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You could read this, or you could go play with KSP for an hour.

> ...for an hour.

This is a whopper of a lie. :p

KSP is not "an hour" of time. KSP is "Oh, hey, I'll sit down for a quick Eve mission at 8PM, hrm, that didn't work, ... ugh, more struts ... right, I'll solve that with a few more boosters ... oh bleep how can that be a relay sat blackout NOW? ... how can it possibly be 6AM? Is that the sunrise?"

Wonderful game, absolutely worth spending money on if you have any interest at all in space. But "an hour," you will not spend on it.

Is it a time suck on the level of Factorio? I've been interested in KSP, but can't afford to lose a month of time like with Factorio.

I've found KSP to have a lot less "one more thing" than Factorio. There's not as much opportunity for "I set out to do this, but first, I need this other thing, which I can almost get if I just add one machine over there and then reroute a few conveyors..."

Way more, since a space mission takes many hours it's really hard to suspend. Then it depends how to play. My goal was to visit each planet with a manned spaceship that would land and get back to orbit without drilling for fuel. Some places, but going to Eve required a multi week preparation with multiple giant space stations, engineering an enormous landing ship that almost required a new gpu and cpu and a 3 days full time mission (like, 12 hours per day).

And in 1 hour without ever having played in KSP you probably can lift of the ground and maybe go straight vertically out of the atmosphere.

If you do have a human being teaching you the first hour you can go to orbit definitely. Something as stupid as "you don't go to orbit by going vertically" is very helpful for an inexperienced player.

KSP should include a black-box warning:

Installing this will affect your sleep schedule, your sex life, your relationships, and you will be late for work.

... but you will understand orbital mechanics deeply. Play accordingly.

Unless you play it at work!

Had a summer job at a web-dev shop some years ago already where the boss had a burn-out, but then to get back to a nice work/life balance he played ksp the entire afternoon at work and let all the devs play too :p

If you want a slightly less time-sucky orbital mechanics game, then Space Flight Simulator (on Android and iPhone) is really good. It's limited to 2D, but you will still learn a huge amount about orbital mechanics. And it is possible to build and launch a rocket to the moon and back in about ten minutes, once you know what you're doing.

It's hard to recommend KSP now.

I installed it last weekend out of nostalgia. Turns out you're automatically opted in to analytics that includes identifying information about your specific machine. Opting out is not possible; the game shows you a button which is apparently supposed to open a web page where you can delete the information collected so far but not opt out. (I say "supposedly" because the button didn't do anything for me when I clicked it. It's what I gathered from reading about it on forums.)

So you have to discover that you have to edit two config files to suppress some of the analytics, then download some fan-made Unity Analytics DLLs, that were reverse-engineered from the originals but are no-ops, to suppress the rest.

Fuck that shit.

Yeah. I'm definitely interested in what KSP used to be, but I was late to the party and now these changes make it repugnant. I wonder if you can still get an uninfested copy somewhere and control patch levels manually.

I took a spacecraft mission design class in college. Every time I tried to search for information, the first 6 google results were from KSP before I got to something based on a real spacecraft.

I wonder if pilots encounter this with VATSIM (searching for real charts or ATC resources and first encountering web pages for the simulation versions).

Not for charts because they are on a company iPad that's way easier than Googling. But absolutely if you just quickly Google something on a procedure or little fact, you get the IVAO (I think V for Virtual aviation organisation?) instead of ICAO and they have lots of docs on it. They seem to be pretty accurate but written in a much more accessible way, and unfortunately have some big mistakes sprinkled across them where whoever wrote it doesn't seem to know why things are done the way they are.

Another one that ranks very well is skybrary.aero on things like de-icing procedures, safety regulations etc.. It's created by Eurocontrol so somewhat official and the information seems very accurate, but they are not really an official source you should use for actual flight planning.

Except KSP simplifies orbital dynamics, such that my favourite aspect, Lagrange points, is missing (or merely artificially inserted).

There's always Principia for your n-body needs [0].

[0]: https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia

Seconded. Principia is amazing; first thing I did after installing it was set up a Kerbin-Mun L4 orbit.

Another thing I found, due to the full n-body integration Principia adds, is that I was able to correctly guess which side of Kerbin the Mun was on due to tiny perturbations in my craft's equatorial orbit.

Knowing that this exists might be what convinces me to finally get a reasonably up to date computer.

Then play Orbiter (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/), which is to KSP like building a house is to playing with lego.

Windows only. D':

Is it as hilariously fun as KSP though?

Orbiter is underrated compared to KSP, which is recommended nearly always when the topic of orbital mechanics comes up. Orbiter is not only free(ware) but also a fairly realistic space flight simulator.

Perhaps the realism/implicit difficulty is the reason it's less recommended?

KSP is enough to give you an intuitive understanding without the gritty details of which switches in which order.

That said I did just pop up a video of orbiter to check what I remember... And the oceans are solid.. at least KSP has some model of water landings?

The most important intuition that KSP gives you is that “go high” means “go sideways fast”.

And when you burn, you affect the side of the orbit opposite of your location.

I came here to leave this comment exact comment. KSP just gives you a better... can I call this "feeling"? of all these mechanics than any theoretical explanation ever could.

"intuition"

This is the potential of games: To give people a real feeling/intuition for anything the game is about.

i agree. though a hundred hours would do more good.

either way, the article reaches about the same conclusion in a quite direct way.

relevant xkcd

https://xkcd.com/1356/

yes, you really develop an intuition about it

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