KSP Old-school memories

[Fraktal]

I began KSP in 1.4. First screenshot I ever made in the game, about three days into my total gametime since:

Less than three weeks later, I reached orbit with my first SSTO.

[RoninFrog]

I started playing in August 2019, a year and a week ago.  I don't know what version it was, but it definitely wasn't one of those ancient things veteran players started on.

My very first flight followed the second section of this tutorial.  I learned a ton, successfully orbited Kerbin, and had a blistering reentry due to burning radial in  instead of retrograde .

For my second flight, I thought, "I wanna land on the Mun!"  So I loaded up 7 kerbals onto this self-built munstrosity, which I believe is the first rocket I ever made.  It was waaaay too overpowered.  It was also an SSTO.  I made it nearly to the Mun's surface on the first stage (7 Mainsails), had to drop the second stage (Skipper) completely full of fuel, and managed to pull off a landing on the third stage (Poodle).

Reentry was really rough.  I ejected from the Mun's SOI totally wrong (radial in again), but I managed to fix my trajectory and reenter normally.  I had some serious problems with flipping because those fins on top kept flipping me prograde, but I did some troubleshooting and finally decided to load a quicksave and not jettison the lander stage.  This both kept me stable during reentry and let me burn and lithobrake while landing, since the parachute I had was a drogue.  But in the end, the Mun mission was successful!  Luck and quicksaves are an unstoppable combination.

Edited August 13, 2020 by RoninFrog

[Guest]

I knew KSP since 2013. I watch someone get the demo and claimed it to be too hard. I found out it was coming out on 3DS in 2014 so I waited... and waited.... and eventually 4 years later I got tired of waitng and got it.

My first rocket I used to have an image of back in December 2018. I devoured hours into KSP where I was able to get into orbit 7 hours after downloading the game. Landed on the Mun 3 days later using the assistance of @ShadowZone's tutorial. I made my first Duna mission a few months later. I got crew to almost every planet by September. And just recently my first Eve mission...

History of my first own designed landers:

 

 

Edited August 18, 2020 by Guest

[Bej Kerman]

I may have found my oldest KSP instance on this PC in the form of a Steam backup, but the second oldest thing I found was an old Physics.cfg file dating back to 2016.

Edited August 13, 2020 by Bej Kerman

[GuessingEveryDay]

I found out about KSP back in 2015, and had been following it for the past 4 years, unsure whether I should by it, or not. Then when I found @hazard-ish's youtube channel, that pushed me into buying it. I got KSP with 1.6.1, a month before 1.7, and I created a simple rocket with 3500 dV, so I thought that was enough, and put it out to the launch pad, it was only until then that I realized that I didn't know what the controls were. I thought I knew enough from watching KSP videos, but nope! Fortunately, the tutorials were simple. And I've been playing KSP for a year now, and joined the forums a year later.

[catloaf]

16 hours ago, Lewie said:

My first flight in ksp....

Well, it was on enhanced edition of February 2020.  So it was roughly ksp 1.6 (EE was a bit funky!)

I actually got to orbit on my first try! I've been watching Matt Lowne for years, so I had a basic idea of ksp. Turned out, orbit was easy. The mun....dang, trying to get there was like getting kicked in the hoo-haws over and over!

I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to reach the mun (10 hours!) But I finally made it. To this day, I have never felt such joy or a sense of accomplishment in playing ksp as I felt in that first Mun landing!

 

I had a similar experience with my first orbital rendezvous. Basically I hadn't played ksp since about 2016, but then ksp2 was announced an rekindled my hype for the first game, I then discovered Matt Lowne and must have watched 30 hours of his videos by now. After about a few months of getting back into the game I managed to dock two mk1-3 pods in orbit which was exhilarating. (Don't tell anyone that I started playing in late 2014 and didn't manage to dock until early 2020.)

[kapteenipirk]

It was late 2013, Youtube was recommending me a series called "THAT'S NO MOON! Base" by HOC gaming, and i decided to have a little peek as it looked very interesting, with bases and spaceships and even a truck mounted Kerbal cannon.

After that i decided to by the game as it looked really fun, and after 7 years and over 7500 hours (not even kidding) of game-play later according to Steam, i can say it was the best decision i ever made...well...as far as video-games are concerned at-least.

Below is a post i made a while back, witch will give you a little look into some of my early creation (before i even had 100 hours clocked).

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by kapteenipirk

[Jacke]

I started playing KSP back in v0.23, 2014 January-February.

I was very turned off with the state of KSP career.  Couldn't start with uncrewed probes ?!?

So I soon found Better Than Starting Manned.  Which became the way I played KSP for the next 2 years.  It was an amazing community.  Shame that a forum bug ate the topic, never to be seen again (of the hundreds of pages of the topic, only a few preserved by the Wayback Machine).

But I struggled with KSP 0.23's very irritating weak joints and the wobbly rockets.  Almost broke me getting my first rocket in a BTSM career to orbit (no struts available).

So as I was metamodding BTSM, I incorporated MechJeb, which helped me keep my sanity until KSP fixed those weak joints.

Alas, when the massive fiddling of KSP 0.90 to 1.0.5 wore out the developer of BTSM, it stopped development.  And I watched KSP improve.

Still trying to adapt to that change, now over 6 years ago.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Jacke

[The Aziz]

My Facebook just showed me my post when I encountered Kerbals for the first time... 9 years ago today.

That could easily be something around version 0.9 maybe, I remember that water was solid and shiny and there was no Mun. No screenshots left, sadly, but I remember making 15 iterations of a rocket, and launching them straight up. The higher the better.

[purpleivan]

Like the OP, it's back to the heady days of July 2014 for my first screenshots. They're not of my earliest attempts, I guess it took a few days to find out about the screenshot button.

This was my first probe to orbit the Mun on July 25th, which was flown as the first step towards a kerballed landing and is my earliest pic. It was followed up with a probe sent to the surface on August 2nd, to check out the surface before a kerballed landing.

I followed that with a series of Apollo like missions (8, 9 and 11), that worked their way up to putting 2 kerbals on the Mun surface and even returning them home safely as a bonus.

• Mun orbit test of CSM August 2nd.
• Test of CSM and lander in Kerbin orbit on August 3rd (00:42)
• Mun landing on August 3rd (13:18).

Shock horror... Jeb was not on the mission. So the paudits went to Harry and Tomner Kerman instead.

This is my first pic of a kerballed mission, taken a few days after the Munar orbit probe flight on July 30th.

Looking back at my old pics, one thing that stands out to me are the large number that are taken after midnight on weekdays. So I was clocking up the flight hours big time in those days.

Edited August 15, 2020 by purpleivan

[pandaman]

My first flights were in the v0.18.3 demo (March 2013).  Chucking rockets 'V2 style' at the island airfield to get a feel for how stuff worked.  Bought the game a week or so later.

First Mun 'landing' several weeks later, first Mun 'rescue' very shortly afterwards.

[RealKerbal3x]

This is the earliest screenshot I have, on my Imgur account. It might be the first screenshot I ever took in KSP, I'm not sure.

That was the first rocket I built, in version 1.3.1. Not as long as some people have been playing, but still pretty nostalgic for me. I remember the first time I tried to launch, I didn't check my staging and destroyed the engine on the launchpad. Eventually though, Jeb made it to space for the first time, and I was hooked on KSP.

[DerekL1963]

My oldest screenshots, waaay back in 2013, my first trip to the Mun, and one of my first forum posts...  (And man am I embarrassed by the design of the spacecraft...)
 

 

Edited August 15, 2020 by DerekL1963

[KevinTMC]

20 hours ago, Jacke said:

Alas, when the massive fiddling of KSP 0.90 to 1.0.5 wore out the developer of BTSM, it stopped development.  And I watched KSP improve.

Still trying to adapt to that change, now over 6 years ago.

I, too, am still struggling to adapt. Career mode never quite feels right, and isn't truly fun for me, or well-structured and challenging in just the right way, like BTSM was.

The time I spent working my way through Death Engineering's BTSM Challenge was truly epic. (I still have half a notion to go back and wrap up Tier 8 someday. Project Heffalump fell by the wayside when I couldn't decide how much contract grinding to do while my first interplanetary missions were en route...and I started running out of free time around then anyway, a situation which has been all too persistent since.)

Maybe I should experiment with new career-oriented plugins when I have the time; maybe I should just give up on career progression and find a new challenge to take on in sandbox mode.

Anyhow, looking farther back...for many of us, there's no memory quite like the first successful Mun landing. For me that came in 2012. (In my sig, I mention having played since version 0.15, and I'm sure that's where this happened; but in looking up my earliest posts I'm reminded that I did play around some with the 0.13.3 demo version first.)

From my very first thread in this forum, here's the list of achievements I set for myself along that path, after realizing how much of a challenge it was going to be, and how many things could go wrong:

1. Reach the surface of Mun
2. Leave non-exploded parts on the surface of Mun
3. Leave a non-exploded capsule containing live kerbonauts on the surface of Mun
4. Leave a complete lander, still with all its parts, on the surface of Mun
5. Leave a complete lander, still with all its parts and upright, on the surface of Mun
6. Leave a complete lander, still with all its parts and upright and with some remaining fuel, on the surface of Mun
7. Land on Mun completely intact, and then take off again
8. Land on Mun completely intact, take off again, and escape Munar SoI
9. Land on Mun completely intact, take off again, escape Munar orbit, and enter Kerbin orbit
10. Land on Mun completely intact, take off again, escape Munar orbit, enter Kerbin orbit, and return safely to Kerbin surface

I did achieve all 10 objectives in the end--though checked them off very nearly one mission at a time, if I recall correctly.

I've rescued screenshots of that first Mun project from Photobucket (gosh, it has been a while hasn't it?). Cast your eyes on the booster-festooned asparagus beauty that got my Kerbonauts there and (eventually) back:

Edited August 15, 2020 by KevinTMC

[KevinTMC]

The following year, I did a series of Apollo-style challenges, which I gave full coverage in a forum thread (which still exists--yay!--but with broken table-of-contents links and obnoxious Photobucket watermarks--boo!).

I bring it up here in part because the mission RobertaME shared at the top of the thread involved old-school fairings cobbled together from structural panels...and I certainly indulged in that here. Witness my Apollo K-X rocket at launch:

(Frame rate in the early stages of flight was...not spectacular.)

That Apollo-style mission to Duna is still one of my favorites. For the curious, it's documented in two Imgur albums.

Part I (29 images, annotated; includes images of mission control and master checklist)
Part II (36 images, annotated)

Edited August 15, 2020 by KevinTMC
Reason: Always plenty edits. Because me.

[Souptime]

Oh i remember getting my first parts mobs! I thought you had to put the parts WITHIN the squad parts folder, so i spent around 20 minutes copy/pasting parts into the squad folders, I.E: Electrical -> Squad_Parts_Electrical, I also tried to make a warp mod by copying the original parts and changing their value. Guess who had to spend even more time deleting files because i thought i could DIY it

[RobertaME]

On 8/15/2020 at 3:45 AM, RealKerbal3x said:

This is the earliest screenshot I have, on my Imgur account. It might be the first screenshot I ever took in KSP, I'm not sure.

That was the first rocket I built, in version 1.3.1. Not as long as some people have been playing, but still pretty nostalgic for me. I remember the first time I tried to launch, I didn't check my staging and destroyed the engine on the launchpad. Eventually though, Jeb made it to space for the first time, and I was hooked on KSP.

I love the name of your craft! I did the same thing myself! (Moho = Mercury ∴ Moho = First Kerbaled flights) I love it!

On 8/15/2020 at 1:30 PM, KevinTMC said:

The following year, I did a series of Apollo-style challenges, which I gave full coverage in a forum thread (which still exists--yay!--but with broken table-of-contents links and obnoxious Photobucket watermarks--boo!).

I bring it up here in part because the mission RobertaME shared at the top of the thread involved old-school fairings cobbled together from structural panels...and I certainly indulged in that here. Witness my Apollo K-X rocket at launch:
(Frame rate in the early stages of flight was...not spectacular.)

That Apollo-style mission to Duna is still one of my favorites. For the curious, it's documented in two Imgur albums.

Part I (29 images, annotated; includes images of mission control and master checklist)
Part II (36 images, annotated)

Those pics are fantastic! This is seriously cool! I love your design, working within the limits of the parts available to still achieve to goal. I only wish you'd gotten a screenshot of your "incident" with Doodsey and the tumble down the hill!

On 8/13/2020 at 7:33 AM, razark said:

First?  Any shots I have from the 0.13.3 demo are on a dead computer, awaiting retrieval right now.

The oldest I currently have is my first Mun "landing", in 0.15.

 

 

  Hide contents

Or was it this, from when KSP was still a text-based interactive fiction game?

 

 

That "text-based interactive fiction game" is awfully familiar... ::giggle:: Totally epic!

[Frozen_Heart]

Don't have my oldest pics from 0.17 anymore sadly. This is the oldest one I have. Not sure which version. 0.18 or 0.19 maybe?

 

Also K-Drives before you whippersnappers thought it was cool!

[RobertaME]

15 minutes ago, Frozen_Heart said:

Don't have my oldest pics from 0.17 anymore sadly. This is the oldest one I have. Not sure which version. 0.18 or 0.19 maybe?

Very cool! Just curious... were you going for a Sulaco-like feel here or was it just a coincidence? :^Þ

 

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Also K-Drives before you whippersnappers thought it was cool!

Also very cool! I've never messed around with the physics-breaking concepts possible in KSP, but I understand the reasoning. Sometimes it's just cool to do something physically impossible! ::giggle::

[Frozen_Heart]

5 minutes ago, RobertaME said:

Very cool! Just curious... were you going for a Sulaco-like feel here or was it just a coincidence? :^Þ

 

Also very cool! I've never messed around with the physics-breaking concepts possible in KSP, but I understand the reasoning. Sometimes it's just cool to do something physically impossible! ::giggle::

I think the inspiration was a combination of the Pillar of Autumn combined with inspiration from another user here who started the warship building craze. Ended up moving into my own style eventually though:

 

Also the physics breaking concepts are great fun to mess with! We noticed kerbals on ladders made an uneven force, and then tried to recreate the effect with parts. The K-Drive was the result.

[KevinTMC]

2 hours ago, RobertaME said:

Those pics are fantastic! This is seriously cool! I love your design, working within the limits of the parts available to still achieve to goal. I only wish you'd gotten a screenshot of your "incident" with Doodsey and the tumble down the hill!

Glad you enjoyed them! Yes, I wish I'd gotten pictures of the incident too. Guess I was too busy panicking...er, I mean managing a crisis situation with uncanny poise and a steady hand.

I liked your album as well. (Got a good chuckle out of "Did anybody bother to spell check this thing before we left?")

2 hours ago, RobertaME said:

That "text-based interactive fiction game" is awfully familiar... ::giggle:: Totally epic!

You and razark are tempting me to go off on an Infocom/interactive fiction tangent.

(I have fond memories not only of the games, but also of some of the more peculiar machines I ran them on. Zork on an Osborne 1 running CP/M, in a college computer lab. Plundered Hearts on a Commodore SX-64 that was on consignment in a computer store where I was working...wish I'd bought that machine off the floor myself. The original Colossal Cave Adventure on a dumb terminal dialed in to a campus mainframe via 150-baud acoustic coupler.)

(In related news, I may be getting old.)

Thanks so much for starting this thread....I'm enjoying it enough that I've gotten the "Sorry, you cannot add any more reactions today" message after trying to hit too many Like buttons.

Edited August 18, 2020 by KevinTMC

[RobertaME]

1 minute ago, KevinTMC said:

Glad you enjoyed them! Yes, I wish I'd gotten pictures of the incident too. Guess I was too busy panicking...er, I mean managing a crisis situation with uncanny poise and a steady hand.

Yes... managing the crisis. That's what we'll call it. Definitely does not include elements of screaming, swearing, teeth-gritting and grinding, or judicious use of quick load.

Quote

I liked your album as well. (Got a good chuckle out of "Did anybody bother to spell check this thing before we left?")

See, the thing is... well... I was so new to the game that... I thought Kerbal was spelled "Kirbal". (tell no one!)

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You and razark are tempting me to go off on an Infocom/interactive fiction tangent.
 

Do it! You know you want to! ::giggle::

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(I have fond memories not only of the games, but also of some of the more peculiar machines I ran them on. Zork on an Osborne 1 running CP/M, in a college computer lab. Plundered Hearts on a Commodore SX-64 that was on consignment in a computer store where I was working...wish I'd bought that machine off the floor myself. The original Colossal Cave Adventure on a dumb terminal dialed in to a campus mainframe via 150-baud acoustic coupler.)

(In related news, I may be getting old.)

I feel you there. I remember buying my first computer game back in the mid 80s... namely Project Space Station for the C-64. (yes... I've always been this much of a space geek-girl!) The guy behind the counter at Warehouse Records and Tapes looked at me funny, asked if I knew this was a computer game and not music, and shrugged and rang it up after I told him I knew what it was!

I actually had a C-128 and felt very spoiled by having two memory banks, a FAST mode at 2 mhz instead of only 1, CP/M support, built in sprite editor and Machine Language Monitor, etc. I taught myself 8502 Machine Language for my most ambitious project ever in programming... building a lunar lander simulator! (basically just like the old arcade game... only all hand-written code that would only work on the C-128... programmed into memory by POKE statements read from a data table... ended up with about 3-4 frames per second, but it was so cool back then!)

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Thanks so much for starting this thread....I'm enjoying it enough that I've gotten the "Sorry, you cannot add any more reactions today" message after trying to hit too many Like buttons.

Thanks for participating in it! The same to everyone else that's added their stories to this thread! I've loved getting the chance to see how other people made their way into this silly little game we've all come to adore!

[Death Engineering]

@RobertaME @KevinTMC Yes, we really have some computer history here!  Maybe I bought that SX-64, hehe, although the one I bought was in western Canada. How about 3D Maze on the 80-col PET!  The first ever FPS?  One frame per, what was it, about 20-30s?     

[RobertaME]

33 minutes ago, Death Engineering said:

One frame per, what was it, about 20-30s?     

Sounds about right....

Echelon was almost as bad. Cool as it was for the time, 1-2 seconds per frame (yes... seconds per frame) made it frustrating at times to try and fly. Worth it though! I spent hundreds of hours working on deciphering that silly code of theirs!

[KevinTMC]

On 8/12/2020 at 11:45 AM, RobertaME said:

I'm a total geek-girl for anything and everything space! I memorized all six Mercury, ten Gemini, and eleven Apollo Post-launch and Mission Reports when I was in my 20s, was playing Orbiter since it came out in 2000... and MS Space Simulator before that... and a host of others all the way back to Project Space Station for the Commodore 64! I played Orbiter right up until 2014 when I jumped to KSP. (and never looked back!) I managed to make a Moon landing with the Apollo add-on in Orbiter 2010, so I had a leg up on the average KSP player!

Always meant to give Orbiter a spin, especially since HarvesteR himself was into it and it helped inspire KSP.

Project Space Station looks rather like a precursor to Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space, which I've played a fair bit of (both the original and the 2013 remake, Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager). Might just have to see if I can get Project Space Station running in an emulator.

As for your total-geek-girl historical expertise, I might have to pick your brain a bit about Apollo.

One KSP project that I've been tinkering with for a little while is an Apollo 11 replica mission. I've put together the most similar craft I can using stock parts; I hope I'm at least in the ballpark aesthetics-wise, but where I really want to nail the verisimilitude is in the actual flight plan. Have started to learn my way around kOS (okay, so now the craft is stock parts plus kOS units) so I can program flight sequences rather than fly them all by hand...this will make for a better simulation in many respects.

There are, however, a few details that have been hard to nail down, even after consulting some flight manuals and reports available online. For instance, I've gotten stuck trying to figure out the orientation of the craft (relative to direction of travel) during transposition-docking-extraction. I am also kinda sketchy on precisely what maneuvers the CSM/LM stack and S-IVB subsequently performed to establish a safe distance and then inject the latter onto a heliocentric trajectory.

Anyhow, speaking of programming (and oh dear, this is where I'm really going to get self-indulgent, isn't it)...

On 8/18/2020 at 4:08 PM, RobertaME said:

I actually had a C-128 and felt very spoiled by having two memory banks, a FAST mode at 2 mhz instead of only 1, CP/M support, built in sprite editor and Machine Language Monitor, etc. I taught myself 8502 Machine Language for my most ambitious project ever in programming... building a lunar lander simulator! (basically just like the old arcade game... only all hand-written code that would only work on the C-128... programmed into memory by POKE statements read from a data table... ended up with about 3-4 frames per second, but it was so cool back then!)

The C-128 was sweet! We had one of those at the computer store too (new, not on consignment, so yet more solidly out of my price range than the SX-64).

Modest FPS or no, sounds like you got way beyond the few stabs I took at programming game-type substances. Knew my way around Applesoft BASIC (I had an Apple II+ that was later upgraded to a IIe), but never got far in machine language. Mostly I tinkered with and expanded games that I had typed in from some books and magazines that I picked up at the science museum. Wasn't too bad at that.

Once I tried creating a graphical game from scratch, a simple drop-ball-onto-target thing...boy did that turn out lame. There was not even the slightest approximation of physics; the ball just went on a pre-scripted trajectory based on when the player hit the space bar to drop the (moving) ball. At least it was a polite program--it began by asking for the player's name, then responded with PRINT N$;" IS A NICE NAME."

(I see some eyerolls out there...I was still in grade school, okay?)

More of a success was the program I wrote (as a high schooler) to create banners, which I printed out on continuous rolls of paper fed into my trusty Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer. (I remember spending a good long while mapping out the letter forms on millimeter graph paper.) Even earned a little pocket money making banners for the odd birthday or retirement party...until Brøderbund put me out of business by releasing The Print Shop.

Still not a patch on your lunar lander simulator I think (certainly not as fun surely)...but clearly I'm still proud enough of the project to blather about it here.

Edited August 21, 2020 by KevinTMC