Kerbal Space Program

[toroid]

NEW EXPLOSION EFFECTS:

Ugh, fuuck.. I was in denial of the fact that the implementation of over-the-top action movie asplosionz was probably unavoidable. I was honestly hoping to see this go in the other direction; being able to see the details of how the craft breaks apart instead of having all that detail be obscured by fire and smoke. Pretty disappointed. Mods will have to fix it I guess.

 

[Hellraiser]

0.25 is not done yet but they already confirmed one thing for 0.26, biomes on ALL celestial bodies.

 

[Drax]

About time. Now to implement biome-based resource generation/scanning/mining.... Basically either import Kethane or Ker... whatever the other one is called.

 

[Ulminati]

I'm finding it harder and harder to get excited about new KSP updates.
It's probably got something to do with me having well over 600 hours logged in KSP already. I've already seen and done most of the stuff I want to do in the game. At this point I'm making up silly goals and restrictions just to keep the game vaguely challenging.

I'm probably going to stop following the updates before I burn out entirely and not play this again until V 1.0 totally final is out.

 

[Drax]

Kerbal Space Program: Economic Boom is Now Available for Download

Kerbal Space Program, the award-winning, indie space agency sim game from Squad, released its latest update, Economic Boom, and it is available to play today.Updates are free to existing players. KSP: Economic Boom offer new players the most fully-realized version of the game, which is still in active development for PC, Mac and Linux as an Early Access title on Steam and via the game’s website.

Players will experience a new challenge as the Kerbal Space Center, where players build and launch their rocketships, is now fully destructible. Buildings can be decimated by poorly-steered rocketships and in the game’s Career Mode, require costly repairs for players trying to manage their space agency.

Among these buildings is the new Administration Facility, in which players can select and activate Strategies. The Strategy system is a new gameplay mechanic, where each strategy, once accepted, applies effects over several game aspects, specifically Kerbal Space Program’s three in-game currencies, Funds, Reputation and Science. Some examples include:

• Aggressive Negotiations: Enables players to get a discount on the cost of parts but at a cost to Reputation on each ‘discount’
• Open-Sourced Technologies: Divert Science earnings to make them public domain, increasing Reputation.
• Unpaid Intership Program: Boost your Science earnings without spending any Funds by hiring unpaid interns to do the data crunching. Working for the Space Program surely is its own reward, isn’t it? Well, as long as an agency’s Reputation lasts that is.

“Career Mode is getting a significant addition with the Administration Building and all that comes with it,” Felipe Falanghe, Kerbal Space Program creator and lead developer said. “The Strategy system gives players great freedom to change the rules around, and ultimately it allows them to tune the game to fit their own ways of playing. Also, as it’s fully moddable and new strategies can easily be added, this new feature has a lot of potential for expansion.”

The team also worked with modder, Christopher “PorkJet” Thuersam, to incorporate his popular SpacePlane+ parts pack mod to the game. This was more than a simple addition however: Each part was updated for even better looks, and to offer players parts that are there not just specifically for spaceplanes, but that can be used in as many combinations as possible.

 

[Ulminati]

Sadly these are very minor additions once you are already rolling in funds, science and rep for doing a kerbin orbit + minmus orbit + mun flyby in your very first launch, picking up missions as you enter the new SoIs

 

[Ulminati]

.25 preview video. Building destruction within the first minute:

 

[Hellraiser]

Word is that 0.26 will implement another mod into stock. Now the question is, what could it be?

My guess is Kerbal Alarm Clock. With contract deadlines being a bit hard to follo and the contract overhaul that we're supposed to get in 0.26 it makes sense to add that.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

What I would really like is some tools to better plan your trajectory during launch. We got quite good stuff once in orbit, but launching is still more of an art than science. Or are there some tricks to near perfect launch trajectory?

 

[Drax]

For me, the hardest part is knowing how much fuel I'll need. I always end up with like a 3rd extra of fuel I didn't really need to put that 10 kg probe in a standard 80 km orbit...

 

[Hellraiser]

New devnotes and the 0.26 development plan is out. Key things:

- KERBAL EXPERIENCE AND TRAITS
- Upgradeable KSC buildings unlocking new capability (probably the use of bigger size parts and what not)
- New contract types and integration of the "fine print" mod (so waypoint contracts and build space station with X-parts at Y biome contracts)
- they got Porkjet, the SP+ mod guy, to work on Mk3 space plane parts rework as they couldn't quite emulate his style.
- biomes on every celestial body (tied to the integration of fine print and new contracts probably)
- VAB/SPH editor overhaul, much needed polish of the interface that Burning Bridges will probably appreciate

What I would really like is some tools to better plan your trajectory during launch. We got quite good stuff once in orbit, but launching is still more of an art than science. Or are there some tricks to near perfect launch trajectory?

If they redo the aerodynamics/atmo model such tools will be rendered obsolete. Or rather they would have to be severely rewritten. Probably won't happen until then. Also the devs do enjoy having the player learn by trial and error, so there is also that.

 

[Absalom]

Whenever I finally get all mods installed to my liking, kerbal updates again and the process begins anew. Such is life. Good way to avoid burning out on the game though.

Still, the game gets noticeably better with every update.

 

[Ulminati]

What I would really like is some tools to better plan your trajectory during launch. We got quite good stuff once in orbit, but launching is still more of an art than science. Or are there some tricks to near perfect launch trajectory?

Just look at the atmosphere density counter. While it's in the light blue, go straight up. Once you hit the dark blue, you want to be flying at (almost) 90 degrees. Do the tilting in the middle blue part. That's the rule of thumb I use for 95% of my non-spaceplane launches

 

[Drax]

New devnotes and the 0.26 development plan is out. Key things:

- KERBAL EXPERIENCE AND TRAITS
- Upgradeable KSC buildings unlocking new capability (probably the use of bigger size parts and what not)
- New contract types and integration of the "fine print" mod (so waypoint contracts and build space station with X-parts at Y biome contracts)
- they got Porkjet, the SP+ mod guy, to work on Mk3 space plane parts rework as they couldn't quite emulate his style.
- biomes on every celestial body (tied to the integration of fine print and new contracts probably)
- VAB/SPH editor overhaul, much needed polish of the interface that Burning Bridges will probably appreciate

What I would really like is some tools to better plan your trajectory during launch. We got quite good stuff once in orbit, but launching is still more of an art than science. Or are there some tricks to near perfect launch trajectory?

If they redo the aerodynamics/atmo model such tools will be rendered obsolete. Or rather they would have to be severely rewritten. Probably won't happen until then. Also the devs do enjoy having the player learn by trial and error, so there is also that.

 

[Hellraiser]

Yeah, fine print going stock is great news. Rovers will get much needed love, same goes to space stations and planes.

 

[Absalom]

Yeah, fine print going stock is great news. Rovers will get much needed love, same goes to space stations and planes.

Thank the lord for that one, since rovers and spaceplanes desperately needed it

 

[Ashery]

Yeah, fine print going stock is great news. Rovers will get much needed love, same goes to space stations and planes.

They need love, definitely, but I'd prefer it if they didn't use the method that requires the least effort to design. Why not make it so that one can do multiple science projects in a single biome provided that the readings are more than <x> meters apart? Sub-orbital hops would still be useful to gather the most valuable pieces of data from multiple biomes, but only a rover would actually be realistically able to exhaust any given biome.

And they need to make non-physical experiments (ie everything besides goo, material bays, and surface samples) transmit at 100%. This would actually make unmanned rovers a highly viable strategy and possibly even make it so that there are two viable tech progression strategies if one wants to maximize science yield.

There's a bunch of ways they can improve on the viability of rovers and science in general without resorting to the gamey contracts in Fine Print.

Also not particularly happy with the introduction of traits and experience for individual kerbals. Contracts can at least be skipped over or rejected, but experience is unavoidable.

Meh. Still, the biomes and editor improvements are huge.

 

[Ulminati]

I'd like to see some new SCIENCE!! experiments that either require you to study something from a very specific position or from 3-4 positions x-y meters apart. A rover would be ideal for those tasks whereas a rocket would end up consuming loads of fuel taking off and doing short hops while a rover could just drive over.

Either that, or we need some way of doing time compression rover-driving without the rover flipping out and spinning out of control. Better yet, give us a GPS system with satellites in orbit visible to the rover allowing it to drive to coordinates without us controlling it.

 

[dbx]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/313-Beta-Than-Ever-The-Future-of-KSP

 

[Ulminati]

There’s a ton of things we’re constantly discussing internally regarding what exactly we’ll add during Beta, but I figure we should at least tell you about the first two things we really want to add to the game before we can call it anything close to ready:

Overhauled Aerodynamics - The current system has been fantastic at… existing, really. It can’t be beat at ‘being a system that exists and works within KSP’, but we can do better. We’ve been a long time planning a major overhaul to make it more realistic, reliable, predictable, and hopefully a lot less arcane.

Deep Space Refueling - We’re aware there is one big end-game mechanic missing in the game: Being able to refuel a vessel once you’re out in Space. This is what we originally set out to achieve with the old Resource Mining plan and saw ourselves running into a very tedious dead-end. The Resources system was flawed because it overcomplicated accomplishing a basic need: To be able to find something out in space which can be used to fill up the tanks again. That’s the essence of it, and we don’t need 40+ single-purpose parts and 9 different resources to do it. In fact, all that complexity was going to be very effective at making sure most attempts to build a refueling outpost would fail. We are now planning a new, more elegant system, which hopefully will add a new, fun element of gameplay, as well as the massive boost to continuity this feature implies.

(Just import Ferram Aerospace, Kethane and Kerbal Attachment System into the main game already!)

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

I would prefer Karbonite over Kethane tbh.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Most of the new features don't interest me.
When do they add new planets?

 

[Hellraiser]

Most of the new features don't interest me.
When do they add new planets?

Probably somewhere during the beta since the focus will be on content and polish, not on building frameworks.

Considering the art team will not have much to work on after they finish building upgrade art, I would not be surprised if they started working on new planetary features.

They didn't entirely ditch deep space refueling or the aerodynamics rework so more planets, which are as high on the request list as those two, should probably make it in before 1.0.

 

[Absalom]

Oh wow, new difficulty feature actually makes the game somewhat challenging again. I almost ran of DOSH on multiple occasions.

Especially with parts needing to be prototyped as well as their category being researched.

 

[barker_s]

So, do you guys know if the developers are planning to add (or allow players to mod in) other star systems? I think it would be kinda neat to assemble a huge ship in orbit and then take it to another, distant star (especially if you could then stop at some alien planet and refuel it to continue your journey). While we're at it, wouldn't it be fun if they had a procedural universe so you could take your kerbals on an infinite trip?