Nate Simpson

Great answers in this thread. All of the engines have upsides/downsides that make them more or less suitable for particular applications, and that becomes especially true when you start talking about interstellar trips (in the real world, delta-V to Mars is about 4 km/s; delta-V to Alpha Centauri is more like 20,000km/s). So obviously the interstellar-class engines are pretty specialized for that application, but are by and large not great for interplanetary travel because they can take a while to get up to speed. But one thing that I like a lot about the new progression, which @Pthigrivi put quite nicely, is that different fuels are derived from different resources, and what you discover and harvest has an effect on what you are able to build. I'm especially excited to see how people use non-optimal engines in creative ways when they have to work within unusual resource constraints.

Check the dev diary channel. I highly recommend comparing the terrain footage from the last feature video and the footage that Eric posted this morning. He's been going like gangbusters on optimizing and refining the terrain system and all that popping that was happening before has just sort of gone away. And it's FAST. The dude is amazing!

Hi friends. And thanks to @KSP Star for dropping in to give you all an update. Things have been BUSY! This team has really hit a fever pitch and we on the creative/design end of the pipeline are having to really hustle to keep up with the high speed of production (not to mention, as more features come online, we also have an increasing number of review/polish tasks popping up as well). And you will not be surprised to hear that this is a very, very big game, so there's a lot to keep track of. I sometimes feel like Lucille Ball tending the conveyor belt. Anyway, the game's going great. Our absence has been evidence of our cup running over, not evidence of something bad happening. We'll have something neat to show you very soon. Thanks as always for your patience.

Yep, that's me.

It actually got revealed in the announcement trailer. It's the place where the Kerbals land at the end.

You're only selling me on this idea more.

Nope! This is the coolest idea and I'm mad I didn't think of this. This is such a cool idea. Dang. I'm going to bring this up at the next design meeting.

This is Charr -- innermost planet in the Debdeb System.

Trust me, there's a LOT we're not showing.

Minor bug. They will actually retract like the strings on blinds -- you won't see rods impinging on the nozzle interior like this.

Yep! And he's great. But don't tell him I said that.

@Nertea is in fact now part of our team (yay!), but since we love doing things backwards, he joined JUST as Jon, Aaron, and Paul were putting the finishing touches on this system. I suspect there will be an ongoing conversation about tuning, as there always is. But we're all very happy with this system in its current form.

Yep, that's still a very high priority for us.

Navball is staying at lower left corner for people who want it there, but we're making sure that a navball-center variant also looks and feels good. Your video's great! I'm looking forward to the day (not too long from now) when we get to let the footage do the talking for us.

This flight HUD is entirely deprecated and an all-new one is already underway. As always, a lot of systems are being developed in parallel, and they don't all come online at the same time. I feel really good about the direction the HUD is headed, and it's influenced in many ways by community feedback around the previous version.

This is a good note. Will add to our backlog. Thanks!

There's a size threshold below which we don't intend to calculate collision -- that's still in flux, but we don't want your rovers to rattle themselves apart on apple-sized rocks. But yes, the big stuff is collidable.

Forwarded your question to Dr. Dodd, and here's his answer: "We had to leave out a lot of details on the continuous collision check. One of those details is that it includes a broad-phase algorithm to improve performance. This algorithm performs a low cost sweep of all the objects to rule out pairs of objects that do not collide with each other. The next step is narrow-phase algorithm which performs the detailed and more costly collision checks on objects that are expected to collide based on output from the broad-phase. Thus, if two players are in opposing positions, their vessels collision pair would be removed by the broad-phase algorithm."

Gurdamma is comparable to Kerbin in scale. The Kerbolar planets are the same scale as in KSP1, and we are keeping to the 1/10 rule for new celestial bodies. If you're asking "will the topology be the same for all Kerbolar celestial bodies," the answer is "our artists often begin with the original KSP heightmap but sometimes make significant alterations." In at least a couple of cases, the topology has been radically altered to tell a slightly different story than the original game (if you look at how Dres has changed, you'll see a good example of this). But stuff like the shapes of Kerbin's continents has not changed too much. Of course the masses, diameters, and orbits of the Kerbolar bodies have not changed from the original game.

Correct!

I think we may dial it back a bit - as other commenters have pointed out, we don't want to spoil too many of the new celestial bodies! This one got grandfathered in because we actually already gave you a peek at an earlier version of it in this video:

The story we're trying to tell with Gurdamma is that it's similar to Earth during the Hadean Eon, relatively shortly after the formation of the Moon. I was actually pretty surprised myself how close the Moon was immediately after its formation: 16 times larger in the sky than today, and just a whisker beyond the Roche limit! To get a sense of how close, check out image 3 in this sequence: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/training/illustrations/earthMoon/ We are still making adjustments to the distance of Gurdamma's moon, but it'll still be both close and fast-orbiting (and Gurdamma has a very short day). Different star system.

Deformable terrain is beyond scope at release (edge cases abound, especially when you consider multiplayer). This is our best solution at the moment, but could be an interesting area of experimentation going forward. It sure would be cool!

Busted! We have a couple of "safe" craft files lying around that don't show off any unannounced parts. I need to find some spare time to make a few more of these!