Epicdreamer

My personal "stock"game has: KER, KIS, KAS, KAC, Docking port allignment indicator, Scansat, Orbital science and Kopernicus... ...combined with mostly a different planetpack, different part packs, and some tweaks and extra's per save/install. Keeps the playthroughs interesting

I've got about 12(ish) copies of ksp in a "main ksp" folder somewhere else than the steam-app folder, to prevent automatic updating. Every install/copy is a different version or has a different set of mods that alters the game to my liking (different planetpacks for example). And every install/copy has one savegame.

And a bit more (but just a little bit) complicated: 3 commsats in a circular polar orbit with a radius larger than the radius of the orbit of the outermost moon of a system. So for the Kerbin system this would result in a 3 sat system, evenly dustributed along a polar orbit larger than the orbit of Minmus (which is aproximatly 42Mm if I remember correct). So put those sats in a 45-50Mm polar orbit. Advantage: these 3 sats will cover the whole system pretty well. You can add a few sats in an equatorial orbit around every body (Mun/Minmus) to enlarge the coverage to (nearly) full. Disadvantage: getting those sats there with only the first few tiers of the tech tree unlocked can be challenging. And you do need either direct or relay antennas that can reach those polar orbit relays on every probe or ship you send out. But this configuration works absolutely fine for me on every planetary system with moons

You could place your main relay sats in a polar orbit larger than the radius of the outermost moon orbit. If you place 3 relay sats at equal distance in such an orbit you will have a connection to Kerbin a lot more often than not, where ever you are in the Jool system. In that case you only have to worry about giving your probes a dish or antenna that can reach those relays, cause they will be quite a distance away....

Launched a kerballed Mun biome hopper. Landed the craft nicely on the mun and discovered that I forgot to give the ship enough batteries/ec. So I launched another craft to give the biome hopper a few batteries and solar panels (playing with kis/kas). Landed the supply-ship nicely a few tens of meters away from the biome hopper to discover I forgot to bring along a wrench...

I play nearly every day, about a couple of hours per session. It depends a bit on what's going on, as others wrote. Sometimes I start the game for half an hour to do some tweaking on a design, or to design a very simple relay-sat or something like that. Or to mess around in a to-mess-around-installment of KSP. With for example a simple ready-to-go out and return mission to the Mun or Minmus I like to take at least an hour. For more elaborate missions, like the Ike refuel and surface mining mission I'm working on now, I need to split it into several multi-hour sessions. And sometimes, on a weekend day with nothing else to do I can play for hours and hours on end. KSP is just the most impressive game/simulator I know of...since I started to play videogames on a Commodore 64 manymany years ago.

...when you are pressing c to turn off snap...in another program...five times in a row...which happened just now. I think I'm going to remap all keybindings in all my drawing/vector programs to fit with the KSP keymapping......omg, thats another "you know when..." Need help edit: need more time off work

A mod like dMagic Orbital Science gives you less science points for every experiment in the game, but there are more experiments to play with. Also you could turn down the science reward slider in the Game Difficulty Options menu. When set to 60% for example, you will need to get out of Kerbins SOI to complete the tech tree. Another tech tree might be an idea as well. I found playing with parts mods is more enjoyable with for example the community tech tree, which expands the vanilla tech tree with nodes that require more than a 1000 science points to unlock. The Engneering tech tree has more nodes for the same amount of parts so you need more science points to unlock everything, which makes progression throught the tree and the way you build your spacecraft quite different, even with only stock parts. Hope this is of any help!

After playing several science career games with different sets of mods I noticed that a few mods are my must-haves for any save. I would recommend KIS and KAS, Scansat and dMagic Orbital Science, which goes great together with Universal Storage by the way. To expand the kerbal system you could choose for Outer Planets Mod. Getting the little green fella's to Sarnus and beyond is a good challenge! And lately I fell in love with the Near Future set of mods which makes going for the Outer Planets a lot more fun. Adds quite a few nice parts and a bit of different gameplay to the mix, without getting very complicated. I'm not to enthousiastic about LS mods. They make the game more realistic, but I got stressed about sending Kerbals up. It takes a lot of gameplay time to manage most LS (resuply-missions). But that's just a personal opinion. I like exploring more. And the extra gameplay systems and parts take their toll on my computer.

@Motokid600 Select the waypoint button in for example the big map of the Scansat mod and click somewhere outside the mapsection, but within the scansat window. Voila, waypoint removed...

*quietly studying the data coming of the spy sattelite...*

I started modding KSP by installing CKAN. I think it's a pretty easy program to use and gives you a large list of mods to try and play with. Works fine for me. Once that was installed you can look for SVE (or in full "Stock Visual Enhancements")...wich gives you clouds! Beatiful mod. I have read it demands quite a bit from your hardware, but with half res textures it worked fine on my i5, 6Gb ram and 1Gb dedicated videocard laptop. Check out the release thread of SVE!

Nice thread! Thanks TheKosanianMethod for opening this one. To me KSP is a lot more than "just" a game. Quite alike MaxwellsDemon wrote I like a more multimedian approach to deepen my understanding of the things I'm interested in. As a kid I absolutely loved playing with Lego's, especially the space-themed Lego's. Later on, understanding (or wanting to understand) more and more about the physical world we're living in astronomy and spacetravelling naturally came into view. From the extremely small to the unimaginable big I like to try and understand how things work. Just and only reading about it is (very) interesting, but keeps my interests on more of a theoretical level. Playing videogames has allways been a way of relaxing to me. And here came KSP, combining Lego's, relaxation and learning :-). The combination of planning, designing, executing, failing, reading up on things I don't understand (yet), redesigning and repating the above untill a self-stated goal is met has a magical attraction to me. And with the excelent modding community (and ofcourse Squad providing this very axcessible possibility to modders) I can slowly but surely turn KSP into a very realistic learning centre to understand more one of my greatest interests. And having a ton of fun while doing this also counts ;-) Ps: excuse me for my grammar. English is not my first language.

After landing and returning several manned missions on the Mun and Minmus succesfully, sending several probes to the inner and a couple of outer planets, building a LKO refuel station and started building a space station for science I decided it was time for a manned mission to Mars....ehm Duna. Having landed a probe there before I was pretty confident about how to set up a proper lander. But sending kerbonauts, now that was a challenge! First of all I didn't want to send out just a single Kerbal. Imagine being on a multiple year mission on your own...no. A three man (actually a two man one woman) mission would suit. And I would need the premium orange suited Kerbals. They were there from the beginning, so I thought they would have the most experience. Point was, they were scattered around. Bob and Valentina were flying on the still incomplete science space station, I think Bill was somewhere on route to or from Minmus. I wanted to build a 2 stage craft. A transfer stage to get them to an from Duna and a lander. A bit Appollo like. But more badass :-). I still needed a couple of tech nodes unlocked....in short: a lot of work to do! So I started collecting some more science points, designing crafts, testing them, redesigning, testing again..etc. After a week or so (yes I'm human too, with a job and other things to do) the glorious moment came. Bob, Bill and Valentina were together in the transfer stage, docked to the LKO refuel station, the lander was there too. The transfer window to Duna opened. The fully refueled tranferstage undocked from the refuelstation, docked to the lander stage and we were ready to go! Set up a manoeuvre node for a Hohman transfer and burn away baby! After a slight correction burn somewhere halfway they caught an intercept trajectory with Duna SOI. This went great! Enough fuel? Well probably (I'm not really a math kind of guy)...and if not, I could allways send a refuel tank there. So everything was covered....or was it? While they were happily coasting towards Duna I kept on building the science station and had probes arriving to Moho and Jool (KAC is great!) The moment came. Duna SOI intercept! Yes, they made it... I set up a manoeuvre node to get them into Duna orbit... and discovered I was short of 4dV to actually get into the widest orbit possible!! No way! At the moment they are coasting back to Kerbin orbit, arriving there in "just" 3 years. I didn't spent any dV at Duna, hoping there is enough left to circularise when they arrive at Kerbins orbit so I can send a rescue mission...

First if all I would like to express my gratitude to the people giving Filipe the opportunity to realise his tinfoil childhoods dream, and with that the dream of many. Then to the whole squad team for actually shaping this dream into what KSP is nowadays. And last but not least to all the modders creating the possibility to make KSP as fun/realistic/hard as one could wish. I'm playing KSP for a couple of months now. Being very interested in astronomy, the real-life space program and being an enthousiastic gamer everybody working on KSP have hit the very sweet spot in me. The cartoonesc "little-green-men" aestetics but pretty serious and realistic simulation of physics gives me the feeling that KSP holds a place somewhere in between a game, a simulation and a learning platform. I've never experienced such a feeling in the couple of decades of playing videogames. Not giving away much about how KSP works (kind of throwing newcomers into the darkness of space) through the easy to understand, but limited in-game tutorials enqouraged me to read up on different aspects of spacetravel. I've learned so much more about spacetravel in the last few months than in the many years before! And writing this on a gameforum (first time I ever did) is a testimony to my enthousiasm Spore was great fun, KSP is bloody excellent. A true adventure of discovery! Great work to all of you. Thanks! Now then, of to build a sattelite network...;)