[theme]
Hello, it is Scott Manley here and today I am going to be doing
a tutorial for complete beginners in
Kerbal Space Program career mode
Now, Kerbal Space Program, as you know
is a rocket simulator game
but it can also be a physics simulator game.
You can play it like Turbo Dismount, you can put it in
at sandbox mode build crazy things fly it around and explode and everything.
But a very good way to learn the game
is to actually go through career mode, so this is what I'm gonna do here
I'm gonna step through and I'm not gonna play it like, you know, a hardcore player
like I would play it. I'm gonna try and
introduce it what things one step at a time so
I will ramble a lot and if you don't keep up with all the information that's
fine because I'm gonna insert a lot of
extraneous chit-chat and you can always rewind it
to have figure out what I'm actually saying. So, just a pointer the training missions
are actually very useful to show you how to build things and to fly the spacecraft
but don't worry I will cover all of these things
I'm gonna start a new career mode game
Now, some things to note here you can pick your flag
for example here you have all these different here... Squad, squad is the
developer incidently
if you're American you might want to pick the NASA flag
If you European you might want one of these ESA flags and if you are a
Kerbal you might want the official Kerbal Space Program
ah, flag. I'm gonna pick, oh, I don't know, the Owl Aircraft one, why not, it has cool
wings on it
now you can also adjust your difficulty options. Frankly don't need to do this
because normal is super easy as it is
Reentry heating some people might feel they want to turn that off or down
because it's a little... ah, it's a little interesting right interesting meaning a
when you think things are going well sometimes it will explode
But I've not had a huge mega problems
and they are definitely working to improve it, so just, ah...
I wouldn't, I wouldn't show you how to build anything that will
kill you due to thermal overloads. Let's accept the basic options and start.
Now upon starting we are greeted by Gene Kerman their flight
director at the gate for this quick introduction
Okay, what he's basically saying is this is the Kerbal Space Center
this is his playground. Now, you can adjust the camera by
holding the middle button and dragging the mouse or right clicking
for rotation each these buildings you'll see someone get highlighted as you move
the mouse over them there's a
bunch different buildings that do different things here and there's only
two buildings I'm gonna show you initially, right
ah right clicking on the building brings up the description
and the two that we want to look at are the Vehicle Assembly Building
and the Mission Control.
So, the goal of career mode, or, one of the possible goals of career mode is to get
all the science so that you could get all the
all the parts unlocked by the R&D department and that
to do that you can eat money and to get money you're gonna do contracts.
So, contracts are available from Mission Control here.
So, left click on it, and we have Gene Kerman once again saying "hi!"
You know, some people actually miss that mission control is there because it is a
very small building and its hidden behind the Vehicle Assembly Building
but it's the first place you should go because that's where you gonna get your money.
Now, there's two missions you should accept. One is to launch
our first vessel. All you need to do is launch your first vessel
let's do that. The second is just to gather scientific data from Kerbin and
a very quickly - ah, very specifically says give us a quick
crew report before launching. So, that's what we'll do, we'll give them a quick
crew report and then launch. We should build to do both contracts
with one rocket. So, we're gonna go into the Vehicle Assembly Building which is
this giant building in the middle and it is far too impressive
for what we're gonna build.
Now, on the - in the Vehicle Assembly Building, we get greeted by Verner von Kerman
who knows all about building rockets and
ah, storied, um, you dubious pasts
so, we could read through that if you like but
this screen is where you gonna do all your constructing. We have
a bunch of tools on the left which he will consist of parts you have, ah
cost information, center of mass and all that. You have
icons up here for loading and saving at launching. Ah, there is some
options here for changing your crew and some information down here. So, this is -
the engineer's, report the contracts we have available
and your current set of messages. So, how do we start building what we have to start
by selecting apart
and every rocket needs a command pod, or
a probe body. So, mouse over the Mark 1 command pod, it will give you a humorous
description and some
numbers about it but then you can left click and it will appear
in your rocket building space here as everyone on the ground appears rather
unimpressed by the whole thing they just go read their business despite
a capsule being suspended in the air
Now, the mission said that we need to build and launch, so, we need
we need a booster, and the only one we have is this
RT-5 "Flea" solid rocket booster.
Which is considered by some to be little more than a trash bin
full of boom. So, that is an engine
which burns solid fuel, and it burns
very very quickly and
you can't turn it off. So, to land it
after that turns off, you'll be flying through the air with the greatest ease
and to land it you could need help from a parachute.
So, if you look at the tabs here, utility has a Mark 16 parachute, so pick that up
with the left button, drag it over and then pop it on the front there. See the green
dots are how the things hook together see it, bingo!
That's our first vehicle. We're almost ready to go.
There's just one more thing we need to do: See down in the bottom right here.
This is our staging diagram and it shows what happens when we hit the spacebar.
What's gonna happen
is: our engine is gonna fire and her parachute is going to open
and these things will fight it out, and you will spin around in ah -
Will be truly comical and you will probably do it many times while playing
Kerbal Space Program
But you want to fix this. Also note that the engineer's report will actually warn you
that the parachute is on the first stage, it will activate on the first stage group, and
the parachute will activate at the same time as the engine.
That's not good. It also says there's an unused motor propeller
resource, which you don't need to worry about it unless you're being
like hardcore. So, what you want to do is make these things
activate on separate stages. So, I've clicked at the plus sign to add a stage one, here
and, you know, you pick this up and drag it down.
And now, stage 1 is gonna have the engine and stage 0
because we're counting down, obviously, will have the parachute.
So let's, ah, launch this. Now, this space program has picked the first pilot for
us automatically.
It is Jebediah Kerman, thrill master extraordinaire.
And I'm gonna have to ask him to do some science first, right
So, to do science, you have to right-click on a part
which produces science. And a capsule
produces science, because it has a crew member inside. So, you can ask
the pilot for a crew report. See, right-click it brings up the menu
there is the crew report left click on that
and
it tells you that you've recorded the cruise assessment of the situation.
Says the crew report
from launch pad. And I'll go into detail
on what's really going on here, later. But we've collected the science that is
required by contract number one.
Contract number two is gonna require us to fly, so, let's keep that data here by
clicking on the green
clipboard. And to actually fly, we just press space.
And as we go, look at us flying it, look at our speeds down here, look at our
altitude here. This is our vertical speed
and up here, at the top right, these are contracts being fulfilled. These are
messages coming in saying you've learned something you've done something. Let's
click at these just to see.
We completed our contract. We launched our first
vessel, and in return, we're gonna get 5321
funds. We're going to get one science, and we're going to get to
reputation. Let's throw that one away.
We set a speed record of 150 meters per second.
We set a speed limit of 300 meters per second, which is
almost the speed of sound, then we set a speed record of
450 meter per second, which is faster than the speed of
sound. And, we set an altitude record of
3,500 meters. Okay!
Let's close this.
There we go. We are now falling back
towards the surface, so, remember that parachute?
We want to deploy that parachute. How do we deploy that parachute?
It's in the staging diagram right? We just need to hit space.
So I do that. There comes out, partially deployed.
And we get jerked back into a reasonable
orientation rather than going nose first. Notice that Jebediah is
completely happy with this the whole time.
So, we're now falling over 35 meters per second.
That means is gonna take us about 40 seconds to get back to the surface.
We can speed this up. In the top left we have
the warp menu here, so you can click on these to go two times regular speed, three times,
four times regular speed. As we get below 500 meters
the parachute will open properly, and our speed will get dropped down to about
5 or 6 meters per second, you can see the shadow
as we get close to the ground. It is very good to do things at day
and during the day, so you could see the shadow. There we go we've landed
and we've completed that first mission, so
to complete our mission properly we need to recover it. So let's
Most over the bar at the top and we get
"recover vessel". Now we recovered the vessel and we get
information, and it tells us that we got experiments that we recovered. So just by
flying a spacecraft, we actually got 5 science.
By doing a crew report from the launch pad we got 1.5 science. So that is
6.5 from this. We also got science
from actually just doing this contract here, so if I click on this - oh, wait a second
Let's... Go through - ah
We get money back for recovering all these parts
right, so that's important.
And Jebediah Kerman got experience and because of this
crew member flying we got some reputation as well.
Which is all good. See, if I click on this it says that we also
got the scientific data gathering contract, that means we have
10 science. Let's throw that away. Okay
So this is the score up the top. We have
funds, 146 thousand. We have
a reputation, which is good
if it was going bad that would be a problem. If Jebediah had died, we might
have come away with negative reputation.
And we have science.
So now, let's go and spend that science. So to spend science,
you gonna go to this large complex at the bottom, this
is the Research and Development facility.
So let's enter it.
The research and development facility
basically gives you a giant tech tree to unlock items.
You can look all the way down to see the amazing things that technology will
bring you.
Eventually you will have things like the RAPIER engine, which is the
Kerbal version of the SABRE engine.
You will have little - ah - radio thermal nuclear
nuclear generator. You'll have large probe cores and...
your ways of - ah - harvesting fuel.
But, we're down to this end of the tree. We all have these
five parts available to us. If we want to get the parts of basic rocketry,
we click on the node, and it says
research for 5 science. So I can spend 5 science, and now
I have that node and it has unlocked further nodes - It is just like a tech tree you
know how this works, you've seen this in a million other games.
It's a good idea unlock both of these nodes, because they give you a whole
bunch different features, which are all
very useful. Also here,
you have the science archives, that show you where you have been getting your
science from.
This will matter more later on, as you go to different locations.
Because you can only do one experiment in each location,
there's a limit of how much science you can get from each place. For example,
there's a limit to how much site you can get from the launch pad.
Okay, so that is the end of part 1 and at part two we will look
at liquid fueled engines and we will go higher and further.
I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe!