Kerbal Space Program

Godspeed, Jebediah.

Kerbal Space Program is a sandbox spaceflight-simulator currently in alpha stages of development, published Last Thursday by Squad. It features a realistic physics engine and rocket science. It's also a giant pain in the ass that turns out to be 3/4 drama, 1/4 space. Navigating KSP is like trying to master parallel parking a cruise ship whilst blindfolded and drunk. It's like Dark Souls on ketamine. You can't do anything. Upon construction of your craft, if it doesn't explode the second you turn the throttle on, everything is still going to blow up the second you exit the atmosphere when the game has to load because it's in alpha.
You want to build a functioning rocket in under a week? Too fucking bad. You get seven and a half hours weeks minimum of things flying out of control shortly before exploding all because you didn't turn S.A.S on. S.A.S just lets you fucking steer for fucks sake. Why isn't the sauce always on? Just remember there is no dicking reason whatsoever to ever turn it off. Unfortunately, steering doesn't actually help anything. S.A.S only ensures that you can steer your craft majestically into the crater of your choice. This is due to the fact that, much like you, the rockets themselves are neither fast nor mobile enough and always weigh too much. If you can somehow build a functioning rocket (by looking up how on gamefags), if you then take your eyes off the navigation HUD for 3/5^ths of a second to check your kiddie porn, you will be in a tailspin headed for certain incineration... for the four hundred and seventeenth time in a row.

KSP takes place primarily on the homeworld of Kerbin, mainly because it's damn near impossible to actually get yourself off the fucking planet.

Typical Gameplay Footage

Kerbals

A Kerbal astronaut.

Kerbals are the misshapen and confused astronaut race in this "game". They are midget, photosynthetic niggers who would all appear to have Downs syndrome, which may be why their government is so eager to spend countless millions killing them in rocket tests. Kerbals seem to live in a perpetual purgatory and appear to be immortal unless they perish in rocket explosions or are killed by alpha-bugs in which they randomly explode. Fortunately there is no shortage of either of these, and much like the jews, no one is upset when they die in record numbers. Fun little tidbit of information: These assholes are resistant to orbital re-entry, but explode if a breeze goes by.

Gameplay

One of the first major accomplishments in the game is reaching Kerbin's moon, named MUN, spelled differently because Squad didn't want to make the game too confusing. In career mode, if you some how rocket clusterfuck your way to the MUN you have to perform experiments, the majority of which involve sticking goo outside for a few seconds and claiming science was done. Much like NASA. Science can be used to purchase more unstable and unreliable rocket parts, which make your rockets explode better. This is to encourage you to visit the other planets.

Unlike NASA you do actually get to land on the MUN.

You can design, build and customize millions of unique ship designs, both based upon IRL rockets or ones of your own devising. None of them will ever work and will in all likelihood explode, because fuck you, that's why. Along with rockets you can also build 'space planes' which will also never make it into space... no one can prove that they ever do so they don't, instead they simply serve as the shittiest flight simulator ever made.

There are a variety of realistic manoeuvres which can be performed in game including:

The typical conclusion to most players' endeavours.

Taking off

• Not happening.

Landing

• Always seems to involve exploding.

Decoupling

• A procedure during which you break off part of your craft mid-flight in order to save weight; resulting in flaming debris falling to the Earth and killing hundreds of innocents.

Air-braking

• It's when the air you are moving through slows you down, it can help you fall gently back on Earth without using much fuel. It's also 89% of the reason it was so fucking hard to get up there in the first place.

Docking

• You have to make two ships scissor each other whilst travelling thousands of miles an hour, hundreds of miles off the ground without blowing up. It's like Parallel Parking³ with no brakes and you always run out of fuel because you never have enough fucking fuel. You dock using small rockets known as R.C.S. rockets, which along with turning your ship can move it up, down, left or right in small controlled bursts. Docking can be summed up with the following quote:

	“	up up UP UP! RIGHT RIGHT LEFT UP UP FORWARD UPUPUPUPUP down DOWN! DOOOOOOWN! FUCK THIS SHIT! ...I'm going to go kill a cat.	„
	— typical player

Rocket Design

ಠ~ಠ

Fuckrockets to overdrive.

FUUUUUU...

KSP features full design and customization of rocketships. This is the most tedious and arduous process of the game experience with a learning curve similar to a straight vertical line. Luckily, the rocket design component consists of 90% of the game experience because they never work. Basically, you need fuel to get the rocket up, but the fuel weighs too much to get off the ground, so in short, you're always fucked. If the shitty mess of a ship design platform will let you put on a second set of booster rockets without placing them horizontally facing inwards so that when they turn on they incinerate each other and explode...again, you're lucky, because you've created a rocket that will now explode in space instead of on the launchpad.

There are like five different types of engines:

Solid-Fuel Rockets

These are the rockets Kerbals use when re-enacting 9/11. They just explode no matter what. They cannot be steered or shut off and at the longest have about 12 seconds of burn time. If they propel the ship for half this time it's pure coincidence.

Liquid Fuel Rockets

Why would you use anything else? You can actually steer them and shut them off, which is useful because the central tenet of Kerbal Space Program is that you want to save every precious drop of fuel that you are constantly running out of, you grubby Jew. Much like yourself, Liquid Fuel Rockets can go for about 23 seconds before finishing.

Jet Engines

Only seem to work in when there is air, which is useful when in the vacuum of space. They produce as much thrust as a ceiling fan. They exist solely to piss the player off. if mods like ferram aerospace research are added, your jet engines pretty much become north Korean type ballistic fucking missiles, in that give you no control whatsoever and end up spiraling your jet into the sea. this can be fixed by adding wings that are at least a hundred feet wide, or equivalent to half of gabe newell's waistband

Ion rockets

These dinky motherfuckers barely accelerate worth shit and only work when they are actually in space. But guess what? These faggots never run out of fuel. So you have all the fuel you want, if only the other rockets were strong enough to put it in space.

Rocket Building

One of the special features of rocket design is the construction of the cockpit and workstation. You can put several kinds of housing capsules for your Kerbals to sit in during their missle flights. Most have no windows or controls, just a blank wall, so upon launching for a 5 year-long Mars expedition, the Kerbal has nothing to do but wish he weren't on the mission, and along with the player will subsequently go completely insane before the mission is accomplished. Since Kerbals live forever, most astronauts spend decades strapped to their chair, staring at blank wall unsure if they have been abandoned or not, knowing nothing but the inside of a small cannister while the beauty of the cosmos is hidden behind just a few tiny millimeters of aluminum.

The Solar System

You can go to any planet in a 1:10 scale model of the solar system although, one should not confuse this with the actual solar system, meaning that the developers can bullshit the physics as much as they want. Their names are Dres, Duna, Moho, Eve, Steve, Hitler Did Nothing Wrong, and Kerbin. If you can get to any of these planets you are the son of Christ. They decided to get rid of Saturn, Neptune and your butthole and shove them into one giant green knockoff planet called JEWel. They actually put a halfway interesting moon in orbit around it, which turns out is not as soulcrushingly boring as the rest of the goddamn game.

mods

lets face it, normal KSP is shit. mods, however, are a different flavor of excretion. some of these fuckers can actually make the game something other than complete shit. not remotely fun, but still not COMPLETE shit.

FAR (ferram aerospace research

pretty much forces you to make significantly more phallic rockets, and turns jet engines into ballistic missiles. the most signifigant thig this mod changes is probably how drag is calculated. while in unmodded KSP, the dick your jet sucks is calculated based mostly on weight. with this mod, all the dick sucked will be from actual aerodynamic drag instead of being a fatass. science.

firespitter

adds a bunch of ww2/cold war era airplane parts. the parts are overpowered as fuck. to showcase said overage of power, you can get a bomber the size of a 747 in the air at about 150-200 MPS with nothing but a 2 meter-diameter airboat engine. yes, a fucking airboat engine.

B9 areospace

adds a bunch of dick-shaped airplane parts. the creator of this mod supposedly got abducted by squad and is currently coding for a rapier engine patch in a sweatshop somewhere in mexico.

interstellar

if your rockets didn't explode enough already, adding antimatter and nuclear reactors to the mix sure sounds like a great idea! also, to help keep your reactors from exploding for a millisecond more, the mod adds a small yellow cooling prong, a medium white cooling prong, and a giant black cooling prong.

kethane

Lets you kill space-muslims to aquire fuel for your rockets on other planets and moons via drilling. Don't even bother trying since the rockets You build re-create the Challenger explosion.

Creepypasta

Jebediah's Vision - Kerbal Space Program Pasta

Hey guys. I just wanted to share with you the story of something very strange that happened to me in Kerbal Space Program, in the hopes that someone out there saw what I saw. It all started at around 3:00 AM EST (I'm kind of a night owl), several hours after the recent 0.16 update was released.

I decided to move the game I had been playing, 0.15.2, to an archive folder. The plan was to start new from a fresh install, since I'd heard on the forums that the update would break persistent and craft files anyway. I loaded up the site and began the download. When it was finished, I was extremely excited to play. I extracted directly to downloads and launched it from the application in the main folder.

I was impressed from the getgo. The background was animated now, showing a cute kerbonaut standing in front of a little Muncastle he'd built at his feet. When I updated my settings back to my usual, there was another of some kerbals floating in orbit around Kerbin. Upon starting the game, I spent only a brief time looking at all of the new parts - I wanted to walk on the Mun! This was something every player dreamed of, and everyone wanted to be among the first.An example of what the one-man pod portrait looks like when the pilot is scared. Added by NormanbatesAlthough my plan had always been to send the whole crew - Bill, Jeb, and Bob - I was in a hurry, and in order to save time, I decided to use my old design. Before, all three of the intrepid trio could go, but unfortunately the design could now only accommodate the new one-man pod. Jebediah would be making the trip alone.

Launch went perfectly, and soon I was set for a Mun encounter. The closer I got, the more excited I became. I know it sounds silly to get so excited about a computer game, but when it comes to KSP, this is how a lot of players are. Every step forward feels like a major achievement. At 50 kilometers from the surface, I throttled up and began to slow my descent. I was going a bit faster than was safe, and that was when I noticed something strange. The portrait that displays your kerbonaut's face is creepy for that pod. It shows your kerbal in a dull orange light, with his head at a slight angle. And stranger still: Jebediah, the one that never stops grinning, was terrified.

I thought this was pretty weird, but there was no time to pay attention to that. I had to land this craft. 30 kilometers...25...20...15...10. I came to a perfect landing at 0.6 meters per second - my best yet. This was it. I extended the ladder, and Jebediah stepped out of the command pod. I walked him down the ladder, released, and - YES! I had done it. Kerbal-kind had conquered the Mun. There was only one more thing I wanted to do before heading home. I had noticed in the control settings that the EVA suit had lights, so I warped forward to night-time to test it out.

I never got the chance. At my location, I should have had a nice view of Kerbin at night. Instead, it was nowhere to be found. For that matter, where were the stars? This didn't seem right at all. I put Jeb back in the command pod and set the time forward. Not only did Kerbin never rise - neither did the sun. Then I checked the map view. I had no idea what to think. Rather than describe it to you, I've attached the picture. I print-screened it (by now it's instinctive, though I know of the F1 command). The screenshot of the map view is attached below.

The map view from the time I arrived on the Mun onwards. Added by NormanbatesAnd so, I did the only thing I could think of - I took off. I ascended to about 5 kilometers from the surface, turned myself to a 90 degree heading, and put myself on escape trajectory from the Mun. I just kept going and going until the Mun was no longer in sight. The map view was now just an empty black screen and a clear flight list. Eventually, I could see indicators of two ships in the distance, but I never got close enough to see the ships themelves.

The names of the ships - Columbia, and Soyuz 11.

I had had enough, and attempted to end the flight. When that didn't work, I simply used Ctrl+Alt+Del. I knew of Columbia, but I had to Google Soyuz 11 to confirm what I had already guessed - like Columbia, Soyuz 11 was a spacecraft that was destroyed on re-entry, killing its crew.

I restarted the game, and attempted to try for an orbit using the new big 3-man pod. This time it actually went off without a hitch, and the spacecraft made it into orbit. I let it go a few times, but when I turned to start my de-orbit burn, Jeb looked scared again. I was a bit unsettled, but started anyway.

Once I was in atmosphere, I was ready to separate the crew pod from the rest of the ship. I attempted to release, but the decoupler failed, and it remained attached. The command pod was meant to separate from the ship and drift down with a parachute, but if it was still attached, it would come down much too fast for a safe landing. Hoping the force of the drag would break the pod off, as it sometimes does, I deployed the chute. The chute was pulled clean off by the air resistance. When the ship hit the ground, and Bill and Bob died, Jeb's terrified portrait remained just a second longer than it should have.

I checked the forums a few days later to see if others had experienced it. Not only did I find nothing, but I was informed of something that still creeps me out. With everyone trying to patch their game, the servers went down hard the day of the update. I couldn't have downloaded it directly from the site, and even at the time of this writing, no direct 0.16 download is available.

Sauce

Gallery

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See also

• Science
• Space

External links

Jebediah Kerman
Kerbal Space Program ^{(See removed posts: 1, 2)}

• Kerbal Space Program wiki

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Featured article February 20th & 21st, 2014
Preceded by Fansy the Famous Bard	Kerbal Space Program	Succeeded by Silverhaze06