Is it true that most KSP players never go interplanetary?

[RX2000]

I've got about 40 hrs into KSP, & I havent landed anywhere other than Kerbin yet.  I actually have only done flybys of the Mun, & havent even done one of Minmus yet.

Mmmmm actually typing that out makes me wonder what the hell I spent 40 hours doing? Lol

[Jonfliesgoats]

Since mods aren't really a console option, I thought my KSP console experience would be limited to Kerbin's SOI.  Instead I find myself using web based tools and graphing calculator apps.  I am still sending missions out are and inward through the Solar (Kerbolar) system.  Life without Kerbal Engineer isn't so bad.

I think that the playing experience within Kerbin's SOI and more afield become vastly different.  The game goes from a physics and piloting exercise to something more involved with strategy, planning, engineering, etc.

There is no shortage of people that want to watch Jeb blow up on the launch pad.  How many people get excited about planning a Jool encounter to make use of orbital resonance of Jool's moons?  Those few people who do get excited  about  such things should have bespectacled nerd groupies following them through airport terminals in Asia, but I digress.

 

[patrioticparadox]

The first day I bought KSP I played for 14 hours straight. No mods and ,luckily, no crashes. I was hooked. A rocketry game that uses real-world principles but doesn't take itself TOO seriously? Count me in!. That was Almost two years ago. In the days of .22 (Oct 16th 2013) Since then, I have played KSP almost every day and have yet to (intentionally) enter the SOI of a planet other than Kerbin. I may be one of the black sheep having owned the game this long and never wandered but why has many reasons. Primarily they are:

1. Mods. I find myself starting new careers when I add mods that significantly change gameplay or my part library. I build up mod after mod, part after part until :
2. New update. Whenever a new update comes out I always start a new game. And the cycle often repeats as mods update individually to the new update.
3. Planning is a biotch. Planning a mission with nothing but the empty space in your head is difficult. "Ok I need this dV here and that there and the mass is here and the dark side and ..." Kerbal Construction Time is very helpful for this in that it lets you simulate before you try for real but that can take significant time. Something that allowed for (very) rough planning of a mission would be a great mod. 

With 1.2 right around the corner, it looks like the cycle will begin anew. Although, I may make it off that dusty little rock this time as the dev cycle has become significantly longer over the last few updates.

[RX2000]

36 minutes ago, patrioticparadox said:

The first day I bought KSP I played for 14 hours straight. No mods and ,luckily, no crashes. I was hooked. A rocketry game that uses real-world principles but doesn't take itself TOO seriously? Count me in!. That was Almost two years ago. In the days of .22 (Oct 16th 2013) Since then, I have played KSP almost every day and have yet to (intentionally) enter the SOI of a planet other than Kerbin. I may be one of the black sheep having owned the game this long and never wandered but why has many reasons. Primarily they are:

1. Mods. I find myself starting new careers when I add mods that significantly change gameplay or my part library. I build up mod after mod, part after part until :
2. New update. Whenever a new update comes out I always start a new game. And the cycle often repeats as mods update individually to the new update.
3. Planning is a biotch. Planning a mission with nothing but the empty space in your head is difficult. "Ok I need this dV here and that there and the mass is here and the dark side and ..." Kerbal Construction Time is very helpful for this in that it lets you simulate before you try for real but that can take significant time. Something that allowed for (very) rough planning of a mission would be a great mod. 

With 1.2 right around the corner, it looks like the cycle will begin anew. Although, I may make it off that dusty little rock this time as the dev cycle has become significantly longer over the last few updates.

Wow I dont feel so bad now!

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Hi all, have to say,' I'been everywhere man' started playing back in o.16 so a while ago, Did all my interplanetary madness in previous versions, built massive RT satellite networks for constant coms anywhere, built bases on mun and duna, destroyed many ships on laythe, left debris everywhere, go me

As others have said, I've done , there's nothing new out there really hasn't been for ages, so these days I'm a homebody, confining my efforts to the oceans and skies of Kerbin.

That said, for nostalgia reasons and finishing the munpocketedition restoration, I took myself off to Jool, I seem to have spent a lot of time there over the years and not sure why.

Spoiler

 

Edited September 13, 2016 by SpannerMonkey(smce)

[Francois424]

A tip to some of the most recent posts :

- Don't upgrade KSP until you are ready to start a new game.  I stayed in 0.23.5 for the longest time, and by the time I switched to 0.24.2, 0.25 was just about the corner, and I skipped it altogether. Install your mods, and play until whatever you have planned is finished.  Only then upgrade to the new version.

- If you want to explore, you need to set goals to follow.  Just taking a week to build a Moho ship is useless if you don't plan to do something once there.  Bring a rover, and check out all biomes with it.  If your rover isn't good enough, send yourself another upgraded one and resume exploring.  Or decide to land + Plant a flag on each biomes.

- Jool is the best place to start up IMHO, especially with a ISRU refuleller (just make a ship that can act both as a miner/tanker and part it around Pol), then explore all of the moons.  If you already how to dock, you could even use your mothership as a refueling space station.  I personally learned so much doing that but my station at the time was between Minmus and the Mün.  It was being tested to go around Pol, the lowest-G of the Moons for easy refueling.  Jool is also very easy to get an encounter with and to make orbit around.  First time I went to Jool, I was still a newb, no mods/dV charts.  I took 2 orange tanks + 4 nukes to send a small ion satellite, and had fun intercepting/making low pass of all the moons.

 - As for delta-V, take a dV chart, and the Mod Kerbal Alarm Clock (KAC)... then add 50% to the d-V number for safety. Ask KAC to plan the next window between Kerbin and wherever, and with the dV chart you have a pretty good idea how much you'll need.  I still don't get the exact number on the chart after years of playing KSP.  But if I usually throw 20% on top of the actual added numbers, I very rarely go out of fuel.

 - Don't plan for a return trip. Just go there and get to the surface of whatever you want to land on.  It will make the whole planning no more complicated than going to Minmus.  Build your ship, burn there, discard pieces as your dV runs out, and land... Do w/e you want and mission over.  There's no need for a huge mothership with a mining ship and a lander or 2.  Just go out to have fun.

These worked for me, good luck.

[GKSP]

Hi, its GKSP here.  I've had the game for about 9 months(from jan. 2016) and am not always able to play.  In the first part of that time, I was just getting used to the game engine, reading up on orbital mechanics, etc. and testing.  I got some rockets that could *almost* return from mun, built a space station in lko, and check out the amazing world of spaceplanes.  It wasn't until a competition between my friends and I in a school history class that I got truly interplanetary.  It was a Duna Exploration competition, which never finished because of, well, school, but It got me a very efficient Duna satellite rocket, practice with phase angles, and frustration at re-routing my friends' probes(which worked!)  Since then, I've transferred the ship/probe to my normal save, and have two probes landed on Duna.  I also have an asteroid tug on its way.(Im usink Kerbal alarm clock 4 that)  In unrelated aerospace news, i built a replica of an airbus a320(i think it was that)

Have a great day everyone!

[nascarlaser1]

I do not go farther then them Mun do to not being capable of such things yet. As soon as I learn how, and with 1.2 coming soon, I plan on setting up an entire radio network across the Kerbol system, with ground support (a.k.a, bases with com towers.)

[Benji13]

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but the 'Rald' planet pack adds a low gravity planet with an oxygen atmosphere. It's great for easy manned landings and its a good place to yeast out ssto's. The mod gives you four options for location. L4 with Kerbin, as a binary moon around Kerbin and two options that include replacing Duna. 

[Firemetal]

After visiting every planet in the game, I will tell all of you who haven't gone interplanetary, you are missing a lot. 

You know when you first landed on the Mun? And then landed on Minimus? (I did it the other way around  ) Well imagine doing that twelve more times!

Seriously, at least go to Duna and Ike.

[KerikBalm]

17 minutes ago, Benji13 said:

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this but the 'Rald' planet pack adds a low gravity planet with an oxygen atmosphere. It's great for easy manned landings and its a good place to yeast out ssto's. The mod gives you four options for location. L4 with Kerbin, as a binary moon around Kerbin and two options that include replacing Duna. 

Well, long ago at the start of this thread, you can see how I was having the idea that a planet at L4 would ease the transition to interplanetary.

Also, for the moon versions... its not going interplanetary either... its about the same challenge as going to Mun.

For the Duna version, if you're not using airbreathing engines, its harder to return from than Duna because the dV required is a few hundred m/s higher... it only really helps for learning to go interplanetary if you pick the .cfg that moves Ike to L4, and thus Ike becomes a dwarf planet that is easy to visit because you don't need to wait for transfer windows

 

Also, its not much of a "pack" its 1 body, and a pack of different .cfgs because I can't decide where I really want to put it.

I had the idea for a "pack" that would slot in with stock and OPM by also adding a vesta and pallas analogue to keep Dres company and create a sort of asteroid belt. I used RSS height and modified RSS colormaps for phobos and deimos to make these two worlds... but I found them quite boring. I replaced one of them with actual heightmap data from Vesta... still boring - not nearly as interesting as the "terraformed mars" that is "Rald". I may go back to them to try and make them a little more polished (like adding biomes for instance)... but I really don't have many ideas for them, and I don't think they'd be very popular as simply dres mk2 and dres mk3... given dres is already sufferign a bit in the popularity department.

Edited September 14, 2016 by KerikBalm

[Riisos]

I am definitely one of those players guilty of not fully exploring the Kerbin system. There has just always been so much to do in terms of planes and stations I never really got around to exploring the other planets. I did a few missions out farther, and built a ton of space stations to provide stepping stones for more, but with so much that you can do around Kerbin alone I guess I was just always occupied. I even built large interplanetary craft (I'm talking 50+ crew stock mega-ships) and stuck them in orbit, but just never got around to sending them out on their missions because I started building another one.

I also lost more than a few saves to updates or corruption via bloated files (I guess having like 20 1,000 part stations is a bit much), so I found myself doing a lot of re-working or creating new planes each time they changed something like wheels or aerodynamics. I also found myself waiting for updates, wanting telemetry or something in before I began a new career mode save, so I would again just build planes and bum around Kerbin.

But the com network is here now! I guess it's time to get out there . . .

[AlmostNASA]

For me on this topic yes I don't go interplanetary because I can't calculate Delta V and I don't know phase angles. 

[panzer1b]

While ive been to every single body in KSP (land and return), i can say there are 2 major hurdles (personally) that really make it tedious to do anything past kerbin.

First of all, there is no way (stock at least) to determine when exactly is the optimal time to go interplanetary.  Myself (being very light on mods and mostly using purely visual crap like scatterer/EVE), i figure it out by having a spreadsheet of optimal phase angles, but even that is hit and miss and requires alot of fiddling since there is no way to actually determine precisely what angle the planets are from each other in the map view.  Honestly, while myself i dont mind the manual way (and it has worked for me ever since), i think there should be at the bare minimum something that tells you roughly when the optimal launch windows are active (you could do this by focusing on your departure location, for example kerbin, and the game would give you teh names of planets as their windows open up).  This doesnt need to be super accurate, but i think the basic functionality should be included so that people dont have to use mods or fiddle with it manually.  Trial and error (the way the stock game is played essentially) is fine for kerbin where mission lengths are insignificant, but its a big turn-off for most players (myself included) designing a ship and then realizing that it cant fullfill the mission just before its completed.

The other thing is that there is alot of time commitment for anything past kerbin, especially if you are looking at mission to jool or farther, or moho.  Personally its the stupid time warp limits that make this annoying.  Time warping within kerbin SOI is fast, but even at absolute maximum its going to take ALOT of waiting to get anywhere outside kerbin SOI.  If there was 1 more tick of the time warp i think the game would be way way better, and i doubt itd cause many issues with calculations (with teh exception of SOI changes where game slows anyways, no reason to disallow super high time warp in interplanetary travel.

Aside from that, while i actually like this, designing long range (and especially reuseable multi-role craft) is pretty difficult.  Slapping together something with 2000dV is easy for most people, and that will do anything within kerbin, but to really have a long term mission to jool or something, you need over 5000dV, multiple types of landers, a fairly large ship to begin with, and then ofc the launch stage for the monstrosity.  I like designing craft, but im pretty sure most casual gamers arent going to spend the time to design an extremely detailed and complicated vessel, especially if said vessels turns out unuseable for whatever reason (too low fuel, missing something like rcs, bugs) before the entire mission is completed.

Finally, while there are mods to deal with this, i have to say that the vast majority of stock planets are fairly monotone once you get there.  Kerbin and the Mun are very well done as both have plenty of variety from flat areas to cliffy terrain that is hard to navigate (the mun doesnt give that impression from orbit, but there is more variety then you would expect from something more or less flat grey ball in map view...).  Most of the other planets are just too flatish and lack any variety in their design.  Also, while this may be subjective, the textures of most of the planets are awful.  You would be surprised how much of a different a good texture replacement does to the planets (even if it doesnt alter the surface).  Id love a complete overhaul to the terrain, but if we cant have that, at the bare minimum they need to retexture the outer planets so they look decent both from orbit and once you land on the ground.

[W. Kerman]

I used infinite fuel to flesh out my understanding of going to other planet originally. Then I just built and launched craft into Kerbol orbit at certain times of day for different planets. Later I found Alexmoon's launch window planner on the internet, and my launches got more efficient as I stayed in LKO until said launch windows. More recently, I discovered you can pull up the navball and focus on the place you're going to, and adjust your flyby in advance, saving ∆v.

 

KSP is a journey, and interplanetary is just one step up from Kerbin's SOI.

[Wildcat111]

For me, even though I have been to the Mun and Minmus, I have never gone interplanetary.

[panzer1b]

This may be a tad off-topic, but i think the new antennas are going to lower the number of people who interplanetary.  Not only do you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of actually pulling off a mission beyond kerbin, but now you cant really use probes without setting up complicated comm networks.  My latest jool trip ended up with me disabling the comms system because an entire fleet of ships all of them equipped with the best antenna available (100G one), no occlusion (that i could see in the map view), 2 of them carrying teh top relay antennas and all of them had 0 signal which is BS imo.

I really like teh concept behind the antenna system, but im not really gonna bother with it unless the signals are reliable and work as you would expect em, or they change it so signalless probes still allow WSADQE controls and 0/100 throttle so i can at least do manual moves even without maneuver nodes or anything else.

[RizzoTheRat]

I usually get most of the way through the tech tree having visited all biomes on Mun and Minmus and messed about with stations and min/min bases before venturing further afield.

This game (my first venture in to 1.1.3 having been away most of the year) I'm making a conscious effort to not farm the moons so much.  So far I've landed on Minmus twice and the Mun once in order to fulfill contracts, and have now got an explore Duna contract so will be sending some RemoteTech/ScanSat probes to Duna and Ike as soon as I sort out my deep space comms network, and then follow them up with with a lander.

The only problem is the next transfer window's ages away and it feels wrong to be accelerating time when I could be doing other stuff more locally

[tater]

A small, directional antenna should be able to communicate with Kerbin from anywhere, the only thing that would change is the effective data rate. Even the omnis should really work anywhere assuming a decent DSN.

What should change with distance is data rate, as a slower data rate is generally used to improve S/N. MRO has transmitted terabytes, for example, whereas New Horizons has 8 GB of memory, and is still sending back stuff that filled that memory during the flyby.

[Gilph]

I guess it depends on why you play.

I am wrapping up my first career.  I went interplanetary very quickly because I did not use life support.  So, my efforts were all around stations, landers and lots of ISRU and mining. Plus, the various tactics needed for orbit planning and execution.

I started a fresh 1.1.3 career to use life support, base building, KAS/KIS types of building, and Station Science.  Basically, all the things I ignored in my first career, and all the things I suck at.  I anticipate not leaving Kerbin SOI for quite a while, if ever. I have a high gravity and low gravity environment to play with these things close by. I can believe that people who enjoy this type of play style don't really need to travel far. Also, I do zero SSTOs, but I can also see how the SSTO fans can keep happy in the Kerbal sphere.

IMHO, KSP is not really suited for the long, epic journey, as you can really run out of things to do (obviously, it depends on your patience level).  But, to define a set of mods to create different universes and set your goals accordingly, you can create enough variability to keep the game fresh for a long time.

[ThatPilot]

I recommend all fresh players to to familiarize themselves with interplanetary navigation using Mun and Minmus as logical approximation (when you do a transfer from Minmus SOI to Mun without circularizing the orbit in Kerbin SOI, its mathematically the same procedure as going from Duna to Kerbin via Kerbol transfer orbit.) This allows you to try out for yourself concepts like phase-angels, setting intercepts in parent body SOI, departure/arrival burns, without waiting for ages for transfer windows, need to build really big crafts and all that timewarping usually required by travel between planets.

[Choctofliatrio2.0]

I have... scarcely gone interplanetary. I sent a satellite to Duna in Sandbox, and it barely made it to orbit. One ship got an intercept with Jool, but it was at a very long distance, and I just barely saw it. Same with Eve. I'm trying to get the motivation to do it again, it doesn't look hard.

[InterstellarOrbit]

I've played for about 6 months and the farthest I've got was Duna. 

[kotomikun]

On 9/15/2016 at 7:33 AM, panzer1b said:

This may be a tad off-topic, but i think the new antennas are going to lower the number of people who interplanetary.  Not only do you have to deal with the inherent difficulty of actually pulling off a mission beyond kerbin, but now you cant really use probes without setting up complicated comm networks.

Even with the old, simpler probe system, I suspect most players rarely, if ever, used them. Maybe for mapping ore, but not for visiting a new planet; I never see anyone making a "first landing on Duna/Mun/whatever!" post that's just a probe, and not a Kerbal or three posing with their vehicle. Landing a lifeless chunk of metal on a distant planet just isn't nearly as fun as flying a cute little green dude/dudette there so they can bounce around and plant some flags, and then trying to fly them home safely. Yeah, launching a probe is more efficient, but you can always use more boosters. The devs know this; that's why career mode is so skewed towards kerballed missions. Maybe the new antennas are more for the nerdier, RemoteTechy side of the playerbase.

I'm still hoping the game will eventually have (simple) life support, dV readouts and maps, and some sort of transfer window tool. That way, interplanetary missions would take a bit more expense and/or planning (and probes might be more appealing), but it'd be less intimidating since there'd be a straightforward means of figuring out how to do it within the game. As it is, going interplanetary is nearly impossible without doing your own research, watching third-party tutorials, and/or using mods.

[Technical Ben]

With mods I went interstellar.

But it took a lot of planning. So now I wait for a big update before taking designs to further planets like Jool.