Flying

The flight screen shows you the ship, the sky or ground around it, and the handful of controls that fly it. Every number on it tells you how hard the engine is pushing, which way the nose points, or how much of something is left.

Nothing on the screen flies the ship for you. The throttle, the stage button and the turn controls are the whole of what you touch; the altimeter, the navball and the resource list only tell you what the ship is doing, so you can decide what to touch next.

The throttle and the stage button

The THR slider sits at the lower left. It behaves like a real lever rather than a switch: a drag follows how far your finger has travelled since you touched it, not where you first touched it, so a stray tap never slams it open. Slide your finger sideways off the column and the slider drops into a finer gain, marked FINE beside the thumb, for a trim smaller than a straight drag can land on. Three settings snap under your finger as you pass them: 0%, 50% and 100%.

The STAGE button, lower right, fires whatever the active stage holds and arms the next one. A ring pulses outward from it on every press, so a tap on a crowded screen always reads. What goes into a stage, and in what order, is Staging.

The rocket on the pad: THR at 0% lower left, the navball centred, STAGE 1 READY lower right, MAP and the menu button top right. — On the pad. Everything you touch in flight is already on screen: THR, STAGE, the navball between them.

The altimeter and the navball

Altitude sits at the top left, counting up in meters and regrouping into kilometers as the ship climbs so the line never widens. Once you hold an orbit, a second line under it adds APO and PER, the highest and lowest points the ship's path reaches.

The navball, centre screen, is the attitude instrument: a ball with sky on top and ground below, the nose fixed at the top of the screen, so pitching the ship turns the ball under it rather than the ship on the ball. A green mark shows the direction you are already moving and an amber one the opposite; tap the ball to cycle its speed reading between ORBIT (against the planet's centre), SURFACE (against the ground under you) and, once the map has a target ship, TARGET (against that ship). Around the ball: a fuel gauge on the lower left quarter, a maneuver node's remaining burn on the lower right once one is planned, and a load-factor arc on the upper left. Two lines below the ball give your pitch and facing, then your angle of attack, your G load and, while there is air to push against, the lift the ship is making.

The flight HUD partway up an ascent: altitude and APO/PER top left, the RESOURCES panel folded under them, the navball reading ORBIT speed with V/S, H/S, fuel and stage delta-v around it, pitch, angle of attack, G and lift below, STAGE 1 ACTIVE, and the two turn buttons at the bottom. — Partway up. The navball reads ORBIT here; tapping it would cycle to SURFACE or TARGET.

Resources and G

The RESOURCES panel, upper left, lists one line per resource the current stage can draw: how much is left over how much the ship holds, and in parentheses how fast that is changing. Tap the header to fold the whole list to a row of dots when you want the view under it back.

Your G load is the number beside the navball's load arc. It reads white in ordinary flight, turns amber as it climbs and red with a warning mark as it nears what a ship's parts start to break under. Sustained load is what breaks a part, not one jolt of it, which is why a hard corrective burn costs you more the longer you hold it.

Steering the ship

Two curved-arrow buttons at the bottom turn the ship left and right. What answers them depends on what the ship is carrying: fins bite while there is air to push against, a reaction wheel spins the hull on nothing at all, an engine's gimbal swings its whole bell, and an RCS thruster fires from wherever it is bolted, propellant allowing. The ship uses whichever of these it has, in whatever mix keeps the turn balanced.

A ship carrying an RCS block gets a second pad: a switch reading TURN or MOVE above four extra buttons that slide the ship forward, back, left and right along its own axes instead of turning it, which is what a docking approach is flown on. Above the stage button sits the master switch, labelled RCS: cyan while every thruster is armed. Thrown off, it puts every thruster nozzle cold, whatever fires it, and drops the mode switch and its pad from the screen, leaving the ship to steer on whatever else it has.

The flight HUD with the RCS button lit cyan and the mode switch reading TURN, four extra buttons below the navball for sliding the ship forward, back, left and right. — RCS armed, in MOVE mode: the four extra buttons slide the ship instead of turning it.

Tapping a part

Tap any part on the ship and its sheet opens over the HUD: what it can do right now, worded for its state, and any of its properties you are allowed to change in the air. Tap a part in flight covers how to use it.

A part sheet open over the flight HUD, showing the Command Pod's name field and a Close button. — The Command Pod's sheet. A pod's name is one of the properties you can change without leaving the flight.

The ≡ menu

The button at the top right opens a menu sheet: ⚙ SETTINGS for the display sliders (scale, HUD opacity, font size); SAVE and LOAD, sandbox only, since the shared world cannot be rewound; the exit chip, reading ◀ EDITOR before you launch, ⌂ HANGAR once you have, or an amber ⚠ HANGAR that asks twice if the ship is still in the air or under thrust, since leaving it there loses it; 🔔 REMINDERS for the list a map marker adds to; ✎ RENAME SHIP; 📋 CONTRACTS, read-only and only while one is under way; ⬇ RECOVER, only while the ship stands still on the ground, which brings it home and refunds every part still aboard; and ✕ TERMINATE, which ends the flight on the spot and also asks twice. Opening the menu does not pause anything: the world keeps one clock, and the flight runs on behind the sheet.

The flight menu open in sandbox: SETTINGS, SAVE, LOAD, an amber HANGAR chip, REMINDERS, RENAME SHIP and TERMINATE, with the full RESOURCES panel and navball behind it. — The menu in sandbox, which is why SAVE and LOAD are here; the shared world never shows them.

MAP, beside the menu button, swaps the screen for the system map without ending the flight; The map and maneuver nodes covers what is on it.