Kerbal Space Program Launches Version 1.0

by jonasrosland • 11 years ago

326 52 11 years ago

mrspeaker• 11 years ago

If you have ANY interest in space, and don't know about KSP - do yourself a favor and check it out! It even has a very xkcd seal of approval: https://xkcd.com/1356/

numpad• 11 years ago

There are even more:

https://xkcd.com/1244/

http://xkcd.com/1106/ (have a look at the alt-text)

Diederich• 11 years ago

Elon Musk gave KSP some love too: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk...

gizmo6863• 11 years ago

The banner on the old KSP website said "Kerbal is awesome -Elon Musk"

EDIT: According to the changelog, "Elon Kerman" has been added to the name pool.

thearn4• 11 years ago

I've been following this game for a long time now. It's fantastic! I'm glad to see them make it to 1.0.

elevensies• 11 years ago

here is another statement, more like release notes: http://steamcommunity.com/games/220200/announcements/detail/...

webaholic• 11 years ago

Got it. Been on my wish list for a very long time now.

deelowe• 11 years ago

Totally worth it and you couldn't support a better development team. Looking forward to seeing what they come up with next.

Crito• 11 years ago

I haven't been following KSP for about a year, but before then I played it pretty heavily.

It seems like two of the things added by this release are more realistic aerodynamics, and procedural fairings. Did they basically integrate FAR into KSP? I never played with FAR because it wasn't quite casual enough for me, but this seems like a pretty substantial release that Squad put a lot of work into.

I guess I know what I'm doing tonight.

JshWright2• 11 years ago

Squad has hired several prominent modders.

david-given• 11 years ago

Plus Deadly Reentry, plus Porkjet, plus Kethane...

yellowapple5• 11 years ago

It sounds like they actually based the resource system on Karbonite/ORS, though I haven't had a chance to try it out yet and see which one it's most similar to.

azernik• 11 years ago

Eh, give them a week or two to shake out the more maddening bugs; there are a few of those that seem to have slipped through QA.

douche• 11 years ago

Nice, I haven't played for about a year and a half, back when it was pure sandbox. Guess I'll have to queue it up in Steam, although I'm having trouble displacing Endless Legend and EU4.

spiritplumber• 11 years ago

I'm taking today off.

tsotha2• 11 years ago

I should have done that. I played a bit at lunch and really, really didn't want to go back to work.

rdudek• 11 years ago

Huge fan of the game, but now I think my rockets will be even more unstable and will burn up poor kerbals during re-entry...

jonasrosland• 11 years ago

Been playing it a bit today, it's REALLY hard now!

yellowapple5• 11 years ago

Is there any way to turn it off? Deadly reentry was the primary reason why I never got around to installing FAR.

golergka• 11 years ago

Just started a new career yesterday after a LONG break. Pretty basic rockets survive reentry pretty easily, especially if you put on some heat shields and caps. These parts might not survive the reentry, but all my kerbals and science did.

twic• 11 years ago

Hmm. Have you considered the possibility of adding more boosters?

JshWright2• 11 years ago

And struts... you can never have too many struts...

fixermark• 11 years ago

There are a couple of very specific ways in which this game isn't realistic rocket science.

... and a lot of ways in which it actually is. But most importantly, it's fun. Like, really fun. :) If it inspires a new generation of players to get excited about the reality underpinning the model, it will have done more than its job. And I think it has a good shot at making that happen.

dnautics• 11 years ago

Agreed. Reading about the oberth effect and actually doing hohmann transfers are totally different things... And you really appreciate how damn difficult the burns done to save Apollo 13 were.

z3t4• 11 years ago

I wonder if it's still fun now when it has gotten harder with drag and heat ...

To get the best experience out of KSP you should play sandbox, but never quicksave! And keep playing the same "profile" every time.

This makes you actually solve problems instead of just quick-loading to retry ... So you had to burn too much fuel to save the situation after almost crashing into old space debris you left ten years ago!? Ahh there's an old space station around the moon we can dock with...

Destroyed an engine while landing on a foreign body? Figure out how to maneuver without it. Or take a walk to the unmanned prototype vessel you had forgotten about, that might have enough fuel to get into orbit ...

It will also make your hands shake a bit from adrenalin, when landing, or docking, after a one hour mission, knowing you would have to restart the mission if you crash.

You also need to have a joystick or pedals for thrust and RCS. Yes! You can throttle the RCS! That makes it much easier for docking.

ninkendo• 11 years ago

My favorite moment is when I first got a spaceship big enough to land on Laythe (the earth-like moon of KSP's equivalent of Jupiter.) It was my first time doing a transfer orbit to Jool so I didn't really know what to expect other than that Laythe had about 85% of Kerbin's gravity... so if a replica of the ascent stage could get into orbit around Kerbin, I should have no problem taking off with it from Laythe so long as I could land with that stage intact with most of its fuel.

After a long mission to get there, "aerobraking" in Jool's atmosphere to get into a capture orbit, orbiting Laythe, landing, planting the flag: I realized I forgot to build a ladder on my spaceship to get back into it.

Sure, I could temporarily cheat and turn off gravity long enough to get into the ship, but that would be too easy...

So I staged a rescue mission to recover my kerbal, this time requiring a spaceship that not only had a ladder but was large enough to fit two kerbals instead of just one. I sent it on its way, and even docked with the orbital component of the original ship to combine fuel resources, and landed within a few hundred yards of my old kerbal. I had to leave a weight on the keyboard on the shift and W key for 15 minutes or so while he walked towards the new ship. I took off, rendezvoused with the orbiting stage, escaped orbit, and slingshotted off the orbit of another moon to get me back to Kerbin with just barely enough fuel to make it, but I made it just the same.

I really love this game.

munchbunny• 11 years ago

After two hours in career mode:

1. The new aerodynamics are less forgiving. Make sure your rockets are bottom heavy.

2. Heat really makes re-entry much less forgiving too. I'd advise new players to turn off heat effects. For a veteran player (like me) it's certainly making career mode a fresh challenge. I've lost three kerbals already.

hyperpallium• 11 years ago

IAMA about it http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/33ys4s/we_are_the_team...

yellowapple5• 11 years ago

Basically taking the ideas from a bunch of the best KSP mods (FAR, procedural fairings, ORS/Karbonite/Kethane, Texture Replacer (specifically, its support for female kerbal skins), etc.), throwing them all together, throwing in some awesome other improvements to everything, and releasing it as the first non-alpha, non-beta release.

All this after Squad declared 0.90 to be "feature complete" and claimed that any further work between 0.90 and 1.0 would be bugfixes and smaller refinements.

Can't wait to get home so I can fire this up. I wonder if my tiny SSTO spaceplane will still work (probably not)?

EDIT: Also, apparently KSP supports up to 10 joysticks now. Like, hot damn. That's a lot of joysticks.

EDIT2: The nuclear engine doesn't need oxidizer anymore. No more having to hack part definitions on my end in order to make it behave realistically! Yay!

ceejayoz• 11 years ago

As only a very casual amateur at KSP, what's the use case for multiple joysticks?

gizmo6863• 11 years ago

For fine maneuvers like docking, you have six axis that you care about (three translation, and three rotation). Unless you want a single joystick. It is also common to pick a plane to line up in, then switch planes once you are aligned, so you might want a separate set of joysticks for each pair of axis.

shmerl• 11 years ago

Strangely their purchase page references Steam, but not GOG. It's available on GOG here: https://www.gog.com/game/kerbal_space_program

po• 11 years ago

A tip for new players: I had trouble understanding what to do in KSP when I first tried it out (a while ago when it was very very beta) until I watched a bunch of videos from Scott Manley:

https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg

His videos really helped me understand the orbital mechanics and get more enjoyment out of the game. He knows the best way to transfer and and gave me handy rules of thumb I could follow.

ianstallings2• 11 years ago

I can add two words also: Mechanical Jeb. http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220221-mechjeb

It's an autopilot that does amazing things for you. It especially helps getting platforms that are kind of squirrelly into space (e.g. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging)

gizmo6863• 11 years ago

Also, it shows you how much delta-v your ship has as you build it, and as you fly it. Delta-v is effectively a much more useful measure of "fuel" than your actual fuel.

tehbeard• 11 years ago

I'm gonna give the same advice I give everyone who is told about mechjeb, learn to pilot manually before using mechjeb. I suggest using it once certain parts become routine (launch, rendezvous, precise powered landing)

yaeger• 11 years ago

I tried it yesterday for the first time and my biggest problem is that the tutorials are a bit too confusing and seem to require some prior knowledge of where things are etc:

I naturally started with the training scenarios and the very first one was pretty confusing. I feel like the tutorial would need a rework by someone who was not involved with the game for months/years.

The problem is that if you are seeing the interface and everything for months on end, and then you write the tutorial, you will likely leave out some things that are "obvious" to you but maybe are not obvious to new people who see everything for the first time.

In case of the first training tutorial where you just build a rocket, why does the text in the end just say "click the red button on the top right when you are done"? Or better yet, why not disable all other buttons that will also take you out the game? I thought after the rocket is built I could click the "launch" button to test it. Because that button was clickable. But all it did was take me back to the start screen. So I though I made a mistake and clicked on the first training scenario again. And now the tutorial would not even progress. It says to click on the command module but when you do, nothing happens. I then had to alt+f4 out of the game and start it again.

I think if they divide all the training scenarios this way, they should probably make it so only the things regarding a specific scenario are clickable and don't result in such undefined behavior.

I then tried the second training scenario and the guy at one point said to "click the AP button and click warp here" It took me way to long to find this so called AP button. Since I was looking at my rocket when the tutorial said to click this button I of course searched high and low on the screen for this button to no avail. It wasn't until I hit "m" to get to the space view and saw my trajectory path I noticed "AP" at the high point of the path. To me, it looked just like a text next to the path but when I clicked it I saw the "warp here" button. It would have been way better for the tutorial to first say "hit m to get to the space view, see your trajectory path and click on the AP which you see at the highest point of the path." Just mentioning an AP button without indication where it can be found and more importantly if it really is identifiable as a button and not just looking like an informational text label would help out a lot.

Personally, I like tutorials better that would freeze and then super impose an arrow while pointing at the thing you are supposed to press next while simultaneously stating so in text as well. Doing it like this makes sure there is no way anybody would not find the button and go searching for it unnecessarily.

Oh, and also a defined end of the tutorial. If the second one is just supposed to let you take of and get to the ap and then burn your remaining fuel, after doing so, why not put up a message saying the tutorial is now done and maybe two buttons. One to return to the menu and one to stay where you are and feel free to mess around with the ship some more.

With the plethora of options and things to do this game is very powerful so I feel it is of the utmost importance to get the tutorials right. I don't think using big arrows to guide one through the complex menues would be pandering or holding the users hand too much. Just saying in text "You may have noticed this new button in the lower right" is not really helpful. I just thought "no, I didn't notice it, which one do you mean, there are like a half dozen there". If you want to tell the user about it, point an arrow at it, tell the user to click on it and then explain the window that pops up.

All in all I already know I will spend many hours with this game but I would probably get "into the action" quicker if the tutorials were laid out a bit better.

clebio• 11 years ago

So funny that the KSP site hijacks scrolling, but no comments here, while another space-related article on the first page right now is getting a mess o' hate about the hijacking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448805

twright• 11 years ago

Because the KSP site only scroll jacks for the first few seconds.

Animats• 11 years ago

Is there a new demo version?

(The site is down. "Kerbal Space Program website is in maintenance mode while we are performing a Server Migration,")

ckozlowski• 11 years ago

"I want to say one word to you, just one word: Fairings."

bittyguy32• 11 years ago

Look at how friendly games can become these days.

jefurii• 11 years ago

xX | Kerbal Space Program MLG_PRO_SKILL | NO_MECHJEB | 360°_ORBITS |Xx - YouTube https://youtu.be/zszJRsGzo9A

helyka• 11 years ago

I've read so many great things about this game; however, the little bit I played on a friends computer just leaves me wanting more (especially at +20$). I understand that this is relatively cheap in gaming standards I just can't get there.

Kerbal Space Program Launches Version 1.0

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