Flight Question Aligning Plane with USCSSPrometheus

[rrichard]

I know very little about orbital mechanics and rely mostly on procedures and autopilots such as UAP and LOLA. This very interesting ship (from a great movie franchise) seems to continuously rotate when attempting to attain a normal or anti-normal alignment and it is therefore impossible to align planes. My search of the forum seems to suggest a center of gravity issue. Can anyone suggest how to achieve plane alignment with this great ship?

 

[PhantomCruiser]

I've not download this particular ship, but what you are describing is something that many larger ships have in common (mainly they handle like inebriated slugs).

Something that helps, is to manually orient the craft using the rotational thrusters, then activate the autopilot (orbit-normal, orbit anti-normal, prograde, retrograde, etc). That way the thrusters don't keep "missing" the target

It takes so much to get some ships moving, that often the autopilots seem to throw the craft out of control as they attempt to make corrections.

 

[rrichard]

Thanks PC, some time ago before the nifty UAP I sometimes used a combination of Attitude MFD and AlignPlaneII MFD to do plane alignments. The approach still uses autopilots but there is some manual technique involved. I'll have read up again since I've haven't used AlignPlaneII in years. What do you think of this approach to the problem?

Oops, AlignPlaneII does not work with Orbiter 2010...