What recent KSP version should I use

[Jacke]

I really haven't played KSP a lot for a long long time.

But I really want to.  There's a lot I've not done in KSP.  And I want to do it.

I know enough to know that even the latest version, 1.12.5, has its issues.  And there are mods that help with some of them.

But I wonder if going with an earlier version would be better.

Any advice for me?

[HebaruSan]

The wiki has a summary of each release:

• https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Version_history

[Lisias]

I'm still playing 1.7.3, it has the best feature/bug ratio IMHO.

Edited June 14, 2024 by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made slightely less entertaining...

[Jacke]

Thanks for the quick replies.

 

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

The wiki has a summary of each release:

• https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Version_history

I'm familiar with it.  But I'm more looking for experience with the bugginess or lack thereof of particular versions.

That did prompt me to skim over it to remind me of some of the changes.

 

55 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I'm still playing 1.7.3, it have the best feature/bug ratio IMHO.

I was hoping for something more recent than that.  (Though 1.7.3 was the version under which the Community Caveman Jool 5 was flown, in which I did help.)

I just may have to try a few versions.

(And if a tenth of the wasted effort on KSP 2 been done on KSP to clean it up....)

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, Jacke said:

I was hoping for something more recent than that.  (Though 1.7.3 was the version under which the Community Caveman Jool 5 was flown, in which I did help.)

I remember some guy I did support commenting that 1.10.1 were the least problematic for him. I can't vow for this information, though, as everything from 1.9.0 gave me many, many little headaches when I tried them.

I think that if you start new savegames on these newer KSPs, you should be OK. But once you have a long running savegame, porting it past 1.7.3 became challenging for me (besides seeing some serious performance gains on 1.8.1!!)

 

4 hours ago, Jacke said:

(And if a tenth of the wasted effort on KSP 2 been done on KSP to clean it up....)

Exactly my greatest grief. They had years of openly published code with work around pinpointing where the problems were, all they had to do is to port the fixes on the main codebase before releasing 1.12.5.

We are not even talking about performance enhancements - merely to apply properly the fixes we already had detected and worked around, deterministically evidencing the bugs and the corrections!

Edited June 14, 2024 by Lisias
(sigh) Moar tyops...

[Grenartia]

4 hours ago, Jacke said:

I really haven't played KSP a lot for a long long time.

But I really want to.  There's a lot I've not done in KSP.  And I want to do it.

I know enough to know that even the latest version, 1.12.5, has its issues.  And there are mods that help with some of them.

But I wonder if going with an earlier version would be better.

Any advice for me?

Actually, 1.12.x has been decent to me. I have had problems, but I also insist on using 100+ mods, some of which haven't been updated since 1.8.x, so I suspect (never could get around to troubleshooting) bad mod interactions more than terrible game bugs, especially since unmodded 1.12 is fine (ignoring the orbital decay bug, but the KSP1 version of that hasn't been as bad as KSP2's version for a long time, and in a dumb way, actually increases game realism, I guess).

TL;DR: PEBCAK aside, I haven't experienced any gamebreaking bugs in the most recent version. 

[ColdJ]

16 hours ago, Jacke said:

Any advice for me?

I found 1.10.1 to be quite stable, though I never used any mods that seriously changed the game play. Also the Kerbal swimming still worked correctly, allowing me to use my kerbal ballast system to sink and be neutrally buoyant.

I do all my latest building on 1.12.2, as it is quite stable, has most of the stock stuff and anything I build in it will work in 1.12.5.