“I build stuff that I’d like to see us as a species build in the future,” says Adderley. Since then, he’s designed dozens of additional mods, including a Mark IV Spaceplane and space station add-ons like centrifuges and inflatable habitats.
Kerbal space program game poster mod#
He started playing Kerbal Space Program soon after its release, and in 2013 started building his first mod for the game-a pack of spare parts, including a xenon fuel tank and a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster (just try saying that three times fast).
But in his off time, Adderley gets into the pilot’s seat himself. One of the most prolific Kerbal modders is Chris Adderley, Nertea in the game, who is an engineer at the Canadian space company MDA by day, designing ground-based systems that retrieve data from spacecraft.
It often feels like watching those blurry old videos of rockets launching only to come straight back down in an explosion of fiery schadenfreude: you feel a little bit frightened, a little bit sadistic, and you really want to try it again. In the game, you are the omniscient director of a space program composed of literal little green men (and beloved little green woman Valentina Kerman-we see you, trailblazer) that you send skyward in spacecraft of your own design. It’s a glitchy, 10-year-old underdog of a game with a cult following of programmers, engineers, astronaut candidates, and your typical lay explosion enthusiasts, and it has a unique and active community of modders who’ve been fixing bugs, adding new features, and generally keeping the game fresh for nearly a decade. Most games lose relevance after a few years, but the indie rocket-building game Kerbal Space Program is a bit different.