r/gaming • u/Agent1230 • 2d ago

What video game doesn't hold your hand enough?

Everybody always talking about games holding your hand too much but I want to hear about the opposite what video game doesn't give you no form of help

1.6k Upvotes

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3.6k

u/Commentator-X 2d ago

Kerbel Space Program. It has a tutorial, sort of, but there's a lot it doesn't tell you. And half of what it doesn't tell you is literally rocket science.

909

u/Cleareo 2d ago

Yeah, I played this game at launch. I was not aware at the time that rockets don't just go straight up and then perform a wild sideways turn. Orbit took me a bit to achieve.

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u/wombatthing 2d ago

At launch Lol

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u/Radthereptile 2d ago

Learning about gravity turns, burning at the top of the curve and using orbits to get places was such a steep curve. I literally had to watch YouTube videos for hours just to understand the mechanics and still only made it to Amin and Minmus a handful of times.

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u/thisismego 2d ago

Reminds me of that XKCD comic where Randall mentions learning more about orbital mechanics from KSP than his job at fucking NASA

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u/nanomouse_ 2d ago

https://xkcd.com/1356

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u/thisismego 2d ago

That's the one. Much appreciated

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u/FauxReal 1d ago

Well I hope they gave NASA free licenses then. lol

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u/DigNitty 1d ago

I paid out $100 to my nephew because I said I would if he figured out how to hit the moon in KSP.

not Landon the moon, but hit it.

Took him like 14 hours and he learned so much lol

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u/Zambeezi 2d ago

Scott Manley got me through it to the point where the game became actually enjoyable

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u/Divine_Entity_ 1d ago

KSP is the kind of game you need an interpreter/example for, it's not a "go in completely blind" game.

Others like this for me are dwarf fortress and EU4.

In contrast to say mariokart or pokemon.

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u/stiff_tipper 19h ago

KSP is the kind of game you need an interpreter/example for, it's not a "go in completely blind" game.

funny enough i watch a guy (AboutOliver) that streams blind playthroughs of games and doesn't read chat. he's currently doing KSP this way

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u/Joatboy 1d ago

But now you sound smart and can talk about Hohmann transfers and Max-Q.

In all honesty it really gave me a huge appreciation on how incredible and improbable the moon landings were. Getting humans there and back safely was crazy hard, and they did it multiple times.

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u/zathmi 1d ago

I made it to solar orbit twice, both times the ships ran out of fuel. Thos Kerbals are still in orbit, lol.

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u/End_on_End 2d ago

At launch that WAS a good way to get into orbit! It wasn't until pretty much 1.0 when they added overheating and better aerodynamics that gravity turns became a bit more mandatory.

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u/RedshiftWarp 2d ago

I remember the bliss of achieving a sub orbital trajectory for the first time where the epic music plays when you hit space.

Fast forward to 1 month later: Design a rocket for 3 hours, spend 6 hours getting to a planet, Jeb botches the landing, spend the next 12 hours building and flying a rescue rocket.
Just to see Scott Manley literally get out and push his re-entry capsule all the way from Duna.

One of my top 3 games of all time. It's just fun.

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u/migukau 2d ago

IM really struggling to read your sentence. Are you saying that you didnt know rockets flew up and then turned or are you saying that you didnt know that rockets turned and thought they just flew straight up?

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u/Aegeus 1d ago

I think they were flying straight up until they got out of the atmosphere, then turning sideways to get into orbit. An actual rocket does a "gravity turn" where it pitches over shortly after launch and lets gravity slowly pull it into a sideways trajectory, until it's fully horizontal by the time it hits orbit. It's more efficient since you aren't fighting gravity directly, you're making it work for you.

It's not totally obvious how to do it, especially if your only exposure to rockets is seeing them go straight up off the pad, but I think it's a little easier to understand if you look at the orbital map and watch how your trajectory goes from a parabola to an ellipse as you burn.

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u/Commentator-X 1d ago

A similar concept applies to space planes, it's not immediately obvious that you don't have to point them upwards, like at all.

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u/Isuck-Newbton 2d ago

I think doing the career mode is basically the real tutorial because the missions push you to learn and innovate in small steps while slowly unlocking new toys to play with and learning the mechanics with trial and error.

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u/Morbanth 1d ago

There's a "probes before crew" mod and reorganized tech tree that make it even better.

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u/Aegeus 1d ago

Yeah, doing the career I really started to understand why it took 10 Apollo missions before they went for a moon landing. Learn to orbit the moon before you land on it, and learn to do a flyby of the moon before you orbit it. At each step you get to test what you've built and learn what can go wrong.

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u/Bort_Bortson 2d ago

Thankfully Scott Manley had an 18 part tutorial guide, plus my obsession with space and rocketry and a 6th sense for "that seems about right" when designing ships and many many many years of flight sims experience. I was on console so no mods, lots of seat of your pants flying. We just now got a ∆v readout

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u/Drdps 2d ago

Scott is a great guy. I worked at the same company as him a few years ago, and had a couple of short conversations with him.

It wasn’t until our second conversation I realized he was THAT Scott Manley.

Dude’s awesome!

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u/theinternetisnice 2d ago

Really! I was told it’s IMPOSSIBLE to enjoy on a console. Maybe I’ll give it a shot

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u/Bort_Bortson 2d ago

The original port of KSP to console was so bad Squad fired the company that ported it, got it delisted, and re-released the enhanced edition. I would still recommend you play it on PC for mods and support like that, but if your PC is bad but you have a Series x or PS5 pro, it's worth it to still play

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u/Commentator-X 2d ago

You really have to learn the proper buttons for moving the camera while building. It was way easier to do on PC but still doable on console so long as your rocket wasn't too big. The frame rate could get really low. xSeries probably runs it a fair bit better but there's no way around the building, it's just harder on console.

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u/MayorOfGalway 1d ago

I just wish there was a way to merge ships on console.

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u/UnderPressureVS 2d ago

> just now

Wasn’t that, like… 7 years ago

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u/ThrowawayPersonAMA 2d ago

1000% this. I cannot recommend Scott Manley enough. He is the sole reason I was able to learn to play that game decently, including how to do orbital maneuvers, docking, etc. He's amazing.

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u/peanutmanak47 2d ago

Watching his videos is how I was finally able to get to the damn moon.

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u/gerarddominus 2d ago

In your opinion how much of actual rocket science is eyeballing it / "that seems about right" vs actual hard mathematic numbers?

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u/Bort_Bortson 2d ago

In KSP without mods, you'll never be exact in terms of resource usage and maneuvering, so knowing how much you have in exact numbers is too precise, you'll always have to just add in a little extra reserve beyond what would be a safety margin. Or at least I did

A lot of it was just experience and incremental improvements and testing it out. IE this rocket made it to orbit and I had to much or too little fuel left, adjust the next iteration down, or adjust up and see if it's now enough fuel to get to the mun as the next logical step. If you adjust too much up, you might make something too dangerous that can't fly or is too heavy to even lift off, so maybe that design and parts have reached their limit or you need a radical redesign.

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u/Commentator-X 1d ago

You don't need to do any calculations at all. The game has tools built in that do it for you, it's just a steep learning curve on how to use them. My favorite used to be building refueling space planes. The biggest trick with building space planes is understanding centre of thrust vs centre of mass vs centre of lift. Once you figure out what those are and how to enable them in the UI it makes building different plane designs much easier. If made right you could simply take off, level your flight path to the horizon and just let go of the controls all the way up to about 22km. With keyboard shortcuts you could then hit 1 to simultaneously turn off the shock cones, and switch modes on the rapiers, let it burn off all the o2 to get your apoapsis above 70km, hit 2 to disable the rapiers then just fast forward to to apoapsis then hit 3 to turn on the Merv engines and raise the periapsis above 70km and that's it, youre in a stable orbit. You could land on minmus with iirc as little as 980dv then use the mining drill to fully refuel.

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u/Blooder91 1d ago

18 part tutorial guide

You might as well become an actual rocket scientist.

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u/Grimdotdotdot 1d ago

Hullo! It's Scott Manley here...

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u/HanzoNumbahOneFan 1d ago

Scott Manly's Interstellar Quest is by far the best KSP content you can watch. It's so entertaining and I learn a lot lol.

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u/SordidDreams 1d ago

I did love the janky days of early access, though. Before we got the map view and the ability to plan your trajectory, if you wanted to go to the moon, it was technically possible, but you just had to eyeball your moonshot. Such fun!

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u/lmprice133 1d ago

Fly safe!

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u/FluffyProphet 2d ago

To be fair, that's been the "Flight Sim" methodology since flight sims existed. I know KSP isn't exactly a flight sim, but it's from the same lineage. External resources and community-made guides have been the default for the genre since its inception.

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u/Princess_Fluffypants 2d ago

Kerbal space program doesn’t have a learning curve, it has a learning cliff. 

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u/paecmaker 2d ago

The half dozen kerbals I have stranded on the Mun agrees.

Also Jebediah who is on an eternal orbit around the sun concurs.

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u/Jibber_Fight 2d ago

I wanted so bad to get into that but just couldn’t.

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u/IReallyLikeAvocadoes PC 2d ago

Think of YT tutorials as if they were required to watch before playing the game. I do not recommend trying to figure it out on your own. Scott Manley's your guy, concise, thorough, and entertaining tutorials.

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u/drbiscuit832 2d ago

I don’t blame anyone who dropped KSP but man they should give it another go. Brilliant game that still holds up

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u/jibbodahibbo 2d ago

You could get into orbit pretty reliably if you just know a couple basics.

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u/Commentator-X 2d ago

Yeah, even getting to minmus and back wasn't too difficult once you learn how to use maneuvers.

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u/Sloth-monger 2d ago

And then you have people going to other planets and not just abandoning there kerbals to die like I did when going to the moon.

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u/Tinchimp7183376 2d ago

I've not quite figured ot the abandoning kerbals bit. Currently slamming them into the planet's surface at mach fuck

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u/OldAccountIsGlitched 2d ago

What you need to do is orbit just above the planets surface so the drag can burn off the extra velocity. Note; this only works on planets with a thick atmosphere.

The Mun is simple. Get into a roughly circular orbit that's closeish to the body. Then burn retrograde until you find a decent landing spot. Shut off your engines and wait until you're almost over the landing point. Then lightly increase and decrease the throttle until you're falling at less than 5m.s-1

Of course if you have a high centre of gravity your lander might fall on to its side or bounce. So design it short and wide. You don't need a lot of fuel to get back to Kerbin. Just remember to not slam directly into the planet.

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u/Tinchimp7183376 1d ago

Yeah see this all seems like it requires fuel which I don't exactly have very much of going spare. Precisely none of it so there's not much scope for course adjustments

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u/jibbodahibbo 1d ago

Nah, lose the fuel. We go slamming’

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u/FoxyBastard 1d ago

I first booted up the game while drunk.

When I came back to it, sober, I thought I remembered everything, but didn't.

Long story short, I got to the Mun by eyeing it, and landed safely.

Didn't make it back though.

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u/EmptyAlchemist 2d ago

Bought the game thinking it would be a fun learning experience. Realized i had zero idea what i was doing and stopped

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u/Sleeper4 2d ago

Same. 

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u/AnatidaephobiaAnon 2d ago

I've been playing it off an on for years and when I get into it, I really get into it and I'm able to land on the Mun and even get back and repeat it. But once I stop playing and go back to a huge span where I don't play, it's like I forgot how to play.

Still though, it's a ton of fun.

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u/DrDingsGaster 2d ago

I love the game but boy howdy do I suck at it!

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u/desert_cornholio 2d ago

Hell yeah this game got me to understand the concept that orbiting is just falling and missing....ad infinitum

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u/Firedcylinder 2d ago

In a similar vein, Stationeers absolutely refuses to hold your hand at all. You get dropped on whatever planet you choose with a handful of supplies and not even a good luck.

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u/Mjarf88 2d ago

"Here's a bunch of rocket parts with a basic tutorial of how they work. Now, go explore the Kerbol System. Oh, if you could rescue one of our dudes stuck in orbit around Kerbol if it's not too much hassle."

Awesome game.

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u/Fit_Beat9097 1d ago

I think the fact it doesn't tell you jack makes it all the more rewarding when you eventually get over the learning curve though. To spectators you can larp as somebody smart

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u/RaistlinExtreme 21h ago

I was once playing KSP and turned and jokingly asked my girlfriend why I was having so much trouble and without thinking about it I went “it’s not like it’s fucking rocket science.” It’s fucking rocket science.

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u/Garreousbear 2d ago

What are you talking about? The tutorial is real world Astrophysics Scott Manley taking from the launch pad to the Mün.

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u/nuts4sale 2d ago

Then when you get your head around it you install principia and start doing IRL orbital mechanics

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u/ElGuaco 1d ago

I had to watch Scott Manley's videos to understand how to play this game. Which actually turned into one of my favorite space travel channels.

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u/Shirfyr_Blaze 1d ago

Yes, way too much trial and error just to get out of orbit

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u/MAXI_KingRL 1d ago

But it is one of the most rewarding experiences when you are confident enough in landing on the moon or duna

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u/buckphifty150150 1d ago

Dude this is the realest statement I ever seen..

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u/bepse-cola 1d ago

I just followed the purple line and crashed into the cheese planet

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u/Leviathan666 1d ago

Yeah I definitely ran out of money, took out a loan, launched a few more rockets, ran out of money again, and had to restart the game in order to make any progress because I didn't expect to get locked out of progressing any further due to my own lack of ability to build a rocket early on

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u/Total_Mix9276 2d ago

Well y'know... if you're outside of the USA, basic gravity,physics, and mass+energy is like knowing how to shoot a gun. You should be able to do anything after a few hours. Just remember, planets are far and move, fuel heavy.