r/KerbalAcademy•
Morticeq

Got my third KSS going, but there are still some things I don't get...

Space Flight [P]

TL;DR: I want to know how to: reposition space station, how to lock direction it's facing, how to rotate it, and how to rotate individual parts after docking.

First of all, how can I make my station rotate? Uncle Google always points at something like rotating habitat, which is precisely not what I want from it. I want to 'reposition' or more specifically reorient my station from time to time. But as soon as I have more than two pieces connected together making up a station, it just starts to sort of wobble like a worm, which induces panic in both me and Kerbals. I immediately turn of RCS again (there really is not point for me to even store monopropellant on my space station now) and just go back to something else.

The other thing that is connected to abovementioned problem is that I would like to have my station always facing certain direction. I want some of my satellite dishes always face Kerbin, my solar panels face the other way, escape pod facing station's retrograde, etc. Is there any way I could do it? Hell I haven't calculated anything in a couple of years, but I'm even willing to do the math. I think that I need to somehow give station a very slow spin, that would match Kerbin. How am I supposed to calculate that? o.O

Third thing is that I want to increase my station's altitude. It has a beautiful 94k/92k orbit which seems pretty circular to me, but I want to increase that to ~125k Ap/Pe. But since I can barely rotate my station, I have no idea how to do this.

Fourth and the last thing is that I would very much like to rotate parts of my base after docking. <-- That thing over there is one of my main priority in learning things in KSP now. It is just impossible for me to accept that my only option is to undock, rotate, pray, redock, swear, undock, rotate, smash solar panels, rotate, redock, give up.

Now my thoughts: this is my Space Station. It is now pretty 'one-axial' (is that even a word?), so if I turn off RCS I can use reaction wheels to rotate it along one axis. Every other movement creates wobble. Fortunately it still has one Terrier engine with a small tank, which could help me move it around. But that would most probably just break the whole thing.

TL;DR again: I want to know how to: reposition space station, how to lock direction it's facing, how to rotate it, and how to rotate individual parts after docking.

Posted May 15, 2016, 8:25 PM UTC

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