New Here

[Tarfu]

Damn your summer sale gabe, that $25 was supposed to be for independence day.  I couldn't pass picking up this game again, since it's been sitting on my wishlist, like forever.

Anyway, figured I'd stop into the forums and introduce myself to the rest of the trolls.

There's a lot of mods and stuff out for this game and I'm interested in suggestions on which ones I should obtain, with an emphasis on making life a little easier on my newbie self.  I'll also take any tips or advice anyone's got as well.

[Vanamonde]

Thread moved to the Welcome Aboard subforum, so you can be welcomed aboard. 

Welcome aboard! 

[legoclone09]

If you want life a little easier, try Kerbal Engineer for a Delta-V and TWR readout. Delta-V is how much you can change your velocity and TWR is your acceleration in gees.

[cubinator]

Welcome to our community! Here's a few things you should learn about eventually:

• Gravity turns: This is how your ship turns from vertical on the pad to horizontal in orbit. It should start soon after launch, and go gradually so that you are at 45 degrees around 10 km and horizontal around 40 km, but it varies for every craft a little bit and you'll just have to experiment a bit, eventually you'll get it right almost every time! Still, you'll most likely need to read up/watch some videos on this if you don't really know how spaceship trajectories work.
• Delta-V: This is how much your rocket can change it's velocity. In order to go places, you need to change your velocity. More fuel doesn't necessarily mean more delta-V! Often you can get even further with a rocket you could fit in the back of a truck than with one that barely fits in the whole VAB. The key to maximizing delta-V is fuel mass fraction. Basically, you'll get less delta-V from a fuel tank and engine carrying a large payload (like a big station module or kerballed lander) than you would from the same tank and engine if you used it to carry a tiny satellite. That's because it takes more energy to move a bigger mass.
• TWR: This is a number that says if your rocket can lift it's own weight. You need a bigger, more expensive engine to lift a bigger rocket because it needs more thrust to move.
• The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation: Fuel has mass too. If you have a rocket, and not enough fuel to get to where you're going, you need to add more fuel, which is heavier, so you need to add more rockets to lift the extra fuel, and you need more fuel to lift the rockets all the way, etc...When I designed my ship to do the first Jool-5 ISRU run (hide the quote in my sig to find a link), I had a lot of trouble with this. That's the reason it's called the "Super SSTO Mk10". There were nine others before it that didn't quite cut it!  Be careful with your designs, and try to minimize your payload mass if you don't want to end up with a colossal rocket that doesn't fit on the launchpad!
• Isp: This is a measure of how much thrust a particular rocket engine puts out with a given mass of fuel. Higher Isp means your rocket will have a higher delta-V for the same payload and fuel mass than if you used an engine with a lower Isp. Note that rockets have lower Isp and thrust in the atmosphere. You will need to choose the right engine for each stage of the mission. For launch you will need one with high thrust (these usually don't have great Isp though!) and in space you should have a high Isp, but you can get by with lower thrust.

Those are fairly advanced concepts, though, and for now I suggest just running through the Tutorials in the main menu. With those, you will be able to build and fly your own rocket, and even get it into orbit! As stated above, KER is a good tool for easily knowing important statistics about your ship without a calculator. You'll do great, it's only rocket science!

P.S. A warning: You will notice every time a movie gets rocket science wrong once you figure out this game. Seriously, every time, and there are a lot of times. Even The Martian messed up, and half the plot was based on orbital mechanics!

[T-Bouw]

You learn more from KSP anyway...

Welcome to the forum!