totm mar 2025 Threads of the month: March 2025

[adsii1970]

The KSP forum moderator's team presents the

Threads of the Month

March 2025 Edition

I know this post should have been finished earlier in the month. However, that will not stop the April threads from being released on time! Because of many things in my private life and work, I didn't get the February thread of the month out in time. So, in this edition, I've combined the nominations from February and March into one! 

Instructions on using the TOTM images: If your thread has been selected as a TOTM, you can copy the image's link above, go to the area of the forum where you want to place it, and then paste the link. Press the <CONTROL> button when the image appears and right-click on your mouse. A menu will drop down and allow you to edit the picture. You can resize it - the first number can be changed as large or as small as you want. Eventually, I will add these images to the thread I've created as a repository.

For those out there who like the nerdy parts of the TOTM:

To continue what I started in May 2021, I have kept some forum statistics to respond to those claiming the forum was dying or interest in the Kerbal Space Program was declining. We know that the release of KSP2 was less than spectacular. The original game is now approaching fifteen years since its initial release as a Steam Greenlight game.  There were  353 new forum accounts created in February (an increase of 75 or up 26.97% from January). Out of the new forum members who joined last month, 17/16 transitioned from new accounts to being active and participating in the forum. This conversion means that 4.8% of the new users who registered their accounts last month are now contributing members of our community! (This is a decrease from January; 5.75% of the new members became active and contributing members.) If you're interested in meeting the new members of our forum, click here!

Now, without further delay, I present to you the threads of the month for March:

Cinematic-based Fan-fiction, Mission Reports, and Kerbal Space Program-inspired Creative Works:

This category features a video or other cinematic form of a Kerbal mission report using in-game video-recorded gameplay. 

Note:  Instead of awarding this to a thread, this is a *post of the month* since most new cinematic works are posted in a single thread. We have a lot of great content creators, but because they've been posting their mission reports as videos in a single thread, most of their work goes unnoticed by the general forum audience. Hopefully, this change in the category to a Post of the Month (POTM) will highlight the great job done by these deserving content creators. Other threads containing cinematic posts will also be featured in this category.

Many great content creators deserve this recognition since we knew the thread by @Halban: Post Your Cinematics Here! (Cinematic Enthusiasts)  This thread serves as a repository for cinematic threads. The thread received the TOTM previously, but it was felt that it wasn't enough for those who shared your fabulous creations featuring our favorite Kerbalnauts. 

This month's featured cinematic is by one of our well-known artists, whom many of you often nominate.  @kurgut has given us many great cinematics over the years, and the high quality of the work involved has held up well over time. This particular one is a little over a year old and is still receiving nominations for CPOTM - which is why we are featuring it this month!  

One thing that is always fascinating about cinematics and Kerbal Space Program/Kerbal Space Program 2 is when the community decides to recreate famous historical moments, such as this flight, in the game and share them with the community. The amount of work and dedication to reach a level of perfection to achieve the vision of historical accuracy attempted is astounding. As a historian and fellow game player, I appreciate the effort that goes into such cinematics. In this particular one, the OP describes it as: 

Quote

76 years ago, October 14th 1947, Chuck Yeager embarked on his Bell XS-1 "Glamorous Glennis", carried by a B-29 at Muroc airforce base. While having two broken ribs, he, the USAF and NACA marked history with this milestone, crucial in developing technologies and knowledge both for planes and manned space exploration.

Embark on the "Glamorous Glennis" with Chuck Yeager, for this historical ride above mach 1, breaking the sound barrier for the first time !

The whole mission was flown from the cockpit, but the video has some external views as well, some archives images and original crew conversations, but from X-1A flight (starting at 5:40, the rest is AI custom generated voices I created to add immersion and make the thing feel more alive).

You can find the cinematic here:

Sometimes, the forum can become a bit glitchy. So here's a direct YouTube link to @kurgut's cinematic:

If you encounter other cinematics you feel are worthy of being recognized as this category's post of the month, please nominate them! You can use the exact instructions to nominate a post containing a video as you would use to nominate a thread.

Fan-fiction, Mission Reports, and Kerbal Space Program-inspired Creative Works:

This category features threads (or threads) that, while not directly related to the Kerbal Space Program, may be creative, fan fiction, or other presentations related to the game.

I enjoy reading. One of my favorite genres is science fiction, and I have always enjoyed the classics—Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frank Herbert, among others. Because I still enjoy playing Kerbal Space Program and love our forum community, I am always interested in how others imagine their "Kerbi-verse." We all have unique visions of what drives our little green friends into the great beyond and the contraptions that will take them to new horizons.  And some of us share those visions through fan fiction. Seeing the adventures others take them on come to life is always fascinating. In this particular fan fiction by @UnusualAttitude, we are presented with the background of the story in the OP:

Quote

This is the story of the Kerbals of Earth, the third planet from the star Sol. Some time in the recent geological past, an unknown disaster brought devastation and extinction on a global scale. Once a paradise of forests and oceans teeming with life, Earth is now a blasted wasteland where small communities of these tenacious little green creatures struggle for survival, striving to rise from their subterranean origins and conquer the surface of their world, and its heavens.

A handful of powerful companies rule over the Kerbal communities and control access to the world's dwindling supply of resources. These companies have agreed to sponsor a small team of visionary engineers and scientists who believe that the future of their species – and an explanation as to their origins – may lie in space. Together, they found the Omelek Space Centre on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

This is the story of Camwise, a resourceful space engineer who proves to have an uncanny ability to survive and get his crew home, even when the odds are stacked against him. It is also the story of Bartdon, a truculent senior investigator trying to hold the space programme together despite facing pressure from without and treachery from within.

It's a good fan fiction story with good character development and neat-looking craft. There's also a lot of world-building, making it a neat read. I'm hoping this will be fan fiction that's still under development and not abandoned. 

Here's where you will find this thread:

So, if you're interested in reading a mission report and seeing how others imagine their Kerbal-verse, why not visit this thread?

Forum Member Created Challenges and Missions:

This category contains missions and challenges created by you, the members of our gaming community. Many excellent missions and challenge threads are created that expand our fun with the game and test our skills, creativity, and sometimes, luck beyond what we get accustomed to. Let's face it: we all have our go-to design basics and our go-to vehicles we like to use. Sometimes, a good challenge can cause us to think of another way to achieve our goals.

This month's challenge comes to us from @Jeb x Valentina and is unique and challenging. I'll admit it has taken me a few attempts in my stock KSP (yes, I consider the two DLCs to be "stock" )! In this challenge, you must think "outside" the usual construction methods to build your rover, ship, sub-orbital, or even orbital craft! Rovers are relatively easy, as are small boats. It took me a few tries to make a sub-orbital craft. I'm still working on an orbital craft that won't strand the stupid brave Kerbalnaut in orbit!

The OP introduces this challenge as:

Quote

The cranes at the VAB recently just broke, because of... a little kraken incident; so they are no longer able to stack parts on top of each other

However, Bill is so stupid that he thinks that they don't need fancy cranes to assemble rockets; just some ol' krute force.  Your mission: Assemble a rocket on EVA construction mode; with the parts supplied by rovers launched from the runway (Example, if you want to use an OKTO2, build a rover with an OKTO2 attatched, and then detatch it  with a stack separator).

This challenge offers a lot of flexibility - modded or unmodded, various levels of difficulty, and mission goals! So, if you are looking for something to do differently in KSP and are interested in giving this challenge a try, you can find it here:

If you are looking for something new and are bored with the same old routine in your game, why not try this challenge? Please post images or cinematics - we want to see your results!

Game Support/Game Mod of the Month:

This category features either help with the game (stock or modded) or mods that improve the Kerbal Space Program's quality-of-life gameplay.

I enjoy mods that add more places to explore for our brave Kerbonauts, and this month's featured mod does just that. In this planet pack by @Mr. Kerbin, this planet pack adds a few more planets beyond Jool's orbit. The OP of the thread even contains a challenge to get you started in exploring these new locations, which is always a bonus. The only downside to this planet pack is that it is incompatible with Outer Planets Mod (OPM).  If you plan to use OPM with this mod, you'll have to either create a Module Manager patch to reset the orbits of either this or OPM so the two mods will not conflict. 

You can find the mod here:

We want to thank our family of mod contributors who continue to develop new and exciting mods that support our KSP1 and KSP2 community! So, if you're looking for something that will cause you to take your brave Kerbalnauts to their next new adventure, give this mod a try. 

General community threads of the month:

This category features a thread that adds to the community and doesn't fit the game support or game mod categories.

We receive nominations where there's not an exact place to put them in any of the other categories of our threads of the month, but they are such neat threads, we want to share them with the rest of the community. And in this thread, a long overdue thought is shared by @Ultimate Steve - what are your most and least used parts? We all have our favorites and not-so-favorites.  The thread has this introduction:

Quote

During the time the forum was dead, I watched a wonderful YouTube video about the rarest moves in Chess notation. That got me wondering what the rarest parts in KSP were, and I got the idea of making a Python script that would download every craft from KerbalX and add up all of the parts.

Unfortunately, interfacing with another site and trying to not spam KerbalX scared me a little, so I scaled it back to just something that would look through craft files and tally up the stock parts.

What's neat about the thread is what @Ultimate Steve shares with the community— a few stock parts are not part of any craft file shared on KerbalX! No, I am not going to spoil it for you, but you can find out which ones they are by visiting the thread:

Visit the thread even if you're just curious about what others have said their favorite parts are or if you want to share your favorite and least favorite parts to build your machinations of Kerbal glory or doom. 

General space flight and space science threads of the month:

This category features a thread that adds to our forum community's STEM knowledge (science, space flight, and related fields) and doesn't fit the game support/game mod categories.

This thread, started by a former forum member requesting personal account details removed from the forum by EU requirements, has threads that remain and are grouped as "Guest." Many old threads like this are floating around the forum, but none of the personally identifying information remains. So, with that in mind, when these threads are nominated, we'll still feature them, but there's no way to give proper credit where it's due. Initially, I was confused about whether I should skip this nomination I received through Discord, but the longer I thought about it, the more it seemed that it needed to be highlighted as a TOTM. 

In this thread, the OP begins with the following description:

Quote

Some things go on to be famous while some things never ever took off the ground...

It has come to my knowledge once I found a lot of old magazines from Air and Space and Science all the way back into the early 90s. Some of the articles where interesting and some where mind blowing. But I knew this had to be shared. So I share my remarks on the website post here...

But there is still a lot of concepts, tests, and projects that where cancelled, failed, or in some cases died in explosions. So that's where I want to start Lost.

For those who have participated in this thread, there are numerous planned launch vehicles and surface exploration vehicles by various space agencies, from NASA, the ESA, and others that were planned, and some full-size mock-ups, prototypes, and even actual vehicles constructed, but for some reason, abandoned.  If you want to take a look at the thread or are interested in taking part in the conversation, you can find it here:

The Science and Spaceflight section of the forum has many topics to feed the curiosity of most of our forum members. So, if you're interested in some intellectual discussion that might chase away afternoon boredom, why not visit this portion of the forum and find something of interest?

Honorable Mentions:

Sometimes, choosing which threads will be selected as the Thread of the Month for our five categories is challenging. We get many good nominations monthly, but limit it to one for each type. Threads nominated but not selected as threads of the month become honorable mentions. The honorable mentions for this month are:

• The Icarus Program (End of Chapter 20) by @Drethon
• The Mean Space by @Darknote

Although this month's honorable mention may not have made the Thread of the Month, if you think it might be worth another opportunity, please renominate it!

Congratulations to all the winners of the Thread of the Month! We want to thank our forum members, specifically @AlamoVampire, @Kerbalsaurus, @Kevin_kerman, @Misguided Kerbal, @modus, @Mr. Kerbin, @TheKspEngineer and the moderation team members who nominated this month's contenders. Thank you so much for helping us identify noteworthy threads and bringing their awareness to our forum community. We'd appreciate your continued help in the future.

Odds and ends:

TO NOMINATE  A THREAD FOR CONSIDERATION: If you find a thread you feel should be considered for next month's thread of the month, use the "Report a comment" feature (the three dots on the upper right corner of the comment box) to report the thread. Please put "Nomination for the thread of the month" in the text field of the report, and we will do the rest! You can always nominate more than one thread, too.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT GOES INTO THE DECISION WHEN CONSIDERING THE TOTM: Wonder no more! This helpful guide is to help you understand what we use to help determine what makes a thread an excellent thread and one that becomes a thread of the month/cinematic post of the month. It's everything you did or didn't want to know and includes helpful tips.

And the last word for this month's post: I'd like to thank a few people who trust me enough to continue supporting and allowing me to contribute to the forum. I want to thank the Lead Moderator, @Vanamonde, for bringing me on as a moderator. It was a decision, and I'm sure he has had moments where he often wonders why he did it. I have no idea who else to thank since we do not currently have an active contact at Private Division or their new owners, but whoever you are, thanks anyway for letting me continue to do the threads of the month.

If you missed the last edition of The Thread of the Month (January 2025), click here.

[Kevin_kerman]

Congrats to all who won!

[mrneon]

Cool!

[Mr. Kerbin]

On 3/26/2025 at 12:15 PM, adsii1970 said:

I enjoy mods that add more places to explore for our brave Kerbonauts, and this month's featured mod does just that. In this planet pack by @Mr. Kerbin, this planet pack adds a few more planets beyond Jool's orbit. The OP of the thread even contains a challenge to get you started in exploring these new locations, which is always a bonus. The only downside to this planet pack is that it is incompatible with Outer Planets Mod (OPM).  If you plan to use OPM with this mod, you'll have to either create a Module Manager patch to reset the orbits of either this or OPM so the two mods will not conflict. 

Oh, thanks!

Never thought I’d get TOTM!