Like Cathy says, it doesn’t even try to be intuitive, gently teach you anything, but it is quite realistic. Playing Kerbal I’ve learned more about orbital mechanics than from any textbook, not to mention aerodynamic stress, reentry heat, engine efficiency, you name it. It forces you to find out the important stuff, and apply it, and you end up with an intuitive understanding of how real spacecraft fly. Like, what you get from practise, not so much understading the maths. Now I think of, say, a RL manned mission to land on Mars, and I know, from intuition: yeah… that’s going to be one bloody massive ship, if we’re stuck with chemical rockets. Haha.

Excellent review, hey, I loled. And excellent game. For space nerds, this is the game to buy, you’ll never regret it.

I didn’t really focus on that in the review, but yes, the physics are real-world based. And yes, Hohmann transfers are part of the game. However, it doesn’t support the Lagrangian table and some other physics tables that are, to some degree, over-kill as they don’t add enough to the existing stuff to merit their complex calculations for inclusion and would just further destabilize the game.

Silly tutorials!