totm sep 2024 Testimonial - What Does KSP Mean to You?

[Fizzlebop Smith]

This is somewhat long.
If you do not have a significant emotional attachment to KSP, please move on and do not bother reading this. It is not something intended for commentary.
It is a testimonial to share with all of those who were instrumental in assisting me through the darkest days of my life.

This is something I find myself pondering in those transitory hours where sleep eludes me. What does KSP mean to me? That is a very simple question with an incredibly complicated answer. I wanted to ask those of the community with a higher-than-average emotional attachment, the same question.
I am not asking for folks to elaborate at great length about some specific aspect of one singular title.
Rather, how has KSP: the IP, forum, craft exchange, Discord mod community, or maybe just the quirk of one Jebediah Kerman contributed in some positive way to who you have become?

If you feel so inclined, please share your account of what KSP means personally.

Perhaps it is something simple. A friend of mine was experiencing a grade school child pulling away due to a lack of shared interest. My friend was always a Lego aficionado, and that semblance allowed a transference childlike wonder once experienced playing with Lego Space or Blacktron model sets.
This love lead to him actively building space themed dioramas with his son. To this day they still build dioramas of whatever missions are ongoing. 
For those of us with mental health issues, it is easy to develop a significant attachment to those things which help us through darkness, but this game has touched such a broad spectrum of lives its insane.

With myself, it is the forum. This space is an example of something becoming greater than the sum of its parts.
The forum is a truly wonderful place. How many places do you see a community transcend national borders and similarly overcome the gap in age and education?

I first laid eyes on these beautiful little frog people due to an ad on a mobile game 'Spaceflight Simulator.'
I was immediately captivated by these idiotic space cowboys. I wanted to learn more and the interwebz provided one heck of a rabbit hole. I gravitated to the fanfiction and really learned a great deal about the Kerbal perspective. An unwillingness to accept reality no matter how harsh, a desperate drive to see and do more.

I found other stories as well, tucked away in some of the more obscure nooks of these hallowed halls.
They are stories where disadvantaged individuals scoff at circumstance. Young teens in impoverished countries learned to code through a love of modding this wonderful game.
People in menial dead-end jobs found a game that nurtured all the geek dreams they held most dear and inspired many to attend higher education.

This forum was instrumental in saving my life. This is not  NOT hyperbole, nor exaggeration. But the simple truth, from the eyes of a bi polar junkie. 
It was these wonderful stories of accomplishment derived from an inspiration supplied by these little frog peeps. So many hopeful testimonials.

You see, when I first saw that ad come across my mobile screen, I was living in a tent under a bridge. Being among the indigent population breeds an inner contempt that burned like the sun next to the candle of past self-recrimination. At this point, any computer seemed to be an extravagant luxury well beyond my ability to obtain. Something I obviously did not deserve. Those times I could snag wifi or afford to top up my phone card were spent lurking in this magical realm. Under that long-lost email, I was able to discover ... hope.

I think this is the singular component of life that most people take for granted. Hope is a such a simple thing when taken at face value, but all together lacking in the lives of many.
I am predisposed to view hope as a dangerous commodity. Hope leads to disappointment, which leads to despair, which leads to darkness that ends in unhealthy coping mechanisms.

I realize, this probably sounds cheesy AF to those uninitiated to the struggles of mental illness.
Sometimes it is disproportionately difficult to "pull ourselves up" or even "touch grass."
Some days every single ounce of energy that can be mustered up through willpower alone is consumed by mundane tasks like going to work or brushing one's teeth.

This forum also helped me to believe in myself again, which is priceless. I got in touch with professionals equipped to provide the proper help. You do not go from a tent to the White House. To even set such a lofty goal is a deadly act that promotes disappointment (a tricky way for the self-hate to justify itself) and leads to despair. I went through a couple of years of "small goals with small rewards" for self-image repair. All the while, I watched this place blossom... as a guest and outsider.

Man, I wanted to play Kerbal so F*ING bad. Becoming part of the Kerbal community was a significant motivating factor. Almost 3 years ago, I got my first computer in over a decade. Kerbal was everything I had hoped it to be. In those hours where darkness threatens to swallow me, I turn to my career game on KSP1 or come to this forum to read/engage with those I have come to cherish.

You see... I love you all. Even those of you that irritate me. All of those folks who have challenged someone else... and it resulted in pages of educational material, MUAH... For all those who write detailed bug reports or play devil's advocate to those who do.
Special thanks to all those wonderful modders & to the forum managers, also to those guests who hit the site traffic metrics without ever belonging. All those kids who were inspired to touch the stars... To the janitor now working in aerospace...

Et cetera, ad infinitum.
Dear Forums,
Thank you for more than I can ever say.

[Vanamonde]

Nice idea for a thread. As it concerns the community, it has been moved to Kerbal Network. 

[Superfluous J]

I grew up loving space, and spaceflight. I saw Star Wars in the theater and parents today would be shocked at how young I was allowed to watch people shooting each other and blowing each other up. I was *just* old enough to enjoy it but not old enough to realize that yeah, the Stormtroopers executed Luke's aunt and uncle in cold blood and one of them was running away on fire when they died.

By the time I was 10, I was reading hard sci fi like Asimov and Heinlein, and before I could drive I'd read the first 3 Dune books, and while those were all great what I really found myself drawn to were the ones with realistic space flight, where travel times and moving targets meant complicated trajectories and multi-hour or -day burns to both speed up and slow down. I devoured the first two of Niven's Ringworld books (the third turned me off early and I never finished it) the entire Heechee Saga by Fredrick Pohl (Again, I was too young for a lot of the themes the first time I read it, but I still loved it), and one of my favorites was The Integral Trees - again by Larry Niven.

The Integral Trees is like a primer for orbital maneuver planning. It takes place in a ring of breathable air orbiting a star, where there is no ground and the "Integral trees" are up to 100 km long, and stay aimed at (and away from) the star by tidal forces, catching organic matter in their endpoints in the wind that blows by because that air is orbiting the star slower or faster than the tree itself. Amazing thought put into those things. And the people who lived in this "smoke ring" know how to navigate it, not because of orbital mechanics but because of a mantra: "East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East, Port and Starboard bring you back." They learned Orbital Mechanics not by studying the sky, but by living in it.

Anyway mumblty-mumble years later, I'm watching this Minecraft player on YouTube and he starts a new series where little green Minions launch themselves into space or explode trying. I was instantly transfixed. What a PERFECT mix of silly goofy fun and real, honest to goodness orbital mechanics. A friend of mine said it best when he told me, "It's as if someone asked me to describe the perfect game for me, and then they made Kerbal Space Program."

I didn't get a career because of this game, or decide to try to become an astronaut or rocket scientist. It didn't get me to look at the skies more (I already did that!) or appreciate the cosmos (I did that too). What it DID do was allow me to participate in it in a way that I never could before. It was tangible. I wasn't imagining what it was like to go to another planet. I was DOING IT.

I'm going to be frank here: The failure of KSP2 isn't that big a deal to me personally (though for literally everybody involved on all the sides of everything I wish it had done better) because I always knew I wouldn't play it anywhere near how much I played the original. Apparently if you do something for 10 thousand hours, you're an expert at it. Well I'm an expert at Kerbal Space Program and KSP2 can't teach me much more about orbital mechanics. Sure it could have applied those orbital mechanics in a unique way, but I've reached the end of the learning curve and - for me - that learning curve (which was more like a learning precipice) was where I derived my enjoyment of the game. Now that I know how to do everything I wanted to learn from the game... it's a bit boring, if that isn't blasphemous to say.

And it's okay that it bores me. I got TEN FREAKING THOUSAND HOURS before I got bored. I orbited through a Mun arch. I landed inside the Tylo cave. I used Tylo to get a better encounter of Tylo (something my brain still refuses to believe is reasonable). I've flown on Jool and glided a dragonfly across Duna. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Oh wait wrong monologue. Anyway you get the idea.

I've said before that really the only thing keeping me here is the community, but also tethering me to this forum the sheer mass of ten thousand hours of experiences that I can't really share with many other people than those here, and those who have left here never to be heard from again.

So that's my KSP testimonial; what it is to me. It's not a game, really. It's a learning tool. The purpose of KSP to me was to learn how to play KSP and I did it. It took a hefty fraction of my life but I did it and now that I have all those skills... I don't really have much to do with them.

Which is kinda sad when you think about it.

[Nuke]

before there was kerbal there was freespace. while i enjoyed such an epic space sim from the late 90s. i was very heavy into modding. after producing a small fleet of soft-scifi ship designs, i wanted something more realistic. the game was open sourced at some point and a lua based scripting system was added to the game. so i took it upon myself to undertake a semi-successful attempt to add a newtonian flight model (and atmospheric forces simulation) to the game. back then if you wanted that kind of thing you needed to play orbiter. but such games were seldom fun, and there weren't many (orbiter, space combat, elite 2 and ffe come to mind). so i may be the only freespace player to ever orbit a small moon in the game.  if only somone could make a fun realistic space game. enter kerbal.

kerbal let me scratch that itch and i scratched it to the point of bloodletting (or rather rocketfuelletting). i conquered space and projected thousands of kerbals into the greater cosmos. some of them even got to return home. eventually i got into the modding but not as deeply as i did with freespace. i found myself more interested in real world projects than virtual ones. i am still quite fond of the little green men and their explosions, even though i seldom find the time to play it anymore.

on top of a great game i think i increased my knowledge of space technology a thousand fold since ive been a member of the community. learned how orbital mechanics worked a lot better than i did with orbiter and how to get the most out of a tank of fuel. this i believe is more valuable than the game itself.

[Hobbesian]

Kerbal Space Program is easily my comfort game. This game has been with me through thick and thin. 

I started playing when I was fairly young, I always loved space as a kid and naturally I found out about Scott Manley in 2013-ish. In those days he could have been considered a KSP Youtuber. I got the game around 2015, either a few days before or after 1.0 came out, as a "belated birthday gift" from my parents. I had actually played the free demo before that but as with all demos they're limiting.

I was never good at it then, getting to orbit for little me was an achievement on it's own. It took me 2 years before I got my first Mun encounter even. But I loved it anyway. I then started to watch old Danny2462 videos, Matt Lowne vids, Hazard-ish, and even RSS youtubers (Remember Chris P. Bacon?). Those were my afternoons and evenings after coming home from school, play a bit of KSP and watch KSP vids. 

The game stayed with me as I got older, I learnt how to mod the game (which is a liquid easy task but not so easy to a 10 year old using his mother's macbook), I learnt how to actually dock, rendezvous (which im still awful at), and visit different moons and planets.  Looking back on old screenshots from these days everything looks so bare but back then seeing this low resolution textured ball flying towards the mun in an attempt to recreate some old Soviet lunar mission was so much fun for me. 

As I also love history, and specifically space history, I got into recreating real missions and crafts as well as I could. Mods helped so much. 

When I think of those days I remember being a kid, just fawning over some rocket engines, and I was happy. 

These days I still play KSP, I still watch the videos (For the channels who still upload), and when I heard that becoming an aerospace engineer was unlikely for me due to dyscalculia, KSP helped me cope with that. KSP is actually what kept me aiming for that education, and I'm working on getting my exams in order to apply. The way I play it now would definitely give a younger me some form of aneurysm, RSS/RO running kOS scripts and principia, but I have fun anyway. Really it was the customizability of the game through mods that kept me interested in it.

Sorry for the only partially structured gushing and memories, it's hard to structure my thoughts on something like this. KSP has been with me for over 10 years, and I hope it will remain with me for another 10 (given my hardware situation that's not unlikely).