11 ms·

Kerbal Space Oddities

208 points by ra7 9y ago

thearn4 9y ago
i can't help but love KSP. But I wish it was easier to just design the craft and missions, and not have to do the manual control. I like flight sims, but KSP controls are a bit too wonky for my tastes.
- jfim 9y ago
  > KSP controls are a bit too wonky You can always use mechjeb for that.
  - Govindae 9y ago
    My first interest in programing, outside of the simple office automation scripting I was doing, started when I built an orbital rendevous calculator in KSP (back before they had orbit planning built in). I eventually merged my mod into mechjeb, adding a whole slew of orbital calculation functions, and many fun space times were had by all.
    - BrockSamson 9y ago
      Thank you for contributing! I love KSP, and Mechjeb helped me get past the frustrating stage of learning the basics. I usually only use it for TWR and ΔV now but I think I'd have given up without it at first.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  There are mods for that. MechJeb and kOS come to mind: MechJeb includes an autopilot, kOS lets you program your own. There's also kRPC which lets you control KSP craft via RPC, so you can use a language that you like such as Python or Node.
  - King-Aaron 9y ago
    MechJeb is about the only mod that I use on a vanilla install of KSP. I honestly feel that it's something that should be part of the game (although I can understand the hesitation to include it).
    - simias 9y ago
      I never use MechJeb because I feel like it's cheating, however I agree that some base functionality is missing from the vanilla game. In particular dV and thrust-to-weight ratio indicators for your rockets while you build them, as well as flight info while in flight without having to switch to map mode every two seconds (for instance your current apoapsis and periapsis and the time needed to reach them while climbing to orbit, and also the amount of dV left in your rockets when you plan your maneuvers). However MechJeb is a bit overkill for that, I prefer to use Kerbal Engineer[0]. It's simple and offers a few quality of life improvements without actually playing the game for you. The other mod I consider vital is the docking alignment indicator[1] which makes docking massively less painful. [0] https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/222685-kerbal-engineer-redux https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/222685-kerbal-enginee... [1] https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220299-docking-port-alignment-indicator https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220299-docking-port-a...
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    MechJeb is awesome, but I only tend to use it once I got the launching manually thing down properly - MechJeb can compensate for some bad design decisions. Some, that is.
  - pc86 9y ago
    Ah yes, because after a hard day of programming I want to come home and relax by programming.
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      Well, maybe not "relax" in the sense of sit quietly, but watching a movie or having a conversation aren't strictly relaxing either. Sorry you don't also enjoy programming after a hard day of (presumably) work.
- Ph4nt0m 9y ago
  You need to get used to kOS scripting language but it is extremely powerful. You can script your whole mission from launch to landing to return. So it can be used for autonomous probes simulations or to automate parts of the mission (Apollo style).
- hcarvalhoalves 9y ago
  Once you have a good design (with just enough control surfaces, good aerodynamics and appropriate thrust-to-weight ratio), you get to low orbit with almost zero input [1][2]. If it requires a lot of input after picking up some speed off the launchpad, it might be a bad design. The controls feel "wonky" for the most part because, since it's a game more than a simulator, you tend to have way more control authority than is realistically possible, specially with reaction wheels. There are some mods to rebalance that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8TO4Ag0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8TO4Ag0E [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel PS: For someone who always dreamt about working in aerospace, KSP is a blast!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dwringer 9y ago
    A lot of the fun in KSP can be finding the line between bad design and good design, and then trying to pilot your way through it (IMHO). I will never forget my first Apollo-style mission and just how many dozens of struts it took to hold together (this was before they added the current largest-diameter tanks/engines), and how hair-raising the piloting of it all was. To me, no game has ever matched the intensity of that experience, before or since.
    - jonathankoren 9y ago
      Agreed. In my current game, I built a station that's in about 100 km orbit of Kerbin, and I've been using Apollo style CSMs and LEMs for munar and minmur missions, but I honestly hate the ships. They have often don't have quite enough fuel for the return trip, so I ended up having to put a tanker out in minmur orbit. It sucks. I've tried to redesign them, but I'm kinda of in a local maximum in designs right now, which kinda sucks.
      - simias 9y ago
- madaxe_again 9y ago
  It sounds like you want MechJeb, which removes a lot of the manual guesswork - it'll do automated ascent, descent, docking, hohmann transfers, etc. - I played vanilla for years but would always get tired of the tedious guesswork and was dubious about MJ, thinking it'd be game-breaking - but rather it's made the game 30x more playable and enjoyable, and doesn't sap the challenge one bit. Only yesterday I ended up doing a return from mun orbit with bingo fuel by spinning a craft up to crazy longitudinal rpm and decoupling the descent stage at just the right moment.
sdenton4 9y ago
Love the seed probes; not a strategy I've tried! I think it's almost always true that your second trip to the mun in kerbal is a rescue mission...
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  They're really handy in the latest version which requires you to set up a sattelite network for communication with unmanned probes, you'd need at least three (ish) to be able to communicate with a probe on a planet, and you'll need several in various positions around the sun to make it work across the solar system (in career mode you only unlock the strongest transmitter late in the science tree, and even then you'll need several).
  - flashman 9y ago
    Having played early in the beta, and then picked it up again this year, I discovered the new need for antennas when my unmanned craft couldn't receive the commands to complete its orbital insertion around Duna. I was... not pleased.
    - rhcom2 9y ago
      Classic KSP. An hour into a mission and you realize you never added batteries and you can't move your probe because the sun isn't hitting the solar panels. Or even worse, you realize as your crew is barreling towards Kerbin that you forgot to add parachutes to your lander...
  - and0 9y ago
    That sounds exciting! I always felt like there wasn't a need to "build" much past the first Mun mission, and grinding for science performing slight variations on the same task to get new parts was really boring. My first thought was how I wished I had to set up satellites (or some sort of infrastructure like remote fuel depots) to reach farther planets. That would also take time but be much more interesting.
sp332 9y ago
For anyone wondering what "spiral staging" is: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  IE, the same thing that Falcon Heavy is triying to do on real world.
  - lightbyte 9y ago
    I thought they scrapped the crossfeed fuel idea because it was too complicated?
    - smasty 9y ago
      They did.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Known both in KSP and space industry as "asparagus staging", it's a pretty old idea. It's tough to implement in real life, though, because pumping fuel around adds a non-trivial amount of complexity to the rocket. FH might be the first ever production rocket to use it, actually. EDIT nevermind, I didn't realize SpaceX scrapped the idea too.
cybersol 9y ago
Great article, but I am pretty sure Jebediah Kerman is NEVER shaken, even if he had to face off against Chuck Norris.
jonathankoren 9y ago
I noticed that this write up is old (2014), so most of the designs shown won't work in the base game anymore. That's good, because why should you be able to launch what looks like a wedding cake? I've been playing this game regularly for 3 years now. It has a vibrant modding community, and recently some of the more popular gameplay mods have made their way into the core game (mainly more realistic aerodynamics, resource mining, my favorite, "deadly reentry"). It's basically a SimCity game, but with rockets. The one downside is that while it's a lot of fun at the beginning, it gets kind of monotonous at the end (if you can call it an end). Flying crew to and from Duna is hard. I've never done it. Even just sending a probe is hard to hit it.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  It's mostly a question of dv. Getting the perfect transfer window is hard, but eyeballing a good enough one and doing some mid course correction is significantly easier. If you put the sun at the center and kerbal at 3 o'clock, you get a good enough transfer window by waiting to having duna at 1 o'clock. You can then eject tangentially from kerbal sphere of influence and correct half way trough. The only real plugin that I strongly suggest there is the aereobrake plugin, that'll show you the predictoion for aerobraking directly on the ksp map.
  - olex 9y ago
    Back when KSP released their first version with other planets (2012 or so), I was a forum mod and tester for them, and I build a small website to simplify interplanetary transfers: http://ksp.olex.biz http://ksp.olex.biz. It's still running and up-to-date, and apparently still used, despite there being a ton of other sites and ingame plugins that provide the same data in much better ways.
    - exDM69 9y ago
      Thanks for your contribution! I've flown many interplanetary missions with your tool. For more accurate and realistic missions, there's this tool [0] to calculate pork chop plots [1] to find minimum energy transfers. (you surely know about this) I think calculators and mission planners like this should be a part of the game proper. Switching to a web browser mid-game to do mission planning is a big turn off for me. It might be a part of their game design, there are very few numbers and data presented in game. But I don't think it works very well apart from some very basic moon missions. A lot of the information is there but it's just difficult to find (e.g. want to know your inclination? select moon, and then look at ascending/descending nodes in map view). I enjoyed the eyeball method initially but you grow out of it soon. I liked the "fire prograde when moon rises over horizon" moon missions and I even achieved a rendez-vous in 0.17 [2] before there were maneuver nodes or other helpful gadgets in the map view. But once we got maneuver nodes, intersection markers, etc that playing style was out of the window. Now I'd really want to have some proper mission planning utilities (similar to some MFD modes in Orbiter). I think the game should (at minimum) have a transfer window planner, a patched conics solver (with optimization), a pork chop plotter and a rocket burn planner for ascent and powered descent. Perhaps a Clohessy-Wiltshire-Hill equation solver for pinpoint accuracy rendez-vous too. [0] https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot [2] http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab
Fifer82 9y ago
I really love Kerbal Space Program but I stopped playing a couple of years back. Unity is really terrible. I remember landing 3 pieces of a moon base, and I was getting like 3fps... After another 3 weeks of making a space station, again was getting 5fps. The funny thing was, I went out and splashed 1.5k on a new PC just for Kerbal, I loaded my save file of my moon base, and now I had 7fps.... Absolutely useless. KSP is like a Mr Universe Body Builder wearing a 3 year old girl's dress.
- bagels 9y ago
  They really improved performance drastically last year. It's totally playable on a Mac mini even.
- cpv 9y ago
  I understand what you are saying, but the latest version is a "big leap for kerbalkind". You should give it a try again. When I have time, I play it on a mid-range laptop.
- golergka 9y ago
  Unity gets bad rep the same way FL studio (in 00s) or any other accessible creative tools do. Because they're the most accessible tools for beginners, they attract beginners and they use it to develop a lot of beginner-level products with all the downsides; however, these tools are quite capable of achieving AAA results in professional help. Unity has nothing to do with KSP being laggy. KSP is a very ambitious game written by a beginner team; without Unity it couldn't have been made at all.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It's not really an argument against Unity per se, but low KSP performance had everything to do with that engine - because it ended up being CPU-bound through single-threaded physics. This problem is now solved, from what I remember.
    - golergka 9y ago
monochromatic 9y ago
This game looks fun, but I couldn't figure out what I was doing when I tried it a couple years ago. I gave up too quickly probably. Is there a good tutorial that y'all used to learn how the game works?
- JoeDaDude 9y ago
  I recommend Scott Manley's tutorials on youtube. Even though many of them are for older versions of KSP, they are still great to get you started. If you are willing to spend a bit, there is a great book that covers a lot of ground in KSP: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do
  - Malic 9y ago
    I'll second that. Scott Manley is THE source KSP tutorials and just plain absurd fun-with-KSP-plugins. You'll get a lot more out of KSP if you watch/follow his videos.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Seconding Scott Manley's videos. The game is fun, and I definitely recommend putting in the time to figure it out. There will come points where things just click, and suddenly getting to orbit becomes easy, then orbital rendezvous, then Mun and Minmus landings, etc., etc.
- bkanber 9y ago
  For me the struggle of figuring it out from the very basics was the best part. It's ok to have 10 or 20 or 50 failed launch attempts in the beginning. You're learning how to go to space!
- CrowCrowCrow 9y ago
  Quill18 has some good Let's Plays - I picked up a lot from him https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tflJyPE7goO4xM0yu96MyD https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tflJyPE7go...
- 9y ago
drewg123 9y ago
Whatever you do, avoid the console version at all costs. A friend told me about this game, and I thought it would be perfect for my (then) 10 year old. We got it for the PS4, and it was nothing but frustration. The biggest controls were complex and confusing when mapped to the PS4 controller, you couldn't install mods, and the game was buggy, frequently crashing and corrupting saves. We finally got the PC version (which I run under Wine on FreeBSD), and it works much, much, much better.
- swiley 9y ago
  I don't understand console games now. I used to buy them because they worked without an internet connection, and the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games tended to be the norm. Now everyone just writes things in unity and the DRM forces you to have a reliable broadband connection, I don't see the point anymore.
  - Rudism 9y ago
    My only computer is a Macbook Pro running Arch Linux (which is my ideal setup for getting work done). In general it struggles to achieve unplayably low framerates in the small selection of games that even run on Linux. Given that I want to play games, my options are to spend a bunch of time and energy researching, price-shopping for parts, and building out what would likely be a $1000+ dedicated gaming Windows PC, continuing to funnel time and money into upgrades as games demand more and more horsepower; or pick up a $250 current-gen console at Walmart, knowing that it'll be able to handle anything I throw at it, and only worry about upgrading several years from now when some game I really want comes out on a future generation console. As someone with a limited entertainment budget, the latter option is by far the more attractive option.
    - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      Dual-boot Windows. Your MBP will do fine.
    - vultour 9y ago
jacquesm 9y ago
Nice Bowie reference.
ateesdalejr 9y ago
Why does it seem that every rocket he designs gets more and more thrusters exponentially?
- jungletek 9y ago
  Because to a certain extent, it's "the Kerbal way". That said, using more efficient staging designs is usually superior to the naive "moar boosters!" philosophy that new KSP players typically start with.

208 points by ra7 9y ago

i can't help but love KSP. But I wish it was easier to just design the craft and missions, and not have to do the manual control. I like flight sims, but KSP controls are a bit too wonky for my tastes.

jfim 9y ago
> KSP controls are a bit too wonky You can always use mechjeb for that.
- Govindae 9y ago
  My first interest in programing, outside of the simple office automation scripting I was doing, started when I built an orbital rendevous calculator in KSP (back before they had orbit planning built in). I eventually merged my mod into mechjeb, adding a whole slew of orbital calculation functions, and many fun space times were had by all.
  - BrockSamson 9y ago
    Thank you for contributing! I love KSP, and Mechjeb helped me get past the frustrating stage of learning the basics. I usually only use it for TWR and ΔV now but I think I'd have given up without it at first.
SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
There are mods for that. MechJeb and kOS come to mind: MechJeb includes an autopilot, kOS lets you program your own. There's also kRPC which lets you control KSP craft via RPC, so you can use a language that you like such as Python or Node.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  MechJeb is about the only mod that I use on a vanilla install of KSP. I honestly feel that it's something that should be part of the game (although I can understand the hesitation to include it).
  - simias 9y ago
    I never use MechJeb because I feel like it's cheating, however I agree that some base functionality is missing from the vanilla game. In particular dV and thrust-to-weight ratio indicators for your rockets while you build them, as well as flight info while in flight without having to switch to map mode every two seconds (for instance your current apoapsis and periapsis and the time needed to reach them while climbing to orbit, and also the amount of dV left in your rockets when you plan your maneuvers). However MechJeb is a bit overkill for that, I prefer to use Kerbal Engineer[0]. It's simple and offers a few quality of life improvements without actually playing the game for you. The other mod I consider vital is the docking alignment indicator[1] which makes docking massively less painful. [0] https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/222685-kerbal-engineer-redux https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/222685-kerbal-enginee... [1] https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220299-docking-port-alignment-indicator https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220299-docking-port-a...
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  MechJeb is awesome, but I only tend to use it once I got the launching manually thing down properly - MechJeb can compensate for some bad design decisions. Some, that is.
- pc86 9y ago
  Ah yes, because after a hard day of programming I want to come home and relax by programming.
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    Well, maybe not "relax" in the sense of sit quietly, but watching a movie or having a conversation aren't strictly relaxing either. Sorry you don't also enjoy programming after a hard day of (presumably) work.
Ph4nt0m 9y ago
You need to get used to kOS scripting language but it is extremely powerful. You can script your whole mission from launch to landing to return. So it can be used for autonomous probes simulations or to automate parts of the mission (Apollo style).
hcarvalhoalves 9y ago
Once you have a good design (with just enough control surfaces, good aerodynamics and appropriate thrust-to-weight ratio), you get to low orbit with almost zero input [1][2]. If it requires a lot of input after picking up some speed off the launchpad, it might be a bad design. The controls feel "wonky" for the most part because, since it's a game more than a simulator, you tend to have way more control authority than is realistically possible, specially with reaction wheels. There are some mods to rebalance that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8TO4Ag0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8TO4Ag0E [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel PS: For someone who always dreamt about working in aerospace, KSP is a blast!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dwringer 9y ago
  A lot of the fun in KSP can be finding the line between bad design and good design, and then trying to pilot your way through it (IMHO). I will never forget my first Apollo-style mission and just how many dozens of struts it took to hold together (this was before they added the current largest-diameter tanks/engines), and how hair-raising the piloting of it all was. To me, no game has ever matched the intensity of that experience, before or since.
  - jonathankoren 9y ago
    Agreed. In my current game, I built a station that's in about 100 km orbit of Kerbin, and I've been using Apollo style CSMs and LEMs for munar and minmur missions, but I honestly hate the ships. They have often don't have quite enough fuel for the return trip, so I ended up having to put a tanker out in minmur orbit. It sucks. I've tried to redesign them, but I'm kinda of in a local maximum in designs right now, which kinda sucks.
    - simias 9y ago
madaxe_again 9y ago
It sounds like you want MechJeb, which removes a lot of the manual guesswork - it'll do automated ascent, descent, docking, hohmann transfers, etc. - I played vanilla for years but would always get tired of the tedious guesswork and was dubious about MJ, thinking it'd be game-breaking - but rather it's made the game 30x more playable and enjoyable, and doesn't sap the challenge one bit. Only yesterday I ended up doing a return from mun orbit with bingo fuel by spinning a craft up to crazy longitudinal rpm and decoupling the descent stage at just the right moment.

sdenton4 9y ago

Love the seed probes; not a strategy I've tried! I think it's almost always true that your second trip to the mun in kerbal is a rescue mission...

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
They're really handy in the latest version which requires you to set up a sattelite network for communication with unmanned probes, you'd need at least three (ish) to be able to communicate with a probe on a planet, and you'll need several in various positions around the sun to make it work across the solar system (in career mode you only unlock the strongest transmitter late in the science tree, and even then you'll need several).
- flashman 9y ago
  Having played early in the beta, and then picked it up again this year, I discovered the new need for antennas when my unmanned craft couldn't receive the commands to complete its orbital insertion around Duna. I was... not pleased.
  - rhcom2 9y ago
    Classic KSP. An hour into a mission and you realize you never added batteries and you can't move your probe because the sun isn't hitting the solar panels. Or even worse, you realize as your crew is barreling towards Kerbin that you forgot to add parachutes to your lander...
- and0 9y ago
  That sounds exciting! I always felt like there wasn't a need to "build" much past the first Mun mission, and grinding for science performing slight variations on the same task to get new parts was really boring. My first thought was how I wished I had to set up satellites (or some sort of infrastructure like remote fuel depots) to reach farther planets. That would also take time but be much more interesting.

sp332 9y ago

For anyone wondering what "spiral staging" is: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging

Zardoz84 9y ago
IE, the same thing that Falcon Heavy is triying to do on real world.
- lightbyte 9y ago
  I thought they scrapped the crossfeed fuel idea because it was too complicated?
  - smasty 9y ago
    They did.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Known both in KSP and space industry as "asparagus staging", it's a pretty old idea. It's tough to implement in real life, though, because pumping fuel around adds a non-trivial amount of complexity to the rocket. FH might be the first ever production rocket to use it, actually. EDIT nevermind, I didn't realize SpaceX scrapped the idea too.

cybersol 9y ago

Great article, but I am pretty sure Jebediah Kerman is NEVER shaken, even if he had to face off against Chuck Norris.

jonathankoren 9y ago

I noticed that this write up is old (2014), so most of the designs shown won't work in the base game anymore. That's good, because why should you be able to launch what looks like a wedding cake? I've been playing this game regularly for 3 years now. It has a vibrant modding community, and recently some of the more popular gameplay mods have made their way into the core game (mainly more realistic aerodynamics, resource mining, my favorite, "deadly reentry"). It's basically a SimCity game, but with rockets. The one downside is that while it's a lot of fun at the beginning, it gets kind of monotonous at the end (if you can call it an end). Flying crew to and from Duna is hard. I've never done it. Even just sending a probe is hard to hit it.

LoSboccacc 9y ago
It's mostly a question of dv. Getting the perfect transfer window is hard, but eyeballing a good enough one and doing some mid course correction is significantly easier. If you put the sun at the center and kerbal at 3 o'clock, you get a good enough transfer window by waiting to having duna at 1 o'clock. You can then eject tangentially from kerbal sphere of influence and correct half way trough. The only real plugin that I strongly suggest there is the aereobrake plugin, that'll show you the predictoion for aerobraking directly on the ksp map.
- olex 9y ago
  Back when KSP released their first version with other planets (2012 or so), I was a forum mod and tester for them, and I build a small website to simplify interplanetary transfers: http://ksp.olex.biz http://ksp.olex.biz. It's still running and up-to-date, and apparently still used, despite there being a ton of other sites and ingame plugins that provide the same data in much better ways.
  - exDM69 9y ago
    Thanks for your contribution! I've flown many interplanetary missions with your tool. For more accurate and realistic missions, there's this tool [0] to calculate pork chop plots [1] to find minimum energy transfers. (you surely know about this) I think calculators and mission planners like this should be a part of the game proper. Switching to a web browser mid-game to do mission planning is a big turn off for me. It might be a part of their game design, there are very few numbers and data presented in game. But I don't think it works very well apart from some very basic moon missions. A lot of the information is there but it's just difficult to find (e.g. want to know your inclination? select moon, and then look at ascending/descending nodes in map view). I enjoyed the eyeball method initially but you grow out of it soon. I liked the "fire prograde when moon rises over horizon" moon missions and I even achieved a rendez-vous in 0.17 [2] before there were maneuver nodes or other helpful gadgets in the map view. But once we got maneuver nodes, intersection markers, etc that playing style was out of the window. Now I'd really want to have some proper mission planning utilities (similar to some MFD modes in Orbiter). I think the game should (at minimum) have a transfer window planner, a patched conics solver (with optimization), a pork chop plotter and a rocket burn planner for ascent and powered descent. Perhaps a Clohessy-Wiltshire-Hill equation solver for pinpoint accuracy rendez-vous too. [0] https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot [2] http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab

Fifer82 9y ago

I really love Kerbal Space Program but I stopped playing a couple of years back. Unity is really terrible. I remember landing 3 pieces of a moon base, and I was getting like 3fps... After another 3 weeks of making a space station, again was getting 5fps. The funny thing was, I went out and splashed 1.5k on a new PC just for Kerbal, I loaded my save file of my moon base, and now I had 7fps.... Absolutely useless. KSP is like a Mr Universe Body Builder wearing a 3 year old girl's dress.

bagels 9y ago
They really improved performance drastically last year. It's totally playable on a Mac mini even.
cpv 9y ago
I understand what you are saying, but the latest version is a "big leap for kerbalkind". You should give it a try again. When I have time, I play it on a mid-range laptop.
golergka 9y ago
Unity gets bad rep the same way FL studio (in 00s) or any other accessible creative tools do. Because they're the most accessible tools for beginners, they attract beginners and they use it to develop a lot of beginner-level products with all the downsides; however, these tools are quite capable of achieving AAA results in professional help. Unity has nothing to do with KSP being laggy. KSP is a very ambitious game written by a beginner team; without Unity it couldn't have been made at all.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It's not really an argument against Unity per se, but low KSP performance had everything to do with that engine - because it ended up being CPU-bound through single-threaded physics. This problem is now solved, from what I remember.
  - golergka 9y ago

monochromatic 9y ago

This game looks fun, but I couldn't figure out what I was doing when I tried it a couple years ago. I gave up too quickly probably. Is there a good tutorial that y'all used to learn how the game works?

JoeDaDude 9y ago
I recommend Scott Manley's tutorials on youtube. Even though many of them are for older versions of KSP, they are still great to get you started. If you are willing to spend a bit, there is a great book that covers a lot of ground in KSP: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do
- Malic 9y ago
  I'll second that. Scott Manley is THE source KSP tutorials and just plain absurd fun-with-KSP-plugins. You'll get a lot more out of KSP if you watch/follow his videos.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Seconding Scott Manley's videos. The game is fun, and I definitely recommend putting in the time to figure it out. There will come points where things just click, and suddenly getting to orbit becomes easy, then orbital rendezvous, then Mun and Minmus landings, etc., etc.
bkanber 9y ago
For me the struggle of figuring it out from the very basics was the best part. It's ok to have 10 or 20 or 50 failed launch attempts in the beginning. You're learning how to go to space!
CrowCrowCrow 9y ago
Quill18 has some good Let's Plays - I picked up a lot from him https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tflJyPE7goO4xM0yu96MyD https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tflJyPE7go...
9y ago

drewg123 9y ago

Whatever you do, avoid the console version at all costs. A friend told me about this game, and I thought it would be perfect for my (then) 10 year old. We got it for the PS4, and it was nothing but frustration. The biggest controls were complex and confusing when mapped to the PS4 controller, you couldn't install mods, and the game was buggy, frequently crashing and corrupting saves. We finally got the PC version (which I run under Wine on FreeBSD), and it works much, much, much better.

swiley 9y ago
I don't understand console games now. I used to buy them because they worked without an internet connection, and the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games tended to be the norm. Now everyone just writes things in unity and the DRM forces you to have a reliable broadband connection, I don't see the point anymore.
- Rudism 9y ago
  My only computer is a Macbook Pro running Arch Linux (which is my ideal setup for getting work done). In general it struggles to achieve unplayably low framerates in the small selection of games that even run on Linux. Given that I want to play games, my options are to spend a bunch of time and energy researching, price-shopping for parts, and building out what would likely be a $1000+ dedicated gaming Windows PC, continuing to funnel time and money into upgrades as games demand more and more horsepower; or pick up a $250 current-gen console at Walmart, knowing that it'll be able to handle anything I throw at it, and only worry about upgrading several years from now when some game I really want comes out on a future generation console. As someone with a limited entertainment budget, the latter option is by far the more attractive option.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    Dual-boot Windows. Your MBP will do fine.
  - vultour 9y ago

jacquesm 9y ago

Nice Bowie reference.

ateesdalejr 9y ago

Why does it seem that every rocket he designs gets more and more thrusters exponentially?

jungletek 9y ago
Because to a certain extent, it's "the Kerbal way". That said, using more efficient staging designs is usually superior to the naive "moar boosters!" philosophy that new KSP players typically start with.