Kerbal Space Program

[Spike88]

Since we don't have a proper thread, I'd figure I'd make one.

For those of you not familiar with the game, it's an indie game that lets you create your own Space Program and attempt to fly throughout the Kerbol Solar System. Here's the synopsis from the actual site:

KSP is a game where the players create and manage their own space program.
Build spacecraft, fly them, and try to help the Kerbals to fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space.

It's kind of like Orbiter, but you make your own rockets. It also uses a 9/10th scale for the galaxy and features little green men.
If you're interested you should swing over to the website:
http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/
You can download a Demo on the Downloads page. Also, there are plenty of Let's Plays and photos floating around.
If you're interested, I suggest buying now, as the game will go up in price come actual release.
*Note: the Demo is of the .13 version of the game, the current version is .17.1 and will be .18 shortly. Also, the game is only in Alpha




News:
For those of you who have the game, but haven't been following along on the recent news in regards to .18, here is a summary. -I'll try and update this with feature updates.

• Alpha .18 is currently in the 5th Experimental phase, which means the bugs are being worked on prior to release. There are typically 7 phases before release, so the update should be in our hands soon. As there is a 16 hour livestream coming out on the 30th to celebrate the games 2nd anniversary. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the launch of update also.
• Kerbalkon will start November 30th 2012 9:00AM EST, 2:00PM GMT. It will be a 16 hour long livestream which will feature "Announcements", "contests", "special guests", and "Special Previews of upcoming services!"
• Lagsbane, a KSP mod, will be implemented in .18. Essentially when unity starts to fall behind in physics calculations(either when you have large ships, or your large ship explodes on the runway) it has two options. One is to continue to try calculating the physics at current speed, which causes the game to lag and the frames to skip. The second option is for Unity to go into "slow-mo" and try and calculate the physics at a slower pace.
  It will be a slider, meaning if you don't want the game to go into slow-mo and would instead suffer through the FPS drop, you can. Also the MET timer in the corner will change colors depending on how far the game slows down.
• Other Features added to .18:

1. Docking - When you dock two vehicles they become one
2. Flight Planner - Accessed from the Map mode, let's you set maneuvers to make docking easier. Can also be used to plan burns to get to other planets, or even do gravity assist maneuvers(slingshots).
3. Electricity - Generated from generators(heavy), alternators, or Solar panels
4. Lights - From landing lights on aircraft wheels, to lights you can attach to your space craft. They drain electricity. If they start to run low on electricity, they will dim, flicker, and then go out.
5. Solar Panels - Generate electricity, are destroyed if you enter the atmosphere with them deployed(due to drag), or if you fly into them.
6. Art passes on most of the planets, these also lead to better performance
7. If you are on the dark side of a planet, your ship will be in shadow. In .17 and below, your ship seems to self illuminate.
8. Resources - Rocket tanks carry Oxidizer and fuel, while Airplane fuel tanks only carry fuel. This means that any aircraft engines will need air intakes. You can also transfer resources such as fuel between docked ships
9. New parts and part touch ups - Trusses, touch ups to the standard fuel tanks, space station parts, sensors(don't have a use yet), and antennae have all been added to the game.
10. Fairings - If you have an engine, and put a decoupler below it, the engine will be covered by a fairing. This will lead to rockets looking a little more uniform.
11. The ability to rename flights mid flight. You can set what they are, which changes their icon on map. The options are Ship, Space Station, Base, Rover, Probe, and Debris.
12. Improved Staging - Only the "necessary" parts IE. Fuel, and engines show up on the staging bar. You can also change staging while your flying the ship.
13. Action groups - You can set objects to be activated by using the 1-10 keys. This could be used to set up an abort sequence. You could put 1 to cut engines, launch any Solid Rocket boosters, and then use 2 to decouple the ship, and fire the escape tower.

Mods:
For those who actually have the game here are some recommended mods:
Protractor Mod:

Lets you stick a protractor to the side of your rocket, perfect for calculating when to do your interplanetary burns. However this mod will be obsolete once flight planning is released in .18


Flight Engineer Mod:
Let's you place two computer chips on the side of your craft. The Kerbal Engineer gives you statistics on your ship while it's in the hangar. These include total fuel, delta V, and your Thrust to weight ratio.
The Kerbal Flight Engineer gives you the same spastics as the regular Engineer, but also gives you the same statistics after your ship is launched. Letting you monitor them as you continue your flight.

Mechjeb:
Suck at piloting? Want to get to space without the hassle? This mod is for you. Basically it's an advanced autopilot with several functions. It can be used to get your rocket into orbit, or even land on other planets without user error. Although, it also has uses for the more advanced pilots. As it lets you set your attitude(prograde, retrograde, etc.) perfectly with the click of a button. You can also use it to see if your rocket isn't making it into space due to your lack of piloting, or because of a design flaw.

Avro Engineer: While I do not use this one, it gives you feedback on your aircraft design, taking out some of the guest work.

Ferram Aerospace Research: Alters the game physics to be more aircraft friendly. Another mod I do not use, but for those of you who prefer to fly aircraft in KSP.

Fairing Factory: Use a Web application to create a fairing for your payload. The website spits out a part, you put it in your craft and have at it. Another one that I haven't used, and will eventually make it into the game.

Payloader: One of the complaints with the current version of KSP is that you can't combine to craft together. Meaning if you build an awesome launcher around one payload, you have to try and recreate it if you create a new payload. This mod remedies that by letting you combine any payload and launcher together. Another one that I haven't used, and will eventually make it into the game.

[Takeda Shingen]

I still need to get around to buying that. Every time I see pics in the screenshot thread I tell myself how cool it seems and plan to go get it, but never do.

[Spike88]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

I still need to get around to buying that. Every time I see pics in the screenshot thread I tell myself how cool it seems and plan to go get it, but never do.

That's how I felt about donating. Back when the alpha was free, and you could donate anything you wanted(starting at $1) to secure yourself a copy. I eventually bought it around .14 but at this point I had to pay $18.

My advice is to buy it while it's still $18, it may shoot up to $30.


Posted in the Screenshot Section, but figure I'll post it here too:

Juno MK II proves to be an excellent launch vehicle. I get my lander in a circular orbit, wait for Mun to come over the horizon and fire my thrusters for an intercept. When the Mun grabs me and pulls me into it's gravity well, I realize I'm on a collision course with its surface. My initial instinct is to fire retrograde to try and slow down so that I could land on the surface, but I realize I'm probably going too fast for this to happen. My only course of action? Burn Prograde towards the moon. You might be thinking, that's insanity! But burning prograde in my orbit and speeding up raised my Periapsis around the moon(my Apoapsis is -900KM xD) to 20KM off its surface. I get to my periapsis and try to fire retrograde to slow down. The only problem is that I run out of fuel... I'm also traveling fast enough that my RCS isn't capable of slowing me down. I probably should've aimed for 10KM, but given the moon has no atmosphere, there is no telling if it would've worked. Anyways, so I run out of fuel and zoom past the moon. I'm brought back into Kerbin's orbit. After a couple orbits around Kerbin, Mun grabs me again and slingshots me.... I'm now stuck in an orbit around Kerbol.





It takes me 80 days to orbit the sun. The orbit comes within 30KM of Kerbin and 100KM of Eve. However, due to the varying speeds, I'd have to wait forever for us to align just right. After waiting two years, I write the capsule off. Jeb hits the self destruct button and ends their flight.

[Oberon]

Dayum, the .18 list looks as impressive as the .17! This is a game that just continues to deliver! Been looking forward to docking for some time, my Kerblas III design will work a lot better if it can recover the Munar lander.

[Arclight]

Gonna be great, really has picked up with the last patches. Rather bare-bones before.

[Lionclaw]

Really looking forward to 0.18!

Have been planning things for space station construction. Like thinking of how to assemble stuff in space.


Like launching this section up for example: With the upper docking port for the assembly craft. Then it just needs to be docked to the station. That could be the challenge of this design, might need RCS on the truss section.

[D]: Docking port
[\]: Truss
[Sp]: Solar panel
[Cm] Crew module

    [D]
[Sp][\][Sp]
    [\]
[Sp][\][Sp]
    [\]
   [Cm]
    [D]

And the assembler looking something like this from above, with the RCS on trusses for leverage in order to make handling large objects easier. (I hope)

And a docking port on top.

[RCS]: Reaction control system
[M]: Module of some sort.
[\]: Truss

          [RCS]
           [\]
           [\]
[RCS][\][\][M][\][\][RCS]
           [\]
           [\]
          [RCS]

[Rhodes]

The version that I played one can only orbit Kerbal! Have to buy a new version and see what's new!

[Arclight]

If you bought it at any point you can just download it. Trick will probably be remembering your details for their store.

[Spike88]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Dayum, the .18 list looks as impressive as the .17! This is a game that just continues to deliver! Been looking forward to docking for some time, my Kerblas III design will work a lot better if it can recover the Munar lander.

There are two mods out there that add docking to .17 if you're impatient. Although the game treats them as two separate vehicles still, you can do fuel transfers and crew transfers.

Originally Posted by Arclight

Gonna be great, really has picked up with the last patches. Rather bare-bones before.

I think it's because they hired NovaSilisko and C7. Both were modders who were hired on. C7 is the one responsible for the aircraft parts. Nova is responsible for all the new parts(except for a couple made by C7), and the planets.

Edit: A post by Harvester(lead Dev) on how docking multiple ports works:

Originally Posted by HarvesteR

It is perfectly possible to dock a hub-type assembly to your space station, to add more docking ports to it. I did that here a few days ago, and if I hadn't decoupled the control unit at the wrong time, I would have had a nice space station... instead of created a small ring of debris around Kerbin... oh well...

But piloting blunders aside, the game fully supports recursively docked vessels (as in, a vessel docked to another vessel, with other vessels docked to itself).

As was said before, docking merges vessels, so every time you dock to something, you're creating a single larger vessel, and the next vessel to dock to it will also merge into the superstructure. Think of docking as attaching parts in the editor. There's no limit to how many vessels you can chain together (well, the cost to simulate that large a vessel will eventually make it impractical, but that's a hardware limitation, not a game one).


And you can actually dock to two ports at a time if you want. If you mount three docking ports on a tricoupler facing a similar docking 'interface' on the other vessel, all three nodes will attach.

Internally, only the first node to attach will merge the vessels. The others will dock in same-vessel mode, where they just create a physics joint between the ports. If you detach the "primary" node, one of the others will become the new primary, until all are disconnected.

So if you had a big robotic arm with a docking port on either end, and several ports along your vessel, you could make it "walk" from port to port, like the one on the ISS does.


(robotic arm sold separately)

Cheers

The robotic arm bit is interesting. I may have to download the mod that adds robotic parts to the game(you move the joints with different key presses). Found here also is a video.

[Hene]

Great game! Downloaded the demo yesterday and now ended up buying the whole thing. One thing that I learned playing the demo is the more engines it has, the better it works no matter how ridiculous it looks. Have to see if that will work with the paid version.

[Spike88]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/...P-Version-0-18
Some .18 videos.

[Feld Grau]

Downloaded the demo last night,still having fun with it. Definitely plan to buy this one. Thanks for posting

[Penguin]

If you plan to buy it, you should grab it in the next few days, as they will soon raise the price: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/...rease-in-price

I bought it in September, after playing with the demo for a while. Worth every cent - even when it becomes more expensive.
The available mods are great and the developer team are the Anti-UBI in terms of information policy.

I'm praying to the gods of Kerbal that .18 will come out this weekend, never anticipated a patch for a game so much as this one.


(http://www.kerbalcomics.com)

[Spike88]

I was just about to post about the price increase and noticed Penguin beat me too it.

As for KSP releasing over the weekend/this week the chances are slim to none.

They've pretty much stated that the game wont be releasing before KerbalKon on Friday, and after .16 they've stated that they wont be releasing any more updates on Friday's or weekends.

As for the reason for no releases on weekends, If I recall correctly the servers died during release and everyone was enjoying their weekend, so it was pandemonium.

[Spike88]

There are mods that add "multiplayer" to the game, by saving the crafts you launch into the same persistence file.

Once .18 launches, is anyone interested in doing this?


Alternatively, if opposed to the mod option we can pass around the persistence file ala Simcity 4 or Dynasty type games.