Kerbal Space Program

[IamLEAM1983]

You've made it to the tenth iteration of the Kerbal Lunar Lander – all previous nine models having resulted in easily predictable failures. It's always one of a few things that really fucks up your entire efforts : you haven't set yourself enough fuel for your return trip and if you do, then your rocket weighs so much on the launchpad that it has trouble negotiating liftoff. You can use stability augmentation modules to try and mitigate that, but starting your gravity turn too late could cost you your ascent altogether. That is, if you don't start it too early, and force yourself through needless amounts of atmospheric resistance. That, in turn, means you burn through about two thirds of your fuel just to leave Kerbin's atmopshere!

Details, details, details. It's all in the details in Kerbal Space Program, and what you choose to do with them. On paper, you're intended to explore the wide reaches of the Kerbol solar system but you're entirely left to your devices in practice. Will you strive to match fuel efficiency and power, or will you strap a ton of booster rockets together with a few flimsy attachment points and watch your Wobbly Death Machine careen to seventy-five thousand feet before condemning your Kerbonauts to a hilarious and unfortunate demise? It's up to you. This might be Brazilian developer Squad's first effort, but influences from a few EA titles are fairly obvious – especially Maxis' pseudo-god game Spore.

This being an indie project still in Alpha, there's no real Career mode to manage as of this writing, although it certainly is in the cards. For now, however, you're free to create as many multi-stage mega-rockets as you'd like and to more or less chart your own way across the cosmos. That helps, considering how the core elements of the game demand – nay, require – repeated experimentation and exploration.

The mainstay of the game is the Vehicle Assembly Building, an open space where you're free to snap engine parts and pods together freely, in a way that feels reminiscent of Spore's Building Editor. You're stuck working with several dozen prefab modules in each category, but you're entirely free to snap them, intersect, couple or decouple them as you'd like. The end result is that you could stick with the “cheaper” parts – money being irrelevant in Sandbox Mode – and simply layer several of them together in order to create one huge tank or several huge fuel tanks. Or, you know, you can just choose one of the unique and bigger tanks that would normally cost an arm and a leg.

Again, though – Alpha stage means Sandbox Only. For the time being, each and every part is free.

Seeing as there's no clear-cut goal to the game other than getting your ass into space, you're free to take it slow or to take insane chances. Luckily, the game comes complete with a rather hefty selection of tutorial missions that are there to give you every single aspects of the hefty jargon and mechanics you'll have to digest. This, admittedly, is where the silly, borderline Dreamworks Animation-esque design aesthetic sort of parts away to reveal an absolutely gritty simulation engine. Spore's Space Stage, this is not.

To keep your tin can from crashing back into Kerbin, or simply staying in orbit successfully, you'll need to master several techniques that are either lifted straight out of real-life space maneuvers, or inspired from them. The liftoff phase is really the easiest, with your only objective being that of keeping on track with your Prograde vector. Prograde effectively means “forward” as translated for the direction-less void which is space. To circularize your descending path into an orbit around Kerbin, you need to create a periapsis to match your apoapsis – the highest point of your trajectory. If you don't, you don't so much have an orbit to work with as a graceful curve, extending from one end of Kerbin to the other. Facing Retrograde is comparable to hitting the brakes, as you're ideally trying to keep falling around the planet.

Robert Heinlein once said that getting in orbit means you're halfway there, in terms of space travel. After that, you're essentially tasked to use the game's robust set of direction vectors to calculate rendezvous paths for whatever planet or planetoid in the system that you'd care to visit. This is all done graphically (thank God), and you really don't need to be a math or physics genius to handle any of it. Once you've internalized which marker points to where and which sequence of way-points you'll have to follow, it's all a matter of facing the right way and doing fuel burns that match those intervals KSP calculates for you. A lot of the busywork of space travel is handled by the simulation engine, with your only job being that or handling fuel consumption and staging. Waiting for your meticulously prepared slingshot effect to carry you to the Mun (Kerbin's moon) or to Laythe or Minmus can be fairly boring. Thankfully, you can fast-forward your way through whatever six hours to thirty-six days your planned trek might require. Compressing time means you can go through several months' worth of space travel in a few seconds. As long as you haven't entered any atmosphere, your created spacecraft will handle that compression like a champ. Speeding up time on Kerbin, however, is not advisable. As the game calculates in-atmosphere physics in real time, any control surfaces you'll stick on your aircraft or spacecraft could be put under undue amounts of stress. I've bungled otherwise perfect gravity turns because I was impatient and more or less shredded my tailfins to oblivion with the application of a compressed amount of Gs on that single set of parts, all in one or two seconds.

Out there, though, everything goes. Provided there's nothing matching an atmosphere on your target planet or planetoid, you can plan out missions that would require generations in a few minutes. This means that in a few hours worth of playtime, you can have potentially explored every inch of Kerbin's solar system. There's a lot to find, thankfully, seeing as Squad seeded each dust ball with a rather liberal amount of Easter eggs and collectibles.

Once you've done exploring, the game also comes complete with elaborate docking mechanisms and clamps you can use to create more than simple propellant units for satellites you'll drop around the neighboring planets. If you've ever wanted to handle something like the construction of the International Space Station, you can. In a fittingly realistic manner, you can't expect to be able to lift the whole thing into space in one go. Space stations are endeavors deserving of their own space programs altogether, with several flights being required in order to assemble everything from solar arrays to living quarters, science labs and the numerous corridors and support structures you'll need to keep everything connected.

All of that very hard science is thankfully wrapped up in a cheeky package that presents the whole of Kerbal civilization as being a bit of an accident. Your Kerbonauts and attending scientists and engineers are remarkably accident-prone and have no real idea of what half of the tin cans filled with compressed fuel they build actually do. You get the feeling that there's no real geniuses in the Kerbal Space Program, but a whole damn lot of eccentric savants that can't be bothered with things like safety, proper staging or basic aerodynamic properties. You're the only one who can tell an ASAS Module from a tank of micro-propellant fuel, so they're all more than happy to delegate the entirety of their space program to you. Some incredibly useful parts like the above-mentioned ASAS Module read as having been “found on the roadside”, of all things! These little green critters are all absolutely ecstatic at the thought of pushing one or more of their numbers out among the stars – but they can't be bothered to figure out how that's going to happen. It's your job to make sure that these little ADHD-suffering critters get to explore the Final Frontier, and that they do so while staying alive.

Or, you know, you can exploit the fact that there's seemingly no such thing as tragedy in Kerbal society, and strap your Kerbonauts to solid fuel-powered booster rockets with no way of surviving the impact with the next continent's beachside. Muahahahahahaha!

All things considered, this game pisses on Spore's Space Stage, adding several layers of welcomed complexity to a core concept that did sound interesting, but that was executed in the most depressingly casual way imaginable. The barrier of entry can be a little hard for some, seeing as this is still very much a Hard Science simulator – but those serious aspects are so carefully dosed that they don't detract from the overall potential enjoyment of the whole package. There's nothing quite like negotiating a difficult re-entry right on top of the Space Center's facilities after managing two orbits around two different astral bodies, and seeing your Kerbonaut's expression go from terrified to worried to ecstatically gleeful, as Bob Kerman realizes you're actually going to land him on solid ground, safe and sound.

Or, once again, you can grin from ear to ear as your little green man's mouth opens in a silent scream of utter panic at the knowledge that you've purposefully depleted all of your fuel reserves in-orbit and have condemned him to a slow death trapped in a tin can floating in space...

Ooor, you can play with Jebediah Kerman in the pod. Jeb Kerman doesn't give a fuck. That crazy diamond's always happy, no matter if you've jettisoned your last fuel reserves or if you've placed him in descending orbit around a distant world – while on an EVA.