The Final Frontier: Fake Space

Jedgan Kerman was just one of a series of astronauts sent up beyond the atmosphere of his planet with one simple goal: get really far away from it.  It was essentially an explosive high jump contest: each rocket flew upwards and hopped above the planet Kerbin, before running out of fuel and falling all the way down again.  Things changed with Jedgan, though.  Focussed unswervingly on the Mün (that's right), he leapt... and didn't fall back down. He broke free of the Earth Kerbin's gravity and set off in search of his own story. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite heading directly at the Mün which meant that his particular story was drifting forever in space with no fuel left in the tank and quite far from any planet or moon of interest.


Kerbal Space Program is a space sim of sorts - you build spacecraft and then attempt to fly them into and around outer space.  It's set in a world much like our own, populated by the cute little guys you see above, all of whom share the surname "Kerman" (please save your questions concerning inbreeding for the end of the class).  The game is available as part of Steam's "early access" program, which in this case means no single player campaign as such: the game is for the most part a sandbox and therefore goals and objectives have to come from you.  Not that there isn't fun to be had just fooling around with it.  Ship parts snap together a bit like Lego so it's relatively easy to create something that looks like, for example, an awesomely powerful rocket.  Then you take it to the launch pad and - in all likelihood - watch it explode.  Repeating this process is fun for a while, and for some people might be all they want out of the game, but before long I found myself itching to get to the space exploration element of the game, a concept which I've always found compelling in other games (the Mass Effect series especially comes to mind).  I thought it would be cool to share my experiences and add a tiny bit of narrative through the stories of Kerbalnauts such as the brave Jedgan Kerman.  I should emphasise, this won't be an exhaustive guide to playing the game - I'm still very much a novice at it and there are plenty of people on the internet (here,for example) who understand KSP in a lot more depth than I do.  I will, however, try to explain core gameplay concepts and strategy for those who haven't played the game.

Rocket-A-Matic V

This is one of the first machines I built, the Rocket-A-Matic V.  I added a number after each failure of one sort or another - the aforementioned launch pad explosion, flying out of control and crashing straight into the ground, running out of fuel almost immediately, the list isn't exactly short.  This specimen in particular was, I think, fairly disastrous.  The wings on the rocket boosters made it spiral out of control and, if it miraculously made it into space, the white engines on the command pod would have eaten through their fuel supply in roughly two seconds.  Nonetheless, the Rocket-A-Matic would eventually evolve into the beast that carried Jedgan out into the void.

Rocket-A-Matic XX

After many iterations, I arrived at the R-A-M XIX, which I don't have a picture of thanks to an interesting quirk of the game's design.  Saved builds can be loaded into the vehicle assembly bay, but only if they are not currently on a mission.  Because Jedgan is still lost in space, I can't examine the craft that took him there!  But I'm fairly certain it looked quite similar to its successor, the R-A-M XX, only with fewer solid fuel boosters, which throughout all these early designs I was using to get off the ground.  After discarding the boosters, two circles of small engines attached to fuel tanks would push the command pod further from the planet Kerbin, in the noble sport of interstellar high jump.  The whole thing was so unwieldy that I had secure to the boosters to pod with "support struts", the white cables in the picture above.  I'll get into why so many aspects of this design were such inefficient, poor choices in a later post, but for now I'll just point out that here I'm still attaching wings to my rocket, because the solid boosters made it so unstable in its first stage of flight.  I'm pretty sure wings belong on planes.  Incidentally, you can build planes.  Space planes.

The sky blue circle is Jedgan's orbit.  From the Sun outwards the
the planets are: Moho, Eve, Kerbin, Duna, Dres, and Jool.
The farthest planet, Eeloo, isn't pictured here.

So Jedgan flew his rocket out beyond the reach of his planet, and as he left Kerbin's sphere of influence, he discovered something that astounded me.  Behind the Mün  two objects appeared on his map screen, in the distance: "Ike" and "Gilly".  Were these other planets?  Up to this point, I had assumed that the explorable world of KSP extended only from Kerbin to the Mün;  after all, the game's still in alpha (an early testing stage in game development).  But no.  I soon discovered that the Kerbal Solar System has half a dozen other planets, a revelation that really made me see the game in a different light.  Not just a sandbox for playing in, but for exploring.  I soon learned that Ike and Gilly were in fact the moons of a nearby planet called Eve.  Those who remember their astronomy lessons should notice that this fictional Solar System is not dissimilar to our own.

Astronomy is something that has always fascinated me and I'm very impressed that the makers of KSP have built their game's "world" on this scale.  I felt an immediate urge to rummage through this made-up Solar System and feel that sense of awe again.  But to do that I'd have to get a lot more serious than rocket-powered high jumps.  Learning how to get into orbit and stay there was the first step, and it seemed an intimidating prospect.  After watching the Rocket-A-Matic XIX drift slowly around the Sun a few times, hoping Jedgan might run into another planet by accident (an eventuality I knew was extremely unlikely), I turned my attention to the puzzle of getting into orbit.  I'll explain how I got on in the next episode of "The Final Frontier: Fake Space".