A Comparison of KSP Rocketry to Other Video Games

[sal_vager]

Yeah, no, keep things civil and move on please

[cantab]

Kingdom Heart's Gummi Ships. You build them to your liking out of parts and fly them in space, but that's where the similarities to KSP stop. Fun minigame though.

[WindShieIds]

I like how they used the LK as an american lander, Huehuehue

[HafCoJoe]

Aeiou aeiou aeiou

[Zaryulenko]

I found a image of the Space shuttle from Megaman X5 (Wich i recently played to end )

It strongly resembles to a real OV shuttle but whit twin tail fins and extra big OMS's, IMHO i think it would have been heavier than any real shuttle from the engine section

[ScallopPotato]

My hope is that KSP will set a standard for space video games, similar to how games like Halo set the standard for first person shooters. Spacecraft would have to follow orbital mechanics or physics and would have to avoid various fallacies, but players wouldn't have to worry about limited delta-V budgets, a TWR less than one, or not having time warp.

[Kruleworld]

i'm surprised no one's mentioned Space Engineers or Take On Mars (both of which i bought and both of which are in development early access like ksp).

Edited March 30, 2014 by Kruleworld

[cantab]

My hope is that KSP will set a standard for space video games, similar to how games like Halo set the standard for first person shooters. Spacecraft would have to follow orbital mechanics or physics and would have to avoid various fallacies, but players wouldn't have to worry about limited delta-V budgets, a TWR less than one, or not having time warp.

The thing is that never mind details of orbital mechanics, just not having to keep thrusting to keep moving is alien to most people, living our whole lives as we do on frictiony, drag-central Earth. For games focussed on spaceflight, unrealism can fairly be criticised though I'd say it's a perfectly fair artistic and gameplay choice to go unrealistic. For minigames and one-off missions though, like the Halo example, realistic spaceflight will probably annoy the players.

In far-future settings where spacecraft presumably have insane amounts of delta-v, I reckon a viable approach would be a sort of linear SAS. By default it slows you down when you lift off the gas, lets you glide when you're at half throttle, and all the usual "errors", but the behaviour is framed as the computer assisting the pilot, and players who want to can turn it off and fly with true handling.

[boomerdog2000]

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident did something that made me very happy. They actually put smaller engines on all the different axes your ship would have to move on. Meaning your ship had the main engines, smaller reverse engines on the front and an assortment of thrusters for lateral movement.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/ibViWr9cAWw/maxresdefault.jpg

Edit: In the picture the reverse engines are firing while the main engines (to the left) are inactive.

[Mr. Rogue Ace]

Halo: Reach spaceflight mission

Yet another victim of the "launch straight up and then magically you're in orbit" fallacy and the "space fighters fly like jets in space" fallacy

HA, ha... huh.. it's funny, cause I made that. (somewhat)

[Tex]

Wow... that's awesome! Even though it's a mod craft, I jelly, bro.

[Xacktar]

I remember one day a while ago I had this happen:

And I had a sudden flashback to this moment:

[Galactic Nexus]

HA, ha... huh.. it's funny, cause I made that. (somewhat)

I did too! One of my proudest creations; flies like a dream too. I ought to redo it with RAPIER engines now...

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On a different note, I've really been wanting to find the time to teach myself to model, so I can make a modpack based around the retro-futuristic style of spacecraft seen in Fallout. Hopefully I'll do it some day.

Nice to see the Shinra No. 26 there Xactar; I've been meaning to make one of those too. With the new 3.75m tanks and massive SRBs from the ARM update, I may be able to soon.

Edited March 31, 2014 by Galactic Nexus

[cantab]

Now you've made me want to recreate the complete Shinra No 26 mission. Lift off briefly and settle back down. Then put an E class asteroid on a Kerbin collision course, have the No 26 lift off again, and set on a collision course with the asteroid, the crew bailing out at the last possible moment.

[Tex]

Then, of course, there's Space Agency by Nooleus. I find it's really cool for your ability to build huge space stations and use actual rocket parts. The only problem is that, like SimpleRockets, it's a 2-D space environment, which seems like a bit of a bummer to me.

The funny thing is, there are some serious problems that me and my friends discovered about it while just screwing around. For one, if you make a rocket big enough to not lose speed, you can go straight up and get into orbit. Even weirder is when you gravity-turn opposite to the trajectory the little computer in the top left gives you... You'd think you'd orbit in an anti-clockwise direction, wouldn't you? NOPE! It suddenly flings you into a clockwise orbit. Haha.

[Tordan69]

I don´t think Space Shuttle Missions Simulator has been mentioned?

[Motokid600]

I remember one day a while ago I had this happen:

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/703981302719551755/D8AD24BEB1A43740DF960D6179DA502AA019AA93/

And I had a sudden flashback to this moment:

http://i.imgur.com/SFLmra8.jpg

What game is that?

[cantab]

What game is that? What game is that? How can you not know! *mock outrage*

It's Final Fantasy VII.

FFVIII has some pretty sweet space scenes too. The electromagnetically launched pods spring to mind, and the energy shield braking at the other end. I don't recall if the pods had sustainer rockets; realistically they'd need to otherwise the occupants would be crushed on launch.

[glacierre]

Talking about combat, space and not totally sucking physics: Freelancer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_%28video_game%29 was a decent one, you would keep your momentum unless you applied acceleration in other direction.

However, I cannot remember now if you could make orbits or it was all pure linear physics.

[Nemrav]

Before getting KSP, there was one game called star conflict which had pretty bad space physics, it did use realistic-ish controls....

but in the end I uninstalled it..

[Tex]

Hmm... I might have to try a few of these

Has anyone played Buzz Aldrin's Race to Space (or something like that)? What was that like?

[Jananton]

Hmm, long ago in a distant past there was Elite of course. I had it in cassette version for my Acorn BBC-b in 1984.

Then there was Privateer, from Origin I believe, who also made the Wing Commander series in the Dos days.

From the windows period I remember 'Independence War II, Edge of chaos', a game with real Newtonian physics for the flight model but no things like orbiting and that kind of realism.

And finally, also windows, 'The X Universe, X3 Reunion'. This is a game you need to play for months on end to get anywhere, so it won't be to every bodies taste, but the rewards are great if you persevere.

All of these by the way resemble the Elite type of game play although their universes weren't nearly as vast as they were in their great grandfather. ;-)

Greetings from nighttime Amsterdam,

Jan

[Beowolf]

Yes, I'm posting to a week-old thread. Apologies if this offends anyone...

But 5 pages of people mentioning other space games and not one mention of Microsoft Space Simulator?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Space_Simulator

I sometimes think I must be the only one who ever bought a copy. I still have the original discs and manual, though I can't really imagine installing and playing it when I have KSP and Orbiter.

[Nikolai]

Has anyone played Buzz Aldrin's Race to Space (or something like that)? What was that like?

Yup. A lot. And it's free now at http://sourceforge.net/projects/raceintospace/.

It's much more management sim than spaceflight sim -- and, since it was based on a board game where too much of that management would become onerous, the options are kind of limited. For example, if you want a one-person space capsule, you only have one option. And astronaut training seemed a somewhat bungled, tacked-on "feature", though they've streamlined it somewhat since the project became open-source.

A word of warning: The learning curve is somewhat fierce. But if you like KSP, you should be used to learning curves like that.

[SpacemanSpiffy]

From the windows period I remember 'Independence War II, Edge of chaos', a game with real Newtonian physics for the flight model but no things like orbiting and that kind of realism.

I'm quite pleased to see someone besides myself remembers the Independence War series

Independence War was awesome due to it's relatively hard sci-fi approach to the science in the game:

• That lovely Newtonian physics model, though you could enable a computer assist that would make your ship fly more like something out of Star Wars, albeit justified by the computer's gratuitous use of an RCS analogue
  
• Primary weapons were particle beam accelerators, the beams from which would properly attenuate over distance
  
• While you could travel between destinations using your impulse drive, it would take forever taking into consideration the realistic distances between celestial objects... and I think the game would actually let you do this
  
• The LDS (Linear Displacement System) drive principles at least sound plausible in that it allows your ship to attain velocities at large fractions of the speed of light by moving the ship an infinitesimally small distance in an inertia-less jump a great number of times per second... though the physics exploit that allows this is hand waved
  

But where it really relates to Kerbal is that in the first game (Independence War I) there's a cheat code that will let you to break away from your current mission and go sandbox, allowing you to explore a region of space many light years in diameter without any fuel concerns (well maybe that part is decidedly un-Kerbal). The first thing I did was jump to the Sol system to visit each planet for an up-close inspection

Yes, I'm posting to a week-old thread. Apologies if this offends anyone...

Let's ride this bus 'till the wheels fall off!