Is KSP1 any fun for casual gamers with only an hour or two and a joystick? Will I have to read up on lots of math and orbital mechanics to get anywhere in it?
Bonus - it's free. I've burned a lot of hours in Orbiter.
If you happen to have heroic self-control, you could find a lot of enjoyment simply doing a few moon landing missions over the course of 5-10 hours.
I wonder if you've tried Factorio?
So very excited about KSP2!
Any perceived struggles relating to inventory management should be recognized as a signal that you should be carrying carry fewer things, which can be accomplished by automating the production of various intermediate components.
Well, now that I put it like this, it sounds way too close to my dayjob...
As for math, you won't have to read up much - KSP is the ultimate textbook. Watch some introduction videos by Scott Manley or whatever the community currently recommends, and fire up KSP. Make your first orbit, then first transfer to Mun or Minmus, then back, learn to change planes, intercept objects and dock... you won't even notice when you've gained intuitive understanding of basic orbital mechanics.
You will, because every time you watch sci-fi where a ship drops from orbit by accelerating towards the planet you’ll be screaming inside.
Other KSP side effects include: wondering how much Δv your car has, calling reverse "retrograde", calling right/left "normal"/"antinormal", calling up/down "radial-out"/"radial-in"...
Aww hell that'll work if you have sci-fi amounts of delta-v. (:
You might end up with reentry heating issues, but that's what burning retrograde with your torchship is for. Who cares about making the landscape glow for the next century, we've got fusion!
0: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php
† Though, y'know, I've never heard a sci-fi story mention gravitomagnetism. Instantaneous change in gravitational force would imply a large gravitational flux, which would cause similarly improbable and interesting phenomena as the ability to instantaneously teleport magnets further together/apart would. With magnetism the weird things are monopoles; with gravitomagnetism... dipoles?
It rotates the orbit, which is not the most efficient way to de-orbit. Instead, to de-orbit with minimal delta-v expended, you burn retrograde at the highest point of the orbit. This will lower the lowest point of the orbit into the atmosphere.
Out of curiosity, what would you want from the story? Astronaut in mid-altitude polar orbit around Earth notices at the end of a few [...thousand...] years that the vacuum-freefalling fuzzy dice art piece in the cockpit finally shows a different face to the entry hatch? Spooky stuff! ;)
A low altitude polar orbit around a millisecond pulsar would certainly allow for plot twists (pardon the pun), but effects highlighted by the GEM formalism would be way down the list of post-Newtonian observables (and in any case you'd be far from the weak field limit in which the GEM formalism is reasonably reliable).
Rather than cast about in the GEM formalism for ideas when departing dramatically from a slow stable orbit around a rotating spherical body, you might be happier going down the Equivalence Principle route directly, thinking about a pseudo-gravitational field popping up in response to acceleration. Michael Weiss's text at the link might give you some ideas: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Twin...
The rough sketch based on that is that an astronaut bouncing around in his reentry capsule, absent any view of the interactions between the outside of the capsule and the atmosphere, is free to think of the pseudo-forces he feels (he and the capsule both want to keep freely falling, but the capsule keeps interacting with the atmosphere, jostling the capsule around his free-fall trajectory) as pseudo-gravitational, much like riders of a vomit comet, roller coaster, fast car making a sharp turn, etc. and their experiences of changing weight. (Weight in the "contact" sense: the quantities piezo-electric bathroom scales would report if slipped between human body parts and surfaces bolted/welded to the inside of the capsule/car/roller-coaster/vomit-comet, with those scales essentially quantifying the feelings arising from stimulation of their skins' various sensory receptors like Merkel nerve endings and Pacini corpuscles).
As a complete aside (I was thinking of dynamic neutral buoyancy for astronauts in your proposed situation, so fish came up), Kerbal probably doesn't simulate anything like the observations in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k0bdu/would_fis... and really you should be able to send simulated octopus astronauts on missions!
Just like the passengers.
This might sound like a flip comment to some, but it's 100% legit. After playing KSP way too many hours over the years, I'll still get an unreasonable amount of joy from creating a new sandbox game (which has unlimited resources), creating an absurd but monstrous rocket and spend two hours trying to get it into orbit.
Yes, that process will cause many explosions. Yes, you will destroy parts of the space center. Yes, it's all-together fun.
The great thing about this game though is that it teaches you orbital mechanics in an intuitive and fun way, much better than reading a textbook full of vector calculus ever could.
You can do the mathematics if you want (or look at a summary in the game) but it's not required.
That said, I did use a joystick with KSP briefly, and it made docking much more fun. And, of course, flying airplanes.