Thank you

[RealKerbal3x]

If my calculations are correct, this will be my 5,000th post on this forum.  I figured that this would be the only appropriate way to mark such an occasion.

I've spent a lot of time on this site, and I don't think it's at all an overstatement to say that playing this game and being a member of its community has drastically changed the course of my life. Let's take a trip back in time, to a little over five years ago. 

The details are fuzzy, but I do distinctly remember scrolling through youtube in early-to-mid 2017 and coming upon a video titled "Kerbal Space Program - 01 - First Flight" by a guy named KurtJMac. Now, I already followed Kurt for his Minecraft Far Lands or Bust series (a journey to the edge of the game's world that still continues to this day), but I had never watched or even paid any attention to his KSP series - I guess judging a book by its cover syndrome had me. That fateful day, however, I clicked on the video and was presented with a little game about building and flying your own rockets - complete with tiny green astronauts. I was instantly hooked - I'm pretty sure I binged the rest of Kurt's KSP series after that - and by the end of the year, I had my very own copy of Kerbal Space Program.

I was immediately faced with the game's steep learning curve - while I don't remember experiencing that much adversity getting to orbit or even landing on the Mun (I think the latter took me only two attempts), orbital rendezvous stumped me at first. It didn't help that I chose an Apollo-style munar orbit rendezvous for my first ever Mun mission.

After many tutorials, tracking station terminations, and waiting for Jeb, Bill and Bob to respawn, I finally cracked it. Whether it was by skill or dumb luck, I don't know.  Regardless, the sense of accomplishment I got from simply docking two spacecraft in orbit was immense - and that was only the beginning. To this day, I still haven't landed everywhere, and only just put my first Kerbal on another planet last year.

I had been interested in spaceflight for most of my life thanks to my dad indoctrinating me, but I don't think I could ever truly call myself a space nerd before I found KSP. I've picked up an intuitive sense of how orbital mechanics works, and I certainly wouldn't have been so deeply entrenched in current IRL space news had it not been for the Science and Spaceflight section of this forum.

But I think there's one thing that KSP did that stands out. I don't think I would be pursuing a career as an aerospace engineer had it not been for this game. It hasn't been easy, but with the promise of our future as a species waiting at the end of the road, it is by all means a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

So, I'll stop rambling. I'm sure many others can join in saying a resounding THANK YOU to the community, and everyone who made this game what it is today. Here's to another 5,000 posts, and many more thousands of hours, whether that's in KSP1 or KSP2.