Category: Kerbal Space Program

Ever have one of those really frustrating days? The kind where you manage to accomplish something really cool while practicing but when you do it for real the result isn’t nearly as good as the practice run that nobody saw? Well that’s what happened to me in this video.

I had just completed a practice run in which I was not recording. It went spectacularly great. So I set up Fraps and attempted to repeat what I had done while not recording. I didn’t even get close.

The result is that now I’m going to record even when doing practice runs just in case they turn out great. If they end in failure I can always delete the recording but if it turns out great I’ll have it for the next video and people won’t have to think “he’s just saying that to look good.” or the like.

In this episode I actually came close to achieving one of the earliest goals in any space program, getting into orbit.

Having managed that much, I really expected to get it done soon after this and then proceed to loftier goals such as a landing on Mun, the larger of Kerbin’s two moons. (even though Minmus isn’t in the version I was running when this was made, I still knew it was there.)

In this second episode I advance the “Crap” series of rockets that I started in the first episode and amazingly, it actually flies.

Little did I realize at the time that I was starting to let myself get just a bit overconfident. Of course, that’s another story to be told a bit later.

Attentive readers may have noticed that I haven’t been posting on this blog very much lately. The reason for this is that frankly, I’ve been somewhat stumped for content. True, I started the theme where I was going to post about assorted forms of excrement I see on Facebook but no sooner did I start that than I found myself too busy to pay enough attention to Facebook to find the really good items to post about and do the bits of research on them needed to make the post good.

Now however I’ve got something that will be a lot easier to post about. Mined you the Facebook Excrement series of posts will continue as I have time, meanwhile there’s something really cool that I’ve found recently.

A relatively new game by an indie game developer known as Squad called “Kerbal Space Program”. In the last few months I had heard about it a few times and the very few screenshots I had seen left me with the impression that it was just another silly cartoon type of game best left to kids.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

A few weeks ago I was looking for something to watch on an unusually not busy evening and because several people whose opinions I considered worth checking out had recommended that I check it out, I found several Let’s Play videos featuring Kerbal Space Program.

I was hooked after watching the first one. Very soon after that I got the demo version (0.13.3) and after playing around with it some and realizing how much time I was spending on it, I decided to start my own Kerbal Space Program Let’s Play.

Those videos will be posted here. This is the first one.

Note: I had some problems with sound at first but those have been solved by episode 11.

You can get Kerbal Space Program here. It is currently in Alpha development which means that you can buy it for only $18 USD. This price will be going up as the program updates until it reaches full price when the full release version finally comes out. This means that the best time to get it is now. That way you get the game at a discount, all updates are free, and when the full version is release you’ll have it way ahead of everybody else.