Kerbal Space Program

[Drax]

What?

 

[omega21]

muh valentina tereshkova, I assume

 

[Drax]

Oh, that. Yeah that's probably it.

 

[Ulminati]

 

[Hellraiser]

I totally did not expect it.

Also this:

Looks like a very early work in progress

 

[Hellraiser]

1.0 entered experimental build testing

However I really would not expected the release to be before the last few days of April. It is already known that all the new stuff they added will need extensive testing, mostly the new heat system. Although aerodynamics and resources have had extensive QA already.

 

[Ulminati]

ITZ HAPPENING!!!!!



Had to doublecheck the date to make sure it wasn't an april fools. Guess ny xnauts lp will get abandoned soon.

 

[Ashery]

ITZ HAPPENING!!!!!

Had to doublecheck the date to make sure it wasn't an april fools. Guess ny xnauts lp will get abandoned soon.

You already abandoned it...*sniff*...

 

[Data4]

Pretty sweet trailer for the Infernal Robotics remodel/re-release.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Installed linux on separate ssd just to enjoy KSP in 64bit, found that CKAN doesn't effin work due to ssl bullshit (yes, tried the libcurl-devel thing).

P.S. Don't install NVIDIA drivers from 1-click repos linked on OpenSuse wiki - they are so out of date that my 970 equipped box didn't even boot to init 5 with them (not sure we can still talk about init 5 though, now that systemd is all over the place)

 

[Drax]

Check your Lilo config.

 

[Ulminati]

Devnotes!

Felipe (HarvesteR): Another pretty busy week here. The camera wobble system is set up and operational (and scalable for internal and external views, separately). In preparation for the impending experimentals phase, I’ve been going over several items here which I had on my list, which I felt had to either get added now or get pushed aside:

• The main menu ‘load game’ dialog now shows Funds, Science and Reputation (as applicable depending on game type) for each game, as well as the number of active flights and contracts.
• The Physics Bubble for vessels is no longer always set to 2.5km. Those values are now defined separately for each possible situation, so we now keep vessels in the atmosphere (or in sub-orbital trajectories) loaded up to 22.5km away. That means falling debris can now easily hit the ground (or KSC facilities) during launch, other vessels can reenter with you and actually hit the surface, quite a few interesting things.
• I’ve added a basic set of custom cursors as well. OS default cursors in a game just scream ‘unfinished’. Although it was a minor addition, I couldn’t help but notice how everyone noticed it.

And last but most definitely not least (actually, quite the opposite), I’ve been thinking long and hard about the tech tree here, and a few important thoughts came up. Most importantly, I realized that no matter what tree layout we end up going with, there was one problem with the current implementation which would make any layout frustrating to go through: Until now, only nodes which were researchable were visible. You’d only get to see a greyed out node in the few cases where you unlocked one of the required parents for a node (in the very few cases where more than one parent is required to unlock). Now, all unavailable nodes will be visible in this greyed out state from the start, allowing you to see all the way ahead to the very ends of the tree,

This simple change alone already makes a dramatic difference in how going through the tech tree plays out. Being able to tell what comes next means you don’t have to take Tech nodes at face value anymore. You can now invest in long-term strategies, as you’ll be able to see where each branch ultimately leads. You also won’t find yourself blindly guessing anymore at the potential future options of a tech node, and getting frustrated when a choice turns out to be a dead end. In addition, you’ll also be able to select those Techs, view the parts they contain, view their dependencies and costs, all of which greatly enhance your ability to plan ahead and strategize, as you now have much more information available to make informed decisions.

Despite that, though (or perhaps as a consequence of it), I’ve also gone over the tree itself, and with the help of the debug utilities I wrote the other week, done a major revision to the tech tree layout. Being rid of the constraint of having to assume players can’t see the entire tree was immensely freeing. I was able to move nodes and parts about and create interesting branch paths with far more freedom and ease. (being able to launch cfg files in N++ straight from the game, and save and reload the tree on the fly were definitely a major help also). IMO, parts are much better organized. Aircraft parts are available earlier, a few redundant parts were repurposed/rebalanced, several new nodes have been added, including a few tier 8 ones, costing 1000 science. It should hopefully be quite a bit more interesting now.

Oh, and I also fixed the build server (again)… Although that’s hardly a lot of fun to talk about. Let’s hope it doesn’t break again immediately after writing this.

Mike (Mu): I’ve been implementing some new parts from Porkjet and fixing a few bugs. The aero and thermal stuff is now feeling solid and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Thoroughly enjoyed a long weekend thanks to some religious thing too.

Marco (Samssonart): This time there’s less to report since we had a short week in the Mexico front due to some mandatory Easter days off. Work on the demo is moving on nicely, I’m about halfway there I think, I’m starting to get into the career stuff.

QA for the tutorials has started too, there are not a lot of nasty bugs, but there is a fair bit of valuable feedback, so I’m going back and forth between the demo and the tutorials. Oh, and the usual “build-server-is-on-fire” situation now and then.

Jim (Romfarer): This week i’ve been doing more bugfixing. I also had a lovely easter holiday. In more exciting news we did have a discussion about the tech tree and decided to make every node visible so you can see and select everything and better plan ahead. So i’ve implemented this functionality into the gui and it should work with all modded tech trees of course.

Max (Maxmaps): Deals, meetings and more. Really exciting partnerships in the horizon that we can’t quite talk about yet without our surgically implanted NDA devices separating our heads from our necks. Other than that, I’ve been working on our prerelease plans for 1.0, contentwise to be precise. Should end up really cool!

Ted (Ted): The QA Team and I have been continuing work on scraping together the last bits of QA and getting them done and dusted. Additional to this work, I’ve been writing and sorting the documentation for the Experimentals Team and testing are up to scratch. With, of course, a few build server issues to contend with in the meantime.

Lastly, I’ve managed to get in some good ol’ playtesting and getting as far in Career mode as quickly as possible. So far, the changes that have been made are fantastic.

Rogelio (Roger): Finally Im done with the smoke simulation for the video, it was hard to really achieve the desired results, but I’m glad I did it. I’m adding some other effects to the shots where the smoke appears, the smoke is just another character in our new animation, it has its own role (I feel it like my little baby) lol. I’ve also been doing some lightning tests and it start to look very cool.

Kasper (KasperVld): On sick leave. Get better, Kasper.

22.5km physics bubble? Be still my beating heart! Synchronized launches incoming!
This also promises great things for accidentally wrecking KSC. I guess we're going to start gravity turns sooner now.

Tech tree is a nice QoL update too. I have a pretty good idea where stuff is suposed to be. But whenever I load a mod, I hav eno fucking clue where the new parts are hiding. Aircraft parts being available sooner in the 1.0 tree makes sense. And it'll make those early moneymaker visual survey contracts viable.

Sounds like they're still on track for an april release. Are you hyped yet? I am.

 

[Data4]

I hope they shuffled a lot of the unmanned stuff to earlier in the tech tree as well. Just makes too much sense not to.

 

[dbx]

22.5km? Is that enough to make stage recovering more feasible?

 

[Ulminati]

22.5km? Is that enough to make stage recovering more feasible?

Not really. Once you hit the 10km mark and the atmosphere gets thinner, you'll start accelerating more rapidly. You may be able to recover stuff you drop at 7km or less. Once you hit the 9-10km mark, your accelerating 22.5km bubble will not be enough to see the discarded stages (that start out moving upwards at 2-300m/s) hit the ground. I think this will mainly be good for accidentally hitting KSC with discarded SRBs on big rockets.

If they scale it up to, say, 30-40km, you could totally recover spent lifting stages though. So unless they hardcode it, it should be easily moddable.

 

[Drax]

Yeah, now I want a 80 - 100 km bubble so I can do all sort of fun stuff with each spent stage... like docking two boosters while they are in atmospheric descent... fun.

 

[Cassidy]

This extended bubble could make it no longer a complete pain in the ass to try using a bigger airplane as a "mothership" to the limit of its service ceiling instead of a booster to lift a spacecraft to upper atmosphere, with the pilot assist atmospheric flight autopilot mod, and hopefully not end like that SpaceShipTwo test.

 

[Hellraiser]

New devnotes

Probably the most important bits:

• Went over the balance and progression of the SRBs in early games. We now have a new SRB, called the RT-5 “Flea” Booster. (Model by Bob “RoverDude”)
• Speaking of new parts, Bob and I are working on two new parts, which should be very useful now that reentry heat is a thing. More on that later.
• Added a difficulty slider to turn reentry heat down (or up, or entirely off… your choice)....
• There’s also been several other minor fixes and tweaks, from proper detection and placement of splashdown effects at very high speeds (now that that’s possible) to making pressure and temperature experiment modules able to function in space…
• The jet engines have had another pass with respect to their characteristics. For those that don’t know, the airflow through jet engines (and thus fuel flow, and thus thrust) is now a function of mach and of air density giving them more interesting limitations and effects.

Roverdude has filled the place of C7 and Novasilisko it seems. The heat-related parts are possibly actual heatshields since we now have a slider. I am hoping one of them is a big heavy shield for doing interplantary aerobreaking with motherships.

Also water got fixed so splashdowns should be less deadly and less prone to disassembling the damn craft.

 

[Ulminati]

Stock heat shields. Calling it now.

Smaller SRBs sound good for farming the early altitude record contracts. But I've difficulty imagining a situation in which I'd use them over the current "small" SRBs. Their burn time is prefect for getting to 10km with small rockets.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

More good news: CKAN works on linux again.

 

[Hellraiser]

Ulminati, prepare some tissues and a clean set of underwear, new screenshot dump with previously not revealed parts!

New intake models:

Wet wings and shuttle tail:

Utility storage bays:

HEATSHIELDS:

MINING ASTEROIDS:

Asteroids will have limited amounts of Ore unlike planets. Also surface drills are supposed to arrest your motion (something no resource mod did so far AFAIK).

Fairings getting jettisoned:

Larger xenon tank:

Also craft thumbnails as mentioned in the devnotes:

Those heatshields make me hard.

Loading times have been optimised significantly in the stock game, the beginning contracts (launch vessel, reach X meters) will no longer require getting them at mission control and will auto-payout to bypass the 2 contract limit. A good change considering the metagaming implications.

Also they listened to players complaining about making the Round-8 tank into the new xenon tank so they made a new xenon tank and kept the round-8 a.k.a. the "lifesaver" (not a re-purposed floatation device) as a LFO tank.

Edit:

Also some other new parts spotted/mentioned. Fuel cells! Radial drogue parachutes!

 

[Ulminati]

It's like they've taken all the mods I can't live without and rolled them into stock.

 

[Hellraiser]

Update is coming out next Monday.

 

[Ulminati]

IT IS HAPPENING!!

 

[Makabb]

damn how long it is being developed now.