kOS is the do-it-yourself autopilot
kOS, or Kerbal Operating System, is a community-supported mod for the popular game Kerbal Space Program
kOS is an autopilot you script yourself. kOS is to programming, what Kerbal Space Program itself is to rocket science. You don’t have to know what you’re doing to get started, but you may find yourself learning a lot by accident as you play with it. And if you already know a lot about programming, it will still be able to hold your interest. kOS is meant to scale with the skill level of the user. You can start off doing very small simple things with it, and get more and more into using its features as you go.
What it does
kOS introduces a few new parts that each contain a simulated computer capable of running programs written in its own scripting langauge called kerboscript. The computer has powerful smarts built in to the hardware that allow it to do complex spacecraft operations in one command, thus making it possible to make complex programs with only a few lines of script text.
The intent of kOS is to be a fully in-game item that lives inside the Kerbal’s universe. The program isn’t running on your own gaming computer, but rather it’s being run in a virtual machine that is simulated in the underlying Unity engine.
History
kOS was originally begun as a mod by a single author, Kevin Laity aka Nivekk. Although the project has undergone massive changes since then and now has a very different underlying archetecture and is under active development by a different set of people, none of that would have been possible without his original vision and work.