#kerbal space program modding

[thefallencomet]

Spoilers for a soon to be released Planet Mod for Kerbal Space Program, Planet Jam 2

I also can’t censor on mobile but it’s my art on my art blog sooooo I think that’s fine!

The last two months of development have been incredibly fun and rewarding, and I’m glad to have contributed so heavily to this project, I’ve learned a lot of new techniques from my work on this jam both in time management and digital art.

I hope those of you who are interested in this mod, which represents two months of work by 15 people, give it the chance it deserves.

[apollo9235]

My good friend @translunaryanimus told me that EVENTUALLY^TM Sacred Estuaries would get into some sci-fi stories. Being the sci-fi nerd that I am, and also since he's helping me with some of the bio and culture aspects of my setting, I thought it was only right to help him with some of the technology aspects of his setting!

Sacred Estuaries lore stuff: The homeplanet of the Chenesht has thicker atmosphere than that of earth, this makes human-style 'tall stick with flamey bit at the bottom' impractical. This is because the rocket has to fight against all the air at sea-level, and also because optimizing a rocket nozzle for such pressures becomes difficult. But why fight against the atmosphere when you can use it to your advantage?

Chenesht launch vehicles are always some variety of air-launcher, they use jet engines or other varieties of air-breathing engines, as well as aerodynamic lift, for as much of the ascent as they can get away with. In the case of the HALC-90 'Skyjelly', the air-breathing engines are able to get it going fast enough that it's apoapsis is out of the atmosphere, and the craft is very nearly in orbit.

After the 'Skyjelly' gets it's payload going nice and fast it's work is done and it can return to the launch-site. The launch site is located right on the planet's equator to take advantage of the planet's spin for some free speed. This site also has an ocean to it's east so any failed launches don't impact populated areas. Kerbal Space Program stuff Air-launchers are really fun to fly, I recommend everyone make at least one, bonus points if you can recover the launcher and payload without reloads like I did here. I maybe should've gone with Whiplash engines rather than RAPIERs for the first stage, but RAPIERs seem to have a stronger positive-feedback-loop with speed so I went with them.

Since I used RAPIERs I could probably also get the 'Skyjelly' into a circular orbit, but I removed all the oxidizer from the vehicle so no. Also I don't think the CoT and CoM line up for the RAPIERs. I also absolutely don't need those solid fuel 'sustainer rockets', but by the point in testing where I realized that, I already used them to attach the stabilizer fins, and also just got aesthetically attached so I kept them.

[whirligig-girl]

Hey you made that one KSP mod with the egg planet! Also what do you think about Neptune not being aqua blue?

Mesbin in Whirligig World is more of a hamburger bun than an egg--the planet is oblate rather than prolate--it's circular around the entire equator and the pole-to-pole distance is smaller than the equatorial diameter.

anyway

I already knew about Neptune! I guess I knew it wasn't common knowledge exactly but I thought it was well known in the space nerd fandom. Maybe only in the tiny little hyperfocused circles I'm in. The reprocessed images are cool, but I've seen Uranus & Neptune in a 24" telescope and they're exactly the color shown in the new oxford study.

But this is why I already knew:

Hubble Space Telescope has been imaging Uranus & Neptune in visible light for decades and yeah, when processed similarly, they're about the same color. The difference is somewhat exaggerated in the first hubble images, but not in the top row on the second.

Notice that there is a difference, it's just subtle. The primary reason being the white polar cap of Uranus, which is really that pale blue-cyan color. It's a photochemical haze that is produced only on parts of Uranus that are in permanent sunlight--it is destroyed in the night side and the regions of day/night cycle. Under the haze layer it looks almost exactly like Neptune. When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus, the pole pointed at the Sun, so almost the entire sunlit hemisphere of Uranus was in permanent light.

In the second set of images, from Hubble, we see Uranus when it has tilted its pole a little away from the Sun. There's still a polar permanent day, but now there's a larger temperate band with a day/night cycle, and so there's no haze there, only cloud banding and methane absorption. Beneath that haze, Uranus & Neptune would be extremely similar. On the night side of Uranus in the voyager 2 days, had voyager an incredibly bright flashlight, it would likely have seen something more like Neptune on Uranus' back end.

Artistically I still like to exaggerate the color differences between ice giants--real and fictional--so in Whirligig World, Mandrake (a saturn-mass ice giant) is a noticeably darker, richer blue than Rutherford (a super-earth-mass ice giant), despite getting the same instellation from Gememma and Kaywell.

[lost-lycaon]

Kerbal Space Program Fans!

My son programmed a new mod that adds more moons to the outer solar system. More exploration! More science!

[maeamian]

Been trying to read Jules Verne's Journey to the Moon because it was one of my grandfather's favorite books, but it's also just fuckin chalk full of technical details about the orbit of the moon that I have already memorized for class ages ago and I am wondering if it is maybe the compilation of technical details that he loved more than the story.

[heyimastopsign]

lol why do people still play Skyrim that game is so old

anyway *boots up my KSP save with over 300 mods*

[untilthevoidstaresback]

I have been doing a career mode let's play of Kerbal Space Program and if that's something you're into I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I'm 5 episodes in to this series and post frequently as I'm usually a few episodes ahead in gameplay). I do post commentary voice over so you get to here the orbital mechanics ramblings and mispronounced space terms from my mostly okay voice. 👍

[ping1n]

hey. i need that.

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM IS ON SALE FOR 71-75% OFF TIL JULY 11TH 2024!!!!

ksp is a space & physics simulator sandbox game where you can build, launch, and fly (or crash) your own rocket in a fictional solar system that's similar to our own, with many unique planets and moons to explore. you can also build a plane if that's your thing, or a rover, or all three in one!!

the game has a big community around it that's still active despite the last major update being issued years ago!! the modding community is large and thriving, and there's a community mod installer that's maintained if you're having trouble installing stuff.

kerbal is easily one of my top three favorite games of all time, it has immense replay value and creativity is practically limitless. if you like sandbox games, simulators, and a game loop of "fuck around, find out, apply what you found out, and fuck around again" you will hopefully love this game

here are some screenshots of what you can do in kerbal space program!!

(yes i built all of these!! some of these have some graphics mods in them

land on the moon (except it's spelled "mun" now) and plant a flag

send a rover to mars

send a BIGGER rover (with cat ears) to an icy moon of jool, the local green gas giant!

build cool space stations

launch an accurate replica of the saturn v that brought humans to the moon!

...and then blow it up on the launchpad

...and then strap some fuckin WINGS to it and fly it like a plane because that's how we roll at the kerbal space center

deploy relays of satellites in orbit and send probes to the far reaches of the solar system

build, fly, and safely(?) land spaceplanes and shuttles

make a penis shaped rocket

stick rockets on the side of a plane and then stick that on top of a bigger rocket to launch it into space

rendezvous with an asteroid and capture it

strap a guy to a lawn chair with a thruster and some fuel, and send him off to deep space (don't worry he's having fun)

whatever the fuck this thing is

anyways please get kerbal space program i need to introduce people to this wonderful wonderful game it's scientific it's engineering it's goofy it's fun it's literally a ROCKET SANDBOX what more can you ask for?? 75% off is a fucking steal!! what are you waiting for!!

[xxredwoodxx]

I'm fucking worthlessly terrible at this (<- intentionally made the Literal Rocket Science Game much harder)

[satoshi-mochida]

Some indie game recommendations from ones I’ve played or know enough about them to suggest them to others(mostly in no particular order), Part 9

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Sea of Stars

En Garde!

Pony Island

Ben and Ed

Bokura

Layers of Fear series

before the green moon

Corn Kidz 64

Turbo Dismount

BABBDI

Itorah

The Vagrant/Sword of the Vagrant

Subway Midnight

Let's Find Larry

Hylics series

Eve of Souls: Static Pod

Perfect Gold

One Finger Death Punch series

Speedrunners

Happy Wheels

Home Safety Hotline

Neverending Nightmares

Black Snow(Half-Life 2 mod)

We Were Here series

Black Heaven

Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia

Kerbal Space Program series

Cavern of Dreams

Pseudoregalia

Alisa

[thefallencomet]

A Very Large Planet Mod has Dropped for KSP:

Planet Jam 2: The Ilio-Pyri System

The work of many talented artists over the course of two months and then some has finally paid off and we are now ready for folks to play with the system we’ve crafted! Weighing in at a whopping 101 handcrafted celestial bodies, meaning stars, planets, moons and asteroids, this is truly a mod for the ages.

Not to mention the gameplay-altering homeworld of the pack: Armstrong, the massive hypobaric planet with an atmosphere thick enough to cause problems but too thin to slow you down. This creates a rewarding yet challenging new environment to launch from, and return to!

More information here:

[djskiskyskoski]

after a few hours of coding a many hours of rendering I got something cool in kerbal space program.

ksp has an rpc mod (krpc) which lets you connect to a craft to build your own autopilot and other things. I found a way to give unique id’s to engines, letting me build an array and display images.

First bad apple visualization i’ve made. Suprised I haven’t made one earlier. There’s a good change I make a new one again soon if I can figure out another  unique visualizer.

[whirligig-girl]

No one said anything about how BORING being a giant mass of mysterious goo in the underbelly of a half-failed Kerbal colony would be.

Kerbals are such fascinating and intriguing creatures, always finding something to bolt together haphazardly, only to reveal at the last minute that they were explosive bolts, or that they had used fireworks as structural beams (accidentally on purpose, no doubt!). That's why you wanted to go on that exploration ship full of them. Well, them and the other colorful little aliens they had invited along.

But Kerbals have a problem with safety culture, and no matter how competently engineered their component design is, they always seem to muck something up, eventually, and so at the tail end of the five year exploration mission, of course they ended up crashed on a barely habitable hell world.

They call it Armstrong. A reference to an early aeronautical explorer who discovered that below a certain atmospheric pressure, Kerbal blood at body temperature actually boils. It just so happens that your body also boils at that point. And you'll just never believe what the atmospheric pressure of Armstrong is.

(These days, the astronomers make reports of other planets in the system with thicker atmospheres, maybe even ones that could natively allow for respiration, and you wish you had a head to slam into a wall.)

All the other Kerbaloid aliens had found their niches within the society that eventually cropped up, but you were just. Lonely. You had gotten big and strong. You had decided to be your own Great Goo Mass. You would surpass even the goo world you originated on. You would become the Greater Goo Mass.

But you realized, after a millenia, that just growing bigger wasn't enough. The diversity of thought and opinion that flowed throughout you when you were in the Great Goo Mass was astounding, completing, magnificent, and you were just a stagnant puddle by comparison.

The Kerbals (and Parbles and Klingbals and Kerbolians and Marbals and Eurydites and Mesbinites and--) of Armstrong would come to you for advice and wisdom and truth. You are effortlessly intelligent of course and, having been around now for longer than any Kerbal alive on Armstrong, you were able to settle a fair few disputes. You began anticipating when the Kerbals would visit you. You're not proud to say you may have even caused some minor emergencies just so that they would come back asking for help.

(not that Kerbals need help creating minor emergencies. It's just that they usually have a pretty good idea of how to fix things for themselves by iteration)

You couldn't keep going on like this. So you thought, if the Kerbaloid form--a large rounded cylindrical head with a small bean-bag belly and short, stumpy legs--worked for so many aliens... maybe it would work for you.

You reached a tendril of mysterious goo out of the goo mass. When it was, oh, perhaps 0.045t mass, you pinched the tendril off. You stared at it, until, at last, it took the shape you had intended for it.

"Who am I?" You--that is, the other you--said.

"You're a Goobal. Go up to the surface settlements. Learn from them. When you are ready, return to me."

You were impatient. This was to be a trial run. But when the Goobal did not come back, you got worried. That was a part of you. And you just... threw it out into the danger of a Kerbal colony on a hellworld where it could boil alive?

You made three more goobals, and told them that they should find the other one.

They nodded, and you hoped they understood, and then with a pang of guilt you added, "but don't forget to enjoy life!"

The first goobal came back. There were three others with them. Finally, your pieces had returned. But in the dim light of your network, you hadn't parsed at first what you were really looking at. The goobal was with two Kerbals and a Parbal, not in fact the other three goobals.

"See?" You said--the other you--the... It. It said.

"This is where you came from?" said a Kerbal.

"It's the greater goo mass. This all makes sense now," the Parbal said, gravely.

"I didn't mean you harm, I swear it!" the other you said.

"We know sweetheart, we know. And now we can tell everyone!" said the first Kerbal.

"Hey do you think your mom or whatever would let us like. Take a swim?" the second Kerbal said.

"Billbobfred!" scolded the first Kerbal, "don't be rude!"

"Don't let's play pretend at being a boat. We're trying to start a space program! It would be improper!" said the Parbal.

Space... program?

Your mind conjured up images of starships powered by fusion bombs, solid rocket boosters falling apart in a massive explosion, precision-engineered spaceplanes gracefully entering the atmosphere, convoluted grand tour missions bolted together with struts, space stations, planetary colonies, and entire spacecraft/launch vehicles massing only a couple of tonnes taking long winding gravity-assisted paths to get to their destination.

Kerbal engineering at by far and away its most distilled form. Terrible, awesome, excellent, and haphazard.

After all this time, would Armstrong's peoples finally reach towards space again?

Well. They'll need your help to get off the ground.

...

You had been to space many times by now. You had made little automata from your mass, knowing full well they'd never come back and rejoin you. But those automata had already returned the first up close pictures of the moons Buzz and Desmet, of gas giant planet Zhandar, and of some of the Arriprit Belt's minor planets. Your automata needed no electricity, just sunlight--which Armstrong's three suns provided in excess--and were far more compact than electronic computers.

Even when they had invented compact electronic computers that could control space probes, you went to space for science, testing the habitability of far off places. It's harder to kill you than a Kerbal, after all. These sentient but not sapient offshoots of your mass were designed--by you--to help Kerbals best understand the habitability of the worlds they would intend to visit. But of course, these probes were one-way tickets, even though recovering them and allowing you to interpret their experiences would have been vastly more scientifically useful.

And of course you were many, working with the Kerbals as engineers and scientists and administrators, because the United Armstrong Space Probe Administration couldn't get enough of you!

But now you were going to space for the first time in a millennia, and you were going to really feel it. Because this time you would be sapient, and you would get to come back.

Your Kerbaloid form fit perfectly in the space suit, one that had been slightly modified to account for your different respiratory system. You watched on the television as you... as it... as she boarded the spacecraft. It was a great big winged spacecraft, taking advantage of what little air Armstrong had to help slow it down, mounted atop a tall, broad booster rocket with many engines, necessary to fight Armstrong's punishing gravity. It had already flown once, and sure, it had fallen apart a little when it landed, but the engineers assured you that it was well within tolerances for crew survivability.

Not that, at this point, you could have convinced your other self that she should not go, not after all the work she put in. She didn't just look like a Kerbal, at this point.

You watched, fear pulsing through you like tidal waves, as one, then two, then four of the rocket motors failed. But there were so many that the rocket just kept rising. At stage separation, the lower stage disintegrated altogether. The upper stage had many engines as well. The television feed cut out as the rocket went over the horizon, but the telemetry would keep coming at least until after they went over the scorched Pyri-facing side.

It was a harrowing few days. Your other selves would visit you sometimes and tell you the news, the mission milestones, etc. You hadn't been this terrified in a millennia.

One morning, the dim light of the Ilio suns poured into your realm. It was you! Her. Sorry. Her. It was her.

She was grinning madly, and she jumped into you, shouting "cannonball!"

As she dissolved into you and you took in her thoughts and experiences, you realized how different you and her really were. You couldn't imagine wanting to go back into space after a harrowing experience like that.

You were not you anymore.

You glowed, shining in pink and yellow and green tones, and your other self giggled.

You both laughed. You were not alone anymore.

The other goobal pulled herself out of you and went to catch the train back to the space center.

She was one hell of a good trial run.

Eventually you lost yourself. You split yourself thin, becoming so many different kinds of people. But you wouldn't have had it any other way.

Eventually that first goobal didn't come back. It was tragic, but such is the plight of Kerbal Spaceflight.

But you--all of you--will remember her.

(KSP planet mod, Planet Jam 2)

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

Want to get back into Kerbal Space Program. I had a bad habit of running too many small missions while waiting for big missions to finish, which meant nothing ever actually happened and I'd get bored and start a new save before really getting to interesting planetary destinations. I need to come up with some sort of rule to force me to move forward if I do that, or find a contracts mod to do the same. Maybe crewed missions only?

One problem is that I like playing with life support mods, and those tend to interact poorly with high timewarp rates, so just hitting "warp to complete" on KCT was often a death sentence (till I loaded my last quicksave). I'm years behind on the modding and updates scene so I'll need to do some research on what's available these days.

[lithominium]

Re: The "assume something about me" post

If you own Kerbal Space Program, you have spent more time in the atmosphere of Kerbin than in orbit.

If you own Space Engineers, you use the aerodynamics mod religiously.

You had a passing interest in the game Amorous due to the presence of a bird character but were put off by the abundance of M/M pairing simply because you're not interested in that

Significantly more time in space than in atmosphere in ksp. The planes are cool but theres just not a lot i can do with them content wise in comparison to space

I havent used aerodynamics mod, i made one mining ship and went “well damn what am i supposed to do next :/“ and stopped playing it

I saw that bird guy and went “neat, bird rep” but ive Never been a visual novel fan