How do play this game without Engineer Redux?

[Kulebron]

I don't see any cheating in Engineer plugin, because it eases the routine calculations, and gives some readouts which are not in a convenient shape together. (like apoapsis is seen in the map, but height is shown in camera view) We could have calculated everything by hand, but eventually would have assembled spreadsheets. It does not give you any supernatural abilities.

That said, I had to arrange a big spreadsheet because Engineer for me isn't enough! It can't guess all my dockings and undockings. To send a mission to Duna & Ike, with two separate landers, I needed to check if this was better than 1 lander, and that I had enough fuel. Had to make a whole balance sheet for that.

After some flying and knowing tricks I don't need Engineer in game, but, hey, Apollo missions already had Flight Engineer in the landing can!

Edited October 21, 2013 by Kulebron

[Kerbart]

So as long as you have a calculator that can do natural logs (ln)

As long as you have a calculator that can do (any) logarithms. Converting between bases is trivial and I doubt I've ever seen a calculator that does base-10 only.

[Godot]

I don´t for long ...

I have added KSP-redux as part of one of the "45-science" - nodes in the tech tree ...

so I only have to go without KSP Engineer for a short time.

If I hadn´t KSP Engineer Redux, I would return to the practice I used before I knew about this mod ... calculating TWR and dV via Excel-Sheets.

Much more time consuming (and grindy), but not that problematic, if you always calculate per stage (from the upper to the lowermost stage)

and always take the inactive parts of the next stages as Payload for the calculation of the stage below

[Dwight_js]

Before .22 I used MechJeb and Engineer to do the calculations for me, but in career mode I've been doing without them for now. I still don't do any calculations (as this is not my idea of fun), but I eyeball everything and use trial and error. I also make "go/no-go" calls at critical points in each mission based on my best guess at whether I can pull off the desired maneuver. I also go step-by step, so for example, my Mun landing program consisted of a free-return fly-by, a mun orbit mission, and finally a landing and return mission (I was actually planning to land during the second mission, but I estimated that I didn't have enough delta v in the lander to make it back to Kerbin so I just did a few Munar orbits before going home, and then tweaked my lifter stages for the third mission).

To me, this trial and error approach somehow seems very "Kerbal" to me. It's nice to work everything out before you go and then do a mission by the numbers, and I've certainly done that (with the help of the mods!), but there is also something to the thrill of doing your final trajectory adjustment burn while heading back to Kerbin with only your best guess telling you that you've got enough left in the tank to make it. I get great satisfaction when I am correct and make it home, and I get the challenge of a rescue mission when I get it wrong. It's similar to how I actually like a lot of the quirks that some others complain about - the cumbersome nature of the node editor in certain situations, the wobbly sas, the bendy docking ports. I feel like if real Kerbals are out there going into space, that's how they're doing it. Rockets spinning out of control with Jeb running experiments as fast as he can so he can salvage some science points to buy stabilizing winglets... to me, this is the Kerbal way.

[Kosmo-not]

This could be worth a read if you want to do everything without mechjeb or engineer redux: Tutorial: Advanced Rocket Design