Kerbal Space Program

[Dog Pants]

Ship #10 - The Flying Shovel
Launch 10 consists of a pair of long, thin rockets with a second stage which consists mostly of fuel tanks, with an other pair of motors on the side. The wide orbital craft on top of the spindly rocket gives it its name. The idea is to save weight with longer, lighter rockets to break atmosphere, and more room for mistakes with the extra fuel in the second section. I've also placed some fins near the top, above the second stage motors, to avoid the flailing and spinning from the last craft.
Despite its unsafe appearance the two-pronged rocket performs pretty well, getting the orbiter up into the blue without much wobbling. However, blue isn't black and when the fuel runs out my kerbal is well short of leaving the atmosphere. I try to let momentum carry it so as to save fuel for orbital manoeuvring, but when I ignite the second, smaller, engines they can't stop the craft from losing altitude. They burn away for a good long time as it falls, but when they start to glow from the heat of re-entry I decide to jettison them. Unfortunately I forget to turn them off, and as the capsule descends the lucky kerbal is treated to a whirling fireworks display as the motors loop and spin out of control.

Ship #11 - The Flying Shovel MkII
The orbiter seemed sound, so aside from replacing the flappy canards with solid wings I leave it as it is. The twix rocket is replaced with the good old Calypso rocket, which seems to give me more bang for my buck, and we're good to go again.
The Calypso does the job. It's not quite enough to get my craft into orbit, but there's plenty of fuel in the secondary motors and pretty soon it's at 40,000m. I check the orbit, it's pretty much a short fall straight down, so I point the ship towards the 'orbit go out now'* symbol on the HUD and fire up the motors again. On the map I can see the trajectory expanding and I make adjustments to keep up with the HUD, which is slowly setting the flight path parallel to the surface. Something isn't quite right though. The apogee is about 30 degrees around the orbit and the craft seems to be going down again. What was I supposed to be doing to move around and push the perigee out? I try to level it out, but before I work out what I need to do the ship splashes into the atmosphere. I cut the engines and set them free. We were a lot closer, but this kerbal isn't going into orbit today.


*May not be actual name

[buzzmong]

Without going into rocket design, as that's the fun part, here's a rough flight plan for easy orbits:

1) Gentle-ish thrust to lift off, keeping speed around 200 m/s until about 20km's. This is to minimise the effects of drag.

2) Throttle increase to something you're happy with above 20km. I'd suggest slowly raising it.

3) At about 30km's up, when you start crossing over one of the atmospheric borders (the colour changes on the meter at the top), you need to start your gravity turn.
This is a two axis manouver: Pitch your craft in small increments until it's at a 45 degree angle (y axis) while travelling in an East direction over the ocean (90 degree heading, which is at the bottom. You should end up with your gimble compass pointing in this direction for a large part of your flight:


Fig.1: Note the HDG and the pitch.

This will cause you to arc gently into orbit. All you need to do now is wait until you get to about 50kms, then just pitch your rocket so that you're sideways. Your upwards momentum will carry you up to 80km+ if you've done it right. Basically you should now be seeing equal amounts of blue and brown hemispheres.


Fig.2: Orbit!

Also, orbit speed is approximately 2200m/s for a ~80km circular orbit.



Fig.3: I can see my house from up here!

[Dog Pants]

Cheers Buzz! I've just realised how approprite your name is for this. I've also just realised that our combined posts read like an edutainment tutorial.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I've been playing with a space shuttle type design, many kerbal have died without making it 100m off the ground.

[Dog Pants]

Hooray! I got a kerbal into a somewhat erratic orbit. Erm, unfortunately I used all my fuel getting there, so now poor Bob is going to be forever orbiting. I also couldn't end the flight so had to ALT+F4 OUT.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

http://imgur.com/a/2F7VI

Pretty nifty

[Dog Pants]

I'm so jealous of stuff like this. I'm struggling to get things in orbit (or in the case of the last mission, to get a thing back again).

[spoodie]

I finally started playing this after purchasing many muns ago and I picked a good time.

As of 24th July there's been some significant improvements. One important change is being able to manually steer the ship while SAS is turned on, making it a lot easy to control. Without having to toggle SAS to make adjustments. I very nearly managed to make orbit with my first attempt at it, my first attempt at anything was getting off the ground without exploding.

Oh and 'reverting' missions is great for experimentation. Ships blows up, revert back to the launchpad or hanger as if nothing happened.

Maybe a good time for people to try it again.

[buzzmong]

You do know the game does have a quicksave and quick load functions built in (F5 and F..9?) right?

[spoodie]

I didn't know that specifically but I've not had to use saves yet, just doing early experiments. I thought the revert options were rather nifty when I stumbled upon them. Thanks though.

[buzzmong]

0.22 is out.

Quite a big update. Initial career stuff and Science!

[shot2bits]

Been looking forward to this update, although now i really do need to get better at synchronizing orbits for docking space stations as i am utterly terrible at it.

[buzzmong]

Okay, career mode and Science! do change the way you play the game quite a bit more than expected.

Only having about 10% of the parts unlocked at the start makes the game a bit more akin to what it was like back in 0.14, having to actually get creative and do a lot more trial and experimentation with what you have got.

After a rocky start, I sort of have got a hang of where the game wants to you do experiments. Suprisingly, the new biome system links in, so you can get quite a lot from Kerbin itself without needing to even go into a space.

[buzzmong]

Heads up to anyone who hasn't got this, it'll be 40% off this weekend on Steam.

[buzzmong]

Latest patch is out.

Its the Asteroid Redirect Mission patch, made in collaboration with NASA.

Import notes are:

Bigger rockets!
Improved connection system: less struts!
Grabbing arm!
Asteroids! Proceedurally generates ones which may fly into Kerbin!
Other bits!

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/con ... y-Released!

[buzzmong]

0.24 is out.

It's a big'un. Introduction of a contracts system into the career mode along with Funds. New parts. New version of Unity. 64 bit version of Unity. New UI. Shed load of bug fixes.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fDJKgjUrs[/media]

[buzzmong]

KSP has just "released" into Version 1.0.

Looking back at the first post, I can't believe it's been just over three and a half years since I came across this game. It's a fair bit different now to what it was then, but its core concept that made it fun is still present. Quite an achievement for a company making their very first game.

[Dog Pants]

And what a great game it is. One of those that I wish I had more time to play, but it's a great story generator. I still have a poor Kerbal stuck in orbit.