New Kerbalnaut in with the expansion!

[Cerberus01]

Hello all!

I'll admit I bought this game sort of on a whim and played around with it a little bit before the First Contract expansion but became a bit overwhelmed on how to do things precisely (my failed Mun landing was particularly hilarious/tragic as I'm sure we all have experienced).

I played it after the expansion and I have to say muuuuuuccchhh better Keep up the work devs!

However, the thing that I thought would help out new players like me a bit (and a project I'll be glad to work on if and when I get the time) is admittedly perhaps a bit ambitious but to sit down and compile 'all' the math together to help others new and old get the most bang for their buck now that we actually have limited funds for launches in career mode. After getting what should be all the equations you will ever need to do anything on here, then perhaps make primers for how exactly to compute and apply said collection of knowledge. I have seen some pages on the wiki with some of the math, but not all of it and not really and I got the feeling (though I may just be dumb XD) that it was written with the assumption that the reader already possessed some underlying knowledge on the subject. And hey, we get people un-afraid of math and start solving what amounts to engineering problems in a fun game maybe we'll get more engineers and scientists . Thoughts?

[Vanamonde]

Welcome to the forum, Cerberus01.

We'd all like a comprehensive manual for this game, but it threatens to be as big as an encyclopedia set. If you're up to making one, though, you'd have a lot of grateful fans.

[Blind Dead McJones]

If you feel like installing mods right off the bat, there's one called Kerbal Engineer Redux that does a lot of the math for you.

KSP can be overwhelming at first, and it took me I think about two days just to achieve orbit. This was in the demo with fewer parts to choose from in construction. There are a ton of videos on Youtube that will explain everything to you, so if you're having a problem just look there. This forum is also a great resource if you still need more help.

[Whirligig Girl]

It's not an expansion. It's an update. Expansions won't be released until the game is finished. If you bought the game before April 2013, you get all expansion packs for free, because there was a confusion between expansion packs and updates. You, however did not buy the game before April 2013, so you don't get free expansions.

So stop calling updates expansions.

They're also not patches. Patches are small bugfix updates, and might include a small feature or two.

[Pecan]

The tutorial linked in my signature is an attempt to provide and explain a complete collection of vehicle designs one might need. In general the maths and details of 'getting to orbit', etc. are skipped in favour of links to other tutorials on the forums and wiki. So much for phase 1 of my intention to write a definitive manual - just these example vehicles print-out at around 100 A4 pages.

This weekend I'm verifying the designs still work in 0.24 then I'm starting work on phase 2 - KSP from the beginning :-) There isn't actually much maths to deal with for the most part - Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, TWR and orbital altitude/speed/period calculations. Interplanetary transfers and windows I'll leave to someone else, I think ^^, as we have the great http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ and http://i.imgur.com/NKZhU57.png.