Would someone kindly provide a detailed introduction to KSP?

[claptrap22]

Greetings:

I've been following this game on and off for a bit, but not especially closely until just recently - and it seems insanely ambitious. I've been poking around trying to get a handle on what the game is about. Before I proceed, I understand that it involves exploration, craft design and construction, resource gathering, and science progression. But I've not yet been able to piece together how all the aspects of the game connect. For example, the site's webpage states that the game features procedural terrain generation and that the Kerbal home world is 600km around. Does this mean that some of your scientific progress is done in then name of developing tech on the home world and that that entails some sort of localized development projects? I also watched a video that involved ice-mining and the gentleman referenced setting up a base. Do you, for example, send multiple ships up (one at a time, of course) and then manage multiple space projects.

This strikes me as a thinking person's game and I appreciate that and I am happy to buy it early access, especially while the sale is going on. I'd just like a better idea what the full package is meant to look like. (And yes, I've looked at the dev roadmap, but a list of features doesn't do a good job saying what the game will be like as a whole.)

Many thanks in advance

P.S. - for whatever it's worth, I have experience playing in the sandbox genre (see what I did there? :) )

[dunbaratu]

While it's true that there is procedural content it should be noted that if you expect this to mean you'll get non-deterministic *different* content from some sort of random seed on different plays you'll be dissapointed. All they mean is that the terrain follows mathematical generation algorithms rather than being hand-drawn by a graphic artist. But they do NOT mean that there is any randomness or pseudo-randomness in the making of the terrain.

Imagine what Minecraft would be like if every player everywhere had to use the same world seed and there was no ability for the users to change it. Every player would have the same exact content. Even though it's procedurally generated, it does so entirely deterministically, from the same exact start conditions, every time, so everybody gets the exact same world.

That's what the procedural content in KSP is like. It's procedural, but with zero variation of any kind from one run of the algorithm to the next, so it's always the same universe for everybody.