Do you remember your first exposure to KSP?

[drhay53]

I remember mine, because I think it's a pretty funny story. 

I've always been a pretty heavy gamer, but at the time I was playing alot of MMOs, WoW probably. We had an observing night on the Keck telescope, MOSFIRE I think, and the weather was bad. High humidity, precipitation at the summit; the telescope operator was never even able to move the telescope and open the dome. Myself and one of the grad students in our group were in the remote observing facility, and were playing around with some browser games or something. 

He asked if I'd ever played KSP. I didn't know what he was talking about (at the time, I wasn't really using Steam much to discover games like I do now). He had played around but never really seriously played, so we booted it up, mod-free. It took us 2-3 hours to get something to space. I had taken an orbital mechanics class in undergrad but surprisingly I don't think we had ever calculated transfer orbits, or burn directions, etc. Just deriving equations and calculating orbital properties; it wasn't orbital dynamics after all

After getting a Kerbal to space, we decided to EVA. We immediately lost control of the Kerbal and sent him hurtling irretrievably into space. This game was making me re-think controls in gaming in a way that I had never experienced, in 25 years of gaming. Eventually before the sun came up (in Hawaii), we had sent a Kerbal to a fly-by of the Mun.

Normally after an observing night I come home and crash, but I was pumped up to buy KSP. I bought it and started digging into mods (I was a heavy WoW mod-user, so I loved that KSP had an active mod community, it was a big selling point for me). That first day I had mechjeb and Kerbal Engineer and a few parts mods with engines; I was on my way. I did my first rendezvous and botched the docking, of course.

In the end I was up ~32 hours straight, the last ~20 of them playing KSP. I think I slept 14 hours that night. 

Did other people have the same "this is a revolution" experience when learning about KSP for the first time?

[Cavscout74]

It was a revelation for me too - was watching some video on youtube & the next suggested video was something like "What KSP doesn't teach about xxxx."  I don't even remember exactly what the video was - something about hybrid rockets maybe.  Anyway, it was interesting but also got me wondering "What in the world is Kerbal Space Program?"  A quick google search, then watching a few videos & off I went to download the demo, followed by the full version the next day.   Not quite a 32 hour day, but my wife sure got annoyed quickly.

[Geonovast]

It was good enough for Randall Munroe, so I decided to try it.  Knew literally nothing about KSP outside of xkcd when I bought it.

[Zeiss Ikon]

Like a lot of people, my first exposure was on YouTube.  I'd seen videos come up in suggestions for a couple years (game's been "accessible" for almost five years now), probably because I watch SpaceX and aircraft-related videos.  Eventually, I clicked through on one, thought it was kind of neat, and went back to the rabbit trails I'd been chasing.

It wasn't until I found Scott Manley's videos, realized that this wasn't just about launching rockets, it involved actual orbital mechanics, interplanetary missions, that I decided to try the game.  I found it on special at the main web site (which was good, because I never bother to search Steam for games -- very few of their offerings have Linux-native versions), bought it, downloaded it -- that was September 2016.

 

[Foxster]

I have never exposed myself to KSP or anyone else, officer. 

[foamyesque]

Ran across a discussion of it on a forum back in 2011. Was hooked right away.

[SpacedCowboy]

6 years ago: "Son, what ya doin. there? (Usually plays all the bang bang shoot 'em up games) " I don't know Dad, it's called Kerbal or something"

And so,,,,

[roboslacker]

My first exposure was watching Nexter's lab.

[Superfluous J]

I was bored one day and remembered this guy who was trying to walk to the Far Lands in Minecraft. I wondered if he was still doing it, so I searched for him on YouTube.

Not only was he still going, but he had started playing this game about running a space program.

4.5 years later, he's still going to the Far Lands and I'm still playing KSP.

[Ty Tan Tu]

When I was a kid in the early 1980's I got a game called Shuttle. Actual orbital mechanics were lacking, but the graphics were stunning - and you got to fly the shuttle - and move satellites around.!

 

I was a kid...and it was the early 80's.

 

In 2003 there was a bunch of hullabaloo about how close Mars was going to be to the Earth. I bought into the hype and bought a 70 mm refactor telescope . A modest scope to be sure, but with the long focal length it was is enough capture an image of solar system objects. Which I did by tearing apart a web cam so that the primary lens of the telescope projected the image directly on to the chip, and then stacked 100 images. I was hooked.  I viewed the moons crossing Jupiter,  Saturn, which just happened to be at a good angle to view the rings at the time, and the phases of Venus.

It was then that my Internet searches discovered a simulator by Dr. Martin Schweiger called Orbiter. 

My first flight sent me me straight up, and with unlimited fuel, probably into an escape trajectory. I really had idea what I was doing. I realized I was far from Earth. and not getting closer.  I just pointed my Delta Glider back towards Earth and fired my engines for all they were worth.. It took forever, but i did get back. I realized that I had no idea how to fly a space ship. The AcitVision game had not prepared me well for this.  So, I went to a NASA web page which started with Newton's cannon on a mountain top.

 

Along with the rest of the tutorial, I was able to get into orbit. And then to the moon,  a Hohmann  transfers to Mars, and halo orbits around Lagrangian points.

In the discussion boards for Orbiter there was talk of a new 'cartoonie'  space fight game named Kerbil Space Program. At the time I dismissed it. But development of Orbiter was still slow at the time, and finally by 2015, I gave KSP a try.

I am still commenting here.

[Fireheart318]

Early 2010s in STEM class in middle school. I decided to do it as my second(?) project and boy oh boy did I suck! I only built a "flying" vessel once, and that was debatable. It didn't have control surfaces or reaction wheels and only got off the runway because it fell, but it stayed in the air.

Like many people here, I decided to look up tutorials and was helped along by Scott Manley. But alas, it was too late. The project was due in about a week and I was only a few meters up the hugeass cliff that is the game's learning curve 

Edited February 8, 2018 by Fireheart318

[Dfthu]

Man, that was such a long time ago

[invision]

my son bought it, said rockets are too hard to fly, told him he was a scrub. then i proceeded to show him how its done and crashed for the next 3 hrs. 

he was all set with this game and i ended up loving it more than any other game ive owned.

[drhay53]

thanks for all the stories, exactly the kind of stuff I was hoping people were eager to share!

[AngrybobH]

My half brother(more than 20 years younger than me) was visiting and we ended up talking about video games and rockets. He had told me about KSP and I knew I must check it out. After downloading it from steam, I played for hours. How many? I honestly do not know. But, I can tell you, my wife would burn down Squad HQ and delete every copy of the game if she could.

[TheSaint]

June of 2013, we were on vacation in Pinetop. We'd just put the kids to bed and the wife and I were hanging out in the sitting area in our hotel room. I was on the laptop and bored with all my current games, so I pulled up Steam to see what was new. I had read some article somewhere that had mentioned KSP, can't remember where now, and had been thinking about taking a look at it, and it floated to the top of my Steam store page. So I decided to download the trial version and see what it was like. Two hours later my wife told me she was going to bed, and I was all, "Okay, I'll be along in a minute." Two hours after that I realized that I had a long day ahead of me the next day and I really needed to get to bed. An hour after that I actually got to bed. The next night I bought the full version, been hooked ever since.

[MiffedStarfish]

KSP was I think my second game. I discovered it from YouTube videos, like Macey Dean’s Spiritwolf series. Prior to getting it, I’d spent all my spare time playing Combat Flight Simulator 3, (think war thunder, but exclusively ww2 and with early 2002s graphics) and though it was a great game, I’d pretty much exhausted it. So then I spent the best £25 of my life, on ksp and promptly ignored space and built VTOLs for 2 years. Nyoom.

[luizopiloto]

First time I saw KSP was this article: https://hackaday.com/2012/05/14/mapping-the-surface-of-a-video-game-moon/

[Canopus]

In 2011 i was reading about Orbiter on Wikipedia and that lead me to a list of Space Simulators. And on that list was KSP and the Name was very intriguing to me. Unspectacular but i remember it like it was yesterday.

[HeliosPh0enix]

For some reason, something by Danny2462 showed up in my YouTube feed, maybe because I had been watching a lot of War Thunder videos.  I watched EVERY SINGLE KSP video that Danny had up, and I wanted more.  I saw something by Scott Manley, and I recognized him from some random EVE Online video I had watched a while back, and I was hooked.  Watched his entire Interstellar Quest series and watched most of his tutorials to get me started.  A lot of my early missions involved strapping as many SRBs together as possible and launching them straight up, trying to get to orbit.

[klgraham1013]

Anthony Gallegos talking about it on the Rebel FM podcast.

[pandaman]

My kids told me about it and said i'd like it, but i resisted, knowing i probably would and would then spend too much of my time on it.  Then a couple of work colleagues talked about it too.  After a while i caved in and got the demo and loved it.  I then thought really hard about whether i could justify spending £17 on a game (cash was very tight for me in 2013) and took the plunge and upgraded to the full version... and spent far too much of my time on it.

By far and away the best value per hour of any game i have encountered so far.  I still play a lot, but less intensely as i did then, and I very rarely play any other computer games now.

[Gargamel]

On 2/7/2018 at 5:53 PM, foamyesque said:

Ran across a discussion of it on a forum back in 2011. Was hooked right away.

Yup, same here.  '13 though. 

Bought v .18 immediately and this is pretty much what I had the first week or so:

[kerbinorbiter]

My first exposure began on 15th December 2015, two things happened my puppy ate my tablets  and Tim Peake Launched, i watched the launch in science and then began researching all things space by the next day i had discovered KSP, and well Scott. Ten days after i caught the space bug i got KSP  

[RealKerbal3x]

I was first exposed to KSP a year or two ago, when I watched kurtjmac's videos on YouTube. The annoying thing was that I didn't actually own a computer at that time, so I (infuriatingly) could not play the game. Fast forward to Christmas 2017, and I actually have a computer that I can play Kerbal on. It's only been a couple of months and I've already landed on the Mun and Minmus and even built a space shuttle.