Nanu Nanu from Kansas

[kchuskey]

Hey gang! Brand new to Kerbel Space Program, and I'm loving it so far! I haven't really did anything other than build a small rocket that went 173,000 meters. A little bit of overkill considering I was shooting for 22,000. Looking forward to the forum, and diving into this. I have a couple questions starting out if somebody can help. First I am interested in these two Mods.. ( Real Solar System), and (Realistic Overhaul). How do I download these, or install them, and secondly.. How do I do this..( "Just to be on the safe side, it is recommended that you copy the Kerbal Space Program folder from the Steam install to another location and do your mod experiments from there. Steam is not required to run KSP".) ?? Any help is appreciated! Glad to be here!

Edited January 22, 2015 by kchuskey

[Starwhip]

Hey gang! Brand new to Kerbel Space Station, and I'm loving it so far! I haven't really did anything other than build a small rocket that went 173,000 meters. A little bit of overkill considering I was shooting for 22,000. Looking forward to the forum, and diving into this. I have a couple questions starting out if somebody can help. First I am interested in these two Mods.. ( Real Solar System), and (Realistic Overhaul). How do I download these, or install them, and secondly.. How do I do this..( "Just to be on the safe side, it is recommended that you copy the Kerbal Space Program folder from the Steam install to another location and do your mod experiments from there. Steam is not required to run KSP".) ?? Any help is appreciated! Glad to be here!

*cough*Kerbal Space Program*cough*

Seems like you're off to a good start.

But:

Real Solar System / Realism Overhaul? Are you nuts? Most people, let alone new players, never even touch it. It's very complicated, designed for those who really love rocket science, down to the nitty-gritty of fuel type balancing.

And I don't know about the Steam thing, but I think that it means that you should copy your files to a separate directory as a backup. I don't use Steam for KSP.

Other than that, hello, and Welcome!

[kchuskey]

*cough*Kerbal Space Program*cough*

Seems like you're off to a good start.

But:

Real Solar System / Realism Overhaul? Are you nuts? Most people, let alone new players, never even touch it. It's very complicated, designed for those who really love rocket science, down to the nitty-gritty of fuel type balancing.

And I don't know about the Steam thing, but I think that it means that you should copy your files to a separate directory as a backup. I don't use Steam for KSP.

Other than that, hello, and Welcome!

Good catch! Fixed. And thanks for the welcome. As far as the mods go.. I'd be ok with just the Real solar system at first, but wasn't sure if they were dependent of one another.

[Starwhip]

Oh, well, they kind of are. You'll have a hard time getting stock-part rockets into space in RSS. Though it is possible. You need to shoot for 10 km/s of Delta V, whereas in the stock game it's only ~5 km/s. Your rockets will be incredibly large, and most likely very laggy as a result.

[Pecan]

Starwhip's right - you really don't want to start with RSS, et al. Get used to the base game first. If you are interested in realistic spaceflight in the Earth solar system you might like to try Orbiter, but that doesn't let you build your own vehicles or explore in quite the same way as KSP (which is why we're all here).

Steam will have installed KSP to a folder (something like) C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\Common\KSP_Win.

Just copy that whole folder to make a backup - it's not protected and Squad do give us permission for that.

To run this copy just double-click (or create a shortcut for) the file KSP.exe in the new folder you created.

[Starhawk]

Welcome to the forums! There is a lot to learn about this game and a lot of great people around here willing to help.

I am interested in these two Mods.. ( Real Solar System), and (Realistic Overhaul).

I haven't tried these, but as I understand it, and as Starwhip pointed out, these are mods designed to make the game much more realistic, and resultingly, much harder.

At least for me, there is already a steep learning curve. May I suggest that you play around with the stock game for a while before making it harder.

How do I download these, or install them

There are usually threads in the forum by the author of each of the mods. These are probably the best source of documentation/instructions.

it is recommended that you copy the Kerbal Space Program folder from the Steam install to another location and do your mod experiments from there

Since I don't use the Steam version, I don't know the details, but I'm sure if you do some searches of the forum, you can find out right away.

Happy landings!

and... Fly! Be free!

[Norpo]

To re-iterate what everyone's already said, real solar system and realism overhaul is HARD.

There's a reason they call it rocket science, eh? Stick with the stock game (perhaps with information mods if you want to get into things like delta-v, you can do the calculations manually, but for large ships and without spreadsheets that can get complicated)

At least land on another planet in the stock (unmodded) game before trying those mods.

Of course, you COULD ignore this and go right with the mods, but that seems like a bad idea. The realism mods make it very realistic.

In a sense, if you someday want to try to try those mods, try the stock game first, think of them as training wheels, if only because in the end you're going to be riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling chainsaws. Probably possible, but you'd want to try riding at least a bike first, eh?

[Cirocco]

hello and welcome fellow kerbonaut!

I won't re-iterate what has already been said too much. RSS and realism overhaul are hard as nails. But if you do want to mod your game and you run it on steam, here's how you go about it:

download the mod. This will probably be a zip file. Unpack file. You'll see a folder.

Go to your C drive in "my computer"

go to "program files". Depending on the windows system you're running (I'm assuming you run windows) it might also be called "program files (x86)"

go to "steam" > "steamapps" > "common" > "kerbal space program"

in the folder "kerbal space program", you'll find a folder called "Gamedata". This is the folder you'll want to back up in case things go wrong. Copy it and save it on some other location on your drive.

Once you backed up the "Gamedata" folder, just capy/paste the downloaded mod folder into this folder and hey, presto, mod installed!

hope it helps!

Cirocco