Kerbal Space Program

It's a game where you make rockets. Orbit and deorbit with nothing but an inertial speedometer and a gyroball, or just make pretty explosions.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com

I'm having great fun with it.

Thanks for the reference, i've been playiing it for the last hour and having a ton of fun with it.

This is really, really fun. I think my favorite part is being able to see the look of relief on my pilots' faces every time they land safely.

So far I have been only able to get into space and back onto kearth, Still working on maintaining a stable orbit

Ah, .exe. My old nemesis. We meet again.

Works page is launched

I did a bit of modding to make a really fast rocket, to see if the game stops you from exceeding the speed of light.

DAMMIT, launch your works in the right Name Space!

Moved to Kerbal Space Program, main page cutlisted.

edited 27th Jul '11 12:50:18 AM by Deboss

So I gave the game a Poke its a lot of fun. However apparently stacking rockets only works so far.

So, I can't link an image. Short story: I managed to put my spacecraft in orbit of the sun.

edited 22nd Jan '12 6:01:12 PM by colinispower

That's not hard. Just build a big enough rocket and go straight up. You can easily go into solar orbit and even escape it if you do it right. What's harder is landing on Minmus without using the new patched conics map system.

Spaceplanes are always hard.

One thing I'd like to see- being able to use RCS thrusters as emergency engines. I've got a ship kinda drifting away with no normal rockets left(one stage was damaged during launch) and I always feel kinda bad killing the guys. You can't tell me nasa wouldnt do this if needed...

EDIT- I jettisoned the SAS section. it seems to have given me enough of a boost to de-orbit.

edited 11th Aug '12 6:21:22 PM by Joesolo

anyone had any success with space planes? i've seen some pretty cool looking ones.

Just bought this after farting around with the free demo for awhile and learnig the basics of getting a staged rocket built and into a stable orbit.

And yeah, spaceplanes are hard. Would be nice if I knew where the combined CG of the assembly was, I did a lot of cartwheeling with my first spaceplane attempt.

Rockets are easy in comparison. Should be simpler now to get a large stack up into orbit for a Mun-shot since I now have the 1200-thrust LF rocket motor now. Was limited to the 200-thrust demo units, and they're rather lacking.

About my only gripe so far is the lack of a tri-coupler for large tanks (MOAR FUEL NAO), and control surfaces for wings mystify me as to where I'm supposed to stick them on. Common sense says "the back of my tailfin and wings" but they refuse to stick there.

Yea, you gotta turn them with the wasd and qe controls to the right position.

and nothing really goes to the right spot easily from certain views. building space planes, i have trouble getting the engines on right.

I've had it for about 5 hours, my spaceplanes havent even lifted off. The first was knowingly stupid, just to test it. It's a pain to line it up with the runway correctly, and if you try to steer it just rolls and explodes spectacularly. once that happened without me even DOING anything.

Saw a bunch of epic disaster vids with spaceplanes. SRB's strapped to it, tail heavy, added tanks to the nose to balance it out, sometimes it collapsed under it's own weight.

So I progressed from the Project Mercury phase (sub-orbital shots, simple "get into orbits and back" stuff), and then worked on Project Gemini (changing orbits, including periapsis and apoapsis, inclination and all that fun crap) and landed myself into the Project Apollo phase - I injected myself into orbit around Mun, farted around up there for awhile, then made it back. Only problem was that my capsule had crap stuck on top of it, so that the parachute ripped itself off when I came down only 20km from the launch center.

Was bummed. Got some good mileage out of that particular craft. At least I left a spent stage up in Mun orbit as a going-away present, so it wasn't a total loss.

Redesigned it, only to have it blow itself up spectacularly a mere twenty seconds into flight. Fixed that (wings fix everything, and if they don't, you're not using enough) but then my staging was all messed up somehow so that I kept ejecting perfectly usable stages for no immediate reason.

Went to another design, and now I'm in Mun orbit once again. Still not equipped for landing, though.

Once I master getting to Mun and back, I can fret about landing.

Kerbin low orbit is getting fairly cluttered with spent stages.

EDIT: I did manage to get a plane to work, but it's not a spaceplane of any sort. Front-to-Back balance is everything - but fuel usage ends up upsetting that balance, so that my plane gets progressively tail-heavy the longer I fly. Might have to manually disable fuel usage from certain tanks, maybe pull fuel out of the central tank only or something weird like that. Front wing canards are stupid looking, but they add much-needed control - my first flyable plane was a total slug on the controls. This one can pitch so fast, I can stall it in no time. Easy to recover from that, though.

edited 20th Aug '12 2:24:59 AM by pvtnum11

My hardrive failed so I was out of it for a while. I'll start screwing around with this again soon.

I've killed quite a few kerbals trying to build a spaceplane now...

So I installed the BFE-5000 engine mod.

Yeah, I could get a needlejet aerospike engine to get me to orbit with just a tiny fuel tank and no additional parts, but that's no fun.

This thing allows single-stage-to-orbit craft, provided that you can manage to survive the takeoff. Protip: Use gantry units to raise the entire rocket to above the launch tower, otherwise the physics will end up kicking out the engine nozzle and making a giant mess. I got the throttle up to about 50 percent before the entire thing self-destructed from excessive loading.

But, I did get the thing to launch itself into orbit, and then, into an escape trajectory from Kerbin.

edited 27th Aug '12 5:07:15 PM by pvtnum11

I do that with 8-10 SRBS and a liquid rocket. and the liquid rocket was used trying to fight it!

The large boosters? still involves staging to a degree - blast them, and eject them when they're spent. Liquid-fueled engines (stock ones anyway) either don't have enough thrust or they do have enough thrust but they burn fuel in such quantities that to fuel it you will need so many tanks that it'll have pitiful acceleration rates in atmosphere.

The BFE fixes that problem. It lifts anything.

My typical rocket: Six srb's, used to claw my way out of the dense lower atmosphere. Triple-engine liquid first "ascent" stage, using nine of the big tanks. T His can burn long enough to get me to clear atmosphere, but isn't enough to round out the orbit. A single-engine second "orbiting" stage, this is used to shape the orbit and provide maneuvering fuel around Kerbin. It is usually enough to get to Mun and shift orbits to there. A small liquid-fueled third "return" stage using one of those low-impulse high-efficiency engines. Enough so that I can leave Mun orbit if I had to jettison the orbital stage prior to departure.

The return stage is usually enough to bleed off forward velocity so that I return to atmosphere.

Also, RCS thrusters can be used to slow you down if you use them in translation maneuvers, although it's far from ideal. So I usually have a fourth quasi-stage just beneath the capsule that contains RCS fuel, thrusters and one of those advanced gryo-stabalizer whatever-they-are things. RCS thrusters are used for when I have too much rocket for the SAS to handle, but then SAS is able to manipulate a small rocket without any problems, ensuring that I have thruster fuel should I need to use them as retro-rockets.

"gryo-stabalizer whatever-they-are things" SAS modual.

Gotta be gyro-based. Remember, when you spin stuff, SCIENCE happens.

I still love the Kerbal who panicks at everything. (Though, really, that just makes him Genre Savvy, no?)

New Kerbal Named after Neil Armstrong. I cant think of a better way for them to memorialize him.