What are some KSP thoughts, memories and nostalgia that make you feel old as a player?

[Yellowburn10]

It's no secret that Kerbal Space Program has been out for quite a while now, with many of us having our start back in the alpha days, myself around when 0.23 was out. I was recently having some thoughts that made me realize how long ago that was. Such things includes as follows:

I was initially anticipating the release of asteroids and the SLS parts as part of a DLC. Now they've been in the base game for nearly 7 years.

It's hard to think that female kerbals weren't a thing until almost 6 years ago.

Mk2 and Mk3 spaceplanes as we know them weren't a thing as well around 7 years ago, unless you played with mods. And speaking of, imagine if the mk3 parts were still scaled to their original size? They'd only be about as useful as today's mk2 parts, maybe even less?

Science mode was the OG career mode for a good while.

Air-hogging SSTOs, anyone?

It was an exciting time to finally have unique biomes on every planet and moon, not just one for the whole darn thing. That was over 6 years ago as well.

I remember the discussions that were had about fairings being procedural and not at set lengths like everything else in the game. 

Anyone else remember those barn-looking things that were suppose to be the first stage buildings in career mode? I still kind of wish they put that in, they looked pretty charming.

Just hearing the words "This is episode *blank* of Interstellar Quest!" recently gave me a whole wave of nostalgia. The first episode of that series was posted in nov 2013, a month after career mode was first introduced.

Anyone who's watched a good amount of KSP videos should know who's videos this music is from.

Those who played in the "souposphere" days knows the struggle of learning how to do a real gravity turn when atmo physics got ramped up. I swear it was like I was a new player all over again, could barely get anything to orbit at first.

 

 

Those are just a few of the things that show my age, but what about all of you?

Edited February 2, 2021 by Yellowburn10
Updated title

[MKI]

My crowning achievement was building this puppy:

 

Not only did I not really understand what I was doing, but getting it to work took a few days of slowly tweaking the fuel mass so the limited gimbal could handle it. 

Today almost anyone can build a shuttle due to the parts (I posted a lot here for those RS-25 engines!) being available, but back then... not so much.

[KevinW42]

I remember playing before they added flags, so I would always design Apollo-style landers that left a descent stage behind on the surface so I could leave my mark.

I also found it endlessly amusing that nosecones actually increased drag in the old souposphere. Even knowing that I still used them anyways just for the aesthetics.

[RealKerbal3x]

I'm a comparative newbie (I only started playing in 1.3.1) but I do remember when the 2.5m tanks were literal oil drums.

Man, the game looks so much better nowadays. 

[Gargamel]

Building a rocket so big it wouldn't launch as it would hit the launch tower. 

[Superfluous J]

Two words: Pancake Rockets.

[dave1904]

Honestly I do not feel nostalgia about the old versions. All i think about is hours of planning only for it to be ruined by my craft exploding, phantom forces or craft ending up in totally different trajectories after an SOI change. 

[SkyRender]

I remember being pretty excited about the Mun being added for 0.12.  Finally, somewhere to go besides just to orbit!  Not that I got to orbit in 0.11, I was still in the "haha rocket go boom" phase back then.

0.14 was the first big game-changer update, I remember being stoked about being able to actually save my flights in progress.

0.18 was kind of the "legendary release" back in the day.  Since it added docking, it expanded our possibilities so much!  It was wonky and unreliable back then, but it was still awesome.  Most of Scott Manley's most popular KSP videos came out during the stretch of 0.17 to 0.22, and the bulk of the really interesting ones were during 0.18.  Ditto for Danny2462.  It was, to sum up, my favorite KSP release series.

0.22 was the first Science mode update (though back then it was called Career mode), and it was a blast actually having something to do besides just go to the other planets and moons because we could.

0.24 was the first "real" Career mode update, and when we started seeing Funds be a thing.  It was definitely something!

0.90 was exciting mostly because we knew that 1.0 was right around the corner.

1.0 was definitely the big one!  Most of the core features we know and love today were perfected or implemented for that version.

Kinda lost interest in KSP for ages after 1.2 came out, right on up 'til 1.8 and Breaking Ground came around.  That was a heck of a release, though hardly nostalgic at this point since it was only a year and a half ago!

[kerbiloid]

That was no Mun.
And Sun was red.

Edited February 1, 2021 by kerbiloid

[purpleivan]

I've been playing since 23.5 and there are two main things I remember of playing back then.

Pro: you could launch from one atmosphere and then slam into another, any shape of craft that your crazed imagination could think of and it would survive. Something like this perhaps (that thing on top survived a landing on Eve).

Con: every other undocking seemed to require a bit of surgery on your gamesave file.

Other things I remember.

• Being able to use a cluster of jets as a first stage of a reasonably sized rocket, for a vertical launch.
• Stock graphics, as I used very few mods at the time and none were visual, whereas these days I like to jazz up what I'm looking at.
• Not really part of the game but, Imgur being easy/quick to use for dumping an album of images of my latest crew's adventure into (had to get a gripe in about that).

[DialoMalison]

On 1/31/2021 at 2:38 AM, KevinW42 said:

I also found it endlessly amusing that nosecones actually increased drag in the old souposphere

I remember launching those good ol' flat top rockets for this very reason.

 

On 1/31/2021 at 7:56 AM, Gargamel said:

Building a rocket so big it wouldn't launch as it would hit the launch tower. 

Yes. I lost many a rocket when they struck the tower on the way up and more than one that was so wide that parts of it spawned inside the tower and it exploded as soon as physics kicked in.

 

23 hours ago, purpleivan said:

you could launch from one atmosphere and then slam into another, any shape of craft that your crazed imagination could think of and it would survive.

I can remember slamming into Kerbin's atmosphere at 6,000+ m/s at very steep angles and surviving. You could also launch straight up to 100 km or more and just fall straight back down and you would slow down enough  to deploy parachutes and survive landing.

 

There was no oxidizer, tanks just held liquid fuel.

I can remember launching satellites that did absolutely nothing because there was no science in the game. I can also remember installing parts packs that had "solar panels"  (that also did nothing because electricity was not in the game yet) to make my "satellites" look better.

[purpleivan]

4 hours ago, DialoMalison said:

I can remember slamming into Kerbin's atmosphere at 6,000+ m/s at very steep angles and surviving. You could also launch straight up to 100 km or more and just fall straight back down and you would slow down enough  to deploy parachutes and survive landing.

Just remembered a slightly faster encounter I had with with an atmosphere "back in the day".

I was sending Jeb in a little lander in a race to Eve (got there from Kerbin in a little over 5 days) and he hit the atmosphere at about 37,000m/s.

Jeb was unperturbed.

Edited February 2, 2021 by purpleivan

[RealKerbal3x]

2 hours ago, purpleivan said:

hit the atmosphere at about 37,000m/s

Could I... uh... see a picture of the rocket you used to do that?

[Superfluous J]

I just fondly remembered that you could use something like 20 Spark engines as a Mainsail replacement on the launchpad, and they had more thrust for less weight. Can't remember if cost was a factor back then.

The only reasons not to were that it looked silly and that that many Sparks were SO LOUD YOU HAD TO TURN THE VOLUme down to not blow your eardrums out.

Good times.

[Xavven]

I remember learning how to build thrust plates to make big rockets when the Rockomax Jumbo-64 was the largest fuel tank we had and the Mainsail was the most powerful engine we had. Everything back then had to be asparagus staging once you reached a certain size.

Now we have 5m parts and my rockets look more reasonable.

[KerikBalm]

Air hogging, pancake rockets, and pretty much being able to slam into any atmosphere at nearly any speed and angle thanks to no heating and nearly uniform acceleration on each part due to drag.

[Bej Kerman]

Started in 0.18. I haven't got any surviving screenshots or much memories, but KSP taught me how getting into orbit worked. To think I was once launching things straight up and being clueless as to why it wouldn't stay in space.

[Dr. Kerbal]

Using Solid Fuel Boosters to get to obit in KSP since 1.12 KSP (Console Edition). Yup. I wasn’t smart back then. I really took “More Boosters” quite literally. I once used 32 solid fuel boosters to get into orbit. 

[FleshJeb]

Doing a search of *.craft across all my KSP installs and finding out there were over 2000 files...and that's probably half the total since 2013.

[KerikBalm]

Can't forget... Terminal velocity ascents... had to make sure not to go to fast through the soup-o-sphere, as aero losses would easily overcome gravit drag losses...

Took another 1,000 m/s or so of dV to get into orbit

[AviosAdku]

On 1/31/2021 at 9:35 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

I'm a comparative newbie (I only started playing in 1.3.1) but I do remember when the 2.5m tanks were literal oil drums.

Man, the game looks so much better nowadays. 

Me and my brother always called them the "44 thousand gallon drum"

 

While I can remember a number of game features that are quite archaic nowadays, the thing that really hits me is seeing when others got their start. While I only registered post 1.0, I was something of a lurker round here from not that long after I got the game (started playing late 0.20.2). As a result, I always thought of the "old guard" as those who had experience in the 0.17 era with 0.18 being rather prominent in my mind as an era before mine, to see 0.23 (a version I consider to be part of my KSP heyday) considered an early era and with all the people who got their start post 1.0 ... all of a sudden, I felt rather old.

As for game related memories, well, there is 1.0 aero change, finally killing off (as far as I could tell) the infiniglide bug (which had made the idea of X-20 like spaceplanes feel "cheaty" to me) ... and pretty much negating a good chunk of rocket design and piloting knowledge I had, resulting in me having to pretty much relearn how to do it (e.g. do not turn sharply at high speed unless you are here for a rocket rodeo rather than a ride to orbit).

Also, another archaic memory relates to my excitement when I found out that Kraken drives are a thing again (by which I mean the piston type systems as was pioneered by the likes of @Comrade Jenkens, @Rune and probably others I cannot recall), I was absolutely fascinated by the things when they were first invented, I even tried to invent my own (didn't get very much success although the JD Gv2 copy I made was a lot of fun to mess around with). I also remember their disappearance back into obscurity with 0.23.5's joint reinforcement messing up much of the first generation designs if I remember correctly (which as something of an ousider to the situation, I probably do not).

After thinking about it some more, there is something that really marks me as from an earlier era: part names. While all engines now have names, I remember back when many of them only had alphanumeric designations, to this day I still think "LV-T30" and "LV-909" more than "Reliant" and "Terrier" for example.

AviosAdku

Edited February 3, 2021 by AviosAdku
Reduced overuse of the word "old", added comment on part names

[purpleivan]

On 2/2/2021 at 3:44 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

Could I... uh... see a picture of the rocket you used to do that?

Indeed you can... have a few of it littering its way to Eve.

I just realised that with a flight time of a little over 5 (Kerbin) days that it was under thrust for a significant amount its journey.

Of course "back in the day" was a time before Xenon drives got nerfed.

 

Edited February 3, 2021 by purpleivan

[Kernel Kraken]

I remember the old, ugly, angular cockpit models. Don't really miss 'em, but it's hard not to feel nostalgic when you see them in an old let's play.

[magnemoe]

On 2/2/2021 at 4:44 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

Could I... uh... see a picture of the rocket you used to do that?

I once did an test run with an nuclear pulse orion mod, reached Eve in 3 days as it was inward from the sun. 
Hit the atmosphere low and got way over 1 million g braking force so stuff like rcs and reaction wheels who was radial broke off so I hit groud nose first. 

But yes my first grand tour with kertane resource, my first grand tour without refueling, so much has changed. 

Some remember these base modules 

Close to the sun

My grand tour mothership

Had an miner who is not in the shot only the lander. 

These rovers. 

Something never changes, Gilly gravity is an joke, just moving an base. 

Jeb landing on the surface of Jool and fail to plant a flag. 


Next update after my bug report Jool did not have an surface

 

Edited February 4, 2021 by magnemoe

[Superfluous J]

12 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Can't forget... Terminal velocity ascents... had to make sure not to go to fast through the soup-o-sphere, as aero losses would easily overcome gravit drag losses...

Took another 1,000 m/s or so of dV to get into orbit

Climbing to 10km straight up at 260m/s.

What a time that was.