Nav-Ball Pink Marker???

[Calixus]

What on Kerbin does the little pink marker on the Nav-Ball do?

[Numb-Tung]

I've nothing constructive to add..''sorry'' , I just keep crashing LOL..

STILL...its addictive :P

[Dark Phoenix]

The pink one is the current target.

[Calixus]

...*Thaaanks*............................................................?

[Calixus]

Oh, actual thanks to coding pheonix!

[Zombo]

The pink markers are straight directional markers to whatever you have targeted. Prograde and retrograde. You use that for docking, when you want to close the last couple hundred meters

[dunbaratu]

Originally posted by Zombo:

The pink markers are straight directional markers to whatever you have targeted. Prograde and retrograde. You use that for docking, when you want to close the last couple hundred meters

It's important to note that there are seprate prograde and retrograde markers when docking that are in fact different from the pink markers. The way you phrased it here could confuse people.

The pink markers show you if your craft is *pointed* at the target (or 180 away from it). But they are not the prograde or retrograde markers relative to the target, which are still the yellow and green marks like always.

That brings up an important point that confused the heck out of me when I watched videos explaining docking because the following important fact was not mentioned to me: When the navball says "Target" at the top instead of "Surface" or "Orbit", that's telling you that the meaning of the prograde and retrograde marks has in fact changed and they no longer show you your movement relative to the planet you're orbiting, but rather they show it relative to the target. (In other words if your target it going 2300 m/s and you're travelling the exact same direction at 2314 m/s, it shows a velocity of 14 m/s - your velocity relative to the target, and also the retrograde marker (green) is showing you a direction that is NOT necessarily retrograde to your orbit but rather is the direction to burn to reduce your relative velocity to the target from 14 m/s down to 0 m/s.) You can imagine my confusion when I was being told that to match velocity with my target I need to "burn retrograde until velocity is zero" and I still thought the navball marker was showing my orbital retrograde mark so it sounded like I was being told to slow down to a complete stop so I'd fall straiight down to the planet.

The reason that's confusing at first is that there isn't any warning that the meaning of the marker changed other than the rather cryptic fact that the text changes from "Orbit" to "Target" in the navball's title box. This can happen automatically - once you get near enough to the target the game swictches modes "for you" without telling you, and if you still wanted the original Orbit mode you have to click the navball's title to switch it back.

If you want to travel toward your target, then first be sure you are in "Target" mode on the navball (which if you are seeing the pink markers you will be), and then burn in such a way that you make the yellow prograde marker move to align with the pink target marker. When they're on top of each other, it means you're travelling straight toward the target, and if it was possible to drift in a straight line in orbit (*), you'd drift right to it.

(*) - It is in fact not possible to drift in a straight line in orbit - you will notice your movement tends to curve noticably when you travel over a distance of more than a few tens of meters, but that's a topic for another time.

[Fastbikkel]

@madings
Very late response, but i had to do it.
Thanks a lot, i was looking for an explanation on that, i could not figure out exactly what the hell was happening. Now i have docked a few times already, but was lost again today.
The only difference today i did a muuuuch lower orbit, 88km. On a 400km orbit this navball interpretation becomes a bit easier i guess.

I do not play KSP in steam.