Kerbal Space Program: Let's Light This Candle

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Man, I can't believe someone hasn't thought of this before. A game about building rockets and seeing if they'll fly (or crash spectacularly).

The premise is simple: build a rocket in the vehicle assembly building using various parts (You want a winglet on your solid rocket booster, you *add* a winglet. Hell, add two and see what it does), take said rocket out to the launch pad, light that candle, and see if you can keep it pointed up and your Muppet-like astronauts alive through splashdown. If you need to tweak your rocket, just go back to the vehicle assembly building, make your changes, and rinse and repeat.

Within a half hour I had a rocket that put John Glenn to shame, though my attempts to complete a full orbit were...much less successful (I blame the lack of winglets).

If you're feeling even a bit nostalgic over the last flight of the Space Shuttle going on, then do yourself a favor and download this free little gem.

Thanks! I'll have to check this out with the kids.

Alpha huh? Lemme know when they get closer to fully featured and I'll give it a spin. Looks very cool.

I've been playing this for a week and it is a great plaything. Not to mention watching the reactions of your Kerbal crew is always hilarious.

You can simply mess around and see what monstrosities you can get off the ground:

Or you can try to do proper things, like achieving a stable orbit:

Right now there aren't any other moons or planets, but the rocket builder is solid in a simply spore-like constructor. It is also easily modded, there are plenty of fan-made parts that are fun to play with.

By the way, if you are trying to achieve an orbit, this table is a goodsend.

That first video made me laugh a lot. Its funny how the rockets are horrible abominations, and yet when they launch they spin out and explode just like a lot of real rockets I could mention.

I've made a good few ICBMs, just managed a 35046m high launch.

For those who are wondering, KSP isn't really a game -- it's a toy. You're basically just screwing around with modeled rockets, ones with fairly unrealistic thrust-to-weight factors. And it's still very early alpha. There are only a few parts you can use, and the game has a number of odd bugs. One is a problem with an occasionally 'sticky' launch pad, where your rocket can get stuck in the ground and go nowhere. I've seen it once already, but nobody seems certain what actually causes it.

That said, it's a real kick figuring out how to use the fairly simple parts they give you to blast your little Kerbals into space. I haven't managed to orbit yet, but I did manage to pull a Major Tom and send the little bastidges off to an airless doom in deep space.

Scratched wrote:

I've made a good few ICBMs, just managed a 35046m high launch.

I've been playing with this this morning. Just got a crew to an altitude of 136km and landed them about 350km downrange.

So far I've only lost one crew because I forgot to put a decoupler below the capsule.

I've also had the ship stuck to the pad bug. Thing just sat there until the fuel ran out.

I've made some ships that didn't have enough thrust to balance the weight of the later stages. Apparently you don't need stupid altitude for going into orbit, in the wiki they say 10k straight up, and then start aiming over to the horizon for freefall at 40k.

This looks like a great toy.

tanstaafl wrote:

I've also had the ship stuck to the pad bug. Thing just sat there until the fuel ran out.

I had a thing where the ship got stuck to the pad but I did something very odd to fix it. I had solid boosters at the bottom, then decouplers, then liquid boosters on top of the solid boosters. When the solid boosters got stuck to the pad, I decoupled, at which point they lifted off. But they were pretty stable, and they carried the rest of the ship on top of them even though they weren't coupled to it. It was pretty funny.

So far, here is my deadliest design, very simple and elegant:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/fmZlB.png)

Switchbreak wrote:

So far, here is my deadliest design, very simple and elegant:

But does it have style?

I was having trouble getting an orbit stabilized, so I used to rest of my fuel to fire my astronauts into the deep reaches of space. They're at 500,000 m in altitude and going strong. I'm going to let it run for a while to see how far they get.

Man this has been a boat load of fun. I've just managed to get 162 km straight up. I'll have to keep working on it see if I can orbit or not.

By the way, Sunday Punch's KSP Parts is a great selection of new parts to play with. Just extract into the Parts folder. There are plenty of other resources, like the KSP Repository or the official forums. Unfortunately many of the parts floating around are pretty unbalanced, I prefer the Sunday Punch pack because the parts inside tend to be better considered.

Also something interesting to consider, the planned features.

So far I can only manage suborbital flights.

I can't seem to keep my rockets stable; the controls don't seem very responsive and no matter what I do they start tumbling.

tanstaafl wrote:

I can't seem to keep my rockets stable; the controls don't seem very responsive and no matter what I do they start tumbling.

Are you using the SAS modules (under the Command & Control tab)? With those on your rocket you can hold F, or toggle them with T, and they will provide extra stability.

Yeah, the problem is that you can't steer with SAS on and with it off it's finicky as hell. That said, I think I may be getting the hang of it; I set a new altitude record and if I didn't orbit Kearth I came damn close.

On the pad.

IMAGE(http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/4469/ksp2011072421333137.jpg)

Launch!

IMAGE(http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5751/ksp2011072421334093.jpg)

Boosters jettisoned

IMAGE(http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/742/ksp2011072421340487.jpg)

Orbit achieved

IMAGE(http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/9582/ksp2011072421384785.jpg)

The Kearth is round! (Maximum altitude - 513.9 km)

IMAGE(http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/8254/ksp2011072421095560.jpg)

Preparing for re-entry; orbital sunrise

IMAGE(http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/9379/ksp2011072421284403.jpg)

Touchdown!

IMAGE(http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/6641/ksp2011072421321590.jpg)

Mission stats

IMAGE(http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/2161/ksp2011072421331690.jpg)

cool post, tanstaafl. i tried for 10 mins, had a few chuckles, and deleted.

I love how almost always, no matter what is happening, at least one of the guys seems to be extremely happy while at least one other is utterly terrified. I had the kids laughing and participating in launch attempts for about half an hour tonight. We'll try some of the add-on part packs soon.

Interesting.

Oops. Didn't mean for those pics to come out that big; I'll try to resize them.

Just did a launch designed for pure altitude. Was over 2,000 km up when I gave up; the capsule was still going up at over 1200 m/s (but slowing), so I might have been there for a while. Anyone know what escape velocity for Kearth is?

IMAGE(http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/1358/ksp2011072423014136.jpg)

Anyone know what escape velocity for Kearth is?

I found that out the hard way; I misremembered the instructions on achieving a 40km orbit as 3300 meters/second, which turns out to be just about escape velocity, at least if you reach it at right angles to the ground. I'm not sure if going straight up is different. The needed speed drops steadily as you gain altitude, so 3300 horizontal speed at any altitude above about 50K should do it

The actual correct value is about 2300. On my next launch, I got a stable orbit going, and left it running; when I got back, about 12 hours later, I was still apparently in orbit (as expected), but it was displaying a box with a couple of trees in the lower left corner, and I was getting about 1 frame every 20 seconds. Bummer, because I wanted to try to land them, I should have had enough fuel. The game crashed when I tried to exit, so it's apparently got a memory leak or a bug somewhere. Don't expect it to run for long periods of time.

If you like this game, there's another freebie called Orbiter that's kinda-sorta similar, though without the drag-and-drop rocket building. It's a more 'serious' sim, and it has the entire Solar System modeled. They've been working on it for like ten years, so I think it must be pretty solid by now.

Yeah, I've played Orbiter but it's on the opposite side of the fluffy---hardcore sim scale. That one is hard. I'm just wanting to play a game, not learn orbital mechanics.

My guys are currently 1600km up and traveling at a mostly-horizontal speed of 886m/s (very slowly decelerating). Been running 42 minutes and I'll leave it running in the background to see how it plays out.

Malor wrote:

One is a problem with an occasionally 'sticky' launch pad, where your rocket can get stuck in the ground and go nowhere. I've seen it once already, but nobody seems certain what actually causes it.

If all of your first stage rockets are solid boosters and they're all the lowest point of your rocket, they will kind of clip down into the launch pad slightly and be unable to provide thrust. Seems to be a bounding box error with the solid rocket boosters. So don't make all your first stage rockets the same height and see if that helps. What I've seen is that the higher boosters lift the rocket high enough that the others can start working properly.

Oh, I've noticed that the game doesn't handle screensavers well, so if you to leave it for later, hit escape to pause/bring up the menu and then minimize it.

My current flight: IMAGE(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5977984/screenshot13.png)

Speed has leveled off and elevation is increasing slightly, but I expect it to settle or even start falling after not to long.

My orbit finally started decaying after a little more than an hour. Eventually I was under 100km so I popped my chute in anticipation of a landing. But around 1 hour 40 minutes, my elevation started increasing again. So I appear to be in a stable, if wildly elliptical, orbit.

The planet does turn under me. I did apply horizontal thrust with the last of my 4 final stage fuel tanks, but perhaps not flat enough or for long enough. I'm thinking I'm in that yellow orbit, and all my thrust is gone.

Does the planet actually turn under you? I'm wondering if you can set up a geostationary orbit. There should be an image taking module that you can attach,

Quintin_Stone wrote:

My orbit finally started decaying after a little more than an hour. Eventually I was under 100km so I popped my chute in anticipation of a landing. But around 1 hour 40 minutes, my elevation started increasing again. So I appear to be in a stable, if wildly elliptical, orbit.

If you apply thrust in the direction of your motion when you're at your highest point you should be able to circle out eventually, like a Hohmann Transfer Orbit:

IMAGE(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Hohmann_transfer_orbit.svg/220px-Hohmann_transfer_orbit.svg.png)

Quintin_Stone wrote:

The planet does turn under me. I did apply horizontal thrust with the last of my 4 final stage fuel tanks, but perhaps not flat enough or for long enough. I'm thinking I'm in that yellow orbit, and all my thrust is gone.

Congrats, you are now a piece of space junk! It would be cool if it remembered your orbiting stuff and kept simulating them while you sent more and more things up there to join it.

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