I love KSP. Build, fly, mod. Any other "simulators" similar in potential scope?

[Gus]

At it's core, KSP is essentially a physics model. I like the "build, fly, mod" paradigm. Are there any other "physics model" games out there with as much potential scope as KSP, or is KSP pretty well the best there is?

Edited August 12, 2013 by Gus

[esinohio]

I'm not sure about its scope but I hear people mention Orbiter as a fairly realistic simulator. I really can't give you much information on how it runs, only that it appears to have a small helpful community like KSP and also appears to have a base of people making mods for the sim. Again though, I'm not entirely sure as I'm a certified KSP addict.

[7499275]

Hmm... Anyone know what all you can do in orbiter? Can you land on other planets, and dock with other craft?

[SolarLiner]

Orbiter is the closest sim of KSP. It has no "Build" part, but has the fly and mod parts. Like said above, it has a little helpful community, and is always welcomed to help new people. Now Orbiter is much more "Hard sim" than KSP, but if you are a space geek/rocket science lover, you sure will enjoy docking to the ISS with the Space Shuttle or do an interplanetary tour in your DeltaGlider.

And the guy behind Orbiter is implementing terrain. So soon in a future update....

I will recommand Orbiter for all space lovers, as it is free and worths a try. Just don't give up too quickly in your journey to space. We, speaking as the Orbiter community, will be glad to help you and push you to the thousand miles milestone.

Now, unlike KSP, modding is almost required to enjoy the full potential of the sim. I recommand searching for OrbiterSound and the DeltaGlider IV, as they bring respectively sound and EVA capabilities. UCGO is a good download too for your freights flights...

I'm planning in recording a set of tuts for this community from the install of MODS (game install is easy, the hard part is actually installing the mods). If it worths the recording, I'll happily go ahead and make you go play in space.

[karolus10]

I would suggest to try Pontifex, it's an old game about building bridges and then testing them in action.

When it comes to space/aircraft simulation, KSP is only of it's kind .

You can try orbiter or SSMS 2007, but they are focused on recreating space shuttle.

EDIT_1:

example of pontifex game-play:

(struts included)

Edited August 12, 2013 by karolus10

[zarakon]

[The Jedi Master]

When I tried Orbiter, I could not figure out which button to press to make the ship go. It would make sense to just press space, but NOOO, we have to use every key on the keyboard!

[SolarLiner]

Hmm... Anyone know what all you can do in orbiter? Can you land on other planets, and dock with other craft?

Create space station module by module, recreate the Voyager trajectory (Earth - Venus - Earth - Mars - Jupiter), build the ISS yourself, do all Apollo missions, colonize every landable planet, do S turns to Canaveral, do your own long-therm space program, do real missions in sync with the real events (just done that with the HTV-4 flight, very hard but very enjoyable), construct ship module by module for interplanetary travel, do fast suborbital transfers, and I miss others ...

When I tried Orbiter, I could not figure out which button to press to make the ship go. It would make sense to just press space, but NOOO, we have to use every key on the keyboard!

Made more sense to me to press + on my numpad. The "weird" part is to press CTRL while holding + to maintain the thrust level. Same behavior for the retro rockets (when available) and the - key.

[Mr Shifty]

Hmm... Anyone know what all you can do in orbiter? Can you land on other planets, and dock with other craft?

Yes and yes. Orbiter is more a space flight simulator than a space program simulator. You can't assemble rockets (though there are many many add-on rockets that have been built by the community.) It models the real solar system; you can take off from Kennedy, fly into orbit, transfer to the moon land, take off, etc. Orbiter has more realistic physics: full n-body gravitation, better atmospheric flight model, gravitational gradient torque, axial precession, exosphere drag, solar radiation pressure, etc. The main thing that Orbiter is missing is terrain (unless you use add-ons like orulex, which are somewhat buggy, and the developer just released some screenshots last week showing terrain he's working on), so every planetary surface is totally flat. Land on Everest; it's flat. Landing on the ocean is just like landing on the runway at Kennedy: flat and solid. Orbiter is also more a cockpit experience than KSP is; there's no map screen or maneuver nodes. All of your information comes in the form of multi-function displays (MFDs) that are embedded into the cockpit of whatever you're flying. There are some very detailed cockpits out there, though, with hundreds of functional switches and modules. You can view the exterior of your spacecraft to take screenshots, but for flying, you need to be in cockpit view. There are some very nice add-ons: the AMSO add-on models all the Apollo missions in exquisite detail, including all of the mission audio, full recreation of the CM and LM interiors, etc: http://www.acsoft.ch/AMSO/Images/images.html

Orbiter is free, so it doesn't cost you anything to check it out. There's more of a learning curve than for KSC, but if you print out the Quickstart guide in the manual, you should be able to fly the Deltaglider (one of the included vessels: a non-realistic SSTO with enough delta-V to get to Mars) from Kennedy up to the ISS without problems. Docking in Orbiter is a breeze because of the docking MFD and HUD. Here's a screenshot of the DG to give you a taste:

[7499275]

Create space station module by module, recreate the Voyager trajectory (Earth - Venus - Earth - Mars - Jupiter), build the ISS yourself, do all Apollo missions, colonize every landable planet, do S turns to Canaveral, do your own long-therm space program, do real missions in sync with the real events (just done that with the HTV-4 flight, very hard but very enjoyable), construct ship module by module for interplanetary travel, do fast suborbital transfers, and I miss others ...

Whoa, I tried orbiter a few years ago and found it extremely frustrating but now that you can do all of this, I may just give it another try... Assuming you are being serious because this has came a long way since I played it last!

[Jason_25]

When I tried Orbiter, I could not figure out which button to press to make the ship go. It would make sense to just press space, but NOOO, we have to use every key on the keyboard!

That's ok that you stopped so early with it, because if you got confused with the controls, you really would not like what comes next. Orbiter is awesome for patient people though.

[Mr Shifty]

Whoa, I tried orbiter a few years ago and found it extremely frustrating but now that you can do all of this, I may just give it another try... Assuming you are being serious because this has came a long way since I played it last!

Many of those require add-ons, some of which take some fiddling to get to work properly, but most of that has been possible since 2006 or before.

[7499275]

Many of those require add-ons, some of which take some fiddling to get to work properly, but most of that has been possible since 2006 or before.

Mods, that explains it haha, thanks downloading it now.

[SolarLiner]

Whoa, I tried orbiter a few years ago and found it extremely frustrating but now that you can do all of this, I may just give it another try... Assuming you are being serious because this has came a long way since I played it last!

Of course I'm serious. Using mods, of course. A good place to search is at www.orbithangar.com

The ones to do what I mentioned:

- AMSO (for Apollo missions)

- Space Station Modules (and try to search similar keywords, they are plenty of packs to help you do that)

- Trajectory Optimisation Tool (for computing slingshots)

- Thorton ISS (for the ISS modules)

- Orbiter Space Program (rough and buggy, made by me, still in beta, and in hold while I'm coding better scenario support)

Vessel shown in videos:

- ESS Space Station

- XR2 Ravenstar

- Delta Glider IV

Now those ones are special:

- Shuttle Fleet. Search for it at www.simviation.com

- Interplanetary Modular Spacecraft. Still in early beta. Find it in the Orbiter-Forum community: http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=28837&highlight=Interplanetary

MODS to download absolutely, regardless on what you want to do:

- http://orbitersimulator.com/orbiter-2010-downloads/ (HD celestial background, hi-res plannetary textures)

- http://orbiter.dansteph.com/forum/index.php?page=download (Orbiter Sound mainly, but the others too !)

So it might be good move to do a set of tuts for Orbiter then (referring to my above post).

[Mr Shifty]

So it might be good move to do a set of tuts for Orbiter then (referring to my above post).

I think it would be valuable. I just started playing around with Orbiter a couple weeks ago. The knowledge of orbital mechanics you get from KSP is very transferable, so it would be useful to have a set of tutorials that showed how to use that knowledge to jumpstart into Orbiter.

[karolus10]

Very interesting statement... this picture tells all:

Never add text to speech function into a game...

Edited August 12, 2013 by karolus10

[Ralathon]

If you want any physics model game (so not just space sims) you can always check out Algodoo. It's a 2d physics simulator for newtonian physics. You can draw shapes and give those properties like friction, density, attraction etc and see how they interact.

You can do some surprisingly complex things with this:

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by ejecting mass at large speeds.

I have no idea how the mod community for Algodoo looks however (I imagine it is pretty much nonexistant, what is there to mod about this?)

[Dortmunder]

It's not space related, but it' supposed to be a physics simulator.

BeamNG

[skykooler]

Another interesting program to check out is X-Plane. The demo version is free, so you can play around with it before having to shell out $60 for the full version. It has a physics-based flight model, and it comes with a program (Plane-Maker) to let you design and build your own aircraft. (And although it's just as hard to make a plane that flies properly as in KSP, at least they are less likely to spontaneously self-disassemble.) Oh, and it lets you simulate flight on Mars as well as on Earth.

[Galacticruler]

Try out Scraps for the building and testing aspect.

some stuff reminds me of the rovers in KSP, but then again it is an early alpha.

[roosterr]

two sort of physics sims for your phone:

* Bad Piggies - made by the same company as Angry Birds, Novasomething (on the tip of my tongue!). This is a cartoonish game, but you do get to use parts to create a flyable and/or roadable vehicle, and gravity/physics is your challenge. Way fun.

* Amazing Alex - Sort of a Rube Goldberg contraption game, using physics and gravity. Pretty cool. I have no time to play or master either, but they did get me through a few long airline flights.

[Levelord]

Very interesting statement... this picture tells all:

Never add text to speech function into a game...

But they make some great songs with it

[FlyingSinger]

Whoa, I tried orbiter a few years ago and found it extremely frustrating but now that you can do all of this, I may just give it another try... Assuming you are being serious because this has came a long way since I played it last!

I just discovered KSP a few days ago and joined this forum an hour ago. Looking around, saw this post. Several others have already talked about what Orbiter can do (all for free). Although you CAN learn and do a lot with the stock spacecraft, it's true that add-ons expand your horizons tremendously, and many are incredibly well done. I've spent a lot of time in Orbiter and even wrote the tutorial book "Go Play In Space" (for Orbiter 2005 and 2006 but I never finished the 2010 version - sorry fellow Orbinauts!). The fact that this tutorial is 181 pages tells you that the learning curve is steep, but in fairness, there's just so much cool stuff you can do, and I cover most of the basics in the first few chapters.

Orbiter is deep, very powerful and accurate, bordering on a professional tool for some things. Some groups at ESA have even used it to visualize proposed missions, even though they have AGI Satellite Toolkit and other professional tools. Martin first developed the flight recorder system around 2006 to allow them to play back missions in Orbiter with trajectories calculated in other tools (even though Orbiter can accurately simulate flights on its own). There are some great tutorial flight recordings included with Orbiter, and since they play back in Orbiter itself (not video), you can take control at any time. Of course you can also record and play back your own flights. Does KSP have a flight recorder feature (KSP newbie!).

On last thing. In 2006, I worked with three other guys to virtually prototype a proposed human mission called Mars for Less - in Orbiter. We developed add-ons to simulate the whole mission, and I presented a paper on it at the 2006 Mars Society Conference in Washington, DC (see PDF paper and PowerPoint slides). Mark Paton's Mars EDL autopilot is brilliant. So it is a very powerful sim, and if you forgive the more complex and cockpit-based UI, your orbital mechanics background from KSP will really help you understand Orbiter (so maybe you can skip reading my book and just watch a few videos and replays to learn it). It's all sandbox - you define what you want to do. There is no spacecraft builder in Orbiter (add-on ships require using a 3rd party 3D modeling package and DLL's and config files to make the models work as spacecraft). But no programming or 3D modeling is needed to fly add-ons built by others - just download, unzip, and launch - once you read the readme file, and maybe the manual for complex add-ons!

I have hundreds of Orbiter screen shots on my Flickr site. Also many Orbiter posts on my blog.

-Bruce

[lammatt]

ihv heard take on mars is highly modable too

[FenrirWolf]

This topic's making me feel like I should pick up Orbiter someday.