Here So this is just about the most fun I've had playing a computer game in... a long long time. The premise (at the moment) is simple. Design a space craft and launch it. It's quite basic at the moment, apparently there's a planet you can fly to but I can just about hit 30,000 meters at the moment. There are plans to design moon landings and all sorts of exciting things into it. And it's completely free at the moment. Too much awesome, enjoy! Post your height records .
Wow, that looks awesome, on download now. EDIT: Damn, that is pretty hard, managed to get to about 110k metres up but anything more and my rocket is so damned unstable.
Ok, I've managed to break 1m meter and I'm still going at >2000 m/s waiting for gravity to pull me back in! So much fun I'm going to try and get into an orbit now.
Once you get far enough away from the planet gravity drops to 0.2 m/s/s then to 0.05m/s/s. I left one of my rockets going while I went to work and it hit 135Mm while still going at 3550m/s. Getting into orbit is considerably harder than just breaking free of gravity.
Yeah I've got a ship that does well over 4500 m/s and from what I read if you throttle down a bit you can get quite a bit faster. Getting into orbit is difficult. I've not managed it yet, can't gain enough horizontal velocity and keep the ship stable.
Played this for 15 minutes this morning and can't wait to get home and play it again. Think I might sign up to the forums and actively help, the game has a lot of potential!
hehe have fun. If you look on the forum there's a pack of rockets that are much more powerful/burn much longer. I've currently into a 1 hr mission travelling at 26k m/s at an altitude of 60000k. I can barely see earth . Almost out of fuel though, me thinks these boys aren't getting back These rockets give a nice indication of what's going to be possible though. Awesome times are ahead! Oh it seems the Kerbals can withstand a lot of G, current max on this flight is 4791.7G! Ok so I maxed the throttle with the last 1/4 of a tank... 94,117.4G haha.
The only noticible thing is the re-introduction of sound. Oh, it also slows down as you entre the atmosphere of course. It's not even version one yet so you must assume there are a lot of awesome plans andreading through their forums, it seems there is!
It's all about symmetry! If it's not stable then the SAS modules help to stablise the ship. Keep holding F throughout your mission.
1st milestone reached: I can get my command center to a speed where it drifts indefinitely into space it seems. gotta take a look at all that orbiting stuff.
The only actual orbit I've managed to achieve was just a single Liquid Fuel Rocket (the more powerful/fuel efficient ones availible from the website). In terms of tallest stable rocket I've built that's hit escape velocity (about 4,300 m/s I'm told) it's EX2 and it has nine liquid fuel rockets at the botton with one fuel tank followed by a joint SRB/Liquid stage, Two levels of SRBs and the liquid rockets with an additional six fuel tanks on a tri couple configuration followed by one liquir fuel with two fuel tanks and lots of SAS modules dotted about. It's pretty big! Yeah it's a nice feeling the first time you do that nice work!
This is Sunday Punche's extras pack. New rockets and things, a nice taste of what's possible. The liquid rocket engines, the lower numbers are less power more efficient and higher ones more power less efficient. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=E39NXYLZ
gonna try it out. I seem to be limited by the decouplers that go on the side, they simply flex too much.
This is awesome, thanks Zinfandel. In case anybody else hasn't noticed, this feature is really helpful (I missed it at first, don't know if it was in the tutorial or what).
^^Makes me sound thick but I didn't realise that's how those decouplers worked. Although I've managed 125k before I'm sure I'll hit something higher! Don't know if antibes bothered but it'd be pretty good if we designed our own bits here on bit-tech.