babbo

I don't know about the intergalactic bit, but personally, I have had a lot of fun making and figuring out airplanes, orbiting stuff around Kerbin and the like. Eventually, once you are familiar with all that, you will probably feel the urge to challenge yourself and to reach farther, but fun in KSP is very much a personal thing, and two players' definition of fun may be very different. That's the beauty of an open-ended game like this one.

See? Exactly my point. Not only are they using KSP as a source of rocketry know-how, they also are using mods. They are likely to become pretty mad when 0.21 breaks their mods, though, because that will mean major delays to the project. Mod makers, don't waste time: space exploration now also depends on you!

While I have no doubt that everyone will take your sage writing advice to heart, what remains is that one can only adjust the level of any communication so much. In other words, it's fairly unbelievable that some (few, I concede) readers would think that someone who claims that KSP is a "worldwide cultural and scientific phenomenon" that influences space exploration is serious, unless they're trolling hard. Make it any more obvious, and you're talking about pink elephants flying through the Himalayas. I understand that there may be an age or a language gap in some cases, but it is no reason to reach for the lowest common denominator. Take a look at the BBC piece that the link points to instead. It's a neat write-up about the project.

Indeed. I am amused and alarmed. One more of these and I swear, I am editing the original post and adding a disclaimer. Fellow forum dweller, allow me to drop you a hint or two. I am an engineer (true story). Lately, I have not been letting KSP influence my work much, though it is difficult to ignore this world-changing piece of software that has been the subject of much discussion by the wise and the powerful of this planet. This may explain my recent engineering successes, really, because my earlier attempts at using KSP as a design tool had landed me in hot water - or, to be more specific, in a hot flaming ball of burning fuel. Call it a major career-limiting move. But I digress. I do think that, despite my occasional long face, real-world space and scientific matters should very much be joked about, because if not, my workplace would be full of sad gits. Current engineers, mathematicians - scratch that, not these guys, just engineers - deserve to laugh, too. We need it. It is for our sanity. It is for science.

The good people of the forum are either much more serious or much younger than I thought.

It seems that KSP is becoming the sort of worldwide cultural and scientific phenomenon that does not come along very often, now influencing an entire generation of engineers and physicists and conditioning how we reach and explore space. To wit, when faced with the challenge of designing a better, cheaper rocket, Esa have just chosen to take a true and tested path for the upcoming Ariane 6: more solid boosters! Not only that, but inspired by Sepratrons, the new remote control rocket parts, and the many discussions on this forum about how to prevent space junk, they decided that they will deorbit the last stage of the rocket instead of leaving it to its own devices! So fellow space program managers, when Ariane 6 first goes up, be proud and remember that we were there first. You're welcome, Esa. Take a peek at the rocket we inspired here.

I was looking at the rocket on the launch pad, and then it hit me. They use rocket clamps.

Wait a second - "real life"? What are you trying to imply here? You mean... Oh God...

This is actually quite clever. You should add it as a suggestion to the "KSP Development" section.

I wonder about how much the survey really reflects the userbase of KSP. It certainly explains a lot about the userbase of the forum, though.

I wish I had taken one, but my screenshot reflex wasn't very developed back then.

My lowest orbit happened entirely by accident, and it may well have been one of the lowest ever. If an unmanned, involuntary orbit counts, that is. Some versions ago, Jeb and friends were on final approach for a Mün landing, before they had a dedicated Apollo-style lander and all. As they were coming in and their trajectory was already intersecting the surface, I dropped (cleverly, I thought) the rocket stage that had given them a ride from Kerbin so that it would crash harmlessly on the Münar surface and, who knows, maybe create a tourist attraction. Everything was going swimmingly: I was managing to land the tallish lander proper side up without creating too big a divot, the green guys were already dreaming of Münar glory, and in a heroic feat of crazy rocket science, the spent stage went slamming into the surface. I was already dreaming of the ticket parade on Kerbin. Then Physics intervened. Little did I know that a rocket stage could so nicely break up on impact before every bit had actually impacted. And little did I know that when you try to throw a glancing blow at the Mün, sometimes, the Mün hits right back. Most of the stage did mesh with Münar dust quite nicely, thank you, but a tank and some other parts attached to it decided to pursue their own space program and were hurled back into space by the blast. Many minutes later, the Apocrap crew was busy milling about on the surface of the Mün, doing whatever it is that astronauts do on dust balls. Bob was busy making shadows on the craft with his helmet lamps, when WHOOOOOOOSH WHATTHEBLOODYHELLWASTHISRUNFORCOVER something looking like a giant spacebound water heater hurtled past like a freight train, about 20 metres above their heads. The tank had achieved orbit, and while its apoapsis was quite normal, its periapsis was, well, roughly twenty metres above the landing site. Needless to say, the Münar landing procedure was slightly altered following the incident, though the mini solar transit that took place every orbit was the source of much science for that mission.

The music is indeed royalty-free. It was composed by Kevin MacLeod, who offers a wide selection of such music, including those pieces you can hear in KSP. http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/ As far as I know, the only non-MacLeod pieces in the game are the title screen music, composed by the Harvester himself, and the credits music, though I am not entirely sure about the latter.

This update is working just fine as far as I am concerned. Been playing since 0.14, and 0.20 definitely adds refinement to craft building. I am enjoying the update very much. I am reusing my 0.19 (and prior) persistence file, which hasn't caused any trouble. It's difficult for me to assess the performance of this version vs. that of the previous one, because I also just took possession of a new, rather more powerful computer. This being said, KSP is now incredibly smooth. The only thing that's "broken" is the simple one-part mod I was using - Graphotron. I don't go ape**** and say "ZOMG 0.20 IS UTTER CRAP MY MOD DONT WORK!!!11!!one!!" precisely because I didn't expect the mod to keep working. KSP is under development and is in its alpha stage, for God's sake, so anyone whose space program is built upon mods does so at his or her own risk, in my opinion.