Kerbal Space Program – Adventures in rocket science
Kerbal Space Program is a charming game about rocket science. No, really. The Kerbals are amusing little green men that are starting a space program and it’s entirely up to you to build their vehicles. Unfortunately for me, this isn’t just a game for building wacky spacecraft and flying around from planet to planet. Kerbal Space Program is actually a pretty detailed simulation of building spacecraft that really need to have aerodynamics, appropriate thrust vs. weight, and fuel / batteries to power the various parts of your craft. It’s also amazingly sandboxy and will let you build to your heart’s content without concern for budget or resource management.
Spaaaaace!
During PAX Prime I sat down to chat with Felipe Falanghe, lead designer and Chad Jenkins, technical artist/developer over at Squad (makers of Kerbal Space Program). Having never really looked at KSP myself prior to PAX, I was more than happy to sit down with someone that knew the ins and outs of the game for an overview. The best news for players like me that aren’t particularly well suited to an open sandbox is that career mode is soon to be coming to the game. The enthusiasm that those guys had for launching hapless idiots from Kerbin out into the reaches of deep space was beyond admirable. Seriously, you need to check out the videos on their site and then click on YouTube links to player made videos as well.
Of course, I’m more hands-on when it comes to gaming, so I had to load Kerbal Space Program for myself. Thankfully there are a series of tutorials that walked me through the process of building and piloting rockets. It’s a tad more complex than slapping some Lego blocks together and running around making whooshing noises while holding a brick ship in one hand. Throttle, stage separation, and steering are all player controlled. It turns out that setting the proper sequence of stages for separating and firing rockets is rather important. I’m not sure what the Kerbal astronauts do besides scream and explode when I forget to attach parachutes, but it’s certainly not pilot the ship for me.
…aaand explosions
It turns out that I am in no way a rocket scientist. However, some of the fun in the game is trying and failing. I failed a lot and in many spectacular fashions. It actually took me a good 10 hours of building rockets before I safely got a crew into orbit. Did not have enough fuel to get them back… soooo I guess there are going to be some Kerbal skeletons orbiting the planet. Building simulated spacecraft that work is hard. NASA is not going to be knocking on my door anytime soon.
People far more talented than myself fill the community site over at Kerbal SpacePort. They’ve put together a veritable cornucopia of imaginative awesomeness there. The site is organized by category so that you can browse for whatever it is that you need to make your space program more complete. I’ll probably end up borrowing most of my vehicles from there in the future.
The bottom line here is that even though I’m terrible at it, I can easily lose large chunks of hours building and blowing stuff up in Kerbal Space Program. I can only imagine that people who pay attention to center of mass, lift, and thrust will enjoy the game even more as they explore the cosmos. Visually, it’s very impressive for still being so heavily under development. That said, this is not a complete game and you should not expect a final, polished product at this point. However, if you really want that open sandbox feel and you also want to be a part of shaping what is already an amazing simulation game, then I suggest going to their website or Steam page and getting in on this one now.
