Kerbal Space Program.

For those of you who haven't yet heard of this beauty of a game, Kerbal Space Program is an extremely realistic spaceflight and rocket design simulator featuring the adorable little creatures named Kerbals. There are actual proper calculations to be made, and doing something wrong in design could end.. unpleasantly.

There is only a sandbox mode and a few scenario modes at the moment, with no clear-cut campaigns. The four tutorials describe, in order,
>Designing a craft
>Achieving flight
>Basic orbiting techniques
>Making it to the game's moon analogue.

Of course, they don't really help much. A lot of what you'll be doing is trial and error, unless you feel the need to actually calculate what you're doing. That, of course, is unorky.

Anyone else play this?
Stories?
Design tips?

No, but this sounds sweet! :D Where do you get it?

Steam.

I've seen it and been interested, but I'm trying to work through some of my other games before I pay for new ones. I've heard good things, though.

There is a demo available on the official site, Mata.

A tad bit of flight advice: Keep SAS activated until you reach around 10 Kilometers. Then, angle your rocket hard to the east/west, at or near the dividing line for ascension and descent. This puts you in a decently steady orbit.

I don't know what was funnier, the horrified faces of his crew as he failed to land, or his final mistake at the end.

Attempted to go in for a mun landing.

Ran out of fuel.

Got a mun crash instead.

I recently got the demo version. My current goal is to fly to the Sun (I presume it is still called the Sun. I could be wrong). It's harder than you would think. First you have to have enough fuel to get out of Kerbin's (Earth-analog) atmosphere. Then you have to have enough fuel to escape Kerbin's gravity. Then you have to have enough fuel to decelerate enough so that you fall into the Sun. I've found that it needs, with one liquid fuel thruster, about 5 minutes worth of full throttle after reaching outer space. I have not yet designed a rocket capable of that.

My tip: For more precise manoeuvres use the Add Manoeuvre feature. Click on a point on your orbit, press the button and it brings up 6 dragable buttons. Each correlates to a direction for which you can apply thrust in 3-dimensional space. Play around with those until the predicted orbit is close to that which you want. It will then indicate on the navigation ball when to apply throttle, for how long and in exactly which direction in a rather user-friendly manner. Takes the trial and error out of flight.