[z3t4]

I wonder if it's still fun now when it has gotten harder with drag and heat ...

To get the best experience out of KSP you should play sandbox, but never quicksave! And keep playing the same "profile" every time.

This makes you actually solve problems instead of just quick-loading to retry ... So you had to burn too much fuel to save the situation after almost crashing into old space debris you left ten years ago!? Ahh there's an old space station around the moon we can dock with...

Destroyed an engine while landing on a foreign body? Figure out how to maneuver without it. Or take a walk to the unmanned prototype vessel you had forgotten about, that might have enough fuel to get into orbit ...

It will also make your hands shake a bit from adrenalin, when landing, or docking, after a one hour mission, knowing you would have to restart the mission if you crash.

You also need to have a joystick or pedals for thrust and RCS. Yes! You can throttle the RCS! That makes it much easier for docking.

[ninkendo]

My favorite moment is when I first got a spaceship big enough to land on Laythe (the earth-like moon of KSP's equivalent of Jupiter.) It was my first time doing a transfer orbit to Jool so I didn't really know what to expect other than that Laythe had about 85% of Kerbin's gravity... so if a replica of the ascent stage could get into orbit around Kerbin, I should have no problem taking off with it from Laythe so long as I could land with that stage intact with most of its fuel.

After a long mission to get there, "aerobraking" in Jool's atmosphere to get into a capture orbit, orbiting Laythe, landing, planting the flag: I realized I forgot to build a ladder on my spaceship to get back into it.

Sure, I could temporarily cheat and turn off gravity long enough to get into the ship, but that would be too easy...

So I staged a rescue mission to recover my kerbal, this time requiring a spaceship that not only had a ladder but was large enough to fit two kerbals instead of just one. I sent it on its way, and even docked with the orbital component of the original ship to combine fuel resources, and landed within a few hundred yards of my old kerbal. I had to leave a weight on the keyboard on the shift and W key for 15 minutes or so while he walked towards the new ship. I took off, rendezvoused with the orbiting stage, escaped orbit, and slingshotted off the orbit of another moon to get me back to Kerbin with just barely enough fuel to make it, but I made it just the same.

I really love this game.

[munchbunny]

After two hours in career mode:

1. The new aerodynamics are less forgiving. Make sure your rockets are bottom heavy.

2. Heat really makes re-entry much less forgiving too. I'd advise new players to turn off heat effects. For a veteran player (like me) it's certainly making career mode a fresh challenge. I've lost three kerbals already.