If you're like me, and actually want to put things like space stations in orbit, but probably won't ever be able to handle orbit calculations in my head, get "MechJeb." It's one of the most popular add-ons for the program. It can handle all the difficult orbital calculations for you, allowing you to match orbits with other objects. Depending on your comfort level, you could let it handle the ascent, orbit matching, and docking, if you wanted. Or you could run any combination of those on autopilot and handle the rest yourself.
As for the crashing, I'm still having the problem. It's tied to a flaw in the design of the game. Although it was originally written for a 32 bit operating system, the program they're using as the foundation for the game is itself an open-source program which is constantly being updated and rewritten by its designer. So that means that as the base development program is updated, this changes the behavior of KSP.
Unfortunately, due to the way the program has been written to date, it can't handle multiple cores on a 32-bit machine. On top of that, it keeps expecting a machine to have over 2GB of available RAM. And on a 32 bit machine, that doesn't happen. So it causes memory addressing errors and crashes. (Don't assume if you installed 4GB of memory in a 32 bit OS that you actually have 4GB of memory. That's the maximum amount of memory a 32 bit operating system can address. But the video memory and audio memory are also allocated space from that stack. So if your video card has 1GB of memory, and your audio card has 512MB to 1GB of memory, then all the RAM left which can be addressed is a maximum of 2GB. It's one of those little loopholes that tends to get missed when people talk about how much memory they have in a 32 bit machine.)
So the short answer is that the game really only runs properly on 64-bit machines. Which means that until they either fix that flaw, or I get a new machine, I'm stuck watching from the sidelines.
---
Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.
As for the crashing, I'm still having the problem. It's tied to a flaw in the design of the game. Although it was originally written for a 32 bit operating system, the program they're using as the foundation for the game is itself an open-source program which is constantly being updated and rewritten by its designer. So that means that as the base development program is updated, this changes the behavior of KSP.
Unfortunately, due to the way the program has been written to date, it can't handle multiple cores on a 32-bit machine. On top of that, it keeps expecting a machine to have over 2GB of available RAM. And on a 32 bit machine, that doesn't happen. So it causes memory addressing errors and crashes. (Don't assume if you installed 4GB of memory in a 32 bit OS that you actually have 4GB of memory. That's the maximum amount of memory a 32 bit operating system can address. But the video memory and audio memory are also allocated space from that stack. So if your video card has 1GB of memory, and your audio card has 512MB to 1GB of memory, then all the RAM left which can be addressed is a maximum of 2GB. It's one of those little loopholes that tends to get missed when people talk about how much memory they have in a 32 bit machine.)
So the short answer is that the game really only runs properly on 64-bit machines. Which means that until they either fix that flaw, or I get a new machine, I'm stuck watching from the sidelines.
---
Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do.