Apollo 50... in Kerbal!

摘要

Despite this being the August issue of SpaceFlight, it's reaching you just in time for the 50th anniversary of the first humans on the Moon. A perfect milestone, then, to pay homage to the Apollo 11 mission in Kerbal Space Program! As explained in previous articles, KSP is not a perfectly realistic spaceflight simulator-the planets are 1/10th scale, and the Moon (called the Mun in the game's universe) is in a zero-inclination and an eccentric orbit around its parent body, Kerbin. Nevertheless, Kerbal is adequate for ourtask here - building a launch vehicle roughly analogous to a Saturn V, and using it to loft a tiny lander to the Kerbals' nearest neighbour in space.