A (not so) complete waste of time.

EdFred

EdFred

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So, I've had an pretty big interest in astronomy since, forever and belong(ed) to a few astronomy fora, until they got overrun with moon hoaxers, political axe grinders, and other forum miscreants. A couple weeks ago a buddy of mine sends me an email, "Hey, do you space?"

He sent me a link to

http://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/

and said "Check out the demo version." And now I hate him.

You get to run a space program with the little green guys in my avatar where you design and build rockets, landers, probes, deal with orbital mechanics. I was hooked enough that I ended up buying the full version.
 
KSP is a huge deal in STEM educated nerd circles. Was for a couple of years already.
 
I'd never even heard of it till a couple weeks ago. Then again, I was de-geekifying myself for a while.
 
I've always wondered why asteroids aren't tracked by meteorologists.
 
I have dumped a LOT of time into KSP. Started playing in November of '11. Haven't been playing recently, haven't had time, but I've been keeping up with the dev notes and things sound like they're going to get even more awesome from here.

I have to say, it's an awesome feeling of satisfaction when you do a rendezvous with the station you launched earlier, deliver your cargo/parts/unsuspecting victims/whatever, then drop out of orbit and land back at the space center. Ditto for getting a crew to the Mun and back or dropping a probe to other planets...

Look what you've done, now I'm going to have to fire up the game again!

Edited to add: Have you messed around with Orbiter? Dumped a load of time into that as well...
 
Thats where the Avatar picture came from!!... I was racking my noggin trying to figure it out for the last week. (Insert needed distraction here):confused:

Careful that looks like it could be addictive. Many moons ago I spent a few too many sleepless nights saving my simcity.
 
EdFred said:
No, and do not post a link to it either! :no:
Click to expand...

Oh darn it, I just googled it to get a link, then made the mistake of clicking through... oh great, they're working on new terrain modeling finally! Which means I'm gonna have to get this set up again at some point... then figure out how to get my HOTAS mapped for it...

Ugh.
 
It was my impression that KSP was more of a game that Orbiter, the latter being something like Microsoft Flight Simulator of rockets. Some people even use Orbiter in preference to things like Ratman's Spreadsheet to calculate performance of various configurations of actual rockets for trade studies.
 
zaitcev said:
It was my impression that KSP was more of a game that Orbiter, the latter being something like Microsoft Flight Simulator of rockets. Some people even use Orbiter in preference to things like Ratman's Spreadsheet to calculate performance of various configurations of actual rockets for trade studies.
Click to expand...

Orbiter is definitely less game-ish and more sim-ish (despite the current lack of decent terrain modeling), with multiple orbital models available and loads of data to mess around with. It's still pretty fun to treat it as a (clunky, not-very-user-friendly) game, though!
 
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