Kerbal Space Program Gameplay

JesseL brought this one onto my radar, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. 

The game is basically model rocket building.  You can either build a rocket that'll just go up and then crash, or make something that'll be capable of landing on moons and other planets before returning.

I've managed to land on a moon a couple of times, but never had enough fuel to take back off.  Still working on that one, till then there's a few stranded Kerbalnauts up there.



Given school and personal life, they might be waiting for a while.  Quite a few have also died on launch pad explosions, mid-air break ups, high altitude space jumps, escaping Kerbal orbit and getting stuck orbiting the sun as a new asteroid, or capsules that I forgot to put parachutes on.

Very fun game!

Found out about the game a few weeks back via a random YouTube recommendation. It's a whole lot of fun... too bad my computer won't even run the demo version.

Quite a few have also died on launch pad explosions, mid-air break ups, high altitude space jumps, escaping Kerbal orbit and getting stuck orbiting the sun as a new asteroid, or capsules that I forgot to put parachutes on.

Very fun game!

You still might be doing better than the Russians. Have you kamikazed a planet yet out of an english/metric conversion error?

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That looks like fun what are the system requirements?

I am happy to report that last night, using the experimental Orion-5 rocket, Kerbalnaut Jedidiah became the first Kerbin to land on the Mun/moon and then return home safely.   

Landing wasn't the goal of the flight when it took off, rather it was to test the transfer vehicle's fuel/weight/engine set up for a later mission.  But the test went well, and so it was decided to expand the mission to include an lunar orbit.  Once in orbit it was found that we had enough fuel to make a landing attempt, and so it seemed like no better time than then to test out the actual lander's fuel/weight/engine set up.

Landing was accomplished with a bit of a bump, and the return lift off left us with just a little more fuel than what we needed.

Excellent.  I consider this one of my best video game achievements. 

This is the biggest time suck that has found it's way onto my computer in a very, very long time.  Insidious.

I tried to download some of the add-ons but can't get them to work.  Do you have to buy the program to be able to use the add-ons?

Well... if you go to kerbalspaceprogram.net some of the addons there are marked as compatible with the free version. I certainly have more parts than come with the free version. I may get the full version for Christmas if my Hint dropping skills haven't declined too much. If not I'll pick it up myself.

One small step for a Kerman...

I finally landed on the Mun.  Unfortunately as you can see my three intrepid Kerbinauts are going to be permanent residents as most of the spaceship ended scattered over about fifty miles of the moonscape.



I can't tell you how awesome it feels to actually have made it to the Mun!  It's so freaking awesome.

Vertical Landings are by far the easiest way to land on worlds with no atmosphere. Just get burn retrograde until you reach 0 speed. Then fall straight down and just use your engines to bring you to a nice soft landing. It uses more fuel but is much easier. You can tell when you will have a vertical landing when the orbit lines in the map view are both straight lines to the ground. This is the easiest way I have found to kill horizontal speed easily.

Good rule of thumb for the moon is your landing speed in m/s needs to be about 4m/s or below to land safely. So keep your rate of descent around 1/100 of the altitude. 100 m/s at 100000, 50m/s at 50000 etc etc.

Honestly I usually just do suicide landings now. I do a straight drop landing from 300k and just scream to the ground until 30k or so and then just burn full blast to slow my descent to 100m/s until I hit 5k then burn the rest off right above the surface. If your engines so much as cough you die, but it is the most fuel effective way.