Kerbal Space Program is a fun, sometimes highly unrealistic simulator game that gives you a decent view of what might go on during a real frontier-exploring endeavour. Thanks to indie (independent) developer Squad, players can experience the successes, failures, and many, many attempts that real-life groups like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States may have to deal with. Due to recent updates, players may utilize high-tech antennae to broadcast data collected from the exterior of Kerbin, the Kerbal homeworld, allowing for the development of new technologies. KSP is currently under development and will continue to be updated every few months.

NEW: The game has been officially released, cheers to our friends at Squad! With these recent accomplishments, and since the last update of this guide, a plethora of new parts and features have been added.

Edit: Someone posted a comment saying thanks on here, which drew my attention to this and I looked back through the guide. I found some errors, which have been fixed, and realized that this guide is very old. December of 2013. Yes, that old. Look at this: "Due to recent updates, players may utilize high-tech antennae to broadcast data collected from the exterior of Kerbin, the Kerbal homeworld, allowing for the development of new technologies." Remember that, eh?

Anyway, below I've added a new recommended mod section (mostly parts and plugins) and updated the info to be current.

"Due to recent updates, players may utilize high-tech antennae to broadcast data collected from the exterior of Kerbin, the Kerbal homeworld, allowing for the development of new technologies."

That's from December 3rd, 2013. Nearly two years ago, and we had just gotten antennae.

A lot has changed, that's for sure. Here's an general idea of some of the things Squad has added or redone.

Additions:

• New massive Kerbodyne parts
  
• Adapters to connect the many sizes of parts
  
• new official mods (Asteroid Day for example)
  
• Lots of new science additions
  
• Larger landing gear
  
• More spaceplane parts

That is simply a short list of all of the new features that have been added somewhat recently, or at least since 12/3/13.

Changes:
One of the biggest changes is Squad's aerodynamic overhaul. Everything as become more realistic, and advanced users can press F12 to see the "Aerodynamic Forces Display." To me, this really just looks like a bunch of colorful cones super-imposed onto your wings in flight. Nonetheless, it looks pretty cool.

I can't think of many new additions/changes, but they'll come to me.

Okay, so today I finished up finals at school, and I remember looking at this page earlier in the week, and now I figure I should probably edit this. The last update for KSP wasn't too long ago, and it had a pretty big focus on spaceplanes. I personally always thought that the asthetics of each part didn't really fit with each other part. The jet fuel tanks were really plane (get it?), with a weird design that didn't fit from part to part and an annoying, glaringly repetitive orange warning sign on each piece you placed. Squad thinks a lot like me, apparently, because 95% of the spaceplane parts look more cohesive and just generaly visually pleasing after this past update.

The basic inline jet fuel tank is so great now, that it can possibly melt dank memes. It has a new minimalistic design with a pattern that actually looks good from part to part. The orange warning sign has been replaced with a gray label saying "Caution! Flammable Liquid."

The devs have also created a new size of parts, titled "Mark 0." It's the smallest size available, and I see potential for small drones and possible weaponry concepts like little detachable missiles.

Another major change that Squad made is to the engines. Every atmospheric engine (minus the R.A.P.I.E.R SSTO engine) has had a complete makeover. They look more like real jet engines, and animations have been updated. The devs created a new engine, the "Goliath" that's positively massive. The afterburning "Panther" engine has a really neat animation as you accelerate.

11/27/16: Look down here! Wanted to add a bit to this guide since I just remembered it was here!
The last KSP update was mostly about communication. You can now apparently create giant communication networks that allow for greatly improved data transmission from afar, meaning you lose less science points in the Career and Science modes as distance increases. I haven't tried it myself, and if I remember I'll try it and put up a new section with some photos and a short tutorial. If you keep up with this guide, thanks! I know I never update it, but it doesn't mean I've not put lots of work in. I appreciate feedback, as always.

There are a number of issues that can interfere with your plans as a fledgling space program. You may enjoy strapping on thousands of pounds of thrust to the bottom of a small rocket, but have difficulty making it work the way you want it to. There is a simple solution for most issues:

Mechanical Jebediah (aka MechJeb)

This is a simple addon, found on the community addon site, the Kerbal Spaceport[www.kerbalspaceport.com]. This is my personal solution to most problems, as the addon adds a handy part that acts as an in-depth SAS system. In other words, this addon gives you an auto-pilot system, and is highly user-friendly.

Edit: KSP's main mod database has moved! The new location is at curse[www.curse.com]! Take note that Curse does not have everything, so use this in tandem with sites like kerbalstuff!

Here are some issues I've had in the past:

Rendezvous

Orbiting

Reaching other planets/muns

Avoiding spectacular failures

Please note!
MechJeb is great for having success and all, but it makes everything almost automated. It is not recommended for players who want to control the game.

The biggest disadvantage in KSP is the fact that any kind of large satellite or space station must be assembled in space. I know from my own personal experiences that this is extremely hard to do. Here I have compiled a short process for a succesful rendezvous.

1.) Using an arm or separate module that you are attaching to form a space station, go to the orbit map and set the main part of the station as your target. This will help you keep track of it as you begin your approach. A circular pink marker should appear on your navball. This shows you the direction your target is in, and the other side is the opposite direction, marked with a Y-shaped pink icon.

By "arm" I mean the part of the station that you'll attach to the base or core. Common arms include the Mobile Processing Lab, Hitchhiker Storage containers, and sometimes extra fuel if you like to dock spaceplanes for refueling.

2.) The easiest way I have found to line up with a target is to slow your speed, allowing the object to catch up to you. On top of the navball, in the place where it says "Orbit" and has an indication of your speed, it should now read "Target" and have a much smaller number. This number shows the difference in speed of your vessel and the target. Get this as low as possible as your ships line up.

3.) When they do line up, take note of which rocket is farther out on it's orbit. If you can, use the orbit map to line up the orbits a few meters apart. The farthest-out rocket was much easier to maneuver for me. I found the simplest way to align rockets was simply to have one accelerate towards the other. This moved them closer together and didn't make them lose speed very much. Try to have a set of weaker engines on your craft to perform those precise maneuvers where accuracy is key. If you don't have any weak engines, you can use the thrust limiter option (right-click on engine and slide the thrust limiter down) to get minimum thrust from a larger engine.

Of course, the next step is docking. I have never successfully docked, but I am hopeful that help from MechJeb will allow me to dock efficiently. From what I have observed, it is good to have some linear RCS ports on the front and back of your craft, as it will make small amounts of acceleration possible when lining up two clamp-o-tron docking ports.

If you have RCS ports like above, right click on a clamp-o-tron docking port and select "Control From Here." The game will treat this as the nose-end of your craft and allow for precise docking using the RCS controls, which may differ for every user.

Note: Watch some videos on Youtube and see if you can find something about docking. A visual representation may help tremendously!

Of course, no rendezvous can be accomplished unless you have the ability to orbit.

Getting a craft up above Kerbin is indeed a fantastic sight. But what isn't fantastic is the tendency for those such ships to plummet to a fiery death back to the planet's surface. Pack some extra parachutes.

Orbiting is the simple process of a celestial body or object being pulled into a rounded path around another body with stronger gravity. This is a basic concept used all over the real world for many satellites, such as the ones used for GPS (SatNav in some regions.)

Orbiting around Kerbin is easier than it sounds. As long as you have the fuel capacity, you can create a steady revolution around anything you want, as long as it has the mass to create gravity. If you were to look at the orbit map as you just exited Kerbin's atmosphere, you might find that the line that your ship follows starts at the Kerbal Space Center and ends somewhere in the ocean or on another continent. To increase the size of your orbit, accelerate in the direction your craft is traveling, indicated by a circle with three lines branching off of it on the navball. If you use the Orbit Map, you can get details on your orbit height, where the closest/farthest point of your orbit is, and how long it is until you arrive at those points. The map will show you how your revolution expands as you accelerate. The atmosphere of Kerbin reaches around 20-30 kilometers above the surface, so I recommend getting well above that.

One of the newer features in KSP is the new abilities that SAS modules have. They can now lock your craft's orientation to specific points, and provide more than stability. Want to get the maximum from a prograde burn? Lock the orientation to face prograde and hit the ignition! The options include prograde, retrograde, target, anti-target, and many more different forms of "holds."

The first alien celestial body you should shoot for is the Mun. The weaker gravity means a softer landing, while the lack of an atmosphere will delight you Kerbonauts enough that they may take their helmets off. I don't know why.

Reaching other celestial bodies is a sometimes difficult process. For the Mun, wait until your orbit will extend about 45 degrees in front of the mun (to the left side.) As you accelerate, your orbit will expand on the opposite side of the planet you're revolving around. As the orbit reaches the mun's path, the orbit line will change, both in shape and color. This indicates that you are in line with the moon and can stop accelerating. When you reach the moon, you will be affected by its gravity. When your ship passes over the Periapsis mark on the map, start slowing down. The weak gravity of the mun cannot pull you into orbit if you are going too fast. Once you slow down enough, you will have reached orbit of a different object in space! Congratulations!

This is the same sort of operation required to reach more distant planets. Kerbin's second moon, Minmus, is, personally, one of the hardest places to reach. It has a somewhat tilted orbit, making it harder to reach with a uniform equatorial or polar orbit. To synchronize your tilt with Minmus, the recommendation is to accelerate "down" or "up" if you have an equatorial orbit, or to the "side" if you are polar. There are no set directions in space, so this is dependent on the way you orbit Kerbin.

Here's an example:

This station is in orbit around Kerbin equatorially. It will have to accelerate towards the poles to tilt the orbit to line up with the orbit of Minmus. Experiment by accelerating and watching the orbit change on your galaxy map to see which direction to accelerate to match Minmus' orbit.

Keep in mind that Minmus' gravity is REDICULOUSLY weak. If you have a landing stage on your craft, you only need a small fraction of the thrust of your engines to slow down.

The next step is the rest of the solar system. It's simply a smaller version of our own, with very similar planets. Duna, for example, is the KSP equivalent of Mars. The Pluto of the Kerbol (like our sun, Sol) system is not an unimaginable 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away from Kerbin at it's farthest point. It would also not take 9 years to get there (congrats to NASA's New Horizons for some fantastic scientific accomplishments). To get there, or anywhere along the way, I recommend accelerating until you reach escape velocity and make a nice orbit around the sun. This allows you to control your orbit much more easily and lets you see the best place to go from there.

While KSP is all about space, you don't necessarily have to go into space.The developers have provided players with the means to build and fly planes. They might be called "spaceplanes," but I feel that a vast majority of these planes are not even designed to go into space in the first place.


...is that it's hard to even get heavier-than-air craft off of the ground. What's the secret, you ask?

The main component in getting a plane off the ground is a decent lift-to-thrust-to-mass/weight ratio. 1:1:1 would be ideal, but that's not exactly easy to do. Did you think that tacking wings onto a cylinder with an engine was enough to make a plane? At some point we all did, but it's much more detailed than that.

Of course, the first step in making a plane is to actually build the body. Here's a demo version I've built for you, with step-by-step screenshots for viewing pleasure.

If you look in the bottom left corner of your screen, you will see some buttons, with icons featuring a wing, a weight, and a rocket engine. There are three of them, stacked on top of each other. Clicking on these three produces these colored spheres, shown in the screenie. Yellow is the center of mass, blue is the center of lift, and purple is the center and direction of thrust.

Before I get into the details, let's talk some deep, real-world ♥♥♥♥: the forces of flight. According to NASA, the forces of flight are lift, thrust, drag, and gravity. These are apparent in KSP, too. If you want to skip the "deep ♥♥♥♥," simply scroll until you see the next heading.

Liftis the upward motion of a craft created by wings, which in turn have an effect on air. The shape of a wing makes air move faster on the bottom than the top. Faster air means more force (like wind), which, based on your craft's speed, can influence the natural ability of the craft to lift off the ground.

Thrust is fairly basic. It's created by things like turbines or propeller engines. It's simply the pulling or pushing effect created by the rotation of the blades as they push or pull air.

Drag is actually apparent in anything that moves. Cars, for example, must limit drag to maintain fuel efficiency. If you have a box with all necessary parts for flight, it will not fly well, if at all. This is because of drag. It's caused by the way that air flows. When air hits a vertical, flat surface, it has difficulty just going around, so it basically just smacks into it. If this flat surface is moving, it is slowed down. Tremendously. By making things more aerodynamic, this effect can be countered. Air will flow around and over rounded or pointed objects; thus, planes are somewhat pointy.

Gravity. What a cruel mistress. The bane of space programs the world over. Unless you have thousands of kiloNewtons of thrust, as is possible in KSP. Gravity is self-explanatory, and even a complete idiot should be able to understand it without me explaining it here.


You need to worry about lift, thrust, and mass. Gravity sort of factors in here, because multiply mass by gravity and you get weight. Anyway, back to designing the plane.

You see, when I add my engines, the purple sphere moves with it. The arrow shows the direction of thrust.

When I add my ailerons, the lift sphere shifts to it. It's facing to the side, but that'll get fixed in a moment.

And yes, adding the actual wings did adjust the lift forward.

Now, let's go ahead and fly. I recommend using some ASAS modules to keep the plane steady. It prevents a lot of catastrophe and also preserves your fingers for maneuvering later.

Here's the flight:
Usually, I like to turn the brakes on and let the engines warm up, but that's a personal preference.


This happens whenever you go for a screenshot. F12 triggers the Aero overlay. Don't worry about it.




Take another look at this, paying particular attention to the spheres. I would definitely try to align the mass and lift as closely as possible, but try to keep your lift just behind the CoM!

If you want a visual representation from the one-and-only Scott Manley, here you go!


Written August 8th, 2015.

The best way to avoid losing your Kerbonauts is to come prepared. Pack auxiliary fuel tanks and parachutes for the rare atmosphere. Attach landing legs to your vessel, and try to avoid landing on the Sun or any gas planets, such as the far-off Jool, mainly because you can't. Try to conserve fuel and make precise maneuvers.

Modding is very simple. I recommend finding your KSP folder first. If you use Steam, it is most likely found at C: > Program Files (x86) > Steam > steamapps > common > Kerbal Space Program.


It looks like that. Mine has some mods, so your folder may differ.

Now, many mods will have a ReadMe file included. READ IT FIRST. I cannot stress this enough. If you simply follow my instructions, you may do something wrong. The developer of the mod definitely knows where his/her mod should go.

I do not know where you might find KSP if you bought it via the Squad website.

Most of the time, you can simply extract your mod's folder to the GameData folder located within your KSP folder.

Here's the list of mods that I use:

• Asteroid Day
  
• BAE
  
• BDArmory
  
• Firespitter
  
• KAS
  
• KAX
  
• KerbalEngineerRedux
  
• KIS
  
• MagicSmokeIndustries Infernal Robotics
  
• OPT
  
• SpaceY Lifters
  
• Module Manager

Those are mostly abbreviations (duh), google/bing them for more info.

Thanks for reading my guide. I know it may be a lot, but I've packed in some valuable information. This info, however, is not as valuable as the suggestions and comments I'd love for you to leave.

Thanks, The Doctor
Or Aidmo. I also go by Aidmo.

Edit: This guide was modified on November 27th, 2016, at 2:30 AM eastern time.

So, it's been a few years since I really looked into the science behind KSP. I'm currently a junior in high school, in a dual credit physics class. After less than a semester of the course, I find myself understanding more information regarding rocket science. I know, I know, everyone's always talking about rocket science being this ridiculous, impossible occupation. However, these things are starting to make sense.

Okay, quick physics lesson: Vectors. Vectors are things that have both magnitude and direction. For example, 100 miles per hour, North, would be a vector. Now think of this in terms of combining the vectors of an orbit. At a single point in time, you have the force of gravity pulling you towards the planet, but the thrust of the engine is continually accelerating you parallel to the surface of the planet. So from a side-on view, it sort of looks like an upside-down "V," with each part representing the direction of your forces. To make it easy, we can assume they're of the same magnitude, which pretty much means we can say the final direction is right in the middle of the two (someone check me on that, I'm not 100% on vectors, cross-products, and dot-products, since I haven't done straight-up vectors in a couple of months). Magnitude isn't really a problem as long as you have a steady orbit. Now, see, I'm not a computer that can do billions of calculations per second, so I can't exactly demonstrate more than an exact instance in time at once. KSP will put it all together for you. If you really have no idea what I just said, take a physics (or even engineering) class or look it up on Google or Bing, or one of those other search engines.