the use of the parachute installed atop the command module.


You'll also noticed I've labelled some things. Take some time to get familiar with the UI. If you'd like to use this craft, I will detail its design in the ship design section.

Finally, I'll describe Action Groups. Its button is labelled in the previous screenshot. Click that, and you get something that looks like this:


When this comes up, you can click any part of the ship, and if it has actions it can perform, they'll show up here. Custom01 through Custom10 are number keys 1-0 on your keyboard. I like to assign solar panels and the like to these. Additionally, all parts that were placed in symmetry mode are automatically selected in the Action Groups dialogue once one is selected.

Here, I've selected my tri-symmetry placed solar panels on my Mars One unit.



In the next screenshot, I've assigned "Toggle Panels" to Custom01, meaning when I press "1" on my keyboard, it will open or close all three panels depending on their position.



I hope this guide is a help. Next section will detail the navball and basic navigation.

Basic Navigation and the Navball

In this section, I'll detail how to read the navball and use its instruments to perform basic navigational tasks and keep your vessel on course to a good journey.



This is your navball. Get used to it, because it's what you will use on everything you build to navigate yourself. Don't be intimidated by all the icons that like to spin all over it and give you a headache; they're actually very helpful. But what are they?

On the left, you'll find your throttle meter, which appears to be split into main thirds. On the right, the G-force meter, which, in the game's current state, has no purpose. On top in the middle is your vessel's speed in meters per second. You can see I was going fairly fast when I took this in orbit 200km from the sun. On the left of the m/s readout is the RSC toggle alert, which glows green if RCS is on, and on the right, SAS toggle alert, which glows cyan. On the bottom in the middle is your vessel's current heading in degrees.

North is illustrated by an orange line with an "N". East is due 90 degrees, South 180, West 270, and North being 0.



This is the level indicator. The center dot illustrates the center of your vessel's alignment. This would be the top or front of the in-control command pod on a rocket or spaceplane.



These two will be yellow in-game. These are your prograde (circle with dot) and retrograde (circle with x) vector nodes. In layman's terms, the prograde circle will always make your orbit bigger, and retrograde will make it smaller. Prograde achieves orbit, retrograde achieves landing. These two will move depending on your position and velocity in your orbit. "Burning prograde" is a common orbital maneuver that you will see and perform many many times during gameplay, as is burning retrograde. Burning prograde will raise your apoapsis (highest point of orbit), and burning retrograde will lower it. Most burns will have the most effect at the opposite end of the orbit.



If you have another vessel or a celestial body targetted in map view, these two will appear on your navball as well. They work the same as the prograde and retrograde circles, except these are directly on your target. These are not velocity vectors and are not used to get you to the same speed as your target. These simply point directly at and away from them. The cirle is prograde, and the delta is retrograde.



Finally, your maneuver node. In map-view, you can set future maneuvers in your orbit and the system will calculate the delta-V (change in velocity) needed to complete that maneuver. A counter will appear next to your navball counting down to the node. When T-0 is achieved, point your vessel's level indicator at the manuever node and peform the burn until the delta-V meter reaches 0.

Section 3 will discuss basic ship design, proper staging, and separation mechanics.

Basic Ship Design and Staging

Design Basics

An important term to understand, and the underlying most important statistic of your vessels, is Δv. That is, delta-v, or change in velocity. In KSP, this is measured by meters per second, or m/s.

Your rockets and spacecraft will have a conglomerate statistic called the ascent profile. Using the autopilot addon MechJeb displays ascent statistics while using the ascent autopilot. These are very useful numbers to have. In most cases, from the launchpad to orbit, an expended Δv budget of 4,000-5,000m/s is a pretty decent ascent profile.

There are many variables that go into your vessel's Δv budget, such as payload weight, engine efficiency, gravity loss, and atmospheric drag. For the most part, getting your Δv exact to your mission profile isn't all that important at this stage in the game's development. However, when career mode is implemented and you have limited resources, using only what you need to complete your mission will be a valuable skill to have.

All-to-often, I see beginner pilots building outrageously complicated, huge rockets with enormous payloads of fuel and way too many engines-- Just to get into orbit, because they don't know any better. I'll admit I was guilty of this when I started out. I won't lie; this game isn't easy and it takes some getting used to. But, once you DO understand how it works, it's a ton of fun.

There are very, very simple ship designs that can get you to orbit. It's just a matter of knowing how to get there. Getting to orbit isn't as simple as building a rocket and going straight up... There's a little more to it than that.



Here's a rocket I threw together in just a minute or two. Back when I first started, this little thing would take me probably 30 minutes to design and fail launching several hundred times. I want you to consider that this rocket is 100% orbit and return capable. It can't go to the moon or anything like that, but it can make it to circularized orbit, turn around, and parachute back. Let's take a run through the parts from the top down:

Parachute
Command Module
Decouple
Large 1m fuel tank
3x radial decoupler
3x large 1m fuel tank
4x 1m engine
3x structural strut
3x fuel line

Not too many parts here. Mostly just things that keep it together. I suggest using a lot of struts on every single thing you make. It keeps things from wobbling and exploding. Here's a quick video of a vessel a made a long time ago that I forgot to put struts on.

With that in mind, I'll reveal one of the screenshotted vessel's most important assets (one of them, mind you), that being the fuel lines. The fuel lines on this vessel are the part that makes it orbit-capable. Each fuel line feeds from the outer tanks, to the inner tank. With how I have the staging set up, all four engines activate at once, and with the fuel lines set the way they are, the middle engine uses no fuel from the inner fuel tank. All four engines draw fuel from the outer tanks.

Once the outer tanks are empty, the radial decouplers are activated to jettison them, and the main, inner fuel tank begins to feed the main engine. Without these fuel lines, all four engines would burn out at the same time, very quickly, and orbit would not be achieved.

Now we'll check out a more complicated design known commonly as the asparagus or onion system. This method has fuel tanks staged in layers that feed into the next in line and are jettisoned in symmetrical order. Here is an animated .gif illustrating that:


Here we have three sets of two fuel tanks on the outside of the larger orange tank. The first set has fuel lines to the second set, the second set to the third set, and the third set to the mainsail tank. This means that the first set of fuel tanks is feeding every engine on the craft, and as it's jettisoned, that role switches to the next set, until it hits the mainsail and it powers itself to orbit.

This method is particularly efficient because it gives you more burn time than just activating all engines at once. Yes, doing that will give you significantly more of a push for a little longer, but once those side engines burn out, you're pretty boned.

Staging

Proper staging is extremely important. In can mean the difference between your parachute popping at the right time and landing you safely on Duna, or your ship exploding on the launch pad because all of your decouplers somehow got set to be on your launch stage.

This is the staging setup from the asparagus engine craft. As you can see, all engines are set to activate on the launch stage (bottom), and each set of two decouplers for the side-mounted fuel tanks and engine are set subsequently to the last as they run out of fuel, from the first set to the final set. Staging doesn't require much of a tutorial. Just mess around with it until you get the hang of where things go. In most cases, do not trust the game's judgement on where things should be staged. It will almost always make something go wrong.

Flight Control

New pilots usually have a problem when they start out that sounds a bit like "I can't even get my rocket off the launchpad" or "It just flips over and explodes". If this is you, I have news for you.

Your rocket does not pilot itself (unless you're using an autopilot addon). You have to steer it yourself to get into orbit, and that means knowing when to do certain things, and what parts to use.

There is a part under the control tab called the SAS module, and it's dapper brother, the ASAS module. These are Stability Augmentation System modules. The SAS module only provides rotational torque. It does not keep your vessel pointing in the right direction. However, it is not useless. If your ship is doing any unwanted rotation that you can't seem to correct, slap one of these on there and it should help remedy the problem.

The ASAS module is extremely useful. It comes in both sizes to fit large and small parts. It provides no extra torque but instead acts as a guidance computer. Pressing "T" in-flight will toggle the SAS/ASAS module, enabling its features. The ASAS module utilizes your ships control points (such as wings and gimball engines) to keep your ship pointed in whatever direction it was pointed when you toggled the module. Extremely handy at launch, as it will keep you pointed straight up during ascent, and you can press "F" to briefly turn it on and off without actually toggling it.

Reaction Control Systems (RCS)
Yep, just like the space shuttle. You have a selection of blocks and linear monopropellant ports under the control tab as well as the SAS modules. However, unlike the SAS modules, RCS blocks and ports require their own specialized fuel that you have to find room for on your ship. There are large tanks as well as small, radial-mounted canisters, so you shouldn't have too much trouble with that one.

RCS is mostly useless in the atmosphere, but can dramatically help stabilize large ships during flight, although it is mostly used for maneuvering and translating vessels in orbit and is almost required for any docking maneuvers, which will be covered later. (To clarify "translation" is simply moving around in space without use of main engines or effecting the orbit in any major fashion.)

Wings, winglets, canards
Wings are useful for any craft that has trouble staying up-right in flight or that you can't control for whatever reason. Placing wings symmetrically on your rocket will usually solve many stability problems. Wings are mostly used in the SPH.

Apparently these guides have a character limit. Next chapter is gravity turns and flight

Lift-off, Maintaining TWR, Gravity Turns

People let me tell ya 'bout my best friend~

Launch clamps! Not always needed, but an important addition to any liftoff. Placed correctly (symmetry mode usually works alright but you might need to place them one-by-one depending on your setup), these guys will hold your rocket right in place until you tell them not to. I've even used them on spaceplanes to spool up engines and get going off the bat so I wouldn't have to achieve any actual lift!

Asymmetric placement can cause problems with these. For example, if you only place one, your rocket will no-doubtedly tip forward and jiggle around a bit. Or explode. That happens a lot too.

Placed properly, they can stabilize the largest of rockets at the home pad. On launch, they are static objects, so they cannot be moved from their position on the launch pad. This makes them very useful because they can support extremely heavy loads, as long as the load can actually support itself without any structural mishaps. In a recent version, they added electricity to them, so your vessel won't lose power when waiting for a launch phase window (say, a probe that you want to send to Jool). Those launch windows can take a long time to come around and you don't wanna sit there with your panels out and end up with your phase angel being in the middle of the night and run out of power! (Also I'll explain phase angles later).

A final note on launch clamps... Stage them properly. Either put them in your ignition stage, or the stage after it. I put them in the ignition stage to maximize fuel consumption.

The next thing I want to cover is your thrust-to-weight ratio, or TWR as it's commonly referred to. This, as you might guess, is the ratio of your vessel's thrust to its weight, represented by a decimal (like 2.63). For the number buffs, you can find this number by multiplying thrust (in Newtons), by weight. KSP engines display kilonewtons (kN) as thrust measurement in the VAB and when right-clicked. Weight can be found by adding up the parts yourself, or using a MechJeb control part (which will also give you the TWR).

The higher your TWR, the better. A vessel with a TWR or 2.0 has twice its weight in thrust. This is an excellent number and can be achieved by small and medium craft with lots of engines but not very much fuel. I won't go too deep into the math, but try to make sure your craft has a decent TWR. My 440-ton Mars One rocket has a surface TWR of 1.48 and can travel to Duna and further. Also keep in mind that TWR increases as you use fuel and ascend through the atmosphere because the vessel is becoming lighter. A TWR of 1 or more is a good idea.

Gravity Turns

Originally posted by Wikipedia:

A gravity turn or zero-lift turn is a maneuver used in launching a spacecraft into, or descending from, an orbit around a celestial body such as a planet or a moon. It is a trajectory optimization that uses gravity to steer the vehicle onto its desired trajectory. It offers two main advantages over a trajectory controlled solely through vehicle's own thrust. Firstly, the thrust doesn't need to be used to change the ship's direction so more of it can be used to accelerate the vehicle into orbit. Secondly, and more importantly, during the initial ascent phase the vehicle can maintain low or even zero angle of attack.

Put simply, it's an orbital maneuver that you perform in your ascent phase (primarily) to get your trajectory (orbit line on the map) exactly where you want it, and the rocket can be at zero degrees on the navball (the border between blue and orange) and still gain altitude in its orbit.

When to perform a gravity turn and for how long

As far as KSP goes, this is up to the pilot. Personally, what I do and know works, is start my turn around 10,000 to 20,000 meters (10-20km), and perform the maneuver until my desired apoapsis is achieved.

Keep in mind that in a good gravity turn, your vessel will end up parallel to the planet below. This is normal. I see and hear a lot of reactions of "why is his rocket sideways" when people see properly performed gravity turns. Even angled at 0 degrees, the rocket will still raise apoapsis, even if slowly. Of course, this doesn't mean immediately point to 0 and power into orbit. Start it off slow. Around 10km, I point my rocket at around 55 degrees on the navball, and slowly pitch to 0 during my flight, depending on how quickly I'm gaining altitude. Don't confuse your gravity turn angle with your actual flight angle. Turn angle is represented by the set of numbers to the left and right of each directional (North, East, South, West) line.

After you reach about 100km on your apoapsis, it will start raising faster and faster.

This video of the STS-135 launch I recorded from NASA TV in 2011 illustrates a perfect gravity turn. For those who wish to see, the launch occurs at 14:20, and from 16-20 minutes or so, you can see the shuttle becoming parallel with the Earth as it accelerates into orbit.

Sorry about the delay between sections. Life calls. If you have any questions about anything I might have missed, please don't hesitate to add me and I'll try to answer your questions. But please keep it to things I've already covered that you're not clear on.

Achieving Orbit, Basic Orbital Maneuvers

Alright, I'm going to assume you've read the other chapters and/or have fully mastered the gravity turn, and you're getting your apoapsis (hereon referred to as the AP) to your desired parking orbit. Let's call it 110km; that's where I like to park. But now you're drifting past your AP, wondering, "Aphox, what the hell do I do now?"

Well, you either keep reading, or learn what hard lithobraking is.

The easy, short answer is:

burn prograde at AP.

By this point, I hope you understand that little tidbit of useful information. Those four words are the most important thing to remember. And since this is a tutorial guide, I'll explain what it means for those of you who are still confused.

Jump back a few chapters to the navball. Familiarize yourself with your prograde and retrograde vector markers. When you reach your AP in your trajectory, point your rocket toward prograde, and light 'em up!


Assuming you've acvhieved an equatorial, 90-degree trajectory (in line with the equator flying east), your prograde marker should be on the 0 degree mark along the eastern hemisphere of the navball, right between the blue and orange. If it's close to that, good enough. It doesn't actually matter where it is, just point at it and burn. Watch the map. Your orbit line will grow and grow until it shoots out of the other side of the planet and your AP and PE (periapsis, your lowest point in orbit) try to flip around. When they start turning, that means you're close to circularized and you have achieved orbit! Hit X or hold control/knock back your throttle in whatever way you please and turn off your engines. You're done.

Disclaimer: I recommend not using NERVA engines or any other low-thrust engines to attempt to achieve orbit. They are weak, cause slow circularization, require early burns, and may result in drifting helplessly past AP and not achieving orbit in time.

Basic Orbital Mechanics

Science/History time!

AP = Apoapsis = Highest point in orbit
PE = Periapsis = Lowest point in orbit

PE cannot be higher than AP.

Basic Maneuvers: The Hohmann Transfer Orbit (not Hoffman)
German scientist Walter Hohmann described this mechanic in a book he published in 1925. The orbit uses an elliptical orbit (non-circular) to transfer between two eccentric (circular) orbits. The ellipse is called the transfer orbit (yellow circle, #2), because it is used as a transfer path to the final circular orbit (red circle, #3) from the initial parking orbit (blue circle, #1).

This type of orbit generally uses two engine impulses. The first one to raise the #1's AP to where #3 is, and the second to circularize it. In the instance of this illustration, the first burn would be performed on the blue line, right above the yellow "2". The second burn would be used at the red "3". Starting to get it? Your prograde burns have a growth effect on the opposite end of the orbit from where you are. 1 turns into 2, 2 turns into 3.

During the burn at #1, no AP is specified, because one is not needed. You do not need to burn at AP to transfer orbits. Where you burn only effects where your AP will end up when the burn is complete, which won't matter once the transfer is performed.

Burning at certain points in the orbit is very important to interplanetary and other-body transfers, however, such as to Mun, Minmus, or an outer planet. This will be discussed in a later chapter.

You will be using Hohmann transfers the majority of the time to perform any orbital adjustments. There are other maneuvers, such as bi-elliptic transfers, that require less delta-v, but more travel time. These are highly math-related and don't have much bearing on you. However, if you're interested, Wikipedia's page on orbital maneuvers has a lot of information that will explain it, given you understand the math behind it.

Orbital Inclination Change

Stay away from these for a while. If your aim is to get a ship into a desired inclination, do your best to launch it that way. Inclination changes are difficult and expend a lot of delta-v that could be saved for other maneuvers.

Inclination changes are most efficiently performed at apoapsis, where orbital velocity is at its lowest. In some cases, it's more efficient to transfer the vessel to a further orbit, perform the inclination maneuver, and transfer back.

The screenshot at the beginning of this chapter shows a variety of different inclinations. These are difficult to perform and hard to explain. An inclination of 0 is an equatorial orbit, that is, inline with the planet's equator. An inclination of 90 will toss your vessel over each pole. 45 is in the middle of those, obviously.

Now, performing inclination changes from non-0 orbits is difficult, because your normal and anti-normal vectors will move. With MechJeb, they're a bit easier. It won't do them for you, but it makes finding those nodes a little easier by pressing the button.

I honestly don't feel like I'm experienced enough with ascending and descending nodes, along with others, to really give any advice on performing inclination changes. If this happens to change, I will update this guide with information pertaining to that. Until then, I recommend use of the official KSP forums at forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com

Update: Thanks to the Steam community, I remembered the maneuver planning system! This can be used to change inclination very easily and will be explained in-depth in a later chapter.

And to end the chapter, I'll cover one of the most important orbital and physical mechanics of our world, which is simulated in KSP.

And that is called the Oberth effect. I'll stay way from the math and keep it simple:

the faster you're going, the more efficient your rocket is.

This is very useful to know when performing interplanetary transfers and transferring to moons. Your rocket will raise your AP faster and more efficiently when you are at periapsis, where your ship's orbital speed is highest. Your speed increases as you near the planet because of the gravity and speed needed to keep the vessel in orbit. Due to some wibbley-wobbley stuff and a little bit of timey-whimey stuff, this makes your engines work better! So exploit the crap out of physics and use that to get places, which I'll explain how to do in the next chapter.

Transfers, Mün Landing Tutorial (Generalized Landing)

MechJeb Disclaimer

For those of you who are curious, MechJeb is an autopilot and aeronautics information utility mod developed by r4m0n on the KSP forums, and can be found at Kerbalspaceport.com. However, please note that MechJeb is not required for play and I strongly, strongly suggest learning the game without it before installing/using it so that you don't become reliant on it. It is an extremely useful tool but I think that you are better off learning how to play the game by hand before you let the computer do it for you. I, like many before me, have done just that and only use MechJeb (for the most part) for information and performing tasks that we've perfected and performed many times. For the sake of proof, I perform each section I write as I write it to make sure I'm not posting lies. -----

Finally, the guide you've been waiting for! Yes, I'll now go through how to perform a Mün (pronounced moon, by the way, note the umlaut) landing, step by step, with the most clear instructions I can come up with. I even got rid of my mods to make it easier on myself. Having 150+ parts in the pages makes things really difficult when you're looking for stock parts. I just want to make it perfectly clear that every objective in the game is achievable without modding. (Please don't hit me for keeping MechJeb. It makes my writing easier because I can accomplish the tasks and get the screenshots I need much faster).

The Mün Transfer

First-off, you need to make sure you have what it takes to get to the Mün to begin with. Sometimes, trial and error is the best way; however, if you've gotten to the point where you're skilled enough to bring a decent craft into orbit around Kerbin, you're off to a good start.

Transferring to Mün from any parking orbit around Kerbin take around the same amount of delta-v, give or take a hundred or so. The transfer maneuver will usually cost anywhere from 650 to 900m/s (the closer to Kerbin, the more delta-v is required). As you can see, this transfer costed me 825m/s of delta-v, from a parking orbit of 125KM.

To get started, put yourself in a medium-high parking orbit. Lower orbits work, but make lining the moon up for proper phase angle a bit of a pain in the bum. Orbits lower than 120KM cannot exceed 50x timewarp, hence my 125KM orbit. 100x does the job just fine, although 50 is acceptable.


I'll be frank here. I really have no idea what the real numbers are behind a moon transfer when we're talking about launch phase angle, because I've never paid that much attention. However, I'll teach you the way I learned how to do it on the KSP forums; a method that, for me, works better (or maybe the same) as having an autopilot do it for me. It's done by eye and on-the-fly. No map screen shenanigans and protractors required.

So get into your parking orbit! At 125KM? 500KM? Whatever. Let's go! Look out. Pan your camera around. See the moon anywhere? Use this flowchart to find out what to do.

See moon? --------> No ------> Go into timewarp until moon appears on the horizon of the planet. Go to step 3.

See moon? ----> Yes ----> Is it sitting on the horizon of the planet? ----> No ----> Timewarp until it is.

On the horizon? ------> Burn prograde until your map screen displays an intercept.

Oh, look, you have a Mün encounter! Might look something like this. I call it a curly space mustache because with one of the recent updates, they made the future orbit lines curly and silly.

Here's the breakdown:

Mün is on a 0 degree incline orbit around Kerbin. So, if you're also in a zero-degree incline orbit, transferring is very, very easy. The moon orbits at such a speed that once it appears on Kerbin's horizon (if you're reasonably close to the planet), a prograde burn will get you on a direct intercept course. Super simple stuff. No LPA calculations, no crazy protractor crap. Just burn when it pops up over the planet and you're there.

Now, make adjustments. Tip-toe between prograde and retrograde until you get a good intercept distance. I usually go anywhere from 25KM to 150. It all depends on what you want to do. For a landing, I suggest 50-100KM.

Circularize

Same thing you do when you get into orbit around Kerbin, only backwards. Assuming you have your encounter where you want it, time-warp forward until you're close to where the line changes over to the intercept. Don't go too fast or you'll just straight up overshoot the moon and probably fly into orbit around the sun.

Anyway, coast to your orbit's periapsis, noted by the blue Pe, and slow down to 1x when you get there. Turn your ship toward retrograde and burn until your orbit shrinks to a circle. Does it have to be perfect? No, but having a more eccentric (circular) orbit will help you land a little easier. Congratulations, you're in orbit around the moon. Press F5. Please. F5 is the quicksave function and I hammer it every time I make it into orbit or am about to perform a landing. If something goes terribly, terribly wrong, you can hold F9 to reload your last quicksave and pretend it never happened. (Yarrr, savescummers!)

Now prepare for the hard part. (No, that wasn't it.)

Landing

Here, I've prepared two images stitched together. On top, my circularized orbit around the chosen body. I've marked in red where I want to land, and burned where my vessel is (noted by the lander icon in the orbit). Note where my ship was in relation to my projected landing spot. It was 100% accurate to the area I wanted to get to.

There are a few ways to land. I'll walk through three. One way is killing all horizontal velocity mid-orbit and falling straight to the ground. Your orbit line will turn into an up-and-down terminal trajectory, and you'll fall directly into your landing spot. I do not recommend this. It's very inefficient and eats up a ton of delta-v that you could otherwise spend doing a much safer landing, which I'll describe next.

Normal landing. What I mean by "normal" is what I've demonstrated above. Burning retrograde in-orbit to shrink my periapsis to send me on a sub-orbital trajectory to the ground, where I will slow to a smooth stop and touch down neatly.

And then there's lithobraking. This is is probably how you started the game. It's a fancy term for smashing into the ground to land. Usually done with big airbags.

How to actually land
Once you've got your landing spot figured out, time-warp until you're about as far away from it as I am in the screenshot above. Figuring that part out just takes practice and getting to know how the orbit works. The more direct your landing, the more fuel you're going to have to use to slow down. So try to stay away from direct-to-ground methods.

As you near the moon, come out of timewarp and begin your braking burn. At this point, you're probably going around 600m/s or so and need to kill off some of that horizontal speed. Point retrograde and burn at 10-60% throttle, depending on your engines. This part also takes practice and I suggest quicksaving before performing the landing. At 5,000 meters above the surface, you cannot progress past 1x timewarp and it will put you there if you're above it. I suggest starting braking around 10KM.

Continued in next section.

Mün Landing Tutorial (Part 2)

Due to Steam stomping on my creativity with character limits, this tutorial has been extended to two sections. Cont...



As you come further and further down toward Mün for your landing, you'll need to start killing more and more speed. This is where your ship makes or breaks the cut on delta-v budget and landing capability. If you don't make it on your first try, don't be discouraged. It takes time and practice to land properly, as well as building craft that can actually perform it.

And I'll tell you a secret. Landing on the moon is harder than landing in some other places. Think about it-- parachutes don't work where there's no atmosphere.

During your descent, you'll be tested in your multitasking skills. You'll have to constantly adjust your throttle. Don't let yourself get going to fast, or even slow down so much that you start going back up. If you have weak engines, you'll have to pay attention to your heat output so you don't explode. On top of that, you'll have to put down your landing gear. (I hope you didn't forget it, because I forgot to mention it!)

And don't forget the most important step: keep yourself lined up on your retrograde. It's the key to killing horizontal speed and keeping level as you land. Utilizing ASAS and RCS during this stage is very useful and I highly recommend one or both. Also, you can press capslock by default to go into "precision mode", which makes all of your inputs slightly less... dramatic. Very useful for keeping on target and not sending your ship too far astray.

At this point, there's no tutorial left. It's up to you to slow yourself down and land level. Don't forget to deploy your landing gear by pressing G.

Landing lights help too. I also hope you brought a power source for those cold nights.

Good luck, pilot!

[jhondoe6969]

i was scrolling looking to see how to earn science i couldn't find ever i didn't read it properly or its not there can someone help?

[Lerik]

good read

[m3]

take my points

[Jeb.]

Despite being 10+ years old, I could prolly transcribe this to my friends who aren't Space-inclined.

[Bored_Kerbonaut]

jeez this guide is old

[Janbo]

@chsavvas_5 You propably play career mode. in order to see apoapsis and periapsis you need to uprade command center and tracking station to level 2 or just switch to sandbox/science

[DrippySpy]

i cant see my apoapsis and periapsis i need help because i cant play he game anymore

[Glamrock Gabson]

might read later as i still didn't learn how to play this thing althought i know its a very good game

[Darki | Delta]

nice

[ʇsᴉƃuǝʌǝɹ]

U P D A T E
(That's not even how it works anymore)