Kerbal Space Program (2015)

Kerbal Space Program did the impossible: it turned orbital mechanics into a comedy without diluting a gram of physics. The player builds rockets from parts in a hangar, seats green-skinned Kerbals with idiotically happy faces inside, and tries to launch them into orbit around their home planet. The first twenty attempts end in a fiery column at the launch pad, and that's okay — the game forgives failures and turns them into anecdotes. But behind the clowning lies real celestial mechanics: delta-v is truly calculated here, the effects of Hohmann transfers and gravitational maneuvers work, and to catch up with a station in orbit, you have to brake, not accelerate. People who couldn't explain what an apocenter is, after a hundred hours, can freely plan a flight to another planet — for this educational side effect, KSP was praised even by engineers. The mod scene around the game has grown into a separate universe over the years.

Watch the trailer and gameplay on YouTube

Game card in the MegaInet.art catalog — reference information. Files are not distributed. Actual data: Wikidata (CC0).