If you have ANY interest in space, and don't know about KSP - do yourself a favor and check it out! It even has a very xkcd seal of approval: <a href="https://xkcd.com/1356/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1356/</a>
I wonder if it's still fun now when it has gotten harder with drag and heat ...<p>To get the best experience out of KSP you should play sandbox, but never quicksave! And keep playing the same "profile" every time.<p>This makes you actually solve problems instead of just quick-loading to retry ... So you had to burn too much fuel to save the situation after almost crashing into old space debris you left ten years ago!? Ahh there's an old space station around the moon we can dock with...<p>Destroyed an engine while landing on a foreign body? Figure out how to maneuver without it. Or take a walk to the unmanned prototype vessel you had forgotten about, that might have enough fuel to get into orbit ...<p>It will also make your hands shake a bit from adrenalin, when landing, or docking, after a one hour mission, knowing you would have to restart the mission if you crash.<p>You also need to have a joystick or pedals for thrust and RCS. Yes! You can throttle the RCS! That makes it much easier for docking.
A tip for new players: I had trouble understanding what to do in KSP when I first tried it out (a while ago when it was very very beta) until I watched a bunch of videos from Scott Manley:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg</a><p>His videos really helped me understand the orbital mechanics and get more enjoyment out of the game. He knows the best way to transfer and and gave me handy rules of thumb I could follow.
There are a couple of very specific ways in which this game isn't realistic rocket science.<p>... and a lot of ways in which it actually is. But most importantly, it's fun. Like, really fun. :) If it inspires a new generation of players to get excited about the reality underpinning the model, it will have done more than its job. And I think it has a good shot at making that happen.
Strangely their purchase page references Steam, but not GOG. It's available on GOG here: <a href="https://www.gog.com/game/kerbal_space_program" rel="nofollow">https://www.gog.com/game/kerbal_space_program</a>
Basically taking the ideas from a bunch of the best KSP mods (FAR, procedural fairings, ORS/Karbonite/Kethane, Texture Replacer (specifically, its support for female kerbal skins), etc.), throwing them all together, throwing in some awesome other improvements to everything, and releasing it as the first non-alpha, non-beta release.<p>All this after Squad declared 0.90 to be "feature complete" and claimed that any further work between 0.90 and 1.0 would be bugfixes and smaller refinements.<p>Can't wait to get home so I can fire this up. I wonder if my tiny SSTO spaceplane will still work (probably not)?<p>EDIT: Also, apparently KSP supports up to 10 joysticks now. Like, hot damn. That's a lot of joysticks.<p>EDIT2: The nuclear engine doesn't need oxidizer anymore. No more having to hack part definitions on my end in order to make it behave realistically! Yay!
I haven't been following KSP for about a year, but before then I played it pretty heavily.<p>It seems like two of the things added by this release are more realistic aerodynamics, and procedural fairings. Did they basically integrate FAR into KSP? I never played with FAR because it wasn't quite casual enough for me, but this seems like a pretty substantial release that Squad put a lot of work into.<p>I guess I know what I'm doing tonight.
Nice, I haven't played for about a year and a half, back when it was pure sandbox. Guess I'll have to queue it up in Steam, although I'm having trouble displacing Endless Legend and EU4.
here is another statement, more like release notes: <a href="http://steamcommunity.com/games/220200/announcements/detail/123063972325987395" rel="nofollow">http://steamcommunity.com/games/220200/announcements/detail/...</a>
Is there a new demo version?<p>(The site is down. "Kerbal Space Program website is in maintenance mode while we are performing a Server Migration,")
So funny that the KSP site hijacks scrolling, but no comments here, while another space-related article on the first page right now is getting a mess o' hate about the hijacking: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448805" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448805</a>
IAMA about it
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/33ys4s/we_are_the_team_behind_kerbal_space_program" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/33ys4s/we_are_the_team...</a>
I've read so many great things about this game; however, the little bit I played on a friends computer just leaves me wanting more (especially at +20$). I understand that this is relatively cheap in gaming standards I just can't get there.