
Kerbal Space Oddities - ra7
https://aphyr.com/posts/345-kerbal-space-oddities
======
jonathankoren
I noticed that this write up is old (2014), so most of the designs shown won't
work in the base game anymore. That's good, because why should you be able to
launch what looks like a wedding cake?

I've been playing this game regularly for 3 years now. It has a vibrant
modding community, and recently some of the more popular gameplay mods have
made their way into the core game (mainly more realistic aerodynamics,
resource mining, my favorite, "deadly reentry"). It's basically a SimCity
game, but with rockets.

The one downside is that while it's a lot of fun at the beginning, it gets
kind of monotonous at the end (if you can call it an end). Flying crew to and
from Duna is hard. I've never done it. Even just sending a probe is hard to
hit it.

~~~
LoSboccacc
It's mostly a question of dv. Getting the perfect transfer window is hard, but
eyeballing a good enough one and doing some mid course correction is
significantly easier.

If you put the sun at the center and kerbal at 3 o'clock, you get a good
enough transfer window by waiting to having duna at 1 o'clock. You can then
eject tangentially from kerbal sphere of influence and correct half way
trough.

The only real plugin that I strongly suggest there is the aereobrake plugin,
that'll show you the predictoion for aerobraking directly on the ksp map.

~~~
olex
Back when KSP released their first version with other planets (2012 or so), I
was a forum mod and tester for them, and I build a small website to simplify
interplanetary transfers: [http://ksp.olex.biz](http://ksp.olex.biz). It's
still running and up-to-date, and apparently still used, despite there being a
ton of other sites and ingame plugins that provide the same data in much
better ways.

~~~
exDM69
Thanks for your contribution! I've flown many interplanetary missions with
your tool.

For more accurate and realistic missions, there's this tool [0] to calculate
pork chop plots [1] to find minimum energy transfers. (you surely know about
this)

I think calculators and mission planners like this should be a part of the
game proper. Switching to a web browser mid-game to do mission planning is a
big turn off for me.

It might be a part of their game design, there are very few numbers and data
presented in game. But I don't think it works very well apart from some very
basic moon missions. A lot of the information is there but it's just difficult
to find (e.g. want to know your inclination? select moon, and then look at
ascending/descending nodes in map view).

I enjoyed the eyeball method initially but you grow out of it soon. I liked
the "fire prograde when moon rises over horizon" moon missions and I even
achieved a rendez-vous in 0.17 [2] before there were maneuver nodes or other
helpful gadgets in the map view.

But once we got maneuver nodes, intersection markers, etc that playing style
was out of the window. Now I'd really want to have some proper mission
planning utilities (similar to some MFD modes in Orbiter).

I think the game should (at minimum) have a transfer window planner, a patched
conics solver (with optimization), a pork chop plotter and a rocket burn
planner for ascent and powered descent. Perhaps a Clohessy-Wiltshire-Hill
equation solver for pinpoint accuracy rendez-vous too.

[0] [https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/](https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/) [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot)
[2] [http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab](http://imgur.com/p5Dz5Ab)

~~~
mpwoz
Have you tried this mod?

[http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/84005-1...](http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/84005-13x-transfer-
window-planner-v1620-may-30/)

It was a game changer for me, and really made interplanetary transfers "click"

------
sp332
For anyone wondering what "spiral staging" is:
[http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging](http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging)

~~~
Zardoz84
IE, the same thing that Falcon Heavy is triying to do on real world.

~~~
lightbyte
I thought they scrapped the crossfeed fuel idea because it was too
complicated?

~~~
smasty
They did.

------
sdenton4
Love the seed probes; not a strategy I've tried!

I think it's almost always true that your second trip to the mun in kerbal is
a rescue mission...

~~~
Cthulhu_
They're really handy in the latest version which requires you to set up a
sattelite network for communication with unmanned probes, you'd need at least
three (ish) to be able to communicate with a probe on a planet, and you'll
need several in various positions around the sun to make it work across the
solar system (in career mode you only unlock the strongest transmitter late in
the science tree, and even then you'll need several).

~~~
flashman
Having played early in the beta, and then picked it up again this year, I
discovered the new need for antennas when my unmanned craft couldn't receive
the commands to complete its orbital insertion around Duna.

I was... not pleased.

~~~
rhcom2
Classic KSP. An hour into a mission and you realize you never added batteries
and you can't move your probe because the sun isn't hitting the solar panels.

Or even worse, you realize as your crew is barreling towards Kerbin that you
forgot to add parachutes to your lander...

------
drewg123
Whatever you do, avoid the console version at all costs.

A friend told me about this game, and I thought it would be perfect for my
(then) 10 year old. We got it for the PS4, and it was nothing but frustration.
The biggest controls were complex and confusing when mapped to the PS4
controller, you couldn't install mods, and the game was buggy, frequently
crashing and corrupting saves.

We finally got the PC version (which I run under Wine on FreeBSD), and it
works much, much, much better.

~~~
swiley
I don't understand console games now.

I used to buy them because they worked without an internet connection, and the
devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines
so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games tended to be the norm.

Now everyone just writes things in unity and the DRM forces you to have a
reliable broadband connection, I don't see the point anymore.

~~~
Rudism
My only computer is a Macbook Pro running Arch Linux (which is my ideal setup
for getting work done). In general it struggles to achieve unplayably low
framerates in the small selection of games that even run on Linux.

Given that I want to play games, my options are to spend a bunch of time and
energy researching, price-shopping for parts, and building out what would
likely be a $1000+ dedicated gaming Windows PC, continuing to funnel time and
money into upgrades as games demand more and more horsepower; or pick up a
$250 current-gen console at Walmart, knowing that it'll be able to handle
anything I throw at it, and only worry about upgrading several years from now
when some game I really want comes out on a future generation console.

As someone with a limited entertainment budget, the latter option is by far
the more attractive option.

~~~
vultour
I bought the PS4 recently to play Crash Bandicoot, great game. Other than
that, I just don't understand how people play anything else other than racing
games with a controller, that thing is absolute trash for actually
"controlling" anything.

I build a new PC approximately every 7-10 years and so far my computers
handled everything fine. My current one which I'm about to replace has a first
gen i7 and a GTX480 and they worked perfectly with pretty much any game. I'm
about to replace it, probably with a 7700k and 1080Ti which should again last
for quite a while. The only reason why I'm replacing it at all is because some
random component on the motherboard started overheating so I finally have a
good reason to upgrade.

> spend a bunch of time and energy researching

This is a terrible argument, I know jack about hardware yet am able to build a
relatively decent computer. It's not rocket science, a couple minutes of
looking through your local computer shop should give you a good idea what sort
of components are good or bad. You can also throw your build into PCPartPicker
which will generally let you know if something is wrong.

~~~
quacker
> I just don't understand how people play anything else other than racing
> games with a controller

Oh, not up to the challenge of playing games with a controller? /s

But seriously, adjusting controller sensitivity/etc to your liking and
practicing helps a lot. You can also turn on aim assist in most shooters (it's
usually on by default, actually). There are plenty of great PS4 exclusives
that it'd be a shame to ignore simply because you think they're unsuitable for
controllers (depending on your taste - Horizon Zero Dawn, Bloodborne,
Uncharted 4, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, Nioh, Ratchet and Clank, The Last
Guardian, Persona 5, Gravity Rush).

That said, there definitely are plenty of games that have terrible console
controls (especially bad ports, like Kerbal) and I've never seen an RTS done
well on a console.

------
monochromatic
This game looks fun, but I couldn't figure out what I was doing when I tried
it a couple years ago. I gave up too quickly probably.

Is there a good tutorial that y'all used to learn how the game works?

~~~
JoeDaDude
I recommend Scott Manley's tutorials on youtube. Even though many of them are
for older versions of KSP, they are still great to get you started. If you are
willing to spend a bit, there is a great book that covers a lot of ground in
KSP:

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do)

~~~
Malic
I'll second that. Scott Manley is THE source KSP tutorials and just plain
absurd fun-with-KSP-plugins. You'll get a lot more out of KSP if you
watch/follow his videos.

------
Fifer82
I really love Kerbal Space Program but I stopped playing a couple of years
back. Unity is really terrible. I remember landing 3 pieces of a moon base,
and I was getting like 3fps... After another 3 weeks of making a space
station, again was getting 5fps.

The funny thing was, I went out and splashed 1.5k on a new PC just for Kerbal,
I loaded my save file of my moon base, and now I had 7fps....

Absolutely useless. KSP is like a Mr Universe Body Builder wearing a 3 year
old girl's dress.

~~~
golergka
Unity gets bad rep the same way FL studio (in 00s) or any other accessible
creative tools do. Because they're the most accessible tools for beginners,
they attract beginners and they use it to develop a lot of beginner-level
products with all the downsides; however, these tools are quite capable of
achieving AAA results in professional help.

Unity has nothing to do with KSP being laggy. KSP is a very ambitious game
written by a beginner team; without Unity it couldn't have been made at all.

~~~
Fifer82
I have not yet played a Unity game which doesn't have the "unity look and
feel". I don't think anyone is going to be able to convince me otherwise. I am
happy to purchase a modern (in the last 3 months) popular unity game tonight.
If you can think of one that doesn't run like a Flash SWF, I will buy it.

~~~
golergka
And how would you know what engine was the game built with anyway? If you're
relying on the Unity log splash screen, then indeed you only see games
developed by beginner teams who can't even afford a paid license.

~~~
Fifer82
Can't you tell? I can't tell the difference between Lumberyard, Crytek, Unreal
(I could Unreal until 2012ish), but I always know a unity game because it
looks and runs like shit.

~~~
golergka
OK, so when you see a game that looks like shit, you have a hypothesis that
it's a Unity game, and vice versa.

How, exactly, do you confirm these?

------
thearn4
i can't help but love KSP. But I wish it was easier to just design the craft
and missions, and not have to do the manual control. I like flight sims, but
KSP controls are a bit too wonky for my tastes.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
There are mods for that. MechJeb and kOS come to mind: MechJeb includes an
autopilot, kOS lets you program your own. There's also kRPC which lets you
control KSP craft via RPC, so you can use a language that you like such as
Python or Node.

~~~
pc86
Ah yes, because after a hard day of programming I want to come home and relax
by programming.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Different people, different tastes. After a hard day of programming I _love_
to relax by doing programming, but this time on something I care about and not
$dayjob related nonsense.

------
cybersol
Great article, but I am pretty sure Jebediah Kerman is NEVER shaken, even if
he had to face off against Chuck Norris.

------
ateesdalejr
Why does it seem that every rocket he designs gets more and more thrusters
exponentially?

~~~
jungletek
Because to a certain extent, it's "the Kerbal way".

That said, using more efficient staging designs is usually superior to the
naive "moar boosters!" philosophy that new KSP players typically start with.

------
jacquesm
Nice Bowie reference.

