KSP a game I have had for a long time now that lets you simulate interplanetary travel and your own space program!. Its unbelievably great fun “if you have the patience” to set up your own space station and use it as a staging point to send missions to Duna aka Mars, but recently I have found a mod BDArmory that gives you access to many modern weapons such as the AIM 120 or the Maverick, even the GAU-8!, as well as the ability to make your own missiles. This has led to many hours of procrastinating when I really should be studying,
Here are a few of my early creations:
First my A-10a, which took way too long in designing and tweaking so that it would fly stably “apparently KSP doesn’t like the A-10’s engine configuration.”
Here it is firing its GAU-8 which sounds as sexy as always.
My Mobile Missile Launch System with my very own designed guided Missiles.
One of said missiles being lauched at my Kodiak “next picture”. I do love the smoke effects in KSP.
The Kodiak my first ship with an impressive armament of Anti-ship missiles “Hellfires” and AIM 9Xs for any air threats, but my favorite part of this ship is its CIWS.
The tracer effects are pretty well done.
CIWS works as it is designed and the Kodiak can continue its mission in patrolling Kerbins shores
Yeah definitely KSP has a massive collection of people recreating different real world programs such as the Apollo missions to as close as the real thing as they can including flight paths and design of the rocket/airplane.
I friggin love KSP. That game is the bee’s knees. Which is apparently a good thing. Not entirely sure why.
Beach, I have made more than a few space planes with RCS thrusters for high-alt work. Designing a successful plane is much more challenging than a rocket - so many variables that are hard to measure/define in game - but the super-intuitive building makes an iterative approach easy.
I haven’t yet made a plane that carried another plane to drop it, like the X-15 and its B-52 mothership, but it’s certainly possible. There are even mods out there that creates parts to look very realistic, although the flight models are still KSP!
[edit: sniped! That X-15 in Maclean’s post looks pretty sweet!]
I had a quick play where you start from scratch and it seemed ok, in that you had to do missions to unlock parts. I did badly because I think I was trying emulate a sputnik style un-manned first, while they want to encourage you to throw Jeb up as soon as possible etc.
It’s great to see how well supported the game is though.
@fearlessfrog The career modes new options are very nice indeed, on setting the difficulty such as how much the parts will cost and how much science you would get for a mission. its very good for the hardcore players as well if they want to set it really hard meaning one mistake can basically end your company.
[quote=“Maclean, post:9, topic:230”]
its very good for the hardcore players as well if they want to set it really hard meaning one mistake can basically end your company.[/quote]
I’d need an Elon Musk type bank account to manage to continue through my failures…
I didn’t find the new career mode that hard. There was a spot in there where I was stuck for science, and I might be running up on a funds issue after launching a quartet of satellites at the Mun and Minmus. The jury is still out on if I can pull this off.
I was quite fond of KSP before modding it but now … wow! I have DMagic Science (extra science instruments and missions), ScanSat (for something approaching ‘realistic’ planet scanning satellites), RemoteTech (which requires me to seriously consider how to do a communications net for any unmanned missions) and Tac Life Support which forces me to consider consumables).
I love this game! Everyone can make something of it that is fun!
use DDS compressor for the textures (there is a mod for it)
have lots of RAM
put the game on a SSD
use 64bit Linux
I do everything of the above at the moment, except the last one. I am still using Windows 7 with the 32bit KSP client. Unfortunately the Unity Engine 64bit is quite unstable on Windows, which is the reason why there is a Linux 64bit version but the Win64 is not supported anymore.
I’ll post a list of my mods later when I’m at home.
The ones that change gameplay most and IMO are mandatory are:
FAR
Deadly Reentry
RemoteTech
a supply mod. I use a rather simple one though (USI supply)
Right now I don’t use a realistic size mod (All sizes in stock KSP are 6-10 times smaller than IRL for gameplay reasons). I prefer gameplay in the stock size. If you change it you create lots of imbalance and break gameplay. Since everything is scaled to each other it doesn’t really make the game harder or easier. It is just realism for the sake of realism IMO. To me it makes the game more boring.
Here’s my list (exported from KSP Mod Admin)
As you can see it is pretty massive, and actually I am not 100% sure about everything being compatible yet.
I mostly test the mods in sandbox mode and once I have everything working (sometimes takes a few versions) I start a huge career save that eats up all my time because there are so many things to do.
It seems I can confirm that. Last night I played for a few hours, including quickloading and reverting a lot (tested mods), which causes more crashs normally. I had just one crash last night.
Another stability hint for those of you who don’t know already: Turn off the stock temperature gauges on launch (F10 key). Those cause a memory leak, which in turn causes a crash.
I’ve been playing KSP since version 0.13, and it has definitely come a long way. Relating to the flight sim genre of Mudspike, here’s my most recent KSP video that showcases some KSP-analogues to real-life aircraft, and some that aren’t. All of those in the video are made of stock parts only. There are a couple of other KSP videos on the channel as well, including a SpaceX-style launcher. The caveat is that the three KSP vids were all pre-1.0 when the aero changed.
I know I’m probably the odd guy out, but here is a complete list of the mods I use for KSP:
I am considering installing something like Flight Engineer and/or Protractor - some tools that give me more information about my vehicle (e.g., delta velocity capability, etc.) and orbit (e.g., inclination, phase angle, etc.) but don’t actually change the dynamics of the game.
While autopilot/control tools like MechJeb reduce a lot of the tedious activities in KSP (e.g., ascent, orbit transfers, etc.), these are the parts I actually enjoy doing, so it doesn’t make sense to let some bit of software have all the fun. These controllers usually have some additional neat features (e.g., precision landing, aerobraking, etc.), but other than knowing orbital angles, I haven’t been too limited by the vanilla features.
