A heads up for a great little space flight sim I discovered recently which I have not seen mentioned on BF (I think). I've found it to be very addictive creating rockets and launching them into space. The sim also supports addons with a dev kit. The author is following the Minecraft model and asking for $15 for all future updates.
I don't know if it migrated here, but we did have a pretty long discussion of this last yeor on the other board. But I haven't kept up with development and largely lost interest once I figured out how to build a rocket that was actually orbit capable. I think they need to add some additional objectives, if they haven't already.
They added the moon, sun, and, I THINK, space stations. Getting to the moon is something I haven't even tried.
Moon shots are difficult. Generally people adopt one of two paths in the sim. One shot to the moon using a large elliptical orbit. Or achieve stable earth orbit and then boost to the moon. You also need to balance fuel/weight requirements when you design your rocket and have enough fuel for a possible landing or return to earth. I've managed to reach one of the moons using the second method but I found it easier to calculate using one of the many 3rd party Kerbal orbit calculators available on the add-on website. The best part of the sim is experimenting with different multistage rocket designs. KSP has more of a fun factor than a hardcore sim like the Orbiter simulator.
Have they added a flight control computer/autopilot or do you still have to hand-steer your way to the correct trajectory?
Not yet but a KSP enthusiast has written an excellent flight control computer add-on -> MuMech - MechJeb - Autopilot - v1.8.4.
I discovered this game through watching One F Jef's Let's Plays on YouTube and holy shit this game looks amazing! They really ought to have this game available for students in every school in the nation. It looks like the price has gone up as it used to be $7 for all future updates and then the OP said $15 and now it's $18. I would have jumped on it for $7 but just as a donation because to be honest I would probably never get around to playing it as amazing as it looks. To be honest I feel like I've gotten my $7 worth just watching Jef's Let's Plays.
Got the demo version and spent an hour building and launching rockets with the 3yr old. Had lots of fun giving each other orders ("engage stabilizers!", "check!", "disengage rockets!", "check!"). Good laugh.
Yeah, I was surprised he lasted as long as he did. The building part is a bit beyond the ken of littles, but telling daddy to fire the rockets, or being told the same is a good amount of interaction for that age!
In the full game do they give you "long" rockets (like the ones on the shuttle system) or just the default short ones? Those bug me, you need to string so many of them together to make a craft get off the ground. Or I need to see some good sample designs.
Well, consider how small that shuttle is. Those solid fuel boosters are small for a reason. They do still pack a lot of punch, though. To make a big long ticket rocket, you need liquid fuel tanks and engines. I feel like this newer version doesn't have ways to add parallel fuel tanks, which I find odd....
I should experiment more, but liquid fuel doesn't feel enough to get off the ground. I rely on solid fuel for that. Which could be because I R Nub and don't know what I am doing.
There are some very effective design principles and methods as well as steering "tricks" that will greatly increase the total thrust output. One tip straight away: you got too many engines. You can stack 2 or 3 fuel units above each other and have only one engine for them, which will save a large amount of weight. The full game has a set of large parts that are needed for interplanetary missions. It quite advanced over the demo in many regards. Also expensive.
For my Mun expeditions (which are progressing nicely; soon the rover will have landed!), I don't use solid fuel at all. In my screenshot barrage up there, the first stage that gets the rocket off the ground is a set of 7 stacks of 4 full-size fuel pods with engines attached. That alone is probably enough to clear atmosphere with the next stage, but using the "asparagus stalk" method shown below, I can get into stable orbit before even finishing the first 'stage.' So when I start the rocket, all the engines on the bottom fire at once, but because of the fuel line design, it pulls all the fuel from the S4 tanks first. That drains them and reduces weight really quickly, while giving tons of lift. When their fuel tanks burn out, the next stage jettisons the S4 tanks and starts fuel flowing from the S3 tanks. Repeat for S3 and S2. At about the point that the S1 engine is the only one left, I'm really close to stable orbit, leaving a lot of fuel with which to boost to the Mun. I like the design a lot and it can probably be improved but it works for me for right now! I still need to land on Minimus, which should be easy with this design once I actually get my trajectory right. (Image shamelessly stolen from the Something Awful thread.)
Derp. Liquid fuel boosters provide as much or more thrust than solid anyway! Back to the drawing board! I can see a great future for this game where asteroid intercepts, satellite deployments and station building all play into a strategy/economy game of some kind. That would be great no hope the devs make it there in a reasonable timeframe.
For anyone who would prefer to enjoy this game by watching it rather than playing it then I would suggest this You Tube Let's Play by jefmajor. I really love his Let's Plays and find that I always end up laughing my ass off. There's a little bit of cussing so no watching it with your 5 year old but it's always very entertaining.
Tried asparagus chaining (bottom fuel tank hooked to bottom fuel tank? Or top?) with two boosters connected to the central core. The boosters has two liquid fuel tanks, the core three. I put the ship into a solar orbit! So yeah, plenty of power there.
Tried a new asparagus with 4 boosters around the core and it worked well except that I can't get an efficient orbit going. I go up, I tilt east at 10k, moving to 45 degrees or so at 50k ish. I watch the Apoapsis climb to 100k and then I cruise close (by now down to my "core" four fuel tanks almost totally full). I tilt over and fire them but can't keep myself from falling back to earth. I can't get enough horizontal speed, I suppose. So I need to build to keep more than a single booster for my orbital burn ("circumference maneuver"?) or am I doing something wrong? For Lolz I replaced my side asparagus with a stack of three tanks, then to them attached two more tanks with a tri-coupler at the bottom and then... !!!ENGINES!!! Thing went up pretty fast, but I still couldn't get into orbit as I was left with the damn slow core stack trying to turn my very tight eclipse into an orbit.
You need about 2300 m/s orbital velocity at the Apoapsis to reach a stable orbit. Also note that above the atmosphere certain engines become more effective. In vacuum the nuclear engine has twice the fuel efficiency of he next best engine, and 2.4 times the fuel efficiency of the big rockomax engines. Getting out of the atmosphere and then using a dedicated vacuum stage is fuel efficient. However, once you reach 100k altitude it should be relatively cheap to get a stable orbit for lets say half a rockomax fuel tank even with inefficient engines. Are you accelerating towards the yellow circle? Or simply away from the planet? The yellow circle is the right one. /edit: Oh sorry, if you are playing the demo it might just be the increased difficulty. With the vanilla parts it is a bit harder to get a stable orbit.
I think that is it. Harder to achieve an efficient, gravity assisted orbit. Still have some ideas on that front - will try tonight.
I suspect Kurt "kurtjmac" kurtjmac's is the canonical KSP Let's Play. (The devs named an astronaut kerbonaut after him.) Although a lot of it's on older versions of the game.
I'll have to check that out. I just tend to watch all of JefMajor's let's plays as then tend to be pretty comical and he has some interesting selection.
The tri-coupler gives a lot of punch for orbital manoeuvres, but building an asparagus with them is hard. One needs to space the stalks away from the core and doing so means you have to decouple them carefully, and even then, one often gets a spin imparted into the craft which usually spells some kind of doom. Maybe I should go back to the single engine stalks :D
Some progression! Here is the Trisparagus VII. Some solid rockets around a stack of asparagus. The asparagus and the central "stalk" get us into a stable orbit. I call it "stage 2" I had to take it up to out of the atmosphere and then rotate as trying to rotate at 10k, with two 'stalks' jettisoned saw the craft start a roll that made keeping the rocket pointed east impossible. This makes things annoyingly less efficient. This is stage three, ready to send us to the Mun! Mun capture! After a burn I'm orbiting the Mun! My periapsis was at 10k leading to a nice Kerbin rise. I had a highly elliptical orbit and burned to cause a landing... but that meant I came in very fast and couldn't slow down enough. Bad luck, Kerbals! Next time circularize the orbit before the de-orbit burn!
I DLed the demo after watching someone play it on twitch.tv. Spent an entire day designing rockets and having a blast (pun intended). So I splurged and bought it. I agree, that currently, it is overpriced; however I am having lots of fun and will easily surpass my goal of $1/hr cost:enjoyable-hours-played ratio for any game. I cannot wait to see where they they take the game in the future but they should do a Kickstart to get more publicity and funding to finish up the Alpha quicker. I would like to see some full length hollow couplers what will cover up an engine and provide more stability than the metal ties. I would also like to see some lightweight fuel sized modules just for attaching rockets to without increasing the weight of the rocket too much. Last night I finally made it to the Mun. I burned all my fuel getting there and trying to set up orbit, so the mission changed to Munar landing to establish a short-term (read: starvation or asphyxiation) single-pod colony. Instead, Jebediah Kerman was able to create a brand new crater on Mun for future Kerbals to enjoy.
Nater, check Kerbal.net for mods. There are "shroud" decoupler mods which cover exposed engines and provide more strength.
I now own the full game! I have been going a bit mod crazy and I am really interested in building satellites (using the remote control mod) and robot landers.... but these parts have almost no tutorials. Very annoying! Anyone seen any good tutorials for the more esoteric parts?
I'M GETTING THERE! MechJeb, MapSat, all running nicely. Sure, it's an ugly satellite, but my approach to part mods right now is to take them one at a time and really look through all the parts before I install the next one, otherwise it gets annoying. Next goal is to install carts and understand them and then try the coms network mod. Using OmniTool to maintain mod state.
This is interesting: a guy running a forum game with players playing KSP and completing missions for cash. And there is stock trading. And patents. And the kitchen sink! http://t.co/g3JkQzTH
Yeah. I wish I was aspie enough to run such a thing here. Instead, I will do a lets play.... But I need a logo for TinyPirate Space Industries - or any logo for any name that anyone would make for me. Anyone up for some shooping for a good cause?
