This translates to going vertically for 5k meters,slightly sideways (e. I got an introductory 1 hour course from a friend and that made it.Īs others said, you need to go sideways to get into orbit.

You need somebody to show you the basics. Use struts to make the whole thing stop wobbling. Once your rocket starts getting kinda tall switch to building a massive set of asparagus stages.

As a rough rule of thumb each next stage should be around 4x the size. This makes the final stage more maneuverable but more importantly it exponentially decreases the size of the rest of the rocket. Use a tiny capsule, a tiny fuel tank, and a tiny engine. The second thing is to make sure your final stage is as small as you can get it. Whenever an engine runs out of fuel you can jettison that stage, and have the remaining fuel tanks all entirely full. Doing this can get you a rocket powerful enough to almost go in a straight line to wherever. Repeat for more layers, transferring fuel from each layer to the previous. Say you have a single stage, Add two fuel tanks to the side of the main tank with separators and hook up a fuel line feeding fuel from the outside tanks to the inside tanks. The main thing is 'asparagus staging', which is where you set up fuel transfer pipes between stages on the same vertical level such that the outside engines run out first, and the inside engines last. So other than the going-sideways thing, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with the construction of your rocket so you get more headroom for mistakes. So once you get your apoapsis (highest point) above 100km or so, you can turn off your engines, wait until you get there, then burn hard in the direction you're going and your periapsis (the lowest point of the orbit) will raise up like magic. Lesson number 1: you can increase the height of your orbit on the opposite side of the planet by increasing your speed in the direction you're currently going. Then once you're up there, you need to know the basics of manipulating orbits. So the right thing to do (again, both in Kerbal and in real life) is to initially go just up, but as the air reduces, gradually switch to moving sideways instead. Problem: there's a lot of air in the way.

The most efficient way to do this would be to just go sideways really fast from the ground. Go sideways fast enough, you'll come down but keep missing the planet below you, so you stay in space. The key lesson you need to remember about orbit (in KSP or real life) is that orbit is sideways speed, not up distance or up speed.

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