Kerbal space program far3/19/2023 My flight path will quickly align with my nose, and then airflow will hold my nose there. Instead, I typically do a vertical launch until I clear the pad, followed almost immediately by pitching down to about 70º when I’m at about 300 to 400 m/s - enough speed to get some airflow, but not enough to make it unsafe or hard to turn. Turning that suddenly is guaranteed to cause problems - there should only be a few degrees difference between your nose (navball centre) and your direction of travel (prograde marker) at all times within the atmosphere. To launch rockets in FAR, you should completely ignore the standard Kerbal advice (ascend to 10km and then pitch down to 45º). You want your ship to be weighted like a dart, not like a sledgehammer - if your tail is too heavy and has minimal drag, it’ll try to flip around and pull you along instead. The main thing you need to know to design rockets in FAR is that you want the tail of your rocket to have more drag than the nose (so put tailfins on it), and you want the centre of mass as high (nosewards) as possible. For example, you’ll want to learn what “max Q” is, and you’ll feel relieved every time you pass it uneventfully (as in a real launch). Pre-flight graph-based simulations give you an idea whether your plane is stable or not, and in-flight readouts let you fine-tune your flight parameters. To counter this, FAR also offers diagnostic tools that help you understand what’s going on with your ship, both during construction and in flight. An ill-designed ship or plane can be completely impossible to control, flipping until it quickly breaks up. Your ship’s shape actually matters, and non-aerodynamic bits will cause trouble very quickly, e.g. It’s a complete remodelling of planetary atmospheres and flying within them. A tall, slender rocket is no more aerodynamic than a flat “pancake” ship, and using nosecones to make your ship sleeker actually adds to drag!įerram Aerospace, or “FAR”, fixes all this. The stock Kerbal aerodynamic model is exceedingly primitive - parts all contribute a certain amount of atmospheric drag, regardless of position or orientation. Don’t start delving into these until you’re pretty comfortable with flight and orbital mechanics, unless you really want a challenge. However, be warned that a lot of realism mods are also going to add difficulty, because in its stock form, Kerbal makes spaceflight a lot easier than it really is. In KSP, there’s another reason to add realism: Education! A lot of us enjoy playing KSP because we get to learn how spaceflight works, and using realism-enhancing mods (or even just researching what they do) can take that to the next level. And at the very least, it lets players better reason about how things will work. It also creates tricky challenges, often via injecting a bit of chaos and excitement. Reality is complex and interesting, and adding realism usually creates some equally interesting interactions that the game designers didn’t foresee, rewarding player creativity. Realism Modsįor most games, I’m of the opinion that adding realism is generally a good thing so long as it doesn’t actively harm gameplay. In the mod descriptions below, I’ll be giving out links to the mods so you can get more information - but if that mod is available in CKAN, you should probably install it there instead. Apply those changes, then launch KSP, either via CKAN or via your normal method. Check off the mods you want, then click “Go to changes” to see what needs doing. First, click “Refresh” to update the list of mods. Using the CKAN graphical interface is pretty easy. It’s the new hot thing in Kerbal modding, and it’s well worth using - unzipping and installing mods gets to be a major pain once you have a dozen or more. It also tracks the versions you have installed and offers to upgrade them when new versions are released. To manage your mods, I highly recommend you grab CKAN, a mod manager that automatically downloads and installs mods (and their dependencies) for you. For those wanting more content, or maybe more realism and challenge, there are countless mods available out there to improve and customise your KSP experience. But also like Minecraft, the vibrant modding community is where it really starts to shine. Like Minecraft, KSP is a full-fledged game, and newcomers would be well advised to play it “vanilla” or “stock” (unmodded) until they’ve got the hang of it. These aren’t the mods I suggest you start with, but they’re pretty fundamental ones, and I’ll be referencing them in other mod descriptions, so it’s important to know what they are. I’ve broken this up into multiple posts, starting with some core mods that dramatically alter the game’s difficulty and realism. Today, I’ll be discussing how to augment the game and take it to new heights. Yesterday, I introduced Kerbal Space Program and gave some tips and concepts to help get started with it.
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