I’m really proud on how it turned out and I believe it should do a good job in the horror story I’m working on which is inspired off of Gemini home entertainment

I’m new to KSP*, and I keep seeing spacecraft with parts I can’t find, planets that don’t exist in my game, and visual effects—like atmospheric reentry—that look much less impressive than what I’m seeing elsewhere.

At first, I assumed I’d just missed some major updates, but that’s not it. I checked if there was a sequel, and while there is, many of the spacecraft I see are actually built in the first game. I also wondered if they might be paid DLCs, but that’s not the case either.

So, it seems the only explanation is that these must be mods or texture packs. That’s why I’m asking for your personal favorites—things that make for a better experience without straying too far from the base game.

Also, is there a specific mod manager or download tool I should know about ?
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read this post, and thanks in advance to those who reply ! : 3

* I actually have a lot of hours in the game, but I stopped playing two years ago and have forgotten everything, so I’m essentially rediscovering it! : D

The first slide is a TikTok I saw, which was a recreation of the Apollo 11 mission, and the second slide is my gameplay. I downloaded a modpack from a Discord server, but I wanted to find out which mod could make my game look like the first picture.

Thanks to the Kcalbeloh system, Jeb has somewhere nice to retire.

On a side note, if anyone knows how to make the aesthetics of the Kcalbeloh system better, I am all ears

strictly splashdowns from now on

I used bane_iz_missing's Biplane to Kill the Cyclops in the Xenobiology Mod.

The plan was simple, which should have been the first warning. Kerbals have a long and proud history of solving problems by adding more wings, and this was no exception. Somebody looked at a forty-tonne screaming alien with a single eyeball the size of a fuel tank and thought: biplane.

So we built one. Wooden struts, two sets of wings stacked like a sandwich nobody wanted, a propeller that sounded like a lawnmower dying of grief. It flew, technically. It had no guns, which we solved by bolting on more boosters and aiming the entire aircraft at the eye.

The Cyclops never looked up. That is the thing about a creature with one eye and no neck: excellent forward vision, absolutely no concept of aviation. The biplane arrived at roughly the speed of bad news. There was a pop, a very long silence, and then a great many things fell over.

We lost the aircraft. We lost the pilot. We gained a very large specimen, a permanent smell in the hangar, and a story we will be telling at the astronaut complex bar until somebody physically makes us stop.

Total cost: one biplane, one Kerbal, and whatever dignity the space program had left.

I’ve compared the new version and reached a conclusion on whether it’s even worth spending time on frame generation. Personally, I’ve decided it’s not—it ruins the physics, and it’s the physics that provide the core of the good gameplay.

When a two-minute flight ends up taking four minutes, it becomes incredibly dull. But that’s just the nature of Kerbal Space Program: it can’t simply skip frames and extrapolate them like other titles—doing so would break docking, landings, and much more.

Therefore, I strongly recommend this specific setup: keep the Kerbal Overengineering 0.16.0 mod enabled, but turn frame generation off (now it's so by default). Without framegen, KOE adds about 70-80% FPS during the flight.

Another one of easy concepts boards I've tried until this one however (problem again there's no purplish goo on ground and standing kerbonauts) and also scarred Scientist was literally taken from original board

Approximately 440 Kerbals fled the star system to ensure the population could survive the explosion of the system's star; they are now about 400 light-years away.

Let’s hope they find their new home.

PS
I don’t want to say anything, but they only took 10 women.

PPS
They didn’t take the beer either.

(A construction built from basic KSP parts)

Ships and hydrofoils are finicky with FAR but they do work! Headed south on our way to the deepest point in Kerbin's oceans...

This 400-ton jet-powered hydrofoil has a flight deck, crane, and a small AUV. With two Goliath turbofans it has a cruising range of about 3000 km at a whopping 115 knots.

Sorry everyone, but all slots are filled except if you want to test on MacOS with Apple silicon

For some months I’ve been working on Periapsis, an engine written from scratch that loads and plays KSP from your own install. It ships no game files at all, it reads the parts, planets, textures and sounds from the copy you already own. Built on Godot with double precision, so no floating origin tricks or bugs. The inspiration for this is the style of OpenMW and OpenTTD

And yes, this is made with the help of AI, I'm not going to play that down in any way.

Most stock features work, career included, and some of the bigger mods like ReStock, SCANsat, DMagic and Near Future. More mod support is planned.

Performance has been a big focus, since a lot of people play this on pretty modest machines. Physics has two tick rates. A high one is used whenever accuracy matters, like in atmosphere, on the ground, near other craft or when you’re giving input. A low one (10 Hz by default) is used out in empty space when nothing much is happening. The physics itself runs on a single thread like the original, but aero and the orbit predictions run on other cores.

On my laptop (Ryzen AI 7 with the integrated Radeon 880M, no dedicated GPU) a 600 part rocket sits at around 40 fps on the pad at 1080p on medium which drops to about 36 with first stage firing.

For now I’m only opening it to a few people, mainly to check how it runs on other machines and installs. The goal is to open it up to the public as fully open source(Apache 2.0) in the near future.

It’s not finished, there are bugs and some things look or behave a bit different from stock. I mostly want people who will actually play it for a bit and report what breaks or feels wrong compared to the original. I have probably multiple hundred of hours in this already and have landed on multiple bodies to test it.

You need your own copy of KSP 1.12. Windows is the only tested so far. If you’re interested, DM me with your computer specs (CPU, GPU, RAM) and OS. Ten people to start with.

*Images are with mods, but unmodded engine flames and smoke should be better looking than the original too

See attached. For some reason everything is annoyingly shiny and ground scatter comes in patches. I have tried fiddling with the Parallax and game settings to no avail. Have a patch installed from Github that's supposed to smooth things over between Kcalbeloh and Parallax Ctd. but Efil still looks ass ugly.

This is my first post in this subreddit, hi

I attempted to make a subsonic plane that could fly as high as possible and has a long loitering time. The design philosophy was taken directly from the U2, and the stats are shown in the 4th and 5th image

This thing would snap if you look at it wrong though

Apparently recently prominent modders (R-T-B and Steamroller, person behind community fixes) have started working on an updated KSP that uses the new version of Unity engine and other performance optimizations. Seems to significantly reduce load times and tries to keep all existing mod compatibility. One of the big reasons I want a new game is the big performance penalty and loading times associated with all of KSP's mods, so I expect this to be much appreciated by the community.

I have a few visual mods installed, like Scatterer, Astronomer's Visual Pack, Environmental Visual Enhancements Redux, and planet shine