K so I recently got this on Steam sale (around 10 Euros) and I'm really enjoying it. Looking at these images again makes me want to start the modding thing, but right now I'm just pootling about in vanilla. I'm interested in atmospheric effects for planets with atmospheres and the above type of internal improvements. But I'm generally ignorant of the types of mods that are even available really, there's probably others that I have no idea about that will become must-haves too.
I'm currently struggling finding all the science tings to do, I discovered today for example that a lot of surface science can be done over & again for each type of terrain, so even on Kerbal itself you can do the same science on grass, runway, sea, mountains etc, which is a bit odd IMO but whatever.
I spent a long time playing the training missions and managed to get OK with switching orbits to the mun and landing on it, then taking off & successfully returning to Kerbal itself, I hugenly enjoyed all that
Having a rough time with manual flight too - although I suspect that a good cockpit-only experience will probably sort that out (i.e. flying purely by navball rather than the distracting external view).I got a Thrustmaster Cougar + pedals so I ought to be good to go for that but it's still rough going, I seem to have lost my fine touch with a Hotas after years of not really doing anything other than Arma & Elite Dangerous with it
. I generally let the Kerbs do it via the SAS.
The maneuver nodes seems to be a touch of genius there, very useful. I can also see some amount of physics simplification i.e. transferring orbits from one planet to a moon is a matter of suddenly traversing some boundary so you're either in the gravitational influence of one, or suddenly the other, but not both. I can't even imagine the amount of eggheadery necessary to calculate this nonsense in 1969 using only a room full of slide rules and graph paper
even more so with 2 interacting variable gravity wells. Mindblowing.
Edit. I don't know why the word Hotas becomes a link :/