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Kerbal Space Program

My god, a positive post!

Delta IV Launch
You mean to tell me it didn’t explode on the launchpad?

Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Jen Scheer via Compfight

The rocket had a successful liftoff, when the main engine suddenly snaps off, still running, and pile drives the ship into the ground, killing yet another member of your space program. Well, that’s just a normal day in the Kerbal Space program.

Anyways, Kerbal Space Program is a brilliant game in which you build rockets, fly planes, and defy basic laws of aerodynamics. That’s pretty much the whole point of the game, and it’s amazing fun.

In the game you can pretty much do anything you can think of with the tools at hand. You can build spaceplanes with ridiculously overpowered engines or build space ships designed to go so fast they set themselves on fire, and then run out of fuel and explode horribly upon impact with the ground. On the more serious end of things, you can construct space stations in orbit around pretty much any celestial body, design interplanetary spacecraft, and conduct scientific experiments in close orbit around the sun.

Besides being able to reenact the construction of the ISS, one of the beautiful things about the game is its realistic but buggy physics engine. It can accurately model orbiting around a planet, but you can do things like make spaceships with the aerodynamic profile of a giant pancake, build giant cannons capable of sending people into orbit around the sun, fix almost any structural instability with thin metal bars (affectionately dubbed “space-tape”), and creating a spaceship specifically designed to lance the ground, destroying the planet. Seriously.

So really, what are you waiting for? It only costs $27!

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