Find location when flying a lander in KSP
How can you find a location when flying a lander in KSP? I have a contract to collect soil samples from specific zones on Minmus. The locations are shown with pink sample bags in the orbit map, but aren't marked in staging view.
I can activate navigation to the location. This adds the pink sample bag symbol to the navball on the direction to the location. When flying over a location I'm looking down on the top half of the navball, but the mark for the location is conveniently located on the bottom half.
Landing somewhere near the locations doesn't work because they aren't visible to the Kerbal on an EVA (and the Kerbal doesn't have a navball).
How can I find these locations while flying my lander?
Example
These locations are not ordinary objects. You can't set them as a target, only "activate navigation".
Only descending into a crater so that a location was above me could I get a good enough idea of which direction it was.
This is the view of the navball from almost directly above the location. Notice there isn't an anti-location marker.
If I roll the craft over the location marker is visible on the underside of the navball.
The above series of actions isn't a solution. It's an aggressive 500 m/s Δv maneuver to demonstrate the conundrum.
Solution 1:
What you want is the In-Flight Waypoints plugin:
Click to view full size.
The KSP developers have even highlighted it on their dev blog. Hopefully this becomes stock soon.
Solution 2:
I second the recommendation to get the In-Flight Waypoints plugin (should be stock).
Other things to try:
- Add a probe core or docking port upside-down so you can click "Control From Here". I forget if you can assign that to an action group, which would make it easier.
- Try the Trajectories mod to make it easier to plan your flight path. You can put it in "body-fixed mode" to show your path and impact point relative to the ground rather than relative to your orbit. It should make it easier to get your impact (landing) point as close as possible to the navigation marker.
Solution 3:
Try switching to surface mode on the nav ball.