Kerbal Space Program

[Guest deleted@83466]

This game makes me feel like its my 10th Birthday, and I just got an Erector Set.  If you'd asked me 10 years ago what my favorite computer game of all time was, I'd have had to say Civilization IV, followed by all the other Civ series.  But f**k, KSP draws me in like none other.  It's the best game I've ever played.  Endless sandbox.

 

Early experiments with counterrotating propeller thrust; An early moon lander; A more advanced moonlanding.  Does anyone else play this?

 

[danielprates]

You bet. I have some 3000 hours on it, maybe more.

 

Modded ksp is even better. There are mods to make it much more realistic; I cant even play it anymore without at least some 100 mods. At the very least try some life support mod (so they can, you know, DIE of water or air starvation), and "kerbal health", which makes the little guys go crazy and die if the spacecraft space is too cramped. With those two alone you will see how hard it is to send them on a 1 1/2 year trip to Mars ("Duna" as it is called there), as in real life.

[AtomicP]

I dabble with it but I'm not nearly as proficient as you two. Mostly I play in the Science mode but get stuck building anything suitable for the Mun. I usually run out of delta V before I can transfer orbit. My problem is I don't stick with it, so I drop it when the going gets tough, pick it up again in a few months then forget what I learned the last time. One day....

[Avimimus]

You guys might also find Children of a Dead Earth interesting... although admittedly it is really let down by the AI... particularly missile guidance is weak and there is no way to get the AI gunners to bracket targets (so the most effective weapons are ones which have been designed to produce excessive dispersion - and one can also always start firing before the AI does and hit).

 

I was planning on learning KSP once KSPII comes out... until then I figured I'd focus on the Plane-Maker in X-Plane.

 

P.S. The ship builder in Rule The Waves II is also interesting if one is into design trade-offs and what-not.

[56RAF_Stickz]

bought it years back, there was only the mun to go to then. Great game, found it incredible  what you can learn from playing it without even noticing Having watched the moon landings way back, working out how to do it yourself. Biggest handicap is masochistly not wanting to speed time up. So it really takes me 160days to reach nearest planets.

[Guest deleted@83466]

Wow, you do things in real time?  That is masochistic!  Right now I'm only about midway through exploring Minmus, so my longest transit time has only been about 10 or 12 days.

 

I love how situtations in the game (of your own making) create entirely new sets of design requirements.  I had 4 tourists go to the moon, but I screwed up and the final descent stage fuel tanks were not powered.  So the whole thing banged in, wrecking the engines and tipping over.  I then had to design a rescue vehicle that could do a ground rendezvous at the docking port, and this was the result.  Powered only by monopropellants, and using differential throttles to balance between fore and aft thrusters as the fuel ran out and the CG shifted.  The front can kneel down to align with the port.  The Engineer has braced the vehicle on the opposite side with an hydraulic arm to keep the thing from rolling over on contact. The whole thing worked great.  And after breaking my arm patting myself on the back for having such foresight, that vehicle eventually became the basis for a Minmus hopper/rover, completely shifting how I went about exploring that planet.  Just fun stuff, any way I look at it. 

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by SeaSerpent