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Comment by mattsan | Hacker News Reader

If you want a simpler intro into learning the math/logic behind rocket guidance systems, kOS is an alternative mod.

The main difference is that it has a pretty good base autopilot, such that you can give it a direction vector to point to.

The downside is that you have to learn a specific language for it, but you can also make your own language that transpiles as a fun project :)

Example of what's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szsIL_0m2Qo

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kOS is good stuff, yeah. Very... immersive, heh. It has all of these weird design decisions from having been built to do relatively simple spaceship sequencing tasks first, rather than as a general purpose programming language, and having grown over time to do arbitrary stuff. That history gives it this really uniquely crunchy feeling that you just wouldn't get with a more modern, ergonomic system.

To be fair, theres also the kIPC mod that bridges and connects both kOS and kRPC together. I personally like the kerbal-y equivalent of Ada with kOS though ahaha

kOS is a very fun rabbithole, the language can strange at first, it's a reactive paradigm with a special flow. I started with the [PID tutorial](https://ksp-kos.github.io/KOS/tutorials/pidloops.html) to learn PID in a fun environnent. Then programming orbital maneuvers to dig into orbital mechanics.

The community is really active, with a lot of challenges like spaceX booster landing.

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