"We Choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..."

-President John F. Kennedy, Speech at Rice University, September 12, 1962.

Simulation games live and die by how well they preform their tasks. Too simple, you're not going to retain your audience who want a challenge. Too hard, you're not going to get an audience to begin with (save maybe some gluttons' for punishment with deep pockets... I'm looking at you "Steel Battalion"). The perfect ballence is hard to come by.

But one game studio from Mexico City found it.

"Kerbal Space Program" is a spaceflight simulator game that doesn't take itself the least bit seriously and yet is one of the most faithful and complex sim games on the market. The game takes a mostly hard science fiction look at the ins and outs of spaceflight. Your job is to manage the space program of a race called the Kerbals, "little green men" who have chose to explore their home solar system.

The game leaves it's mark in the massive attention to detail give to it's physics engine. there are some breaks in realism, but they are a nessesity. For example, an object is only considered to be in the effective gravity well ("Sphere of Influence") of one body at a time, because having to calculate the effects of gravity in real life would cause a consumer CPU to melt.

You have a choice of game modes.

Sandbox, which let's you play to your hearts content, and two more challenging modes, Science and Career.

These two require more management of space program. both have technology trees that require advancement in order to unlock better parts. Both require you to collect data on missions, but career also requires you to deal with funding your space program, this is often done through accepting tasks for outside parties, like launching a satellite to a certain orbit or flying a paying space tourist on a mission.

The truly fun part of the game is actually building your craft. while the game has a set number of parts by default (though countless more can be downloaded and modded in) the only limits to how big and complex your rocket can be are you imagination and how well your computer handles things. 

Remember when I said this game doesn't take itself seriously, well, let's just say watching your creations fail mid flight is often as much fun as actually flying them, something the community has embraced. 

Something I made a long, long time ago, launching a space shuttle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg2s_aH5udU&list=PLeupn-WiB8zA_pUiXGHJ109L-oRswz7yo&index=12&t=0s

This video actually got shared by the developers on their Instagram account.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii1uYlsfxVM