Chapter 7. Historical Reenactment
In Kerbal Space Program, you can re-create real-life space missions with a pretty good degree of accuracy. Historical reenactments are a lot of fun, and youâll often learn some space history along the way. In this chapter, weâll be re-creating some important firsts: the first satellite, the first person in space, the first space docking, the first soft landing and first crewed landing on the moon, and the first lunar rover.
For these missions, we wonât be using any modsâno custom parts and no autopilot. This has two consequences: because weâre using only the built-in rocket parts provided by KSP, the ships wonât look entirely the same, but theyâll come close enough. Second, the lack of an autopilot means that these missions will actually be slightly harder to fly than the initial missions. To be fair, though, the original missions had to deal with actual rockets and explosive fuel, so that evens the score a little.
Additionally, every mission that weâre re-creating in this chapter included science gear, which was brought along to serve the missionâs goal of discovery. We wonât be including these in our re-creations: our goal will be re-creating the look and behavior of the vessels, but not necessarily the science or the innards.
With all of these caveats in mind, letâs press on!
Note
We flew all of these missions in Normal difficulty, and using the gameâs Sandbox mode, which means you donât have to worry about the cost ...
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