Great sim

[Scramble]

Just got started with KSP and having great fun with the sim. Career mode is really nice, and gives the sim a sense of purpose. I started again from scratch with 0.23, and I like having limited access to technologies. It makes things a bit simpler in the beginning.

After a couple botched attempts at not only going to the Mun but also returning, I watched a bunch of videos and did some googling, and ended up aiming for Minmus instead with a better rocket design. Which has been loads of fun, and I just completed my first Minmus rendezvous including low-orbit scientific measurements with a return trip and safe landing at Kerbal. And all that science really helped getting some technologies which should make a Minmus landing more viable, and eventually that trip to the Mun.

Discovering that the command module has built-in SAS was a big help. It never occurred to me to try hitting 't' as I thought SAS had to be researched. Made flying a whole lot easier :-)

Figuring things out is part of the fun. But could maybe a bit hard for some on career mode? I've done a lot of Googling. As there is limited science to work with in the beginning, figuring out a reasonable sequence to research technologies, is one big question. E.g. from videos I inferred (maybe wrongly) that getting fuel lines is important in order to enable the asparagus design. Not so obvious for a new player ... and you also don't get to "peek ahead" in the tech tree.

Encountered a couple bugs/features. The rocket designer doesn't seem to faill on ctrl+z "undo" for some operations. If I clicked the wrong place and deleted that piece in order to undo it, then undo does not work (at least not for me). Had a nervous moment earlier when returning from Minmus, when I decided to tab through objects before doing my return trip burn. At some point neither tab or shift-tab worked anymore (by the way shift-tab is a bad choice as it conflicts with Steam keyboard overrides; I had to remap that to something else on Steam), and I was stuck with a view from some remote location. Then a bit later, it worked again. Also, as I did a bit of shift-tab later on, I did not realize that thrusters were coming online as I was holding shift while tabbing - so I did a major burn which brought me completely off course. Twice! Luckily I had enough fuel to revert the effects when I discovered that problem.

One feature that would be really nice, which I thought of after I was a bit eager to fast-forward to get to my first Minmus encounter and overshot because I did not slow down in time ... would be some kind of "fast forward to x minutes before maneuvering point". E.g. I like to re-orient the spacecraft around 2-5 mins before the maneuver, and check again about 30s before the maneuver. It would be nice to have a "skip to -2 mins" and a "skip to -30s" key.

Probably going to ramble more about random thoughts and ideas in some other post. Having great fun with the sim and getting quite worked up about it, so gonna start following the forum.

I teach physics, and am really looking forward to some type of school-friendly version of the game (e.g. some sort of licensing that makes it possible to buy the game for installing on students' laptops). Would have loved to let my students play around with it. For now I am going to just show them one of the tutorials on YouTube which shows how to build a rocket to go to the Mun, land, and get back again. There's just so much physics we can cover in terms of what is going on during that video, that it easily fills a lesson.

Thanks for a great game, look forward to spending more time with KSP!

[Vanamonde]

There are already several teachers using KSP in the classroom. You can email the creating company, Squad, about it at this address: [email protected], and there's a project just for this purpose, which can find here. Good luck with it.

As for the issues you mention: the current version of career mode is preliminary, as the game is still under development, so its already planned to be revised. I haven't run into that ctrl-Z problem myself, but you might try looking in the bug reports sub-forum for help. And there might be a mod you'd like to help with timing planetary flights.

Welcome to the game, and the forum.