I haven't seen this mentioned here, but I'm pretty sure at least a few of you would like to tinker around with it.

Kerbal Space Program

I've been following it for about a month. It's still in very very alpha stages, so there's not much to do outside of make ridiculous rockets and attempt orbit.

downloading now!

Hello Roach, where have you been, space?

Another cool thing to look for this: http://en.spaceengine.org/load

Is that like Celestia? http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

Jeb is the jewel in the Kerbal Space Programme crown.

Afraid I've been helping a humble president invent push-ups...

I'm on my phone, is that program a live solar system sim?

Making Jeb scream is my passion, ******* is too sure of himself.

I can't wait until they add the Mun, it should be within the next month or two.

Has anyone downloaded this yet? I see a lot of thread views, but no replies. I swear I have no affiliation with Squad, I just feel like minded nerds here will share my excitement.

I 've been playing it actually since you posted it, really addicting. My laptop kinda sucks though and performance is hit so I can really only play it at home.

I hear ya, man. As far as I know, the engine was made for smart phones, so it'll max out a cpu core, and a gpu core, so it really can't be classified as stable, but if you can get over the lag, their forums and the kerbal space repository do a great job of giving you access to mods and challenges to keep you occupied until at least beta.

I was playing it a month ago, but I kind of felt there was a narrow band where you had the optimal weight/fuel/acceleration/heat in order to reach and sustain a certain speed through each stage in the launch sequence. And all you're doing (at least with the standard rocket equipment), is playing around with numbers of boosters/fuel-tanks/separators per stage to reach this optimal band.

"Success" seemed to be to create a reasonably boring rocket, that optimised fuel/weight etc within the acceptable band, and failures were amusing but not cataclysmic eg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl9u-h_btBo

Here is a rocket I created I named "motorbike of god" :

Once you start tinkering around with modded parts, you get some nice 1950's rocketry re-enactments where your SAS won't hold your bearings and your trajectory turns into a pattern a 5 year-old might make with a sparkler. And I've had a few craft blow up on the launch pad. Just not with the vanilla parts.


Haha, it reminds me of what some of the SA goons have done, trying to build a brick of SRBs and lobbing themselves to orbit.