totm july 2021 What is your favorite old version of KSP?

[Bej Kerman]

6 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

I just had the -admittedly very thin by now- hope that the final official update would be a serious effort at polishing and finishing the pile of half-implemented or less-than-optimally-working things still left in the game. I really, really wanted 1.3.1 to get a proper successor.

I hope Squad spends the rest of 1.12 polishing the game, now that rising ambitions are no longer a problem. Either way, it won't matter too much since in a while we'll all be playing KSP 2, which will be far more optimised, being made for modern systems.

[Maple Kerman]

I started playing around with KSP back when 1.2 released. To this day, 1.2.2 and 1.3.1 are my favourite "old" versions.
I  spent much more time playing 1.2.2 than 1.3.1, since this was back when version downloads were separated into "stable" and "newest", and 1.2.2 was considered the latest stable version for a while. I eventually moved to 1.3.1, though, and I loved all the improvements it brought without changing too much. I was able to keep mods for a while, too.

I ended up dropping it when 1.4.5 released. Unlike with 1.2.2, I updated my game every time a major version received a patch (I usually skip out on the "X.0.0" versions), but none of them really felt as good as 1.2.2 or 1.3.1 did (maybe it was Take-Two).
I arguably think KSP 1.12 is a better game than 1.2.2 or 1.3.1 were, but I do miss back when things were a lot simpler and there were way less serious bugs in the base game. 
I also don't own or care for the DLC very much, so that doesn't make much of a difference to me. But yeah, 1.2.2 and 1.3.1 were great.

[panarchist]

For me it was 0.23-0.24. I started with 0.17, 0.18 introduced docking and made things A LOT more fun. By 0.23 the modding community had released most of the "must have" mods everyone takes for granted now. I was playing on Mac back then, and it was totally awesome.

[KevinTMC]

My fondness for old versions has a lot to do with what challenges I took on at the time.

After trying and instantly falling in love with the demo (0.13.3), I bought the game when it was on 0.15.2. One's first missions--and especially first landing on Mun--will always be special and make that version of the game dear to one's heart...and there was something about the more cartoony and explodey wacky vibe of those early versions that I miss sometimes too.

My first forum-driven missions were done in 0.21.1 for the "Doing It Apollo Style" and "Duna Apollo Style" challenges. (My thread recounting  my entries in both can still be found here for historical interest. I'm still particularly proud of my engineering and piloting/docking feats on the Duna mission, and think I told the story reasonably well in the Imgur albums too.)

After those milestones came the Better Than Starting Manned era, which for me ran from 0.25 (the version I started the "'Better Than Starting Manned' Career Challenge" with, and played BTSM the most on) until FlowerChild understandably got worn out with updates after 1.0.4. My Munar landing on Tier 6 of the Challenge (I dubbed my efforts on that tier "Project Fugu") was a special moment, almost like the first time all over again; but I was proudest of and remember most fondly my Tier 7 missions ("Project Guanaco"), which among other achievements sent a massive convoy to Minmus, which was wildly successful with biome exploration while also fulfilling some sometimes-wacky contracts.

Through a combination of life evolving and getting busier, concern over reports of enduring and pesky bugs as more recent versions have rolled out, and never quite getting over the loss of BTSM, I've not managed to get back into the game to the same degree at any point post-1.0.4.

(Though I do have an Apollo 11 replica project that I started around the time of the 50th anniversary--all stock parts except for the addition of kOS, so I can automate as much of the flight plan as possible--that's been fun to work on, and that I may even finish before the 55th anniversary. I very much hope the final iteration of 1.12.x is solid enough for me to migrate that project to.)

Edited July 27, 2021 by KevinTMC