Kerbal Space Program.

Akrasia

I spent ages planning a return trip to Ike in career mode and it was all going fairly ok until I started my descent to Ike's surface and I realised I had put the landing struts on upside down.

It was my first time making a ship where the lander docks with an orbiter and it required an apollo style manouver in Kerbin orbit to detach the lander from the delivery stage and re-attach it to the nose of the rocket for the journey to ike.

Luckily Ike's gravity is so low that I was able to land on just the engine and not explode, and when it fell over, the reaction wheel had enough momentum to allow me to point the ship towards the sky enough to take off.

BeardySi

Highly successful Minumus mission last night

Did manage to invoke the Kraken on the way home though - in a fit of impatience (and minor inebriation) I really cranked up the warp on the way home (I'd burned for a direct re-entry as I was low on juice) and hit hit Kerbin at massive warp - cue large explosion and no Kerbin!!!! some part of the ship must have survived as my view was flung out of the Kerbin system with massive velocity...

Thank feck for f9!

Turtwig

You can destroy planets?
Cool, I did not know that. I must try this!:D

BeardySi

Gotta love late night Kerballing...

So I'm sending a biome hopping lander to the Mun followed by an orbiting fuel tank for it... The lander is the first one to approach the Mun and all goes well with the munar capture. Only fumes left in the transit stage by now, so with the last dregs of fuel Jeb drops his PE just below the surface and drops the stage. All good so far...

Round about this point I think right I'll just raise my PE back above the surface straight away - one quick burn later and I've driven the lander straight through the (thankfully empty) jetissoned stage. Stage destroyed and big bang ensues - the lander comes off seemingly unscathed until on later inspection I notice the docking port is gone! Looks like Jeb's going home sooner than he thought. I suppose I can be happy I noticed the missing port before I burned all the fuel aboard the lander and marooned Jeb...

Akrasia

Treadhead wrote: »

Gotta love late night Kerballing...

So I'm sending a biome hopping lander to the Mun followed by an orbiting fuel tank for it... The lander is the first one to approach the Mun and all goes well with the munar capture. Only fumes left in the transit stage by now, so with the last dregs of fuel Jeb drops his PE just below the surface and drops the stage. All good so far...

Round about this point I think right I'll just raise my PE back above the surface straight away - one quick burn later and I've driven the lander straight through the (thankfully empty) jetissoned stage. Stage destroyed and big bang ensues - the lander comes off seemingly unscathed until on later inspection I notice the docking port is gone! Looks like Jeb's going home sooner than he thought. I suppose I can be happy I noticed the missing port before I burned all the fuel aboard the lander and marooned Jeb...

The great thing about KSP is that the more ambitious you are the more rewarding failure is You can think of it as failing to explore the mun, or a glorious apollo 13 style recovery from disaster

Akrasia

My last KSP session ended as a damp squib (squid)

I was trying to rescue a guy in orbit of the mun and another guy stranded on the surface of the mun (contracts) in the same mission, so I wanted to make the lightest possible lander. I figured external command seats would do the trick, so I bolted them onto a small fuel tank with a very small engine and micro struts thinking that these would be enough to land and return to an orbiting return vessel if the orbiter was in a really low mun orbit

The problem was that when I tried to get Valentina to sit on the external command seat she just wouldn't climb on board. I tried over and over but there must have been a glitch or something so I had to just return home without rescuing the guy from the surface of the mun.

Adyx

So the Xbone is getting in on the reaction along with the PS4 now...

See what I did there?!! No? Okay

Subcomandante Marcos

Just downloading the demo for this, am I about to get sucked in?

BonkeyDonker

Subcomandante Marcos wrote: »

Just downloading the demo for this, am I about to get sucked in?

Yes.

Akrasia

Subcomandante Marcos wrote: »

Just downloading the demo for this, am I about to get sucked in?

It will probably take you a bunch of goes to get into orbit, (many explosions await you) but after then, you have about 200 hours of Scott Manley videos on youtube to explain to you how sh1t moves in space

Enjoy

Subcomandante Marcos

Akrasia wrote: »

It will probably take you a bunch of goes to get into orbit, (many explosions await you) but after then, you have about 200 hours of Scott Manley videos on youtube to explain to you how sh1t moves in space

Enjoy

I got out of the atmosphere handy enough but trying to establish orbit is so hard. Bit the bullet and bought the game anyway and now it's even worse. I literally have no idea what I'm doing now, messing around on sandbox and it's so bloody hard even figure out which parts to string together to build a decent rocket.

Akrasia

Subcomandante Marcos wrote: »

I got out of the atmosphere handy enough but trying to establish orbit is so hard. Bit the bullet and bought the game anyway and now it's even worse. I literally have no idea what I'm doing now, messing around on sandbox and it's so bloody hard even figure out which parts to string together to build a decent rocket.

Half the fun in the game is figuring out the best rocket design but it's a bit overwhelming for the newcomer

One important tip is to use struts to strap everything together and stop them from wobbling around and exploding

It might be a bit easier to start out with a career or science mode game because they limit the parts available to you so you don't get too overwhelmed

If you want to stick with sandbox, a tip is to sort the parts by size or by mass. This makes them a little bit easier to sort through because in general, the bigger the rocket, the bigger the parts you'll need

If you wanna build a huge big rocket, you'll usually be looking at bigger parts for that

Keep it simple at the start, just the essentials, command modules reaction wheels, fuel tanks, engines, stack separators, batteries, parachutes, struts, fuel lines and solar panels.

figuring out your own rocket design is what makes KSP so much fun, but when you get stuck there are tonnes of youtube tutorials for every aspect of the game.

Thargor

Do they include a tutorial these days and is it playable in Vanilla without having to dick around with 50 different mods?

Thargor

Getting back into this while waiting for Fallout, couple of questions though.

In Career mode, is money a problem? Do I need to be hitting contracts with every launch etc? I cannot find a single explanation for the latest version of this online, for example can I be left with a situation where there is no more money for launches and the game is unplayable? Or can I just speed up time and let it build up again like in other management games.

Same for Science, is there a list of science objectives I should be hitting?

For the current version that is, theres a million tutorials out there for old versions.

Akrasia

Thargor wrote: »

Getting back into this while waiting for Fallout, couple of questions though.

In Career mode, is money a problem? Do I need to be hitting contracts with every launch etc? I cannot find a single explanation for the latest version of this online, for example can I be left with a situation where there is no more money for launches and the game is unplayable? Or can I just speed up time and let it build up again like in other management games.

Same for Science, is there a list of science objectives I should be hitting?

For the current version that is, theres a million tutorials out there for old versions.

I think it definitely is possible to run out of money if you play with hard difficulty settings, (especially if you have an accident and blow up an important building) but when you start your career, you can choose the multipliers for science and cash, so I went for extra cash and extra science for each objective because I wasn't looking for the kind of micro management of assets and resources challenge that others might enjoy.

When you lose a Kerbal in space, it costs more money each time to replace them. The costs go up exponentially, so I reckon the hardcore player has enough to keep himself occupied. Kerbal on hard mode is unbelievably hard.

It's pretty damn hard on easy mode too, but for other reasons, and at least it's more forgiving of mistakes.

Thargor

Thanks, and when I do fail is it true Im not losing money or Kerbals when I hit "Revert to Launchpad/Flight Centre" etc?

Akrasia

Thargor wrote: »

Thanks, and when I do fail is it true Im not losing money or Kerbals when I hit "Revert to Launchpad/Flight Centre" etc?

Nah, if you go back in time there's no penalty other than your own shame for forgetting (again) to correct the staging order so that the lander retro boosters don't deploy before the main engines.

Thargor

9 out of 10 of my launches the parachute deploys when I hit space to start the rocket on the final stage, the Kerbals make strong parachute string

Akrasia

KSP version 1.1 has just been released today

It's the biggest update in ages, but the main benefit is that it now supports 64bit processing in Windows using the Unity 5 engine

This means it can use more than 4gb of ram, and multiple cores in your CPU and the performance is way smoother and your mad creations can be much bigger and madder without everything slowing down to a crawl

There have also been lots of little improvements and changes to the UI and controls, as well as a whole new tutorial and help package to make the impossible trips slightly less impossible.

Alcoheda

All versions after this release have been crashing intermittently for me.

Seems a lot of people are having an issue.
I'm wondering how many of you are experiencing it.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/140001-bust-11x-crashes-your-help-requested/&page=7

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/8241